skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Every time Kayak paddles into my consciousness I end up with a sense that those people are just doing something right.

Does anyone understand what the Left-Right slider does? My first guess - left-handedness versus right-handedness - isn't consistent with the slider usage.
I work in market research and have to use SPSS. It sucks because the old versions would crash for no good reason and the new versions are slow. The output is ugly as hell. I haven't switched to R, StatXP, Stata because I'm lazy, we have a huge number of old surveys in SPSS format and a whole lot of scripts and macro written.

Oh and the copy protection sucks. Seriously, if I want to pirate your software, I will download a crack.
Agree. "Naturally sounding" isn't.
Giving indulgence money to rich bishops, to allow them to eat, drink, and bugger the choirboys, is ethically different to compensating for your high-consumption lifestyle by giving poverty-stricken subsistence farmers fresh water and their eyesight back.

It does make a difference who you pay the money to.
As a child, I wanted to be fluent in six languages. I speak a little German and read and write a little French. I know a few words of Russian and a smattering of Spanish. I have gotten some use of those, mostly German because I have German relatives and lived there for a time. But I never became as fluent as I wanted and it never opened up social opportunities like I had fantasized it would -- opportunities like the author of this article experienced. For me, learning a little HTML, XHTML and CSS have done far more for my ability to reach out to other people and therefore has done far more towards widening my horizons. I'm not particularly fluent in those either, but they get a good deal more use than the human languages I dabble in. It has had the unexpected side effect that I no longer bitterly regret not becoming fluent in six human languages.
If you want to network, go out to the bar. It'll only cost you tens of dollars.
This may be slightly tangential , but the report indicated that 80% of the entrants to the competition were between the ages of 18 and 24 years old.

After heading over to topcoder.com I found it curious that this site is yet another in a long string of businesses that offers up "contests" with "prizes" for doing work.

In the design community this is known as spec work and the reaction to it ranges from being highly frowned upon to pitchforks-and-torches style anger.

No!Spec (http://www.no-spec.com) is the industry's main sounding board against these types of "competitions", so I won't rehash those points here.

The article's implied "gee-whiz these are wonderkids!" approach to the entrants didn't sit too well with me. The fact that entrants were largely between 18 and 24 years old seems more to do with a lack of professional experience (evidenced by partaking in spec work), than some magic ability of younger people to be able to do compelling work in technology.

I think it's more probable that those grizzled old guys with beards are too busy getting paid for their labor to partake in a lottery, hence the skewed demographics. Also, it would be natural to see more entrants win in countries where the US dollar exchange rate benefits taking a risk of getting no money. It isn't indicative of a lack of talent inside the US.

Disclosure: I'm in my late 20's.
I love that these types of articles make it to the front page of HN. It's not about being shackled to technology but using technology where you need to to free you and enrich your life. /swoon
The atmosphere, the people, the resources.

---

... are worth $100k+ in total??
http://autos.yahoo.com/newcars/future_cars/mazda_3_2010.html

The new Mazda's always crack me up when I see them for the same reason. I wonder if it's a conscious design decision.
Yes, but if they are adding nothing to the content but ad's, is that fair use?
I love it! I love it! I love it!

I've used a lot of word generators, built some of my own, etc. -- but these are great names.

The only thing I noticed that was slightly annoying to me off the bat was I had no idea what the little bar was until I moused over it and realized it was the number of hits it received on Google.

I think it'd also be good to integrate this with another service -- perhaps a hosting service? You should talk to linode, dreamhost, slicehost, etc. -- Perhaps you could license this to registrars?
Aggregators certainly can add value. The aggregator makes a choice of which articles to include vs which to omit. This is an editorial decision. This in turn allows readers to find content of interest to them without having to hunt for it themselves.
Oh and one more thing! You should have the ability to include domain hacks like del.icio.us, fabulo.us, etc.
Do the people who write these articles not realize that other people have said the exact same thing before?
Okay one final comment for you:

I think one of my chief issues with these sorts of apps is that after they are released to the public, the algorithms never change, and you see page after page of registered domains, which are completely unhelpful. I would suggest you continue to add other languages to the mix, and consider modifying your algorithms slightly just to keep things interesting.
Ah my mistake - I think the ideal case is going to be a combination of both but at some level using technology will become a more viable alternative, especially for those that do not have access to teachers.
Really? A down vote for this?
For many people, probably not. But there is a huge variance. How much more money did Steve Ballmer make in his career because he met Bill Gates at Harvard? Nobody knows, obviously, but the odds on anyone becoming a multi-billionaire (like he is) are incredibly slim. I'm not saying his story is at all typical, just that the decision can pay off in completely unexpected ways.
Exactly. The value is the other students. That's certainly the factor that influenced my experience more than any other.

