skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why go to school at 15 when you can drop out and make twice what you're parent(s) do selling drugs.

Of course the book Freakonomics posed the question of why so many street-level drug dealers still live with their (usually single) parents, and the answer was that most of those dealers don't actually make much money. But, yes, the DREAM of making big money draws young people into dealing when studying their math and English lessons would almost surely produce more return on investment for their time.
does anyone actually get any work done on smartphones or is it just an excuse to have your business pay for goodies and writing it off?
You can downvote me to infinity. Google is a company and as such it is only interested in earning money, everything else is second.
It baffles me that the first instinct of some students in response to massive budget deficits is to protest budget cuts and layoffs. They should move to California when they graduate, they would fit right in. I was on the mailing list of a few organizations that urged me to fight the state government's plans to cut back staff positions and hours in response to our multi-billion dollar hole. What do they think we should do, close our eyes and wish the deficit away?
When it comes to maintaining code, I believe there are 2 kinds of crap: subjective (I don't like it) and objective (it's crap because of these 14 specific reasons).

You're probably right about people who inherit my code. I know, when they've whined about it, I confronted them. "Please show me exactly what's wrong with it. What are your specific complaints about violations?" I rarely got an objective answer. It was usually something about formatting, indenting, variable names too long, variable names too short, I'm use to it the way we did it (wrongly) at XYZ Co., something like that.

True crap can be objectively identified by a violation such as:

- variables named so that no one except King Tut could possibly figure out what they are

- the same variables used for different purpose at the same time, usually in nested recursions

- variables named with 1 or 2 characters

- unassigned variables

- variables initiated when they shouldn't be

- division by zero

- single entry, multiple exit (heavily maintained so that now outlying cases skip critical logic)

- the same code in multiple places (only some of it maintained so that outlying cases skip critical logic)

- endless recursions (for outlying cases only, naturally)

- comments that don't agree with the code

- data base tables with no definitions either in the schema or any code (my new favorite)

I could go on and on, but you kinda get the picture. I wonder how many readers here have posted crap like this on their "wall of shame" at one time or another. It's funny the first 2^n times. Not so much fun anymore.
Lion gives owner a birthday hug 
Jupiter the lion, who was rescued from a travelling circus by the owner of an animal shelter in Colombia, gives her a big hug on his tenth birthday.
You don't have to use Objective-C, and you are free to use a language with a garbage collector:

http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-schem...
Actually, I think the iPhone's success has practically guaranteed the next wave of personal computing will follow the console model.

It's easier for the user, the development community is willing and it offers larger returns for the platform creator.

Besides, most of the guts of personal computing are being done via protocols and services; platform lock-in isn't really done on the device anymore.
Women uses dead husband's ashes for painting 
A widow has immortalised the memory of her husband by commissioning a painting using his ashes.
Could you elaborate on what taxes are levied on property at the Federal level? I was not aware there was such a thing (I've never owned real estate).
Social Skydiving Final Exam: Challenge Me, I Fail, I Pay You
I'm issuing a challenge for you guys to come up with an impossibly hard challenge as my task for my final day of social skydiving. You can post them here or, if you want to be eligible for the $500 bounty you can post your ideas in the comments of my blog here:
http://socialskydivingwithjustin.posterous.com/social-skydiving-win-up-to-500-to-challenge-m

I'm posting this to HN because it's social media + self improvement + code monkey.
Honestly, I think if you need to "Try" to get more twitter followers you are:
1) not interesting enough for people to follow you on their own accord.
2) doing it wrong.
Microsoft kills Popfly, all mashups and contributions will be lost.
Why do costs get created in a company? Generally it seems that we create a cost because we think it will result in revenue greater than that cost or because we think that cost will prevent some other larger cost (such as fines from the gov't).

I'm all for efficiency and maximizing the revenue we gain from each expense but we've still gotta realize that when we cut costs, we're losing something that was intended to generate revenue.

I've seen this happen in a large company where they cut a ton of expenses thinking they are going to be profitable (and they are in the very short term) but all those expenses were there for a reason. A few months later, revenue drops like a brick.
What you've got here is a charity case. No matter whats promised, you're almost certain to get nothing out of the deal.

If you think that its worth doing a few extra hours of work to help out this 'old friend' then tell him exactly that and do it without expectation (or request) of any financial compensation. If not, just tell him that you've taken on all you can handle right now. Sorry. Repeat as necessary.
You should consider your code to suck over time, if you're "doing it right".

If you keep learning new and better techniques and practices, old code starts to look immature. If you code in the real world, you make compromises to get a project launched before you're living in an alleyway.

