skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I finally took the plunge with he-who-must-not-be-named the other day.

I have to say the sheer amount of documentation on the site (especially rationalisation of the design) is fantastic. It really puts confidence in you to use the "product" :)
Preaching 'College is a waste of time' and dropping out of college makes you a Facebook founder, isn't healthy! If you are studying Computer Science, you need to learn Artificial Intelligence or Architecture design, you cannot say it has no relevance to the industry. It does, and it helps to shape up a young mind to look at the BIG picture. YCombi is great, but how can you replace that for College education? Its narrow in scope.
It's not just for browsing (FF let you close tabs and open new ones too when you middle click on a link). For instance it is instrumental if you want unix-like copy and paste, to which I am addicted by now.
hmm, could that list not be replaced by one book?

Common Sense for Dummies
While I agree with your opinion of the submitted list, I feel your list is a bit unbalanced. Why only math, science and economics?

A few random suggestions:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/06712...

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century by Neil Postman

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Bridge-18th-Century-Improve/d...
I think the larger problem is the nature of current political discourse is to assume the other person/party is an evil idiot and do everything in your power to spread that idea, without addressing the content of what they say or proposing any details better solution yourself or working together to for the good of the country instead of infighting.
Sometimes I wonder the case is when we meet any new problem, we first try to fit it into any existing framework in order to understand it, until the framework is broken.

This doesn't debase the beauty of math. But I just feel maybe we just need an excuse to fund mathematicians.
Why is this getting that much of upvotes?

That was clearly a typo. Besides, Mommaboy seems to be a new account created just to troll.
Ask HN: Wireless Video Streaming to Justin.tv?
I'm trying to figure out the easiest option for setting up live video streaming from my buddy's bar to Justin.tv. I'd prefer to use a wireless camera because the location of the PC in the bar isn't a good spot for video recording.

Is anyone aware of any wireless cams that work well with Justin.tv please?

I searched quite a bit online. I came across this article, but it's elaborate and prone to failure:

http://johnbeales.com/20080820/using-vlc-to-transcode-an-axis-cameras-video-stream-and-stream-it-out-again/#vlc-transcode-solution

Also thought about using WM Encoder to stream directly to a service like Fliqz: http://www.fliqz.com/

But I'd prefer to use Justin.tv for the social features, etc., not to mention the user base!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Now we only need some data that somebody in a billion years wants to read.
Senators challenge AT&T's exclusive iPhone deal
I know they're not valued much here at HN, but don't forget the Liberal Arts types. Art History and such may not be my cup of tea, but I'm glad someone out there is teaching and studying it.

College may not do much for the entrepreneur types, but I didn't know I was one until after college, and it took the skills I acquired there to get myself off the ground.
I guess what joshu was trying to say, is if you're receiving SMS, then a url with that is useless. You can't look it up on your phone, and if you can, then use twitter on your web browser instead of SMS. Even including the URL would mean you'll have to wait til you get a computer, at which point you could just visit twitter anyway.
Ask HN/PG: College/YC. Too young for YC?
As I have posted in some other topics, I'm a high school student, enrolled in a Computer Science-focused high school program (read my bio for more). This is my last (senior) year.

I always 'fantasized' about skipping college (plan to study Business and Entrepreneurship) for a while and jump into YCombinator with some of my ideas, which I've begun to develop using Rails. I even gave (and am still giving) serious thought to submitting an application for YC Winter 2010, when I'll be out of High School, but right before I enter college. I'd very much rather live the YCombinator experience than going to college first.

However, I've always thought YCombinator would see me and my co-founder as too young, being only 18 years old by Winter 2010.

I read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663903 and thought that it reflected exactly what was on my mind. I'd like the opinion on people involved in the community (and PG if he has some time) as to whether I am/will be still too young for YCombinator.
College !== Law School
College !== Medical School
I'm sorry... it's not ready for the enterprise until there's a code generator that will automatically create the XML based on some existing COBOL code.
Doctors learn medicine in medical school. College is just wasting time jumping through hoops.

As for law, a friend who recently graduated from law school said, "We would spend all semester paying to hear our professors who just liked to hear themselves talk. Then we would spend our summers interning and get paid to learn useful skills."
Auto-Discover JAVA_HOME on Windows
Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage contact with your users?
Recently, I've been thinking about how I can do a better job of giving admins at one of the websites I run better tools for managing their relationships with users and customers.

In my head, I'm envisioning a tool that's easy to feed information into about user activity and that also makes it easy for my admins to keep track of interactions and give context about a user when they have a conversation with them.

I've been looking at tools like Highrise for CRM, Tender Support, and a few others but nothing perfectly fits the bill.

