skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why should they be spending all their profits on R&D and not marketing?
Do you refuse to wear name-brand clothes because they spend 90% of their profits on marketing?

I just don't get the R&D vs Marketing hate.
Modern History of the Middle East
ifs-at-the-start-of-a-method

Even for a simple if: DRY! You should have put those in reusable functions with nice understandable names ages ago :]
Okay, the misinformation is getting a little out of hand here. DigitalOcean certainly aren't charging you to erase your data, all you have to do is check the "Scrub Data" checkbox. Yes, you have to pay for the time your VPS is on while erasing, but that's perfectly reasonable.
Its only a code name.
Olive oil

a) has the ability to permanently ruin clothes

b) is expensive (don't kid yourself, the very cheap stuff is not all olive oil)

c) takes more time to clean up

d) has the potential to clog drain pipes

e) isn't something normally found in the bathroom, and as such requires a container that needs to be refilled

Shaving cream

a) takes time

b) is over-dispensed by most people

c) is something else to buy

d) takes time to clean up

e) has mess potential

f) costs money

I use water or shave dry, cheaper and has worked for 20 years.
Hmm. "measure inequality by the ratio of the largest private fortune to the wealth of a typical (median) household"

Seems like using the Gini coefficient (the standard measure of inequality in a society) would have been a better choice than creating a new one.
I nearly dropped out, but got very, very lucky.

Last semester some organization introduces nationwide competition for all colleges on various professions (programming included) with sponsors like Apple, Microsoft, Cisco etc.

So I won competition in the college itself since they only can send one applicant.

I won national-wide competition as well thus showing that my college is the best in the field.

After that my grades got cooked and I graduated with accomplishment diploma and pretty good grades.
I think you meant: Mr. Édouard Neigedon.
I rarely hear devs saying they use much of what they studied, except some general programming techniques. I do think having a degree is awesome but I'm not sure who is actually wary of self-taught programmers.
> the truth of life is that having a Masters degree opens 100x more doors than not having it

This is true in some industries but not all. In the world of programming, it is perhaps true for your first couple of jobs. After that, if you have done well, it is basically irrelevant.

If you have access to an excellent CS program like Stanford or MIT, then that is definitely worth it, and any university is good for making social and business connections which can be very valuable later on.

But from a strict getting-a-job perspective - well, I hire programmers for a startup, and I don't place too much weight on a degree. I've seen people with CS degrees who were absolutely useless, and absolute top-notch developers without a degree, and vice versa. I will look at their work and their personalities over some long-ago half-forgotten theoretical knowledge every time.
I won't be able to underline how true is this comment.

Other people (HR, collegues, etc..) might be very superficial. As a dropout, best case scenario, you will have to prove your knowledge on a daily basis. It will happen, quite often, that some people will not even try to understand what your real level is and will simply consider you "inferior".

You should dropout if and only if you have something concrete and important worth the loss of a missing degree. Which it means: 1) you are the founder of a successful business 2) you have a serious offer from a well-known company

In any other scenario, not having a degree will put you in the horrible position of continuously confirm that you are worth your salary.
I share your pain, bro :)

Although, two corrections:

1) prices are, in my experience, lower than what you quoted: around 10-12 $/IP, depending on the subnet size.

2) RIPE is indeed encouraging the marketplace model: it is seen as a mechanism to move resources to LIRs that need them the most, with the side effect of increasing IP efficiency.

Also, to note:

4) Since some time, there is a policy proposal [1] to allow intra-RIR transfers to/from RIPE. I'm not aware on whether there is such a proposal within ARIN, which currently allows only transfers to/from APNIC (not very useful if you're american... addresses in APNIC ended a long time ago!).

5) RIPE currently operates in a "emergency policy" that allows a /22 to new registrants and a /24 to new members. ARIN will follows the same policy as soon as they remain with a single /8 left (probably around May-June 2014).

6) I always like to give a link to the very informative exhaustion graph of Geoff Huston [3] :)

[1] http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2012-03

[2] https://www.arin.net/resources/request/transfers_8_4.html

[3] http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html
I just finished the "Thank You" video yesterday and, while I appreciate your humor (he does say both phrases a lot), I also want to point out what makes him so effective. It's a given that you have to be able to communicate your subject matter, but he's got an obvious enthusiasm for machine learning. And it's contagious - I'm a long way from Linear Algebra and Partial Derivatives (early '80s) but his easy-going style combined with how he presents the material makes it easy to follow along.