TicketStumbler may be a steaming pile of crap in some places and my deployment strategy may have devolved to "install random packages until it stops throwing internal errors", but it was not always this way. Not only have I managed to become an even more amazing programmer in the past year (against all odds), but I've had to cut so many corners the whole thing is beginning to look like a circle. These two factors, above all others, have caused me to rather loathe my code. But that doesn't mean I always do.

Maybe this was the point Jeff was attempting to make? If I am only good by hating all my code, I don't see how I could ever be good.
Selling in a down market can often be worse than debt.

The cuts are extreme because they need to start thinking 1/2 the ROI * 70% of the endowment or ~35% of last year’s income. They must do a huge drop in spending over the next 10 years or they are going to actually run out of money.
Point him to elance and if he still complains about your paltry $100 bucks then tell him to take a hike.
For good or ill, GPL reflects RMS' personality, in much the same way start-ups reflect their founder's personality. GPL is a polemical, political statement, not just a software license. That reflects the fact that RMS is a moral philosopher, not just a programmer.

This is not to say that we should judge GPL by RMS' personality - GPL, just like companies people create, will stand on its own; all I am saying is that GPL is strongly influenced by the personality of its creator.
Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?
My son just turned 4, so I'm in a similar boat.
My current thoughts are to use something like Lego Mindstorm NXT. This way he will be able to program graphically which will teach him logic and the robot will show the result of what he did, instant gratification. A much more playful environment for a 4 year old than see some script/compiler/IDE stuff.

Any Thoughts??
I'm using Chrome 2.0.172.33 and I don't experience what you are describing.
It is unlikely, actually -- they were forced into DRM by the publishers, not because of any true desire to include it. DRM doesn't help Amazon; it hurts them.

As for DRM, if you think that at least 200,000 people haven't heard of DRM (all my statement requires, if you'll read closely) ok then.

Do your own research, if you want to. There are resources available. The EFF alone has around 80,000 members, I believe, and I am sure just about every one of them knows what DRM is.

The problem with measuring opportunity cost is that it is very, very, very hard to measure. DRM means that I haven't bought about $500 worth of books or so, so far, I'd guess.

Wonder how many people there are like me? More than a few, even without having hard numbers, I'd wager.
Mission possible: researchers make online text self-destruct
Another Mainstream Media Castoff Joins TechCrunch: Welcome Paul Carr
Honestly if you want to start an open source project for the sake of starting an open source project, its probably not going to work. You're probably not going to want to work on it after awhile and you won't accomplish much.

What I would suggest is examine the software you use and problems you are having with it, or some problem that you have that hasn't been solved by software yet.

After you find a legitimate problem that you have,set out to fix it(in the form of an open source project). That is generally a way to be successful.

Its easy to get jazzed up about something you are using to solve your own problems and it gets even easier to stay motivated when other people with the same problem identify your piece of software as a fix.

(I would probably say this is decent advice for starting a start-up as well :P)
As someone who has done some code reviews recently, I can tell you that my answer would definitely not be "My own." :)
LocalBunny Gives Businesses Custom Twitter Bots
sounds like a typical idea man. the kind of guy who has an invention he wants to patent and sell for a billion dollars, or someone who has an idea for a startup but has no idea on how to execute.

if you feel like this relationship has potential for a future, eat the $100 or so cost and try and create something he wants just to see what will happen. don't get suckered into doing anything else.

if you don't, tell him no. or treat him as a client.
I don't understand who votes these articles up anymore. They're just completely useless.
Canvas Demos: demos, games, tools and tutorials for the HTML canvas element
If he won't even invest $100 for a mock-up he's not serious about the project, end of.
XING launches an OpenSocial app assault on LinkedIn
That current situation is basically extremely powerful. It's effectively doing your own time slicing. In terms of code, to me, it's pretty.

IMHO it'd be far nicer just to speed js up and perhaps create some helper functionality to aid in splitting chunks of work up into bite size pieces, and make it more optimal.

It'd be much nicer to just have some yield statement which allows you to say "Hey, it's ok if you process any pending UI events, timers etc etc here". That way you could just have a single main loop with some yields in the right places. It'd create simpler, more maintainable code, and there's no reason it'd be slower or less responsive UI wise than the web worker version.

I can see the examples where web workers can be useful, where you're doing really CPU heavy backgroud work such as image processing etc. But I think people will end up using web workers for far more than that, which will make for some ugly code (IMHO).
Agreed. Stallman strongly believes stuff should be free (not a bad atitude) and so the GPL tends to force things to be free in sequence.

Personally I find the GPL distasteful; because it locks you in. Frustrating (and I cant help feeling causes substantial code duplication for some projects that dont want to use GPL code)

(disclaimer; Im not personally a fan of Stallman, so I might be a bit biased over it)
Why Did Google Let Yahoo Run Off With Xoopit?
The Harvard brand provokes a lot of resentment, and writers of articles like this one tap into that resentment by going on about these luxuries.

