skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be hard pressed to name any 30 seconds in my life more consequential than these:

Counselor: "Wow, that's a lot of AP credits. Well, you've passed out of 3 of the 5 classes freshman CS majors are supposed to take. We don't have enough CS classes you're qualified for to fill the rest of the schedule. What are you going to take?"

Me: "I don't know, I'm thinking a language. Do you have a list of the ones the school teaches?"

Counselor: "Yep, page XXX."

Me: "scans list Oh, Japanese sounds fun. High tech country, lots of money, few English speakers. Sign me up."

Counselor: "I studied it in college, too. Its a "#%"%."

Me: "I'm up for a bit of a challenge."

I loved every minute of it, added another degree on, and here I am ten years later in Nagoya looking at a stack of bug reports filed against the university entrance exam administration system.
He missed his chance to really connect the housing bubble and the education bubble in their causes -- well-meaning public policy meant to encourage home ownership/college education that provides an endless fountain of easy credit to do so. If you dump the kind of money into an industry that we've dumped into real estate and education, there will be people available to soak it up.
I'm not trying to say that's the only reason you should go to college -- meeting smart people is simply one of many reasons. There are a lot of valuable payoffs that come with minimal risk, like the degree itself. And there are plenty of good colleges you can go to that don't cost 100k.

If going to college was truly not worth it, then you'd see a lot more people not doing it. The fact that going to college is a such a common course of action says that people actually find value in it (or there's a giant inefficiency in the market -- which is the argument of this article, but I think it's worth considering the alternative as well).

And I don't think the lottery analogy works. Regardless of what you (legally) do, you can't influence the chance that a single lottery ticket of yours wins. But you can improve the chance that certain low-probability events happen to you (like founding a successful startup) by your actions. And I think going to a good college can be one of those actions for many people.
Thanks everyone. Resolution: stop worrying about CloudFront and focus on moving the very heavy JS file out of the head.

This advice has been extremely useful.
Living at home during college would suck. If they were willing to put up with that, imagine how much crap work they might have been willing to put up with at your office.
We are just now at the point where battery technology makes this possible. It's not like 'BigOil' has been preventing this... liquid petroleum based fuels have so far offered the most practical solution for powering a vehicle, and this is only now starting to change.
That's true if the assumptions behind it are true -- that cheap/free doctor's checkups result in lower catastrophic care costs. I'm not aware of any study that shows that they are.
Depends on what you're studying. System programming is and should always be done in C/assembly. Personally I am doing virtual machine design in C at the moment.
It's particularly galling because the fake ATM was put right outside the security entrance. I'd almost be willing to bet that any account number/PIN tuples gained from this (if they were collected before the unit was discovered) won't be used. This was someone making a point, and they did an excellent job of it.
It's a pretty safe bet that designers take it into consideration, and intentionally play it up in some situations.
Why not start this now? Even if you're seasoned, I'm sure the experience and refresh would be a nice experience to anyone. I'm in a distance grad program right now and could use a real cohort.
This course has four purposes. First, you will learn about the hierarchy of
abstractions and implementations that comprise a modern computer system. This
will provide a conceptual framework that you can then flesh out with courses such
as compilers, operating systems, networks, and others. The second purpose is to
demystify the machine and the tools that we use to program it. This includes
telling you the little details that students usually have to learn by osmosis. In
combination, these two purposes will give you the background to understand
many different computer systems. The third purpose is to bring you up to speed in
doing systems programming in a low-level language in the Unix environment.
The final purpose is to prepare you for upper-level courses in systems.
This is a learn-by-doing kind of class. You will write pieces of code, compile
them, debug them, disassemble them, measure their performance, optimize them,
etc.

http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~bmd/cs213-f03/docs/syllabus....
I don't have the studies in front of me, but it generally depends. In the case of diabetes, for instance, a lifetime of diet monitoring and counseling by a doctor or nurse is still way cheaper than insulin or amputation.
Your "your X sucks blog post" sucks.
Page faults illustrate the idea of the memory hierarchy, which is one of the most important architectures in computer science. Programmers who don't understand the memory hierarchy write slow code. You also can never do "massively parallel systems run, or how distributed databases handle consistency, or high volume scaling, or NLP or any of the other areas of CS that are far more interesting that page faults" without virtual memory, paging, and page faults.
Code that test the finite switch:

3. for (int i = 0; i < iteration; i++) {

4. testSwitchFinite(i);

5. }

Once i > 5, testSwitchFinite will always skip to default. This function doesn't even test the switch properly.