The author may have a point about universities being overpriced, but he missed a pretty key point, so his analysis is suspect.
I'm sure you are aware of this, but just in case, there are good reasons why this hasn't taken place and most of them have to do with battery technology. The basic problem is that the current crop of batteries take too long to charge on residential current and don't hold charge long enough. Their weight is also a big issue.
I think OS classes are the best place to cover pointers and memory management. Assuming you are covering how how an OS works vs an intro to UNIX class.

Granted in our OS theory class we spent most of our time using / talking about ASM, but C could also work fairly well.
How do the property managers not realize that someone has dropped off an ATM that isn't supposed to be there? Is it just me or does it seem like the properties are partially responsible if someone gets ripped off by this?
UPDATE: The on-line book was only up temporarily, to get comments from the artist. It's gone now. It'll be back up when the printed book is published.
People from developing countries have more incentive to participate in these competitions as the effort/reward ratio is greater. This is what significantly skews the numbers.
For low end stuff, linode is great.
When I was a real little kid, maybe 8 or 10 or so, my mother took me shopping for a new car and I distinctly recall bursting into tears at the sight of the first one she liked because I thought it looked mean. I've always wanted to hear the inside scoop on whether cars intentionally anthropomorphise so well or if that was just one of those happy accidents.
another point is that in the US the notion of "Hacking" is still seen as negative or criminal.

Something else is that in that age group in the US people are about to graduate or graduating so if they are really good at math/science/engineering they have already either been picked up my companies or in the process of getting hired. Why does this matter? Becuase if you are going to or are working for a company im pretty sure they dont want you to participate in any event about hacking.
The coworker only spoke English. My dad made some remark about his coworker not speaking any language at all, but I figured you'd get that from the context.

I mean really - that's pretty easy from here on out, right?
I would insist all applications to warn users IE6 is forbidden by IT policy, to record its usage and to fire upgrade requests for the IT services team.
Absolutely. He bases it on the analogy of library browsing.

I agree that its a played out symbol. And I'm a librarian.
Most depressing finding: People age 65+ watch more TV than any other demographic. If that's what I'm looking forward to, then I am not retiring.

Though it does explain why all TV ads are for drugs...
There is something fantastic though to being stuck listening to crap on the radio and suddenly a wonderful song comes on. Pleasure through forced deprivation.
This is complete garbage. Even allowing for it being a microbenchmark, each iteration contains a System.out.println that takes thousands of times more cycles than the conditional.
The three language system exists in all South-Indian states. I studied Kannada, English and Hindi from grade 5-8; Sanskrit, English and Kannada from 8-10; Sanskrit and English from 11-12. So that's 4 languages in 8 years :)
I couldn't find anything definitive, but here are some papers on the topic:

http://mint.typepad.com/mypapers/pp017-lizorkin.pdf

http://www.fran.it/articles/wikimania_bellomi_bonato.pdf

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=arnumber=4...
True, but the odds of that happening are probably similar to the lottery. I'm not trying to argue that college is worthless or of low value (I think the answer can only be subjective). But if one is to argue that it is valuable, they should probably base it on the learning opportunities.

Equivalent networking and social opportunities exist in plenty other areas of life that don't cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We're at least as bad in Australia and quite possibly worse given the number of Americans who speak Spanish. You certainly don't need a second language to get a Ph.D. here.
Thanks for pointing this out. That's a perspective on these types of competitions I've never considered, but it seems like you're exactly right:

"TopCoder also sells software licenses to use the growing body of components that have been developed in competition. Finally, TopCoder acts as an outsourcing center, allowing companies to farm out custom design and development tasks to TopCoder competitors."

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopCoder#TopCoder_as_a_business )

Sounds pretty sleazy to me.
Pointers are easy. I thought several people in our CS program how to use them in ~2 hours. What's hard for most people is thinking abstractly between what the code looks like and what happens when you run it.

Pointers are simply the first thing that forces most coders to consider that split. But, a reasonably competent JAVA developer moving to C can pick them up in little time. The problem is reading other peoples C code that looks more like line noise than structure. But, pointers are a tiny step along that path.
My apologies, you are right, there's nothing asynchronous. It's all pre-loaded.
Well, if we were specially created, Gen 6:3 would explain Senescence. No need for you to jab at fundie hackers when it's not what your comment is actually about.
It constantly amazes me as to how even the simplest and most shallow of figures ("It affects less than one-half of one percent of people we cover.") can lie in a spectacular way. I tend to think of myself as a fairly well-educated person, but I wouldn't have looked twice at this statement unless I was given good reason to.