Now I just need a project where machine-learning would be an appropriate way of processing data!
It really hurt the non-Indians in my American university's MEng program that all the Indians (about 80% of my department) worked collaboratively on all the homework, projects, and exams. Culturally, this had been acceptable for them as Indian undergrads, but it was completely unacceptable cheating in the US and ruined the curve for the rest of the students.
Damn straight, I went there. And got no replies. Because there's really no good reasons to defend LISP's horrible syntax in non-live programming use-cases.
Just finished yesterday
Obviously you are a technician and not an HR manager ;)
But we won't be able to browse Hacker News! (Even though they use Cloudflare now and could just turn on the AAAA records).
30c3: To Protect And Infect, Part 2 (New Snowden revelations from Applebaum)
YouTube Started Deleting Egypt’s Husni Mubarak Era Torture Videos, But Why?
Display your PC screen on TV Wirelessly with AirTame Wireless HDMI
Yes, but on the other hand, there are plenty of plain losers with degrees. Not that I recommend dropping out, though.
Firstly, to come out with a statement like "Ev's technical skills are light years beyond any of you so-called programmers" shows that you have no idea who the audience is for HN. Your comment is both incorrect and comically pretentious.

Secondly - are you the same Gwen Bell who "co-created" Bitters? If so, can you enlighten us on how it differs from the Express demo app? Please give details.
Except it's happening right now. Google's chart of percentage of requests coming over IPv6 shows that usage rate is accelerating: http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html

And my personal experience is the opposite - most 'big' networks are fully IPv6 capable (both in terms of equipment and staff), there's just no business case to enable it for many of them because of the lack of capability on home (consumer-grade) equipment.
I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists.

Prices are determined at the margin, not in aggregate. The question is whether you'd hate to live in a world with one fewer artist. I think we could manage.

I.e. if the first 10 artists in the world increase wealth by $100k/each, and the 11'th artist increases wealth by $10k (due to diminishing marginal returns), then the price of an artist will be $10k. That's how much society loses if one artist quits. The remaining $90k x 10 artists is captured by society as consumer surplus.

(This is true of all professions with competitive employment markets.)
Unfortunately I assure you nothing changed in the 90s or 00s WRT teaching yesterdays fads, tomorrow.

Maybe its better in the 10s.

I did the night school / online thing nearly a decade ago after having been in the field a little longer than yourself. What I enjoyed the most was variety. Some schools don't have many electives, avoid those.

I got an associates degree when I initially got started. 99% of hiring managers consider that toilet paper if not used toilet paper. That's "OK" because after your first real job no one cares about degrees anymore. It just makes the initial job search, pure hell. The only difference between an associates and a bachelors is about 32 credits of liberal arts, lots of math, and some random stuff (public speaking, survey of engineering, business 101, that kind of thing). I was kind of pissed off at not getting transfer credit for my FORTRAN and COBOL classes, I got to take some intro to programming C++ classes in the early 00s, that was, um, interesting, it was very easy but still very time consuming.

Liberal arts are wasted on the youth. For example I hated history class in 8th grade, absolutely loved college level history when I was about 3x that age. Lit classes were awesome. You'll hear a lot of 19 year olds on the HN echo chamber mode telling each other that liberal arts classes are a waste of time, that kind of talk goes away once (or if?) they age and get some wisdom.
Just curious: what country are you from? I'm from Denmark and my L-1B process wasn't nearly as bad; certainly not as bad as my IR1 which is still ongoing--but maybe the fact that I have an IR1 application helped with the L visa somehow.
In a conflict with thousands of drones none of that high tech stuff has really proven itself. What good is a satellite network, when satellite communication can be blocked? Why make something disposable stealthy?
I have an even better idea: no pharma patents at all. Instead of relying on private R&D, rely on public funding -- just like we do in other fields of science. Let anyone produce the drugs discovered by that research and bring the focus of research back to drugs that work rather than drugs that are easy to profit from.
In most countries, other than US, UK and a few others, these services are either not available, or the internet speeds are not fast enough to stream movies. For eg. in India, we the avg speed we get is around 20KBps. So its ptrtty much impossible to strem via Netflix, Hulu or amazon.

Torrent is the best (read only) option we have. I myself download about 3-4 movies and several seasons of tv shows a week.
Economics being the study of scarce resources, this is basically something that should be viewed through that lens. As the good becomes more scarce, it stands to reason that the price will go up and 1) encourage people to use them more efficiently, and 2) encourage people to look at alternatives like ipv6. It's probably a bit more complex in some ways, but I think the basic logic makes sense.
There are some reasons why IPv6 will take until 2015 until we start to see substantial adoption, but technician knowledge isn't one of them.

Any competent IPv4 network engineer can come up to speed on IPv6 in a single one-week class.