Something like testSwitchFinite(i%5+1) would have made more sense (for the finite switch and if-else.)
Intro CS courses at MIT, CMU, and Northwestern are taught in Scheme.
If you want to network in your industry, it's probably just best to get some small job in whatever industry your interested in, go to the local ___ industry club, (Linux user groups, iphone developer groups, mechanics'r'us, etc), make friends and teach yourself. I found doing that helped my carreer more than local college buddies who didn't have much in the form of connections or experience anyway.
Are you white supremacists or christian fanatics? I've heard that, in the US, they are the most likely to homeschool their children. Do you think that's true?
Flash Player support on 64-bit operating systems
Listening to the Boston T rattle past my new apartment, I feel the same way.
The way I heard that quote was "You receive a new soul every time you learn a new language"
> they want their apps to access the 'net everywhere, not just wi-fi spots.

Well, isn't it the connectivity they want then, and not the App Store specifically?
Often times, there is a third choice: polymorphism using interfaces.

Consider an example from the article:

public static void testIfElse(int jumpLabel) {

if(1 == jumpLabel) {

System.out.println("1");

} else if(2 == jumpLabel) {

System.out.println("2");

} else if(3 == jumpLabel) {

System.out.println("3");

} else if(4 == jumpLabel) {

System.out.println("4");

}

// Removed for simplicity

else {

System.out.println("default");

}

}

Why not implement this as follows:

public interface IfElse {

public void testIfElse();

}

public class JumpLabelDefault implements IfElse {

public void testIfElse() {

System.out.println("Default");

}

}

public class JumpLabel1 implements IfElse {

public void testIfElse() {

System.out.println("1");

}

}

...

Then, to do the same test, you have this function:

public static void testIfElse(IfElse obj) {

obj.testIfElse();

}

This is faster than either an if-else statement or a switch statement and you can easily add new cases by creating new objects without needing to change the previous code.

I'm not sure why this option is not included in the article.
But wait, that's not all! If you respond now we will include a handful of prepositions and a huge pile of adjectives for no extra charge!
but could your father speak Australian?
The diabetes example is not one I had thought of, I'll look into it.

What bothers me is that I see a lot of knee-jerk "we'll just make it up on preventative care" in the debate, without any way of proving how the costs add up.

Without having looked into it deeper, my question about diabetes would be whether free/cheap checkups and counseling affect the number of people who correctly handle their problem.
A counterargument to the idea that we have regressed terribly and now uniquely subject to the vicissitudes of propaganda in a new way, presented not because I 100% believe it but because I think it worth considering: Perhaps we are so vulnerable to audio and visual input not because our generation is so terribly degenerate, but because it is a new thing that there are no social mechanisms to prevent.

If this is true, one would expect vulnerability to propaganda in those forms to be going down over time, all things kept equal. Despite the cynical answer, I think that's actually true. Propaganda from, say, 1950 seems laughably crude. Some of that may be cultural messages that signal that of course propagandizing against the Nazis is silly, but some of that is, I believe, the fact that we are more hardened against that stuff both individually and as a society than we used to be. Of course, messages have coevolved with the media, so it can be hard to see the progress, but I contend that it is at least plausible that we have made progress.

Similarly, it is fashionable to believe that our education level has gone monotonically downhill for decades, but I would contend that it is likely that there are just as many idiots (proportionally) in 1909 as there are in 2009, it is just that the only surviving cultural material from 1909 are virtually by definition from the upper, educated class, whereas in 2009 the media is much more egalitarian. This has the effect of making the past look much more educated, but this can be a selection-bias induced illusion.

I think these two ideas are worth considering. I am actually very harsh on the modern educational system and broadly agree with this essay in most ways, but it is still important to separate the real problems from imagined problems, and to find the real causes and not the bias-feeding, cognitively-convenient ones. There are things that argue against these points, too, but they are worth considering.
The BMWs, I feel, are a good example of that with a pretty feline look (to me at least), or gaze maybe.
Google aggregates these sites fine for my needs.
Sigh, so close and yet so far...........
The day I use an ATM machine that isn't physically attached to my bank is the day I die.

You know, with the fees and all.
Can someone with the power retitle this discussion, at least?
Get a double and put some attitude control on it. You should get almost a KG of payload that way. CO2 jets.
The essential problem is that the person paying the premium is not the insurance companies "customer". The health insurance company's customer is the shareholder, not the premium payer, that has to end.

I have built software for health insurance companies. I can tell you for certain they only look at the details of a policy for rescission purposes for those policies that are costing them far more than the premium has been paying. And if you watch the congress video embedded in the blog post http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H9ufue_1uI&eurl=http%3A%..., it makes perfectly clear that the application part of a policy is very easy to find "flaws" with retroactively if the insurance company choses.
As Banks Retreat, Quattrone Fills Gap in Silicon Valley
As a completely self-taught software engineer, I'm inclined to agree. Except for one big doubt: A large percentage of people do not excel on their own. They rely on social standards to specify what counts as "good enough" and to provide them a roadmap through the learning process.