So I'm asking, does anyone else out there use a particular tool or have a set of strategies to manage relationships and communications with users of your service?
Doctors do learn on the job. Med School, Residency, etc. When they are done with that they are "practicing".
They also spend time keeping up with the latest research and best practices(we hope).
MacKay's side by side table comparing his book with Harry Potter made me laugh out loud just now:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html

He makes a pretty good case that his is the better textbook.
My personal opinion is that you are better off finding a job at a medium to largish company first, if you don't plan to go to college.

While this may not be the popular opinion here... There are many people out of high school building webapps. There are very very very few people building companies.

Building a viable, sustainable company has a lot of complexity. It is very valuable to see how a "real" company looks and works on the inside, good and bad, so that you have a better idea what to replicate and avoid as you build your company.
This is a fairly silly gripe. There is no objective measure for "best," content. Google has done a great job of finding relevant results for a given topic, and as the previous poster pointed out, they are constantly making adjustments to prevent "gaming," of the system as you describe it.

Beyond that, marketing is nothing more than swaying people's opinions. If you engage in marketing, and convince people you have the best content, and Google picks up on that and increases the page rank accordingly, I'd say they are doing exactly what they advertise.
We are not the mixergy RSS feed. Everything created there doesn't have to show up here [make up your own comments about the community expanding and contentless articles appearing with high upvote counts here].

Also, you're not helping your point:
"I bet you that a collage graduate learns more in her first year on the job than she does in all four years in college."

Interestingly though, a "collage graduate" is a good thing. A good university experience will give you exposure to a bunch of a different areas. Hopefully you'll become well-rounded. Then you can start connecting multiple disciplines together in unique ways not many people think to cross-pollinate.
I hate to chime in on an obvious troll, but I have to admit I laughed when I read the title.

The thing about college is that, for some of us, it teaches us to learn. Much like the IB program I attended in highschool, the Computer Science program in college forced me to learn how to learn.

It seems silly thinking about it, but looking back I remember a great deal of my peers in the lower level, general knowledge courses who complained about writing two page papers on something they'd just discussed in class. This should not be difficult. A 5-6 page paper was a single night ordeal for me, and a 2 pager just seemed like a silly thing to worry about. For me, it was a walk in the park because I had already learned to write from my time in IB, and before that in the honors middle-school program.

A trend? Yep.

So after college when I took a salaried job writing ColdFusion, a language I had barely even heard of, I picked it up quickly. Of course, that was thanks to having to learn a ton of languages, constructs, and their memory layouts in college. I had learned how to learn, just like highschool taught me to question things and middle school taught me to write (and enjoy writing).

That said, there is definitely nothing that will ever replace real-world experience. However, that coupled with a college education might just save you from picking up a bunch of bad habits and give you that much more of an edge in both life, and your career.

Disclaimer: All mispellings and terribly grammar are to be politely discarded lest the trolls be fed. ;)
the creations of the artists they represent are manifestly being widely disseminated without their authorization. This is against the law.

Gay people want to be able to get married. Currently, this is against the law in many places. Should we censor all sites that are advocating gay marriage?

(The will of the public is often way ahead of the law. Perhaps copyright is dead, and doesn't deserve legal protection anymore.)

The IFPI only wants to censor The Pirate Bay, which has always been blatant about what it's up to.

Fair use, like allowing people without good TV reception to watch TV? They also save me from setting up my own tracker when I want to distribute something to a large audience.

You'll note that they're not trying to censor github, for example.

Well, not today. But after they have set the precedent, why not censor everything they don't like?

Once they get to censor the Internet, everyone will want in. Will it be fair to only let one group censor the Internet? I think not. I demand equal censorship rights!

Finally, it's impossible to censor the Internet. Ask all you want, but censoring the Pirate Bay just means that they will change their IP addresses and will be down for a grand total of 10 minutes. Those IPs get blocked, TPB gets new ones, etc., etc.

Censorship is harmful to society, pointless, and technically impossible. (The Internet routes around damage. Damn that Internet, we should make that illegal too!)

So why bother?
Nope. There was just a bug that broke the re-reading of the change log. It was fixed pretty quickly. But not before I had a chance to show a bunch of Smalltalk students VisualWorks flailing.
In Derek's defense, several of the books he listed do have specific, harder knowledge, such as "Predictably Irrational" (written for the lay person, but cites many high quality studies), "Stumbling on Happiness" (same, covers much good research), "The Innovator's Solution", which contains a lot of high quality thought about how industries change, Bernstein's "The Four Pillars of Investing" (again, backed by good financial theory), and "Fooled by Randomness" (less original than it proclaims, but its fundamental perspective of the outcome of chaotic processes is useful for people not familiar with stats).