The major reason why we aren't seeing adoption is that there is no commercial need - that's the real driver.
I don't think you're using the word monopoly correctly here.

Google clearly does not have a monopoly on search.
I believe in PG's "what languages fix" criterion, and I'm convinced that C will be displaced by a language which fixes multicore programming. You can do multithreaded code in C the way you can do structured programming in BASIC (or do OO in plain C): it's possible, because the language is Türing-complete and the required primitives are there, but the language is so unhelpful that it simply doesn't scale, and the only sane thing to do is to try and avoid doing it as far as possible.

(I don't mention C++, because it sucks as a high perf solution in the hands of the C++ programmers you can effectively hire: cf. e.g. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus)

Hence I'm more than puzzled that M# design doesn't seem centered on multi-core exploitation, including GPUs. Single-threaded Moore law is over, so robust concurrency is where performance gains are. They pay lip service to coroutines, because they know they have to, but that's hardly their main design constraint.

Go with its goroutines at least addresses the proper question, whether you agree with their proposed answer or not.
I also finished the last of the videos over the weekend. I thought the course was excellent -- just the right amount of detail to get you started, and yes, his enthusiasm for the material is contagious.

Ng's machine learning is the first class on Coursera I actually saw through to completion, and I'm a little sad now that it's over. It reminded me of all of the best classes I took in college, how excited I was about the material and the inevitable letdown when the class ended.
I found this to be one of git's greatest strengths; Beyond the basics, it doesn't force you to use features you don't need or want. Initially, I just committed snapshots in a single branch. Later, I found I wanted to do something experimental, so I learnt to branch, and so on…

Now, I would miss git's more advanced features if they weren't there, but when I started, I distinctly remember thinking, "For now, I just want to be able to change my code non-destructively, so I can easily revert it if I make mistakes". Git did that, and did it well.
Can you explain the mechanism by which the rich keep the poor there?

(If the answer is simply "insufficient wealth redistribution", what is the right amount of wealth redistribution? I.e., at what amount of redistribution do we declare that the wealthy have done enough, and the problem must lie not with them?)
This is tough to do. A while back, I sold off an effort I'd maintained for several years called http://langpop.com , which was, IMO, the best effort out there because I looked for a lot of different data sources to utilize including source code, google searches, books, and jobs.

One of my conclusions is that there is "popularity" in terms of overall use, and "acceleration" in terms of something gaining popularity quickly. Cobol is probably something in the first category. Ruby, when Rails started to take off, was in the 'accelerating' category.
Like so many others have said, first it depends on what you mean as successful. One thing you need to think about with college is student loan debt. Some can go through without loans but many can not. So you need to not only work hard, but also to network hard so that you can get a good enough job that will allow you to pay back the loans without destroying your standard of living.

Beyond that, college offers many opportunities such as making friendships, meeting people from other countries and having access to vast stores of information and industry professionals. This is something that is difficult to duplicate simply by striking out on your own. Possible, but difficult.

It's true that some people simply don't need to go to college. They are already emotionally and intellectually mature enough to enter the world of business. But you must realize that they are the minority. Not everyone can be Steve Jobs.

Personally, I didn't drop out. But I did take several years off between high school and college. I worked one awesome job until it went out of business. Then I tried freelancing but I just didn't have the technical ability nor the salesmanship to make any money. During undergrad I continued freelancing on and off but I got burned by more clients than I actually got paid by. During my master's though I worked for the university on several great projects and that allowed me to have an awesome resume. Then it pretty much started raining jobs. By the end of my coursework I was working 3 jobs and I ended up killing my 4.0 and graduated with a 3.9 (I may never get over the shame).

Now I am qualified, have a track record of success, and above all else have the confidence to sell myself and my abilities. And I didn't have any of that before college.
I don't think such research wasn't considered, it's been used constantly in many projects since.

The reason why some platforms have "silly" choices like stop the world M&S GC, or interpreters with AST walking is, likely, that optimization wasn't a goal in the original implementation and it's hard to retrofit it while keeping compatibility.
True, although if you're in Europe, it's definitely not as hardcore (tenure wise etc.) as the US.
Does anyone know if this function is actually written in asm? Case in point:

The code was probably originally written for NeXT
by an engineer who was familiar with load-store
architectures like PowerPC but not so familiar with
register-memory architectures like x86 ... Those of
you who do know x86 better may be able to identify
some of the inefficiencies in this code

Why wouldn't/couldn't this function be written in C (are there any instructions that would need some non-portable intrinsics?) and leave it to an optimizing compiler to get the instructions right. Sure, sending messages is low-level and needs to be high performance but that, to me, doesn't necessitate "we have to do this by hand" asm instead of C.
So is there are single-word name for "angle brackets", the ones you write with less-than/greater-than symbols?

