skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't lose your passion for the subject. I nearly did, because I got really, really bored near the middle of my degree (thankfully, my interest and love for CS was re-gained), mostly because I didn't follow the advice that I provide in the next paragraph. On the coding/academic side, apply what you learn early and don't feel like you should be constrained by what is being taught. Take every opportunity to code, learn and experiment.

And remember there is more to life than just academics. They are important and all that, but cut yourself some slack and remember to have fun occasionally. If you treat the academic side of things as your job, then you need to have things outside of that to keep you sane and balanced, and to prevent your job and your hobby from becoming totally indistinct from one another.

This also feeds into the basic notion that most future employers or grad school admissions committees will appreciate the fact that you are actually a well-adjusted person. Learning how other people in the world operate is valuable. Learning to be social with lots of different people is important. Having hobbies that you actually enjoy are important. Learn public speaking! All of these things will work to your benefit in interview situations and in any kind of later academic or industrial career.
it might be worth noting that basic auth is slightly worse than the others because it sends your password across in the clear for every request, whereas session-based authentication is only sending it once.

if i login to flickr at home and then go to a coffee shop a few days later, i'm never sending my password in the clear. of course, someone can steal my session cookie and be me, but they still won't have my actual password. with basic auth, i would have been giving my password out on every page view.
Which language with a static type system accepts statically-typed variables via querystring?
How to Upgrade the Windows 7 RC to RTM (Final Release)
take things seriously from the start. you're probably the type of person who could barely be awake in high school and still make an A+ in all of your classes.

you can maybe skate by doing this in college, but if you want to keep your grad school options free and/or keep your scholarships, you'll have to be serious from the start.

edited to add: i'm not saying go full-tilt study crazy either though. just make sure that you expend the effort you need to do well. don't forget to have fun, meet people, and expand your horizons.
Yes this is spam
It requires the server to store _either_ the password or the hash of the concatenated username, password, and realm. As long as the realm used in the challenge is consistent, the password need not be stored (at all, anywhere).
Hi all,

I've discovered another interesting approach out there - show the user their own flag (via geoip) strictly as a icon indicating that the language can be changed. Next to that goes a menu with all the supported languages listed (in their native character sets). As far as I can tell this solves all the issues I know of:

1. The flag icon provides the user a hint that they can change language
2. Geo politics isn't involved
3. The list of options doesn't get stupidly large

Anyone see an issue with this approach?
Hej buraz!! Ma evo sve je dobro :D imas blog/website/facebook?
Not a particularly accurate portrayal of 4chan... amirite?

From what I remember of 4chan, and CP was removed within a couple of minutes, and in some cases, everyone replying in the thread banned for up to 36,000 years. Everything else he said has some truth to it, and noone can really argue that 4chan isn't a dirty place.
Why is this better than bugmenot? I can't find a single feature that's better, and I'm not at all dissatisfied with bugmenot.
"First of all, to be an ecosystem there has to be an open marketplace."

I know we're speaking in analogies, but Wikipedia defines ecosystem as:

"An ecosystem is a unit of interdependent organisms which share the same habitat."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem

...I fail to see what disqualifies the App Store as an ecosystem, analogy-wise.

I've had enough self-described "rebels" (in this case, "heretic") who think they are going out on a limb criticizing Apple and making broad statements such as "Apple is the new 'X'". The author doesn't appear to know much about how Microsoft operates or how it attained it's current (perilous) position, otherwise the flaws of this comparison would have been obvious during the first edit.

"...comparisons are odious, Smith."

Has Apple done some questionable, uncharacteristic things lately? Sure. Does it make life difficult for Developers? You bet. Is this something they've never done before? Absolutely not.

So instead of trying to draw attention to yourself by invoking dramatic characterizations (I once heard someone say that anytime someone compares something to Hitler in an argument, they automatically lose) how about "sticking it to the man" by building something better yourself. If you're right, maybe someday someone like you will come along and write a rambling diatribe about your creation (and then you'll know you've really made it).
I'm sure there's a way to make users want to enter captchas, like by making it a game of some sort. It would be cool if each captcha was some sort of pun or riddle that the user had to answer. If they don't know, they get another one. It would be kind of fun to know that only clever-enough people could gain access to your site :)

(just an idea)
Scott Hanselman has been warning folks that this is not supported, and that also, there is a known issue with upgrading an OS that has the VS2010 beta installed.