Yes, there are fluff books in there (Gladwell, Godin, etc) but you seem to be dismissing a lot of quality work just because you feel everyone should be reading hard theoretical material.

However, I do agree that it's easy to read only books such as those on Sivers' list and ignore those on your list, which is a mistake. A mix is healthy.
The Future of Web App Testing and How to Stop It
Required National Service is a horrible idea, for a myriad of reasons -- #1 of which is that it's slavery. Notice how whenever anyone talks about national service, it's always aimed at the politically naive (children, and young adults). We don't see required national service for 35 year olds, or 60 year olds.

Now supporting groups for young people to tackle is interesting problems (where they develop character and lasting relationships) is commendable, as long as its voluntary and not looking for a handout.
If you're ambitious, motivated, and skilled technically, college might be a waste?

I've yet to meet anyone who wholly discounts their college experience, even if they're advocates of alternative, experiential learning (like YC.)

You don't go to college for academic credentials. You go to college to meet people and learn about yourself.
How do you develop with developers you don't trust? I think that's the wrong question.
3D Printing For New Tissues And Organs
[ Original poster here ]

The stance that "images have no place on the Web" is the oldest of the lot, dating back to Netscape 2.0 days... it's hard to remember or even believe now, but people did rail against the IMG tag.

Back in the late 90s there was much argumentation that "things shouldn't move on webpages". This has died down as people have realized how motion can help clarify interfaces (iPhone's intertial drag helped lots), but we're still not at the point of universal acceptance that animation helps increase the total number of people who find the message accessible.

My point was that the arguments against richer interfaces have died down, as the browsers slowly advance to bring such abilities within reach. There will always be criticism of the leading edge, but Silverlight, iPhone, and "HTML5" have each helped convert camps away from the belief that only permissible medium is lengthy English text.

(SEO has had the gosh-darnedest amount of misinfo spread about... search engines have reached inside SWF for years and years, as the old Slashdot example query of "'contrary evidence' filetype:swf" showed. Start by visualizing the terms on which people will likely seek your services... research the competition you have for the first ten Google hits on the term... then optimize your pages for those terms in the usual way, as recommended by the search engines' guidelines. The "every little bit of dynamic text" fascination is starting to bite Ajax now too, so I have hope it will soon go away. ;-)

jd/adobe
those reasons are ultimately selfish

I don't know if that's right. There can be altruism in medical work, for example; and great scientific discoveries and artistic accomplishments have a pan-human, almost spiritual significance, at least for me -- like gifts to the species.

But I take your point: even if it's not a conversion from selfishness to "what is best for my child," but rather a conversion from altruism or pursuit of a masterpiece to "what is best for my child," the conversion still happens to a lot of people. And when it happens, it feels right.

----

p.s. sorry for the comment churn, your comment wasn't posted when I deleted my comment (which I realized was essentially just a more vehement restatement of my top-level comment).
Do you want a doctor to learn his trade on-the-job?

That's what rotations/residency/intership are. On-the-job training.
I would not advocate this myself. The advantages of college are not measured only in earnings. And even if they were, YC would only be suitable for a small percentage of students, because only a small percentage have the temperament to start a startup.
Now the title of Robert Martin's talk: "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby Too" makes sense.. http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/2089545/
Now he should invest in some screen cleaner. My God.
>What it teaches is out of date by the time students graduate

Subjects like math and algorithms (some of the most useful classes I took) do not go out of date by the time you graduate. I may have to learn a new algorithm later in life, but the building blocks that I got in the class are often necessary.
I don't understand the Android netbook meme at all. Moblin seems to make much more sense since it was actually designed for netbooks.
Why the hell they have to mention google wave on this page? ofcourse no one is confused about it and tgethr... I thought the page would show number of customers they got by 48 hrs.
"It creates corporate drones"

There are plenty of ways of going to college without assuming a lifetime of debt. But no one is going to bring you a bunch of money. It's up to you to find it. See, you learned something from college before you even matriculated.

"What it teaches is out of date by the time students graduate"

In Current Events class, maybe. In classics, sciences, history, etc., etc., etc., hardly.

"It doesn’t teach the way people learn"

Maybe. Maybe not. What is does do is present enough options so that someone who wants to learn will find a way.

"Four years of information is too much to retain"

If you're going to college to learn "four years of information", maybe you shouldn't go. OTOH, if you're going to discover yourself, expand your horizons, learn how to learn, and build a foundation for a better life, who cares how much "information" you remember?

"Its promise is a hoax"

Anyone lazy enough to go to college and expect the world on a silver platter deserves whatever they get.

"The truth is that college is one big party"

Any your complaint is...?
I'd suggest you at least do a year or two of college.