How many people are being manipulated by 'simple' and seemingly pure figures every day?
Guys, Interorbital has little credibility _to date_. They have been around for quite a while without having much to show for. Maybe, just maybe, it is true that they have everything lined up and ready to go and just need the funding, but so claim pretty much any other crazy space startup. Some of these actually have pretty sizable working rocket engines and have flown experimental vehicles already, yet they make humbler claims. I'd just take the news with a grain of salt. It's easy to talk.

Again, they may be for real. In any case I'd expect to see some of the new companies succeed in creating a cheap nanosatellite launcher within 5 years.
I think the phrase "hacking contest" was how the author of the article chose to describe it. The TopCoder competition page doesn't mention the word at all: http://www.topcoder.com/tc ; probably exactly for the reason you describe.
In addition, this varies greatly depending on the values you're matching against (how efficiently can it be compiled?) and what compiler is being used, even in just the Java space.
Your 'Book' Sucks
It almost broke my browser (Camino)!
I think comments like there are border-line trolls in a community like HN.

The languages used in various parts of a CS curriculum are one component to the whole. Holding up that component as the reason that the sky is falling is, at best, disingenuous. I can construct terrible CS curriculums that start with C, and terrific ones that start with Java.

If those who construct the curriculum want the beginning courses to focus on algorithmic thinking, I think it's fair to use a language that abstracts away much of the physical machine. The abstractions can be peeled away in later courses.

If, instead, they want the beginning courses to focus on the realities and difficulties of dealing with computer systems, it makes sense to start with something like C. They can then introduce the abstractions that let people manage those difficulties in later courses.

I think both approaches are valid, as long as a student gets a view of the important points of the field. I can even see arguments why one approach might be better than the other. But claiming that one approach represents the failure of our CS academic system is zealotry.
They're probably just as naive as I was (before reading the article) about the existence of fake ATMs set up by scammers. I don't think it's common knowledge that this happens, is it?
I have recently begun participating in the TopCoder 'Arena', where I've made some code that could be of absolutely no monetary value to anyone (except to me, as training). Actually, it's a lot of fun.

Still, I wonder about this company.

It has some connection to the NSA, as advertised on their web page and elsewhere. Does anyone know more details about this relationship? In particular, what does the NSA aim to get out of it?
I ask everyone, on behalf of the internet, to not implement this. Digg is extraordinarily painful to use if you actually like to read the entire comment tree. You either have to set it to show all (which, of course, means you have to wait while all the AJAX calls take place, rather than it sending down a page with the comments inline) or you have to click each comment and wait. I don't know who thought this was a good idea from a usability standpoint, but they're dead wrong.
Thanks for the advice. I'll see if we can get away with putting the js in the footer like you say.
The Monty Hall problem has nothing to do with his statistics, which in any case are completely dependent on his unsupported assertions, cf.:

"If, as I suspect, rescission is targeted toward the truly bankrupting cases – the top 1%..."

"But let’s not forget that the very nature of the forms is designed to create inaccuracies"

Not to mention:

"I tend to think of traditional banking and traditional insurance as mirror images: when you take out a mortgage, you get a lump sum and make a series of payments; when you get life insurance, you make a series of payments and get a lump sum."

Which pretty much sums up the problem with the current health care debate -- almost nobody involved knows the difference between insurance and care. There's no reason middlish class people need to have things like physicians' visits and normal prescription drugs filtered through an insurance company or the government, they're completely affordable and expectable on their own. You insure unexpected, unaffordable events, like crashing your car, not oil changes.
If someone set up a Coke machine that stole people's dollars, do you think they'd notice? This doesn't have anything to do with the scam, but simply being completely oblivious as to what's going on in your place of business.
I'm incredibly torn....

On one hand, I've watched a few OpenCourseware lectures and think it's a spectacular way to learn. If I received a resume from someone who had "taken" 20 of such courses via an informal online study group, I'd interview the person simply for the initiative shown.

On the other hand, I used to interview a lot of college students. After awhile, I found that I could quite easily differentiate between those who had lived in a dorm/off-campus house/etc. vs. those who had lived at home and commuted. Students who had lived at home lacked perspective, spoke poorly, and were much less self-aware than those who had been immersed with like-minded peers.

