skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author has some good points, but IMHO he does not see the complete picture.

The IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance Examination), the examination used to recruit students into these institutions is arguably the most grueling experience for a high school kid anywhere in the world. Thousands of students all over India spend upto two years of their lives doing nothing other than preparing for these exams. There are many side-effects to this phenomenon.

First, these exams are not like the regular school exams which essentially promote rote learning. The problems are designed to make you think. Two years doing nothing but solving physics and maths problems hones your problem-solving ability to a very high degree.

Second, the pressure to succeed is immense and the competition is cut-throat. Anyone who has successfully been through two years of such an ordeal will be able to handle stressful and tense situations a lot better. This kind of a mindset is a natural fit for a lot of careers that these kids will eventually go on to take up, thereby increasing their chances of success.

<flamebait>
At this age, an average high school kid in the US or UK is probably having a lot more fun, trying to get drunk or get laid :) (if you go by all those teen-flicks and TV Shows!)
</flamebait>

Related Reference : See this Al-Jazeera documentary on a guy who runs an IIT Training school in India's poorest and most lawless province Bihar - http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/witness/2009/02/2009...
If only there was some license that not only allowed non-profits to use the software, but also contribute back and share with everyone! You could crowd source your own product!
EVERYBODY will have health problems and use their health insurance. Very few people will have their house burn down and use their fire insurance. Therefore, there is a massive difference in price.
Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber-Shot 
Sony Ericsson has always been a company to innovate, instead of follow the market trends. Their cybershot phones have incorporated digital camera features in the body of a phone, with outstanding results.
Looking for a Python programmer in Vancouver, Canada. jobs@rhinoaccounting.com please put [HN] in the subject line.
> 2. Water Tower

I have though of doing this for my house in the past.

Before I start building the tower I wanted to have a feel for how much energy one can store using this method. I live next to the sea so water is no issue.

Say to power 1 low energy 20watt light bulb for a few hours how large would the tower have to be and how high from the ground.

I'd really appreciate a link to a resource explaining the maths behind this.
spam, the actual article is at http://torrentfreak.com/id-rather-be-raped-by-pirate-bay-tha... (as much as I despise Torrentfreak for often inflating things into many words though)
Since "Programming Praxis" is not a registered trademark then it would likely be a long and costly battle to legally force The Daily WTF to cease using it. (Common Law trademarks do have rights, but it's not nearly as clear cut).

That said, if the emails are accurate I do think The Daily WTF is behaving incredibly poorly and they've just lost this reader.
Yay. ICANN redeems itself just a little bit.

I'm all for a grace period of a year after a domain has been owned by another party. Just like old phone numbers.
Ask HN: Which scheme implementation do you recommend?
I want to start learning scheme, but the scheme landscape is dotted with numerous implementations (mit-gnu-scheme, guile, plt-scheme to name a few). Which one is recommended ?
Les Paul has been a personal hero of mine since I was a kid. It's really sad to see him go, but at least we can continue to enjoy all of the wonderful creations and creative spirit that he brought into the worlds of music and engineering.
The questions sure seem to be better than whats on the SATs: http://www.iitjee.org/iit-question-papers/iit-jee-2005-main/...
What about modules that people use that abuse this power? All it takes is third parties to mess up the ability to analyse the syntax...

Though I agree it's not a problem for actually trying to execute a Perl script.
A lot of students attempt IIT twice more if they dont get in the first time (or not get one of the choice electives). The ordeal does not end with IIT Entrance, but is even more stressful after getting in – as they compete with the best bunch of students and even though they may be better than the top rankers in other institutions, they would be at the bottom of the pool within their peer group in IIT.
raises hand College student that somehow resists the apparently insatiable urge to purchase crap I can't afford reporting in.
This is inaccurate and based on speculation. We bought them long after the Natal project was underway. I would assume to protect ourselves from patent lawsuits.
The line is that with my tax dollars, I don't want to fund madrassas or kids studying jesus riding around on a brontosaur. If you want that, you do it on your own dime.

Basically, I would see school vouchers as being a way to compete between different schools teaching more or less the same things along more or less the same guidelines, and perhaps with no restrictions, on, say, hiring union labor.

I think the state has a duty to provide non-religious education to everyone, even if you're the lone Christian in a heavily Muslim area, say (or vice versa). If everyone could send their kid to a religious school, in some areas, the market would simply not provide for non-religious education.
It’s a very rare company where they can make the claim that their CEO is the recipe for success.

This seems to be the opposite of what most VCs tell. "We invest in people, not in ideas" is a common claim.

