skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most adults can learn a new language in ~6 months; the real test is how much substance is in each topic. Anyway the real joke about Phd's in Literature has to do with the perception that it's total BS. The great example of this is so-called ‘postmodern generator’ written by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. Using this software (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo) NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal’s generated a brilliantly meaningless article which was accepted by a cultural criticism publication, Social Text Vol. 46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). (Sokal, A., 2007, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/, accessed May 13, 2007)

PS: However, the same could be said for CS depending on your standards for quality (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/).
University of Kansas clocks in at $29k for four years; UIC in Chicago is about $25k (plus some fees that might bring it closer to 30). UMN does appear to be pretty expensive relative to other schools for in-state tuition, but it's a quite reputable school so maybe they've earned a premium.
You have to admit that Michael Jackson was just plain weird. But then many of the greatest innovators were also considered weird in their time.

I think that in particular is what I'd want to emulate: He was weird because he did a lot of stuff that he liked that nobody else really understood. I don't know if it was courage on his part or if he just didn't care, but I hope that I'm one day able to do the same.
Bill Wasik on Internet-Driven Culture
It's fairly common -- less so than :) and ;), though. Usually it's a typo, but sometimes people use it for humor or satire about something negative.
I had people from out of state going to my school, because they said it was cheaper for them to pay out of state tuition there than any of their state schools.

Shepherd University/semester (09 to 10)

IN-STATE Tuition and Fees	$ 2,617.00
OUT-OF-STATE Tuition and Fees	$ 6,787.00
+ (optional)
Room	1,945.00
Board (19 Meal Plan)	1,669.00

So four years instate would be 21k + books (excluding normal living expenses.)
>The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical represents an affinity for music; naturalistic, an affinity for biology or geology) or personality traits (interpersonal or intrapersonal skills, which correspond best to the related concept of emotional intelligence).

Hidden in the article is a sneaky mismatch of definitions. Isn't it a tautology to argue that intelligence is singular by using a narrower meaning?
Trees, Pictures, Classes, Anything that varies on a per instance basis and can't be easily shoved into a fixed schema. There are plenty of things relational database suck at, are you implying otherwise?
I don't know why they would want either honestly, it's not a real interesting problem and there are already plenty of solutions.
> sometimes people use it for humor or satire about something negative.

Thanks, that makes sense. I guess I just haven't been on the right sites to see it.
Sure sign that Apple did /something/!
Because the submitter and most visitors to this site are hackers?
Actually, I've got to correct myself a little -- looks like Skype uses it for crying:

http://www.skype.com/intl/en/allfeatures/emoticons/
I'm Brazilian-American so I know nothing of eastern culture first hand. This is just something that I recall reading many times in discussion of the performance gap between American and other students around the world. Do you believe your Chinese parent's views on the subject are representative of the predominant cultural beliefs in China?
India's Unique Citizen ID initiative - how would you build it using open source?
http://www.indiatvnews.com/main/newsdetails.php?id=1711&pg=index

The Indian govt. is setting up a Unique ID Authority, headed by ex-Infosys head honcho - a first for India, where only politicians head such positions.
From a technical standpoint however, that brings about a lot of challenges for a potential data set of one billion and where privacy laws are not as strongly understood as elsewhere. How would you architect such a system as well as its use?
Would you use traditional DBs for the backend, SAML for the data xchange and RFID based solutions for the cards?
I tried. I tried really hard. I tried to gloss over the part about one of the panels hanging. I tried to not think about licensing terms or the hard cost. I stopped myself from wondering how responsive or open the dev team would be to user input. I purposefully didn't look up whoever the company was that actually developed the software before Microsoft took it over - and I tried not to assume that that was the case.

I'm exhausted.
Twitter has now disabled search altogether which is the first time I recall that happening. I'm sure that's one of the reasons for the decline in the graph.
These are the times when I wish that this technology was open-source (correct me I'm wrong), so if it was lacking, it could be added. I would love to have some similar way of turning commutative diagram sketches into TeX-ready form. It would save me hours of times fiddling with the current LaTeX packages.
Even if there is an absolute physical property of the brain that we could call intelligence, it would be foolish to think we could measure it through the results of a pencil and paper test.
UITabBarController with UINavigationController Using Interface Builder
i read it, but still have to ask why ?
Even if kayak loses the court battle, the amount of free PR they get from suing far outweighs the cost of the lawyers.
>Is the putative student "bad at math" or "bad at math the way it's taught in high school, perhaps even by a certain teacher"?