Perhaps socio-economic status can explain most of my observation. However, this is difficult to prove because almost no upper-middle class and above kids live at home and go to the local state school. It may be that upper-middle class graduates could still have achieved the qualities I identified previously if they had lived in their parents' basements, bu the sample size is too small. For those of lower classes, I do believe that an immersive college experience can make up for differences in upbringing.*

What if a couple hundred 18 year-olds formed a group online, moved to the same city, found an apartment complex owner would rent to them exclusively, and took OpenCourseware courses for a couple of years? Would this be a sufficient substitute for a $100K degree? Perhaps the hire-a-processor model proposed in the article could supplement freely-available courses.

* To some degree, it did for me. I'm the son of a janitor and a high school librarian. We lived in a small, blue collar town. Four years in a dorm were quite transformative.
The App Store is an Apple Product
Isn't wikileaks sort of all about publishing technically illegal documents. It may be illegal in the letter of the law to publish, but if you expose illegal behavior that was actually causing harm to society then its ok. I'm not sure that I totally buy into it but I think thats the general idea.
A fantastic book about learning languages:

How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own

by Barry Farber

- http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Any-Language-Inexpensively/d...

which is available as a PDF here:

- http://fld.hit.edu.cn/english/webedit/uploadfile/20085121524...

Some articles on the TPR method for language learning:

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/tprmax.htm

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/krashentpr.htm

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/ashertpr.htm

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/ashertpr.htm

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/firstday.htm

More great articles on language learning here:

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/articles.htm
Organizations beyond a certain size are such that no single person can know everything that is going on. Where that threshold lies is a function of the general competence with which the organization is managed. To get a sense of the level of competence of the Las Vegas Riviera, consider this anecdote:

http://las-vegas-hotels.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g459...
Would humanity really be better off by having individuals living longer?

How does it make sense to talk about how 'well off' humanity is outside the context of living people?
The cohort there is different.
Cargo Container Uses…The Many Uses for Cargo Containers 
When most people think about cargo containers they think of those big “steel boxes” that they see on trains, trucks, and ocean vessels… and most of the time they just think about those “steel containers” being used to haul cargo. But cargo containers/shipping containers have so many more uses than that…and you might be surprised at what they are.
Cargo containers are regularly used around the world to not only haul cargo but to also store all sorts of cargo from furniture to commercial items to hay and farming equipment. In this article we will also tell you about some uses of cargo/shipping containers that you had no idea about!
Did you know that cargo containers are also used for office buildings, commercial structures, and even the construction of homes…which is getting more popular every day.
First we will talk about the use of cargo containers for offices. There are many offices around the world that are made from cargo containers, some made from 20 ft. cargo containers and some made out of the larger40 ft. cargo containers. Why do companies use those big “steel boxes” for office buildings? Because they are a great way to have an office building without having to spend a bunch of money to construct an office.
How does this work? Well as you can imagine a big steel box is pretty strong and offers good security, but how does it make a good office. Well we will tell you!
Cargo/shipping containers can be modified with a lot of features, from doors to windows, to electricity. So these big boxes can be modified to make terrific offices for you and your business.
When you want to add doors they can be sliding doors, normal doors, roll-up doors, or about any type of doors you can imagine. Windows can be added and those windows can also be of different varieties. So now we have the doors and windows to your office taken care of but you can also add electricity (which means you can put air conditioning in) and finish the walls and sides.
And of course since it is a cargo container to start with you can move your office fairly easy when you want to! Now for some other uses of cargo containers that you probably did not know of.
Cargo/shipping containers can also be used for underground protection from tornadoes. They are also used for the construction of homes (some of these homes are pretty amazing), and they are used to store all sorts of equipment and supplies…anything you can think of.
And of course cargo containers can hold a lot of cargo and can be a great asset to you when you need to ship items around the country or the world.
If you need any information on cargo/shipping containers go to this site for more information.Containersstorage.net
Phuby : All your PHP belongs to me
IIT Kanpur develops nanosatellite
And they'll keep on saying them again and again until things are different. That's how revolutions work.
That's true, though if you're on the hook for a person's catastrophic care, you may very well want to give them economic incentives (i.e. cheap/free doctor's checkups) to invest in preventative care.

Now, this doesn't mean that we ought to necessarily have a big, bad program (government or private) control everything.

But it does mean that the "insurance is for catastrophes, everything else should be out-of-pocket" model isn't necessarily as simple and wonderful as it sounds.
For most applications, the choice between an if-ladder and a switch statement should be driven mostly by legibility and not performance. If performance is at stake, I would look for I/O first, memory access patterns second, and instruction sequencing last.