If you can’t trust the guy sitting in the cube next to you, you are in trouble. Hiring rock stars and ninjas is inviting trouble because they are likely to be glory seekers who are thinking about their own personal rewards, and less likely to be thinking about the team

I disagree with the stereotype he draws of "rockstars" (which is a retarded term anyways).

Overall this whole article is just based on a broken premise. The author suggests that a team of programmers is more than the sum of its individuals. This is false. A team of programmers is less than its sum. The larger the team, the more dramatic the impact of this inverse correlation. Cf. The mythical man month.

That's why a very small group of "rockstars", or even an individual, can run circles around mediocre teams of any size.
Why Sony is embracing the ‘open’ ePub eBook standard (Hint: Amazon)
L4 isn't UNIX. It doesn't even have a POSIX userland, necessarily, and certainly wasn't designed with 70s hardware limitations in mind.

<speculation>
The L4::Pistachio kernel provides direct access to high-resolution hardware timing interrupts, though the secure variant may restrict some timer access in order to prevent covert timing channels between threads in different security contexts.
</speculation>
We like PLT Scheme. (You used it to post this question.)
Ask HN: Are Gmail users faster at replying to incoming emails?
I have noticed that the people I come across who use Gmail are much faster at responding emails then people who use different clients.

For example I sometimes have to go through several freelancers' emails. I respond to interesting submissions in a timely manner. I notice that applicants who use Gmail respond much faster than the rest. And this has been constant over the past few years.

Have you noticed something similar?
The links at the bottom seem to refer to SourceForge's privacy/terms and digitalfortress.co.uk.

I don't get how the front page comparing different device categories' openness is useful. I find an index more useful with like-for-like items.
Intelligence may be a Darwinian liability
Hi sokoloff, thanks for the feedback.

We actually support having the same email address for multiple alarms in the system. We also have regex trigger rules for each alarm, which are based on the subject and/or body of the trigger email. This means that you can set up a single email address, and trigger one alarm if "port XX on switch YY" is down, and trigger a different alarm if the "CEO video conference network" is down.

It might be easier to discuss your requirements over email. My address is alex[at]pagerduty[dot]com.
That's very well written, however there's a better way to put it: when hiring, neither side should be trying too hard to sell themselves. A candidate telling a company "I am a rockstar ninja" is a candidate selling themselves too hard. A
company talking about "hiring the top C/C++/Java hackers, from a top-ten CS program" to create CRUD screens in PHP is selling themselves too hard as well. If you want top talent, give them top challenges. You can find plenty of people who are passionate about web development who would be interested in writing PHP for you. May be they can't implement a red-black tree on the white board (yes, I have literally heard of a PHP/Perl web developer being asked to do that), but they may have a great deal more knowledge when it comes to UI/UX, requirements gathering or people/project management.

I do think there is room for "top talent" in a start-up, but the key thing is that they will almost certainly be doing work that is "below them" at one point or another. As pg pointed out, YC presently has a tenured MIT professor as their Systems Administrator.

There's also a corollary to that: if you're coming straight out of college and are looking for serious technical career growth, you may want to hold-off joining an early stage start-up unless they're doing something truly uniquely challenging (e.g. Netscape in the early 90s, Google in 1998 or -- right now -- Directed Edge or the YC start-up making an alternative storage engine for MySQL).

It's also true that seemingly "simple" sites such as various social networks, e-commerce and media sites (Facebook/Ning/LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter) do grow to present many fascinating scalability and algorithmic challenges, these do not occur until the stage where these companies are no longer early-stage start-ups (particularly now, when powerful web frameworks abstract away any systems programming).

(EDIT: some start-ups do have many scaling and algorithmic challenges, but usually not in the early stages)
Valid point. You'd probably have to hand inspect the generated ASM to make sure the compiler didn't really dick something up.

Also, with the optimizations on modern chipsets it might not be immediately obvious which implementation will actually run faster.
As pg mentioned, PLT is a good place to start. It's widely used and has an active community. Dr. Scheme is a nice IDE for learning as well.

If you need to compile to C, Chicken and Gambit-C are both pretty well regarded (it has been a little while since I've looked into this specifically so take it with a grain of salt).
This is the important bit:

When numerous instances of Duff's device were removed from the XFree86 Server in version 4.0, there was a notable improvement in performance.[3] Therefore, when considering using this code, it may be worth running a few benchmarks to verify that it actually is the fastest code on the target architecture, at the target optimization level, with the target compiler.

Optimization without testing is worse then pointless. It's premature and we know that's evil.
Musclehack: The NEW Bodybuilding Diet - G.L.A.D.
Two things. One, if you don't bother to get legal protection for your "trademark", don't complain if people "steal" it. You can't have something stolen from you that you never owned. Get over it. Two, generic terms should not be eligible for trademark in the first place. Especially, no phrase of the form adjective-noun and no compound noun should be elgible for trademark.
Aren't people more likely to have a web-browser window or tab open, versus an entire application?