And maybe that's how it is for undergraduate athletes, or business school students, but let me assure you: it is not so luxurious for this particular neuroscience graduate student.

But I can't complain -- I still find it remarkable that I get paid -- albeit a barely livable stipend, but still, paid -- to do science. I am grateful to be a well-educated American during the most prosperous era in human history, and I will do my utmost not to waste the opportunity: I will do as much science as I can, while the good times last. Maybe my whole lifetime, maybe just another five years, who knows? But this is the time when it can get done.
Well, I'm not trying to be flippant, but if I was paying $50k a year (tuition + board) to attend Harvard, a free hot breakfast is the least they could do.

But yeah, I can agree it's a poor example to throw out there as 'experiencing hard times'.
This as atrocious reporting.

First of all, you DO forget how to ride a bicycle. Anyone whose gone for more than a decade without riding on and tried to take it back up should be able to attest to that.

Secondly, this research doesn't seem to have anything to do with retaining memories; just how they are formed.
DeeperWeb: Building a Better Google Search (useful tools review)
Cautiously Optimistic:CrunchBase Q2 Report Shows Upticks In VC Funding and Exits
I'm not really surprised. This is exactly why I thought the contest was kinda lame.
I didn't intend any PHP bashing. I was just pointing out that PHP is quite a way behind in the IDE department. Apart from some half-hearted Eclipse plugins like PDT, nobody has stepped up to the plate. Certainly not in the way that Netbrains did for Java or MS did for .NET.

I've done my share of PHP development over the years, and have clients to this day that need their PHP sites maintained. And every time I need to touch those sites, I wish I had a tool powerful as, say, ColdFusion Studio 4.5, which came out in 2001.

If you can point out such a development environment for PHP, I'd be quite grateful.
Not me. Typically the last line I read in an article like that is the one that says "Page 1 of 6." I was curious to discover what happened to the $37 billion, but it was clear the author had other plans.
Here is a much less superficial article from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who has extensively studied highly creative people:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-...

If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."
You should not avoid him, just tell him that you do not work for free.

$100 plus some equity in the company (either now, or a signed contractual agreement for such after the company is formed/funded) is perfectly reasonable.

I also somewhat doubt his ability to pull this off from what you have described. A basic 5 page website is not really going to show very much. It's not going to be functional, it's basically going to be some glorified images and text. He should at the very least be able to mock up something himself in Powerpoint to show a "conceptual" webpage. If he cannot, I would question his ability to communicate the idea effectively enough to get off the ground with the idea.

Also, somewhat related, I would caution you against charging "by the page". That model encourages endless requests for tweaks and changes. If you are going to do any project like this, I would probably go with something like $20/page to implement a page to the rough spec drawn out in an initial meeting, PLUS $20/hour for any changes/updates/edits after the first draft iteration.
Those are technical issues. The truly most nightmarish software to inherit is one that shouldn't have been writen to begin with: software made by people who either lack the programming skills, or the domain knowledge. Nothing worse than an accountant-turned-DBA's perl, or a system's programmer that just left you an steaming pile of MFC GUI. Worst of all, the person responsible for the mess is not long gone and forgotten, quite the contrary, he has been promoted through and he is now responsible for interviewing you to polish his brown magnum opus.

I breath a sigh of relief whenever Microsoft breaks and old DLL's compatibility: when you can't push through for an upgrade, pray for Redmond to force it.

[Update:

``The hardware-specific accounting package''

This one is truly the "winar": plain-jane boring software that for some goddamn reason depends on that old Hayes modem, or this matrix printer. I have been hired to do this shit so often it's not even funny; it tends to sneak past the initial discussions. You tick off "GUI" and "ODBC" and you're on your way to start hacking, making a mental note about "ability to print". What you don't know is that, not only do they want to convert the old Access package to an intranet web app, but they also want it to print receipts using the "receipt printer" -- a custom made piece of pain that uses the parallel port for data, the serial for control, and two RJ45s to whistle the Danish national anthem on error. FUCK!]
I wonder what prompted this.
Detecting underground smuggling with low-frequency radio waves
Startups VCs are dying to invest in
Thanks. Maybe it was building up on other posts that I haven't read...
...who has a grant from the NSF in high speed crypto.
Integrate Launchpad and Wave: the dates of the big code release for both of them are a lovely coincidence.

Also, a cross-platform alarm clock that has a good UI.

Learn Django or Grok (or Zope) or some other cool Python web technology.
gmail and google searches are 80% of what I use my iPhone for. Making / Receiving calls is about 19% and 1% is super monkey ball. So yeah, a mix of business and personal. It's so nice to have a decent browser in my pocket.