I started down the RC-to-RTM path, but quickly changed my mind and just did a fresh install. Naturally, YMMV.
Sorry, these tracks got nothin on "Weezer - The 8-bit Album."

http://www.ptesquad.com/more/pte018.html
I used to despise the GIMP because of its interface. All those clunky windows... Yes, I'm aware that there are forks which add MDI support, but meh, I want to use the official version..

Then I switched to a tiling window manager and now those horid multi-window layouts are... the greatest thing ever. To me, its as if they have a single window layout, but with a huge amount of flexibility in how I want the layout. Now I like the GIMP and its multi window system and dislike MDI/single layout programs :D

So.. an interface is the best thing ever to one person and it turns another person "blind".
I was using haystack with whoosh and running into the same problem. I was waiting for some updates on that, but I think I'll check this out first. Thanks for sharing the code.
Don't skip class. College is easy if you actually go to class and pay attention.
Do you have statistics on homelessness before the mental institutions were closed down? Obviously we'd need to find a way to time-adjust them but I'd be curious to compare.
Significantly better than similar concepts I've heard in the past. The rapping is actually very good, not just a gimmick.

I especially like the Mega Man track. Well done, thanks for posting.
If you're not enjoying it you don't have to do it. I switched course (admittedly from maths w/ CS to pure CS) after my first year and had a much better time.

Get involved in stuff. Don't spend all your nights indoors hacking!
How iPhone's GPU works (or why it sucks)? [large video]
It would be at least more competitive with a Firefox Addon.
Because this is what his colleague and friend says.
Hahaha, what a joke.

This is what happens when you let propaganda factories take over news outlets.
I am sorry, but this is a most asinine logic. Correlating "the opening of a day laborer place on the block" with your failing business does not make sense.

Defaulted on my loan and had to lay off 12 people.

So how are these 12 people you laid off different from the day laborers? I've worked countless restaurant gigs, and restaurant work definitely counts as "day labor". The problem that people like you don't understand is what it's like to not own anything. You can't take out a loan against something you don't own.
I'm guessing that WordPress has user_activation_key set to '' (empty string) when the user hasn't requested a password reset or similar email-confirmed operation. So, it checks to see if it is empty, it isn't and so it checks to find the user(s) who have empty user_activation_key values. It's using a get_row() method which indicates that it will just return one and not an array which would have caused a type error.

UPDATE: yes, user_activation_key is an empty string when WordPress hasn't received a request from a user to do something that would require it to be set.
It is funny, when every I speak php to another coder I call -> "dot". It isn't a dot, it is an arrow, but something got wired that way in my brain. "Object" "dot" "attribute"
College is more than the classes you attend and the grades you get. Get involved on campus, and make friends. This will make your life easier in the long run because you also have people you can help you if you're struggling in a subject, not to mention you can go and focus on other things if you're burned out. This is all coming from someone who just finished their first year at Georgia Tech.
That thread recommends many very few good books, but probably mostly books too hard at first for the participant who has posted this new thread.

I'll recommend a couple of books from that thread:

http://www.springer.com/physics/book/978-0-306-45036-5

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Short-Introduction-Timothy...

I agree with the recommendation of An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning in this thread.

Another participant has already recommended my favorite for background reading, Concepts of Modern Mathematics by Ian Stewart.

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Modern-Mathematics-Ian-Stewar...

Get that right away.

Sawyer's A Mathematician's Delight is surely also good (I've read other books by Sawyer).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0486462404/

Read those for background as you get my favorite overviews of mathematics: Basic Mathematics by Serge Lang and Numbers and Geometry by Joseph Stillwell.

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Mathematics-Serge-Lang/dp/038796...

(Basic Mathematics is mostly high school level math, with a minimum of fuss and bother, and good exercises.)

http://www.amazon.com/Numbers-Geometry-John-Stillwell/dp/038...

(Numbers and Geometry is mostly undergraduate level math, with very good explanations and excellent exercises.)
- Make sure you work on cool side projects to keep your hacking motivation up. I regret wasting all my time on stupid games online or just chatting with people. I'd much rather have a few cool projects under my sleeve.

- Look for hacker-friendly internships in the summer. I really wish I had done internships instead of trying to breeze through college by taking Summer semester classes. My resumé still looks as if I'm straight out of college[1] and I graduated 3 years ago.