The most valuable things you learn in college are probably the meta-lessons. I.e. the things that are taught by the college experience generally, rather than any specific class. You learn many of them in the first year (maybe even the first semester). So there is a big difference between having one year of college and zero.

Don't prematurely optimize yourself.
"all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code", which just plain incorrect.

NVidia is saying that on Tegra the rendering is done in software because NVidia hasn't written a Linux 3D driver. Clearly that isn't Android's fault. I wonder how many months or years it will take to get the driver written.
Horrible bar graph.
Forget Google Wave.. How is this different from Google Groups?
Only if it is initially promoted.
"Partying is socialising, building a circle of friends/associates and generally learning how humanity interacts."

So is work, except you're more likely to remember it the next day.
The e-ink part is exactly the same. It's the logic behind the screen that is different.

And Kindles are not that different from any other e-paper display device bundled with e-readers from many other sources.

The Kindle should be cheap to build
Degree in Entrepreneurship? I've not heard of this, and (off the bat) it seems like it might be one huge contradiction, or a way for a school to bundle a bunch of pre-existing courses together into something "new and innovative" that they can advertise.

Can you discuss your program a bit?
I can understand Nvidia's position. It was either endorsing CE or losing support in future versions of Windows...
I think the grandstanding fist pump should disqualify mixergy from Hacker News altogether.
Don't you guys ever get tired of jerking off about YC?
College is not a waste if you want a great education. Where else can you interact with and be taught from the world's best in nearly any course of study? In college you get a mind opening view of what any one subject has to offer, rather than a narrow view driven by a purpose for learning that material. That broad exposure translates to being a more effective thinker and problem solver.

And to counter a few more of his points:
1) The fundamentals don't change every four months.
2) Lectures can be dry, but it doesn't mean you don't learn from them. And you DO get to put it into practice when you have labs or personal projects (often inspired by the new material you learned).

When I read that "many students" would do better as entrepreneurs out of high school, I take that as some significant amount of high school graduates. The vast majority of entering freshman really need the time and environment a university offers to develop their skills and passions (ie. figure out what they want to do and what they're good at.).

I'd be afraid that the students who would do the best without college are the students we need most to pursue educations in engineering and sciences. It would be unfortunate if they spent their resources starting a company which likely wouldn't succeed instead of getting an education that would bear better fruit down the road.
YCombinator is a waste; replace it with Vegas.
Personally I'm getting tired of all this college bashing. Nowhere else can the most people build up the biggest contacts' network, greatest knowledge and the best personal development for the shortest amount of time. Sure thing, there's always the exceptions proving the rule. This is probably the most evident within comsci.

As a reply to the article, I'd say the best way to transform "waste" into "worth" is simply to get rid of the huge tuitions with maintained quality. Though, I realize this is probably next to impossible for the US. However, it works fine in other countries.
Well... I love Ubuntu on my Aspire One.

That said, it's a dual-threading 32 bit CPU with 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and a slow, but spacious, 160 GB hard disk.

This was good for a beefy server a couple years ago.
I hate AT&T as much as the next iPhone owner but is this really something they need to concern themselves with?
Less "scare quotes", more recognition of the nominalization being used.

Much of the WhatWG evangelism tries to portray these proposals as a done deal, using phrases like "the HTML 5 standard". But none of us today know how that process will eventually turn out.

The browser vendors within the WhatWG have been trying to define a multimedia engine for years... phrase "HTML5" first got on my radar four years ago:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2005/06/html5.html

The W3C has bought in to the WhatWG's work, but there's much ambivalence too, particularly as it attempts to rewrite existing Standards and Recommendations (URLs, accessibility), and how editorial control is so focused in so few hands. Hard to say at this point how it will all turn out. Bottom line, what we conveniently call "HTML5" here is not necessarily what a future "HTML 5.0 Recommendation" may be. (Or, more tersely, "don't jump the gun. ;-)

By the way, who are you? I remember researching the handle "johnnybgoode" a year or two ago, but this Hacker News account is recent. It's funny to see people arguing about how "open" they are when they keep their identities hidden... attaching your reputation to your opinions raises their value. You can hide if you wish, but why not open up...?
That's kind of funny, I actually just finished building a tool that lets you perform queries against the ruby AST. You can pattern match and process S-Expressions. It still needs a bit of polish, but it's pretty neat.

Check it out, SexpPath:
https://github.com/adamsanderson/sexp_path/tree
they have one at my school. it's like a hodge podge of different things, with some basic stuff thrown in like "Writing a business plan". so much of the stuff is out of date and useless, it's not even funny.
It's a good idea if it makes your competition follow what you say while you do something else.
For an academic, MacKay seems to have a great sense of humor :)