If I had my way, I'd call them pointyparens.
How Yahoo is going to compete with Twitter, Facebook et al
NSA reportedly plants spy malware on laptops purchased online
In short: This guy wrote a wrapper around git [1] that practically makes it SVN, then wrote a paper about how students don't like the staging area and actually got published. [2]

The real interesting story here is how peer review managed to let something slip through that ignores the main target demographic for git, professionally working and experienced developers; and also ignores such extremely simple hypotheses such as "some people think Git is hard because most learning materials about Git are bad at communicating".

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/sperezde/gitless
[2] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2509578.2509584
Strange indeed. Mystery solved though. Thanks for the screenshots - they helped debug it!
Darcs vs. git annoyances: pushing specific patche
Wisdom, from A Football Life: On Lombardi, "He just made me want to play harder"
How do you figure? Jobs seems to have dropped for lack of funds, Ted Turner was expelled,
/8 is CIDR notation, CIDR standing for ClassLESS Inter-Domain Routing.

Classful network architecture died a couple of decades ago, I'm not sure the term still persists with people erroneously substituting class A/B/C to describe any of /24, /16, /12 or /8 IPv4 networks, sometimes as part of an RFC 1918 network, sometimes not..
>Also, isn't the internet itself more or less a "a network [where] the moving entities selfishly choose their route"?

The moving entities? No, the routers make choices; it's equivalent to the road telling you which turns to take. In the example scenario the router at 'start' could evenly distribute the entities for optimal performance.
I'm ashamed I have to ask but: furry animals?
The principle of net neutrality is directly related to freedom (or ability of a corporation to curb it, kill competition they don't like by throttling access to them etc).

How net neutrality is put in practice is entirely a different matter. And for some reason you think if it is the government doing the enforcement, that it is somehow against freedom? I completely disagree. Government not allowing another private entity to abuse me is fine with me.

In some countries net neutrality is the law already by the way.
Simple unix scripting
One of the very first points Greenwald makes is that encryption software is ridiculously hard to install and use for even versed users, nevermind the general populace. I didn't check the rest of the conference materials, but i've no doubt that nobody picked up on that; even though it represents a very hard but very worthwhile problem to pursue and solve.
1000$ for 1 year of online-news? Seriously!?
This isn't news. There are plenty of poor quality conferences and publications willing to take your money and publish without checking.

Even the good quality conferences send out batches of papers to be reviewed and then the reviewers forward them to their students and colleagues without properly checking the feedback before passing them back to the section chairs. Just be thankful that you didn't have a good quality paper rejected due to a bad review by a tired PhD student who didn't have enough experience in the field to be a reviewer.

The OP blames the education system for putting pressure on students to publish. The problem is more like not teaching the students how to find a reputable path to publication and not weighing the quality of the venue.

He/she should also be complaining to iraj.in for hosting the dodgy conference website and lending credibility to it.
Binary thinking ALERT

Lets have fun with "scare quotes". No one told me I "had to" "either" attend university full time or drop out completely, so crazy me, I chose the 3rd option.

I ran out of money and motivation after about a year full time, man cannot live on ramen alone, got an offer for about 1/2 the pay of a real job but full tuition reimbursement while 1/2 real pay was still a modest integer multiple of minimum wage, so needless to say I jumped. Dramatic increase in standard of living, etc.

Personally I found one weeknight class (typically 2 hrs tue/thr or mon/wed) and one weekend class (typically a brain numbing 4 hr saturday morning/afternoon) was about right when things were boring, but family + work pressure etc occasionally resulted in only one class per semester. I knew people who tried to pull off 3 or even 4 classes with a full time 1st shift job, but they suffered horribly.

I studied and did homework every lunch time at work and very rarely did homework at home other than the occasional term paper.
MegaCmd - A commandline sync client for free 50G storage
Cisco partners with Wilocity on hyper fast 5-gigabit Wi-Fi tech
For those learning English: parenthesis is the singular, parentheses the plural:

( opening parenthesis
) closing parenthesis
() parentheses
(( two opening parentheses
)) two closing parentheses

Way more info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket
Clearly WaMu, Countrywide and AHM (some of the biggest mortgage issuers) faced no consequences from people defaulting on mortgages. Clearly BankAm and Citi aren't sitting on massive losses from bad loans they made, desperately trying to push the losses into future years.

Go read this paper about what actually happened. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421837

It's hard to claim that person A stole from person B if both A and B lost money.
"Türing-complete"

This must be the more metal version of the regular Turing completeness. \m/ :)