It could also be a mismatch between someone's personality and the sort of math kids get taught. I did poorly in most of my math classes in high school and college. After failing a few classes, decided I was hopelessly "bad at math", and left the topic alone. A few years I took an abstract algebra class on a lark and really enjoyed it. In hindsight, I did poorly in my earlier math classes because I was undisciplined and really disliked memorizing disconnected tricks and formulas. Abstract algebra, on the other hand, was more elegant, conceptual and fun to learn. Doing well in one class punctured my myth of inability and gave me the confidence to properly learn linear algebra (and take some other interesting classes).
Every time I see a website like this I think "I really wish I had both the visual design and front-end engineering talents to make something like this happen". I have enough problems getting text to go where I want it to go and while I can read and understand Javascript I just have no clue where I'd even start going about getting, e.g., semi-transparent balloons with rounded corners as a rollover effect. That would probably take me a week to get right, after much copy/pasting.

I suppose that, somewhere out there, there is a front end engineer really wishing he could alter the Big Freaking Enterprise Web App backing his AJAX calls.
twitter is like email or instant messaging, its a method of communication, not a source.
I would recommend these books for a good grounding in marketing and fostering innovation:

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey Moore
Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker
Marketing High Technology by William Davidow
Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
Jumpstart Your Business Brain by Doug Hall
E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & R. Mauborgne
Influence The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg

For an article that summarizes key concepts see http://skmurphy.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/Crucial%20Mar...

There is a companion slide deck here http://www.skmurphy.com/f/SDForum061211.pdf
"Who you're stealing from" is a bad argument for (or against) piracy. The only sound (pun intended) argument for piracy that I know of is the fact that intellectual property laws are fundamentally a bunch of crap.
If we could get a few more use cases for tables like this, maybe we'd see a combination trackpad-tablet input sometime in the future on some laptops? Or a secondary tablet input (as some particularly gigantic 2-screened monster laptops currently do).

Pen input is just so damn natural, but writing over a laptop screen is terrible. Useful ways to map tablet input onto parts of the screen (like this) would be a wonderful middle-ground.
Hm. When I look at UIC's tuition calculator, it's giving me
$6757 per semester for undergrad engineering tuition and fees per semester. Over 8 semesters, that's ~54K. Other departments are slightly cheaper but all were over $6K/semester.

http://www.uic.edu/depts/oar/undergrad/tuition_undergrad.htm...

When I revisited UMN, it is $4200/semester... but that seems to be without fees.

http://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs_and_tuition/tuition_an...

I first saw the UMN tuition on this site, which calculates it for the year:

http://www.getreadyforcollege.org/sPagesGR/TuitionChart.cfm?...

That's more time than I really wanted to spend on this topic, but I do find it interesting that even state schools can cost way more than I would have suspected.
That's strange, I thought crying should be :'-(

I guess the semicolon could be seen as having a tear coming from one eye, but it's too easy to confuse with a wink.
If you can't see the difference between HN and Reddi, then perhaps Reddit truly is for you.
Sounds like my definition of "profound" may contain a lower amount of pretentiousness than yours.

People are moved by many and varied things in this world. Often it's not necessarily the importance or the profundity of the thing its self (in this case Michael Jackson's music) but the associations that the individual connects to that thing.

You mock how someone could be affected by such things as their fantasy football team and by implication, Michael Jackson's music. I only see this as an indication that you have very little insight into the inner workings of your own mind or that of anyone else's.
Yes, but I read the article too, and it seems like an adequate characterization of the C&D and the conflict, as far as the article describes it.
Actually, data are information. The way I understand the words is: information is simply any communication or part of a communication. Data specifically are units of information that are derived from measurements or calculations, and therefore are generally useful.

What Twitter is NOT is a source of FACTS.
"Muni spokesperson Judson True says otherwise. In fact, he says that, no, Muni owns the data in question and that the public is, of course, entitled to access it."

I paste this here, because it's at the very bottom of the article and it doesn't seem obvious to me that the arrival time of buses is public data that can be used for free. Well, that's what most of us wish but if Nextbus had made a deal with Muni to put their transponders on the buses in exchange of owning the data and giving it to Muni for free, it would be hard to argue otherwise. I wouldn't be surprised if Muni actually got a special deal because I think I remember looking at this exact thing for the buses where I live and that it had to be licensed.

It's somewhat similar to satellite or map imaging, in that companies have invested money to gather the data. It is public data in one sense but that doesn't necessarily mean it can be used freely. I'm glad Muni spoke out and made it clear though.

Another example (of a similar kind of possible deal) would be JCDecaux which offered (I believe) bus-stops benches to cities in exchange of managing the advertising on them.
Yep, business schools have been furiously selling out for many years. I remember attending classes in IBM and HP branded classrooms, and there were entire wings named after corporate sponsors before I'd left. Branding the degree itself itself isn't too much of a leap from there.