[1] In the sense that I don't have much experience out of my current employer where I've been working at since college.
I read "itanium-like" not in terms of architecture, but in market timing, delivery on performance promises, and scalability for future revisions.
Looks great. Is there a way to make the Experience section details project-based in addition to company-based?
It's that 8-bit banger son!
This is not nearly as good as bugmenot because it doesn't tell you the success rate of each login. It also only shows you one at a time.
Here is my advice, which is going to be completely different from everyone else here. As a caveat, I almost flunked out of college but am doing pretty well for myself right now, so take it as you may.

Just have fun. Screw classes. Screw trying cramming for tests. Do well enough to learn while not stressing yourself out. College doesn't matter at all for if you can succeed in life. If you have the chops, you don't need the degree. But, you will never have a chance to live up life as you will in college. It is the most care-free and awesome experience you will ever have, and if you're lucky you'll make some awesome memories and lifelong friends.

But if you must do well in school. Spend your time wisely (I also had a 3.7 my last year in college as BS CS). Sit in the first row, do all your learning you need to do in lecture. Do homework between lectures so you can party harder at night and wake up whenever in the morning. GO TO OFFICE HOURS. Pros and grad students practically give away answers on tests at those things.
How can you not like an article that involves cake, pirates, and property taxes?

One thing that I wonder is how is a self reinforcing transaction affected when the third parties that used to mediate it are shut out. For example, certificate authority companies that are no longer needed.

Furthermore, the "all hands" in the room as opposed to secret ballot voting - while on the surface it is self reinforcing from a social perspective it wouldn't really work (i.e. the coercion he mentioned and also the lemming effect where someone votes with their crowd delaying raising their hand just enough to see what the consensus is).

Finally, the collusion and breakage of a self-reinforcing system like the pirate example shows that a self-reinforcing protocol is situationally dependent. What are the chances that at least one pirate will collude with the captain? (I bet the chance is quite high considering the nature of pirates) As opposed to the property tax example which seems to be a very good use of such a protocol.
Ditto to this. While slacking off during college is not a good idea, working so hard that you burn yourself out is also something to avoid. Believe me, after working on a physics problem for ~20 hours straight it's hard to remember why exactly you ever thought you enjoyed the subject. If you don't take breaks and live life a little it's easy to become disinterested in your field of study, at which point you'll be working hard, learning nothing, and hating every minute of it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you learn a lot more than academics in college; people also learn a lot socially, which is just as important.
Yes, be flexible. I started out in Computer Engineering, and was miserable for 1.5 years. After switching to Computer Science I was much happier as it was a better fit for me.
HD Screencast: BitsyBox Integration in Five Minutes
Isn't the point of a self-reinforcing transaction that it doesn't need a third-party mediator?
It depends strongly on the class. If you have a bad lecturer, I find it a better use of my time to stay in my room and read the textbook.
Hey, that's over half-a-gig! A warning in the title would be nice, since for me that's NSFW, albeit in a non-traditional way.
Alternatively, I could read their comments and read a few of the original studies (or at least their summaries) and find the questions that they raise are indeed valid - which you may choose to do as well. They did not provide a consensus view but rather pointed out the limitations of the study which the original authors also pointed out though others, like the conclusions you have made, have cherry picked from.
I disagree on this point. I skipped classes left, right and centre. I'm sure it annoyed the hell out of my lecturers, but I was spending my time doing things that turned out to be much more valuable in the long run.

For example, I did actual research! By the time I was finished with my undergraduate programme, I had enough "real" research experience to gain entry to a very good PhD programme in another country. This was coming from a small university with no particular research reputation outside of a few select areas.

So skipping classes worked for me. Just don't do it to the point where you think you know what is going on in the class, when you really don't.
I also want to add: in addition to losing the flags, you may want to show the target user's language as the default. eg: if primary target users are spanish, load your site in spanish.

dell,creative websites have a simple - "change your country". perhaps that would suit you?
Go to parties. Rush for a fraternity. Have fun.

Meet girls. When you are laying on your deathbed, you will never think to yourself "gosh, i wish i got with fewer women in college."
Sure, with some skill that can be monetized. I don't have statistics, but I would be willing to bet that not many farmers have CS backgrounds (or other backgrounds that can be monetized easily).

I'm not against progress, but I think statements like this ignore the difficulty involved. Even for someone who does "take hold of their own destiny" they may well need to through retraining, etc...