Of course, that's what vocational schools are for, not universities. Universities got confused when they started pretending to offer job training.
"Have you ever heard the announcer say that the batter has struck out 10 times in a row and is "due" for a hit? Same fallacy. Each at-bat is an independent trial; previous attempts have no influence on the current one. The probability of a hit is just the same as before. If this batter is striking out a lot, maybe the batting coach had better get busy!"

Independent? Maybe if the batter is a robot with anterograde amnesia, but otherwise this is really a poor example of probabilistic independence. :-)
According to Jacques Ellul (the favorite author of the Unabomber, and one that, ironically, almost led to his arrest) it is education that makes us vulnerable to propaganda.

From the introduction to Ellul's book "Propaganda":

A related point, central in Ellul's thesis, is that modern propaganda
cannot work without 'education'; he thus reverses the widespread
notion that education is the best prophylactic against propaganda.
On the contrary, he says, education, or what usually goes by that word
in the modern world, is the absolute prerequisite for propaganda.
In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul call
'pre-propaganda' ...

[Ellul designates] intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable
of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons: (1) they absorb
the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information;
(2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important
question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered
to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information;
(3) they consider themselves capable of 'judging for themselves'.

Ellul's book on propaganda is well worth reading, as is his classic "The Technological Society".
The people interviewed in the article claim that "if we shut the gates... they wouldn't be able to make computers anymore". But elsewhere in the article it makes clear that making pure quartz artificially is simply much more expensive than pulling it out of the ground. So it's not really a secret ingredient, it's just the cheapest available source.
This article showcases that a critical component of attaining fluency in a language is immersion. Many linguists insist that language cannot be separated from culture. Another important ingredient in language learning is practicing output; i.e. not restricting yourself solely to input (reading, listening).
You probably drive across town looking for $0.01 cheaper gas, right? :-)
Which is really the case for almost all such choices, and the reason that we generally favor languages with more expressive power and code clarity, rather than raw speed, except in tight inner loops.
I speak Indonesian and Javanese as my native language, "forced to learn" Japanese, English, Malay, and a bit of Chinese here in Japan.
Contrary to common opinion, I regret that I learn and speak a lot of languages because I don't feel adequate enough in any of them, even my native language. Being able to use a lot of language really broaden your view, but at the same time, you will incline to develop multiple personalities/conscious in your effort to speak like the native. I find it difficult to express myself in a "constant" way regardless languages, hence the feeling of inadequate.
Sadly, many force themselves to go to college because the alternative is scary and shameful.
I think you can. I used it a while ago when it was in private beta. You can even create a Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) appliance, which you otherwise have to buy.
how_about_underscores_and_a_greasemonkey_script?
Everyone thinks they're open-minded about change, because they only see a relatively small amount of social change in their lives. I wish we could revisit this discussion when we get old though, because I suspect many of our ideas and taboos will seem silly and be routinely flouted by future generations.
A Contrarian View of Twitter Etiquette
I can't disagree with you. But we can't dismiss the fact that the world's more competetive place that it was before. And the quality of education in the US esp. maths/science should to be on par with the quality of education in developing countries.
Madison square garden nyc tickets
The World"s most famous arena, Madison Square Garden is located in the heart of New York City. Madison Square Garden, MSG, is presently the home of the NHL"s New York Rangers and the NBA"s New York Knicks.
When deriving insights into target use-cases for tech startups, the graph you want to look at is the one for "employed" people. Serving unemployed people is probably a poor choice ;)
Sometimes I have to use a hack in javascript to create a quick switch, instead of if...else:

if(n==0) dir="north"
else if(n==1) dir="east"
else if(n==2) dir="south"
else if(n==3) dir="west"

or switch:

switch(n){
case 0: dir="north"; break;
case 1: dir="east"; break;
case 2: dir="south"; break;
case 3: dir="west"; break;
}

I'll use:

dir=["north","east","south","west"][n]

I hope you find it useful in some cases too
I doubt its an hacking contest. The title is misleading, and the competition is just a regular one except that "TopCoder" is backed by NSA.
Weird, a comment replying to the above disappeared. Anyway, just wanted to share this:

- http://www.gapminder.org/videos/gapcasts/gapcast-6-chile-a-d...

Pretty OT, but important to notice that "developing country" is not an easy definition.
Yes. I compete in the ACM ICPC and TopCoder competitions and here's the deal. Top Chinese competitors in these areas get jobs doing these competitions. They literally get paid by the Chinese government to practice algorithm writing and competitive programming all day every day. US competitors are just college students like me who have things like school to deal with. Given this situation, it is unsurprising that Russian and Chinese coders win almost every year.
Pretty clever & cool.