The bitter/sarcastic tone this article takes toward the end reminds me VERY much of humor/commentary I've heard from academics. It's amusing but off-putting at the same time, and comes off sounding as though the writer has an axe to grind.
Social Skydiving Day 3: My Own Biggest Obstacle- Me.
For the few interested in Delaware vs. Pennsylvania, here is another article from a PA-based firm:

http://www.barley.com/publications/article.cfm?article_ID=21...
Going to http://vyoom.com, here's how I can predict this site's eventual failure without having used the software at all:

* The header design is lifted from Facebook, except for the login, which was made artificially bigger and uglier.

* They use an externally hosted video to make me want to join. Hell, they use a video to make me want to join period.

* Using an image just so you can use an ugly serifed font?

* I don't know what bonus points are and I don't care, and I don't care that you're giving me a special offer. Giving me "points" suggests that I'll have to pay money.

* They're bribing me with gizmos to make me active? Desperate.

* Lots of bullshit without telling me why I care.

When something comes out that's really a Facebook killer, versus a Loopt or a Vyoom, you will know it's coming out because it's incredibly simple, doesn't bullshit on its front page, and it explains itself simply and powerfully. Compare this front page to Twitter's front page, which isn't as supersimple as Facebook's but which is fairly bullshit-free. Once you start fucking up your homepage, it's an indicator that you're not good enough to let your product speak for itself.
> I think the cost would be infinitesimal.

What is your "thought" based on?

> Weapons are cool, but not essential.

I've got nothing against martial arts, but AFAIK, they weren't associated with the observed reduction in criminally violent gun use.

Assuming that the effect is real and significant, why don't you find it important?

I'll state my bias up front - I'm all for reducing criminal violence. (However, that means that I oppose things that don't reduce criminal violence because they make it harder to do experiments and I think that restricting people for no good reason is bad.)
> Just ask anyone who conducts taste studies for food companies: there's a surprisingly large discrepancy between what people think they enjoy and what they actually enjoy.

I know at least one person who prefers the taste of Pepsi but drinks Coke "because I'm a southern girl and we don't drink Pepsi", that is, cultural reasons.
> If they gave a free upgrade to Windows 7, they could pretend Vista doesn't exist and eliminate most of its support costs; simply tell all customers that Vista will not be supported because Windows 7 is free and is compatible.

That sounds nice in theory. In practice there are many companies that change OS's very slowly as it cost alot of money and time to test internal apps and systems on each new OS.

I'd bet that even if Windows 7 was free there would be a substantial client base that would still stick with Vista, XP and 2000 because they don't want to have to upgrade thousands of computers.
I upvoted you for upvoting him, even though I'll get downvoted for saying this.

It's a testament to the worth of Hacker News that after literally an entire day of the vocal community calling an MJ article on HN blasphemy, the truth rings out with 100 karma.
Doing it this complex way would never have occurred to me. I would simply create an accessor method in the ActiveRecord model that doesn't exist in the database to take the hash and have it set the database field as a side effect, or in a before_save filter.
Infosys Co-Chairman to head India's UID project: The Probable inside story.
It isn't. But there's more to life than hacking, and I spent just as much time trying to perfect my moonwalk one teenage summer as I did trying to get my programs to run.
… and that's probably one great reason why monophasic sleep 'won' in an evolutionary sense. Robustness usually wins out over efficiency, and not being able to stay awake for a few hours to finish a hunt/avoid a predator/avoid freezing to death/etc. is a pretty big reduction in robustness.
It's the Pop-Eye emoticon. ;( "I yams what I yams"
No point in using big buzzwords. Given India's incompetence with building any system, we should first hope that whatever technology they use is scalable.
Election commission did a commendable job of making Voter Identity Cards but they entirely forgot to have the backend. They also forgot to put birth date and put Age instead (its not funny).

I also feel that some open source technology must be used here. Even an entirely new technology can be built.
"Why We Nap" - Stampi - next to impossible to find. It coined the word polyphasic (and monophasic) sleep.

It's exploratory, but pretty good science. It's basically a study of solo sail-boat racers- long distance. They have to get little naps in, but they have to stay awake enough to take advantage of wind and water currents for days and days.

Other than that, at least last time I checked a year or two ago, all sleep scientists had written it off as "sleep deprivation" which they feel they already have a good handle on (it's evil), and therefore they are very disinterested in actually studying it.
While this is a decent reminder of some reasonably current UI trends (and some very old ones - just check a few of the form-oriented items in this list), I'd guess that most HN readers are familiar with all of these concepts.

I'm somewhat tickled to see "sign-up forms must die" as the first item, but then a feature about giant, prominent sign-up forms appears farther down. Hm.
The link is heavily editorialized. The actual title of the article is: "Does A Private Company Own Your Muni Arrival Times?"
I had a tablet once. It's... the problem is that it's still a laptop computer. It's just not suited for being a digital notebook, whatever that's supposed to be.