To answer the original question: yes, people on Gmail tend to answer their emails faster (barring corporate email inquiries).
"The line is that with my tax dollars, I don't want to fund madrassas or kids studying jesus riding around on a brontosaur."

That line of argument can be extended in all kinds of ridiculous directions. Should we ban Hummers off the roads? After all, they're driving on roads paved with your tax dollars, and you do not approve!

We should also ban rapists from drinking tap water. After all, my tax dollars pay for water treatment, and why should scum of the Earth like them get to drink it?

Do you see what I'm getting at? If you are going to insist that none of your money goes towards things you do not directly approve of, you're going to have to go for a 100% free-market economy - and by that I mean no police, no fire brigade, no public roads...

"Basically, I would see school vouchers as being a way to compete between different schools teaching more or less the same things along more or less the same guidelines"

... except if the schools teach things you disagree with. Like I said, it's "We should have freedom! But only for things I agree with"... which doesn't strike me as very free at all.

As an aside, one of the problems I see with the various interesting people of the internet is that, for a bunch of allegedly smart people, they harbor a lot of hatred and prejudice. You can't surf without running into hate-filled articles bashing the religious, unions, immigrants, poor people, etc ad nauseum.
Ask HN: Help me pick a domain name.
So I'm building a little app, mostly for myself, but also who those who find it useful.

It can be summarized as a simple personal memo or note taking app.

I went for the name "remember the memo", with the url "rtmemo.com", but right before registering, I wondered whether it made any sense to use that.

Now I'm stuck. What do you think of the name I chose? What do you suggest?

Thanks!
DC plasma + garbage incineration wastes = functional ceramics
"preventative care improves quality of life but doesn't reduce cost"

That strikes me as a very questionable assertion. Health problems always get worse with time, becoming more complex and expensive to fix the longer you leave them. How could prevention possibly not reduce costs?
In fact, he took the pains to make it clear that he politically supports meritocracy during his talk. So, yes.
Actually I think it goes deeper than this. I've looked into Mint's operating model in the Canadian market, for example, and we have a lot of privacy laws that simply do not exist in the USA. These privacy laws make it practically illegal to do what Mint does (i.e. collect private information, login on your behalf, and scrape your bank's site).
Art of Travel is an excellent book. It contains a great story of a man who decided that planning for traveling is superior to actually traveling and many other great little gems.
rtmemo.com is as good as it gets, better register it while you can!

If you come up with a better one later on then you can always find another use for this one. For $7.25 or so that's a pretty good deal, 99% of the domains that are up for sale on ebay are not that good.
> I think you're confusing Trademark and Copyright.

And I think you didn't read the OP's link:

"Is registration of my mark required?
No. You can establish rights in a mark based on legitimate use of the mark. However, owning a federal trademark registration on the Principal Register provides several advantages, e.g.,"

Furthermore:

"When can I use the trademark symbols TM, SM and ®?

Any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO. However, you may use the federal registration symbol "®" only after the USPTO actually registers a mark, and not while an application is pending."

So no, the OP isn't confusing trademark and copyright. You do, however, have greater legal recourse if someone inappropriately uses your mark if it's not registered. Otherwise, you're SOL.
> That's why a very small group of "rockstars", or even an individual, can run circles around mediocre teams of any size.

They can (and do) in the case of a true technology company. Lot of early stage Internet start-ups aren't yet technology companies (the modus operandi is "do the simplest thing that could possibly" vs. "build a technological advantage that others can't").
I believe the corollary to be more apt. 'People use gmail because they want to reply faster'.

The threaded style of inbox messages also helps keep track of previous conversations to an extent
Dean Kamen is my hero. I'd love to work with him and his team. I'd probably be the dumbest one there and I'd love every minute of it.
Advertisements shit on your brand.

I don't know if I'd go that far, but I will say that the absolute best performing advertisements are for competitors. Thankfully, my free competitors have mostly not figured this out yet, and think that their yearly AdSense check is webmaster welfare instead of an indication that charging money is working for somebody.
This one's more hacker than you think. The medical machine is running poorly. We're poking at the source code to figure out what might be wrong.
go with your gut. if you want to change it later, you can always drop another few bucks. its not a huge expense.
http://www.retireat21.com/new/isteam-for-iphone-earns-makes-... says "The iSteam application is for sale for just 99cent and has been bought over 1 million times since its launch last week! ISteam has currently experienced more than 14% daily growth, with estimated monthly revenues of $100,000 - all this just 8 days after iSteam was first released."