I didn't find this article very useful. Just citing biased opinions. I do agree though that thick-client phone apps seems like a bridge-gap while browsers evolve.
Most interesting was the idea of conservatism as an asset for some classes of enterprise:

“Harvard, institutionally, never had change when I first came here,” the law professor Alan Dershowitz told me. “It was like the old baseball teams; you were born here and you died here.... But the turnover now has become like corporate turnover—and that always takes a toll.”
Why do it sit here and program all day, when I really would be an architect instead?
I don't see it in Chromium 3.0.195.0 (Linux nightly build) either.
Extrapolated...

Programming will make you hate software.
Programming will make you hate programmers.
Programming will make you hate computers.

Lisp will make you forget all of that.
Will Google Chrome OS Bring Us the Mythical GDrive?
My experince with "cloud computing" has been that needs always grow to fill all available capacity.

As your capabilities expand within a given budget, new needs arise. All of the marginal applications that were impossible to pitch under the old cost structure are suddenly compelling choices.

Firms provision VMware environments in order decrease labor costs and consolidate servers. Before you know it, the business "needs" ten times as many servers as before.
I completely agree that pretty much every proprietary software product that has come bundled with a device I purchased has been useless crap. There's probably one or two exceptions but I can't think of them.

I didn't find the rest of the article that interesting, but he definitely nailed his first point.

It's not so much bad programming, it's more a case of why? Why do I want to install something that by default will chew up memory by running in the background (and default to launch on startup), that I will never use, because I have so many better tools for the job.

I guess the argument is that it's useful for non power-users... Umm sure. How many of you have been asked to fix something on a relative or friends windows box only to find it grindingly slow because of all the run-time resident crap running on it? Like 10 things in the system tray? Update notifications launching one after another on boot? My first task is usually removing all of this stuff they NEVER use before even tackling the real problem they're having.
Google wrote their own engine after hiring away a bunch of the top guys from Nuance.

They started it with Goog-411, training it on requests like "Pizza in Oregon" where they'd know if they were right or wrong because people would request another listing if they weren't quite correct.

This is the next step of that, so far as I understand. They're giving it a broader base of phrases to work on. I imagine the ultimate goal is to throw it up against Youtube, so you can search for a phrase, and Google will give you YouTube videos where someone speaks it.
How long until some high-traffic page owner decides to resell his visitors CPU time ?
I heard the rumor once and lose the url. It says Google hires the original engineer who created Nuance Dragaon NaturallySpeaking. There is also a old rumor about one goal for Google's participation in WINE Project is to let Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking working on Unbuntu.

I think the reasonable assumption is that Google hires engineers and built a version of the engine on their own platform. So it may be a new engine in different architecture as the desktop PC version but with all the brains behind Dragon NatuallySpeaking.
Finding Local Twitter Trends with Perl
It can happen. In 1983, I was 4 and I learnt how to program on a VIC 20 my Dad bought on a whim at a garage sale for $20. My sister was either 8 or 9 at the time, and she taught me the basics of, well, BASIC. I was motivated because she taunted me with the prototypical:

10 PRINT "NINA IS COOL"
20 GOTO 10

My parents had no idea how to use the computer but they thought it was a good thing for us to learn.
Plenty of Drupal Jobs for Computer Science Students
"If ever you are by far the best, or the most interested, student in a classroom, then you should find another classroom."

This advice generalizes to many subjects besides mathematics.

AFTER EDIT:

Here's what one math professor says about the delightful aspects of mathematics to learn besides calculus as it is now taught. Professor John Stillwell writes, in the preface to his book Numbers and Geometry (New York: Springer Verlag, 1998):

"What should every aspiring mathematician know? The answer for most of the 20th century has been: calculus. . . . Mathematics today is . . . much more than calculus; and the calculus now taught is, sadly, much less than it used to be. Little by little, calculus has been deprived of the algebra, geometry, and logic it needs to sustain it, until many institutions have had to put it on high-tech life-support systems. A subject struggling to survive is hardly a good introduction to the vigor of real mathematics.

". . . . In the current situation, we need to revive not only calculus, but also algebra, geometry, and the whole idea that mathematics is a rigorous, cumulative discipline in which each mathematician stands on the shoulders of giants.

"The best way to teach real mathematics, I believe, is to start deeper down, with the elementary ideas of number and space. Everyone concedes that these are fundamental, but they have been scandalously neglected, perhaps in the naive belief that anyone learning calculus has outgrown them. In fact, arithmetic, algebra, and geometry can never be outgrown, and the most rewarding path to higher mathematics sustains their development alongside the 'advanced' branches such as calculus. Also, by maintaining ties between these disciplines, it is possible to present a more unified view of mathematics, yet at the same time to include more spice and variety."

Stillwell demonstrates what he means about the interconnectedness and depth of "elementary" topics in the rest of his book, which is a delight to read and full of thought-provoking problems.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387982892/