It is simply not enough for there to be some parts of some applications geared towards tablet style interaction, the ENTIRE system needs to be built for it, and Windows with tablet input just wasn't.
The founder of Routesy should sue NextBus for harassment and Apple for complicity, and see how fast this case gets settled. He'll get his app reinstated and probably get some compensation for lost revenue from NextBus to avoid trial... if in fact the MUNI position is correct.
Good advice on a very important subject.
Tata Nano: First 100,000 Owners Chosen & Deliveries in July
The Post Processing Era of Photography
I agree. I've been using a Thinkpad for a while and now trackpads just feel icky. I actually looked to see if they exist. They do, but they're like 100 US$ and have a bulky trackpad attached on the bottom.
Or... just add a privacy filter to the display. http://www.google.com/search?q=privacy+filter+display
No need for webcams, special software that needs to run on all possible OS'es etc.
It's funny. Just today I read that it was not uncommon for people 200 years ago to die from toothaches. This story brought that immediately to mind. Just ignoring something you don't really understand and hoping it won't be important in the long run is often fatal.
Agreed. I recently added emoticons to my startup -- ran into the same issue myself.
Man in the mirror lyrics by michael jackson
Yes, I suppose that would have worked as well, and would've been more in the spirit of the first attempt at a solution, but it wouldn't have been very general, and it certainly wouldn't have worked for all models in the application (without a lot of manual intervention).
When I need to focus, I definitely need to use my left ear. Never really gave it any thought before. I just thought my right ear was not exactly doing a good job. Now I feel uncomfortably predictable too
You are right. I knew the expression seemed familiar for some reason.
i agree. tmz and hn rarely have common interests, and it should stay that way.
In memory of michael
why they're inefficient?
it’s a community that holds rationality above all else. It is not rational to stick to strict rules no matter what

Wow! Well said.

And as others suggested, its worth providing a link to this from the FAQ.
I've lived the vast majority of my life here, so I can't speak for the average Chinese person in China. But based on all the Asians I've ever met in the US, it's a pretty clear yes.

The US is the most progressive nation in the world in terms of promoting ideals of racial and gender equality, which naturally results in more people believing in "genetic equality" as well. As such, I'd be very surprised if there were another nation/culture that downplayed the genetic influence on intelligence/aptitude as much as in the US, where people are taught that anyone can do anything if they want it badly enough. (e.g., "The Secret" book and dvd's)
I keep submitting DreamHost links, but trust me on this one!
Importance of Quality Assurance
Quality assurance takes into account a series of planned steps required to provide any business with confirmation of certain expected quality standards from its products or services. A company must avoid any flawed product or negligence in services and offer the products and services of the top most quality.
Amazing illusion
steve, you should submit your own blog posts to hn... ;)
Woonerf and Python
Cultural Imperialism, Technology, and OLPC
Here you go. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630233

Hold on while I find the better link... Here you go: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/09/recognizing-impr...

I thought this second one was pretty interesting. An EMR company CEO on a forum I sometimes read enthusiastically pushes Win 7 over XP. Apparently it's _much_ better.
Obviously, not an ideal like Gandhi or MLK.

But if Michael Jackson was a hacker, he was a nearly ideal one. He was recognized as a musical prodigy when he was 5. After that, because of his domineering, exploitative, and probably abusive father, music was basically all he thought about [1]. These are the same childhood circumstances that produced Mozart and Beethoven.

The experts all seem to agree that he was an absolute master musician and dancer. At the very least, he made some of the most popular albums of all time. It's hard to imagine anyone achieving that kind of success without a lifetime of dedicated practice. I can definitely see the shoe thing as the product of someone who spent a lot of mental energy thinking about new ways to push the envelope in a song-and-dance act.

So, to sum up, if Michael Jackson was a hacker, he was a great one. And the trouble is, if Michael Jackson was a Great Hacker [3], he's the only one I know [4]. I happen to agree with Paul Graham's take on Greatness:

So if you ask a great hacker how good he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't know. He's not just being modest. He really doesn't know.

And none of us know, except about people we've actually worked with. Which puts us in a weird situation: WE DON'T KNOW WHO OUR HEROES SHOULD BE. (emphasis is mine)

I'm really not comfortable with this conclusion, because I'd like to be a Great Hacker myself someday, and it's pretty obvious that Michael Jackson's troubles were partly caused by his success.

Of course, I'd love to find a way to escape this line of reasoning...

[1] Obviously, this isn't something anyone would want to live through, but it did have the effect of making Jackson focus on music the way a great hacker would. If music was the only way for him to earn his father's love when he was five years old, then he definitely would have wound up loving music [2].

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1059324...

[2] Yes, this is pretty twisted. Hard to believe. Most of the reporting I've read about the Jacksons says something to similar effect, though. I'm inclined to believe it's true just because it would be such obvious libel otherwise.

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

[4] Or more precisely, if we're going to call MJ a hacker, I have more evidence that he's a great hacker than I do for anyone else.