Using the farmers as an example, how would you suggest a 45 year old farmer do (for the sake of argument, assume he/she needs to support a kid or two) when his/her job gets automated away?
You should value your time, and if you are spending too much doing an unproductive activity you should change your habits. This goes beyond college, but the college experience is often the first time you are fully in control of your schedule so it is a bit test.
Last week, a few of you asked about how BitsyBox works exactly (especially compared to CushyCMS) -- this is a quick overview. Any feedback is much appreciated. We're currently in beta right now, but considering quitting our day jobs and applying to Winter YC.
Anyone remember the protocols for 3+ people dividing the cake? I cant find the article I saw.

Edit: Still can't find the article, but wikipedia mentions the relevant research papers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake_cutting
Yes, http://pacsdrive.com my role is founder (what doesn't that include?)
I'd say using the USA flag will disenfranchise Brits (to varying degrees) - we're generally annoyed when those in the USA assume everyone reading an English language page is centred in the culture of the USA. Or at least that's the impression I get.

Personally I'd try and go for a dropdown list of language names in that language - probably choosing the default selection from the UA string or the accept-language; then keeping the language setting in a cookie.
I think his point was that current third party mediators will not be happy to be cut out of the equation. Even though the system will be more efficient without them, they will try to do whatever they can to still get their share of the transaction.
Two pieces of advice come to mind:

1. If possible, don't think about what degree you're going to get until at least your 3rd year. (This might be impossible, depending on your college -- some institutions require incoming students to declare a major promptly.) Out of dozens of students I've dealt with, I'm only aware of one case where "spend four years taking whatever courses looked interesting each semester" didn't end up with a student meeting the requirements for a degree in something -- but I've seen lots of cases where students decided what degree they wanted before starting, carefully mapped out all the courses they'd have to take, and then changed their minds later.

2. Read your textbooks before class. Not five minutes before the lecture starts -- two weeks before the semester starts. Learn the material before the instructor reaches it in class -- and then go to class and pay attention to how he/she teaches it. Aside from cases where the instructor wrote the textbook, I always found that this approach, and consequentially hearing two different perspectives on the same material, resulted in my understanding the material far better than if I only went to the lectures or only read the textbook. (Think you can't spare two weeks to read the textbooks before class? Look at it this way -- if you spend those two weeks, you'll know the material well enough that you don't need to study at all at the end of the semester.)
And because it gets him traffic when he posts it on HN
Hands-on with Android: Building a Ticket Responder, Part 1
College is a great place to start building your network. Teachers, fellow students, employeers... These are all people that you can use later in life to make things easier/possible.
I'm not sure if it is surprising or non-obvious, but I wrote my postfact list of things someone would've told me at the start:
http://metarz.net/blog/17/
The query-string is (obviously) a string and there is no way to treat it as anything else in a static type system.

But in a static type system you will have to cast or convert query-string data to whatever you want them processed as before you can use them as anything besides plain strings.

If you want it to be an int, convert it. If you want it to be a datetime, convert it. If you want it to be an array of whatever, convert it.

If the data is not in the expected format (like in this case), the conversion will fail.

In this example we saw how modifying one query-string parameter had effects down to the signature of a function. Something like that will never happen in a static type system.
The greatest danger of a karma system is for it to become a means unto itself. I think you've fallen headlong into that danger. You don't have a single sentence about how your system would make the site better, which leads me to the conclusion that it isn't even a goal of yours. Without that as a goal, you're not going to create a decent design except by sheerest accident.
"thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping."

This is not uncommon here in Pittsburgh, either, and I'm sure plays no small part in people's decisions whether to drive their own car vs. use public transit. If you can't even schedule your day because you don't know if the bus driver will actually stop for you and there can be an hour wait for the next bus, public transit is not a viable option. Or if it's the last bus that whizzes past you, do you go back into your office and sleep under your desk, or what?

In Japan, of course, they just forcibly push everyone onto the train, which is a better solution than not letting people get on, in my opinion.
I would love to hear an idea for how this could be used in an online gaming situation.

1. Imagine a simple turn based rpg combat system where each side rolls a hit die and the other side a block die and then they compare. given this premise, what needs to be modified to prevent cheating?

2. Once 1 is solved, how much does a fps situation where network lag effects player's perception of each others location complicate the procedure?
http://www.8bitpeoples.com/
Thanks - that is exactly what I meant.
See also the 8bit Peoples:

http://www.8bitpeoples.com/discography