Any ideas on the software used for creating the images?
Could someone change this title? TopCoder is an NSA supported competitive programming site. While I guess competitive programming could be consider MIT-style hacking, this is not cracking and it's definitely not run by the NSA.
Why web capitalism matters
I've read this article before, but not on this website.
CSS emulation of tables doesn't meet the requirement though.

The question was whether CSS supports the primitives required to do grid layouts without coupling the CSS to HTML, effectively requiring the two of them to be treated as object code.

If you're going to require that the markup contain divs that are ordered and nested just so, so that they can be styled to layout like a table, then you might as well just use a table. Either way you are coupling presentation to semantics.
They don't appear to be escaping the input when you click preview. I wouldn't be handing these fools my credit card.
The interesting thing about this blog is that it shows how long Slava has been hacking on Factor. The earliest entries on this blog are from 2005 (and before that there was a blog on Jroller, which , sadly, isn't there any more). In 2005, Slava was wrestling with OpenGL and so on, and now in 2009 with compiler improvements. It is great to see the steady progress over many years. We should all be so blessed.

PS: Factor is an awesome and mindbending language. Well worth a look
New Strain of HIV
There are a substantial number of people who go to med school and law school while living off campus. Those are of course different and many of the people probably had on campus under grad experiences but I wouldn't be so quick to discount living at home.
That is so true. The insurance companies for health care should be non-profits with set salaries for all the employees.

The reason that people buy health insurance is for exactly the reason that the insurance companies drop the insured; They cost more money than they spend.
Because they are increasingly outnumbered by younger people. The social norm changes, probably faster than they're comfortable with, but with or without them as they die out. Black people go from slaves to sharecroppers in a generation, but it takes over a century for any of them to become millionaires, CEO's, and presidents. Women have progressed even slower.

My grandparents are all dead, but I suspect that few of them would be pleased with the prospect of a black president. Even my parents would be less than pleased to learn that I was bisexual.

Your grandparents may be more open minded than mine, and that is a credit to them. But for every one of them there's ten old people who don't keep up as well.
To intercept the expected comments that these contests have nothing to do with real world skill (in programming, not 'cracking'), Steve Newman, cofounder of Writely, was a top competitor on TopCoder, as was Adam De'Angelo, previously CTO of Facebook. Craig Silverstein, an ACM ICPC programming competition world champion, was Director of Technology and employee #1 at Google.

This does refer to the algorithmic competitions specifically, the correlation between achievement in the design/development competitions is less clear.
Regarding the part at the end, with the idea that we could take 10 students' tuition money and use it to "rent" an exclusive professor for a year, he's assuming that 100% of tuition pays for a professor's instructional time, completely ignoring the other things that money pays for.

Given the choice between one year of "visit the professor at home" or four years of college, I'll take the latter. And gladly pay more for it.

Did the people dreaming up these end of college ideas actually attend college? They're not talking about college, they're talking about college reductio ad absurdum.
Yeah the title is definitely misleading. The word "hacking" isn't even mentioned in the article besides in the title. Replace "hacking contest" with "programming competitions" and "NSA" with "NSA sponsored" and you have a more accurate title.
Easy Weight-Loss Tips - 2 Instant Weight-Loss Tips For Women
Google Releases 'Simple' Programming Language
This graph does not show how people use their time. It shows how people claim to use their time. The caption clearly says "The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day." Not only is it just what people claim to be doing, it's what they claim to be doing while later reflecting on it. I don't have the slightest idea what I was doing at 1:00 this afternoon. I would probably guess eating lunch, but that could just as likely be wrong. Also, I'd be much more apt to claim to be eating lunch than wasting time with the TV or by just sitting around doing nothing.

I'm not suggesting the graph is completely unreliable. I'm just saying you need to consider that certain aspects of the graph will be influenced by the human nature to lie and to remember imperfectly.
It's actually quite common for High-Deductible plans to include payment for standard preventative care (e.g. annual physical). After all the costs covered are predictable and well-contained anyway (typically a few hundred a year).

Beyond that, the emerging "direct Primary Care" model (e.g. http://qliance.com/) is another way to remove the financial disincentive to use preventative care. With them you get unlimited around-the-clock primary care for $50+/month, so there's no additional cost to come in for a checkup. And the barriers to interacting with them are even lower than an insurance-bound doctor, as they embrace modern forms of communication so you can e-mail them about problems which otherwise would not have risen to the level of motivating an appointment.

Note that in this case, subscribers would then favor insurance which does not cover preventative care, or else they'd be paying for it twice, so it's not necessarily beneficial that all people get this support from their insurance.
Which just leads me to say, if you can't report something accurately, don't report it at all. Reporting an average of 8 minutes a day of computer use is just absurd.
This looks like just a stub; I don't see a sign of a compiler, interpreter, runtime, or any embedded or dynamic linking.

What exactly does it do besides evaluating PHP booleans from Ruby?