--

The numbers on this site seem bogus.
iSteam is currently ranked 99th in Entertainment. However, if it had been #1 last month, one million downloads in one week couldn't have been possible.

The app costs $.99. It is funny that the post talks about one million downloads in one week and then goes on to say that the monthly revenue is expected to be 100,000.
It would need to offer a french version.

A positive is that there are only 5 banks the majority of the population uses in Canada compared to how many in the US?
The bottom line is. There are numerous, equivalent ways of defining the real numbers and each have the advantages and disadvantages in understanding. Any good introduction to analysis class will do a definition several times and prove equivalence.

Infinite decimals in particular bring up the equality problem. If you're willing to think of the real numbers as ONLY infinite decimals, you avoid this confusion. But it's silly to always write .999... instead of 1.
It really depends on the type of business you are opperating and the background you bring. Companies that operate content businesses or busineses that rely on advertising as their primary revenue model rely on SEO more than most others.

Regardless of the value you see in SEO, it drives a number of critical skills. SEO relys on data, keyword data, traffic data, bailout data, conversion data etc. and so learning about what makes SEO successful means you must have quality analytics in place and learn how to use them and that will make all of the operating parts of your business better and or more efficient.

Again depending on your needs and the size of your business SEO is best managed internally, rely on an experienced and reputable consultant if you need help.

Sites like SEOmoz and SEObook offer excellent information and tool sets to get you started for a minimal monthly fee.
And yet ... it is.

To quote Lao Tsu:

"The Tao that can be parsed is not the true Tao."

Who knew? (Probably Larry)
Mint.com raises $14M Series C
I don't think it's the people, it's the fact that they don't wade through a ton of spam to get to your message that makes them pay attention to their 'xbiff' analogue.
StumbleUpon Rolling Out New Version On Sept. 1
Alright, I registered it. Thanks for your help.
memodrug.com
You can either clean them yourself, install a cleaning system, or hire a professional solar panel cleaner. Unless you live in a really dusty area, your panels should only need a rinse-down a couple of times a year. Here's an article on a solar company website in Northern California I found that is pretty concise:

http://www.thesolarco.com/what-kind-maintenance-do-solar-pan...
Do anyone even try any of those diets?
No, school vouchers are not a libertarian solution.
A libertarian solution will not use one person's tax dollars to pay for the education of another person's child.
Keep in mind that the term "parse" here is being used in its strict sense to mean static parsing -- taking a piece of code and determining its structure without executing it. In that strict sense the Perl program does not parse Perl. The Perl program executes Perl code, but does not determine its structure.

A less alarmist title would have been "Perl cannot be parsed unambiguously without runtime information". A less technical summary:

whatever / 25 ; # / ; die "this dies!";

Could be parsed both as (using parentheses to show arguments):

whatever( / 25 ; # / );
die "this dies!";

Or:

whatever / 25; # the rest is a comment

This depends on whether `whatever' is a function of one argument or not, which you don't know until runtime.
I can’t tell if that’s terrible or awesome.

This is a mathematical problem like poker. On one hand, it exposes the issue for attack by hackers who didn't know about it before. But it also makes systems in the future more secure. What is the probability that a malicious hacker has found this issue before you and is using it to attack java based systems? What is the probability that after you expose the issue, all the vulnerable systems will be patched with your suggestion?

I'm curious what other hackers think of this. I've found XSS vulnerabilities in sites and other security issues. What do you do when you find these? Do you notify the sites? Sometimes I notify the website of the issue, sometimes I don't. I struggle with the decision myself, but I don't think I'd ever go open with such a vulnerability without first being more determined about getting a response from those who can fix the issue before the hackers find it.
It is a very interesting definition of "off the grid" which involves semi-regular shipments of semiconductors - an artifact of high civilization, notorious for its energy-intensive manufacturing process.

To me, the phrase "off the grid" does not necessarily imply living like a prehistoric savage - just something which one could reasonably hope to maintain if civilization collapses. LED lighting certainly doesn't fit the bill.
Finding Good Ideas: How To Improve Product Development
Trademark rights arise once the mark is used to identify goods in the stream of commerce.

Registration gets you two things:
1. The scope of your mark applies beyond your geographical area.
2. Registration on principal register is constructive notice to the nation. It creates nationwide coverage and removes defenses of good faith and lack of knowledge.

If "Programming Praxis" is not registered, then Daily WTF can asset good faith and lack of knowledge defenses. I don't think that the geographical limitation issue has much weight on the internet. Those would be the only differences.

Registration also puts a nice, convenient stake in the ground of who was there first. I don't think that will be an issue here.