skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems that a lot of good points have been covered so I'll point out two that seem lacking:
1) Make sure that when you do have a choice, that you only live with folks who will be easy to get along with even at their most acrimonious
2) for late night snacking and caffeine, fruits, oatmeal, and some variety of loose leaf tea are the way to go. Its cheap, and in the case of tea, even the strongest caffeine dosage of tea (even at the energy drink strength) is very low jitter.
3) you're in the boston area, take advantage of it and the opportunities to meet fun interesting people at other universities, seeing the constrast between the cultures at different schools is not to be underrated.
I want to echo gdp's advice above. What I wish someone had told me as a freshman:

Grades don't really matter, no one will care about them.

1) Future employers (investors too?) will care about code you wrote outside of class, whether open source or your own projects.

2) Grad schools will care about great recommendations, which you do not get by getting good grades. You get those by doing research with the professor outside of the class.

I'm not saying it's ok if you fail; just that there are different priorities to be balanced. Missing out on that A in order to improve on 1) or 2) above is a trade off that will serve you better.
my totally unscientific examinations suggest that people grow more after a year of travelling than they do after 4 of college.

This makes sense. Data point of one, I grew more by living overseas after college than I did by working my way through college.
I got a 404 because I was visiting from Mobile Safari, which redirected me to the /m mobile site which apparently doesn't exist in the sandbox beta.
I think chasing women is a terrible use of one's college years. The women are mostly immature and have terrible tastes in men. Better for him to recognize that he probably won't meet a marriage-worthy woman until his mid-20s, suck it up and work hard until then.

I definitely regret having lost a lot of great learning opportunities because I was fooling around with spoiled, immature, half-formed people. Very few men, at 18, are good enough judges of character to not end up losing badly on this gamble. Most 18-year-old men have certain, umm, influences on their judgment of other people that make them pretty bad at this.

Obviously, some people luck out and meet a soulmate at 18. One of my friends met an amazing woman (also his first girlfriend) in his freshman year and is now happily married. I've seen it happen even in the US, where the average quality of women is low ("hookup culture", Sex and the City) and the odds are bad. I don't think he should count on it, and he definitely should not allow his success or failure with women to affect his concentration and work.
I logged into an older Hotmail account the other day to be greeted with hundreds of spam messages in my inbox. My active gmail account gets maybe 1 spam a month that isn't filtered. At least for webmail providers, Google has won the war on spam and Microsoft is far behind.
Poona, India.
I usually don't login to google, hence my original assertion.

I've not seen any evidence that Google actually do any analysis that is quite that smart. My best guess is that they just do keyword analysis. This is something of an educated guess, because I know someone who worked on keyword extraction at Google.

Even if Google _could_ extract that kind of rich data you describe, I very much doubt they have done it to the point where it is in a format that is suitable for providing targeted ads (beyond what they already do, which as I said, I would guess is keyword-based).

The difference with something like Amazon's data or Google Analytics is that it is structured data that is already perfect for providing recommendations and targeted ads.
Mmhmm. I avoided those kinds of classes like the plague.
I suspect that Ehrenreich was writing for an audience that sees recreational pot use as one of those "technically illegal but who cares" crimes, like jaywalking or driving five miles over the speed limit.

The smell of marijuana comes out of my next-door neighbor's house on a daily basis. One of the guys who lives there has a criminal record. We are literally two blocks from the nearest police station. And yet nobody in that house is getting busted for marijuana possession (even before MA partially decriminalized it).
just to be clear, you save as much gas moving up from a 20 mpg car to 25 mpg car as you do going from 50 mpg to 100mpg. (think in terms of gals per 100 mile)
I don't; it's not something that I research personally. However, there appear to be links to interesting sources here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Stat...

http://www.nrchmi.samhsa.gov/Channel/View.aspx?id=18
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/

The general impression that I've obtained in my casual reading of this over the years is that (a) there have always been "indigents", but (b) the numbers have gone way up since the 1960s and (c) a disproportionate number of "indigents"/homeless have been those with mental illnesses.
Instead of giving the amount to the captain, they could throw it away to the sea. Nobody would cheat then.

In real life situations, you may want to replace the sea by the government or some kind of common fund in the domain.
Not yet, but working on it!
Wordpress and its ecosystem have such exceedingly great code quality. :/
Linked site appears to be an uncredited duplicate of: http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/9410
Ah, sorry about that. Edited the title

Here is a leaner version with reduced quality:
http://media.assembly.org/vod/2009/Seminars/875_iPhone_-_lea...
I don't believe that to be a true statement in general, but I would claim it about a system above a certain level of complexity without a formal proof, or tests covering every possible input(which is usually unfeasible.)

Every software project worth building is above that level of complexity, and it typically doesn't have that formal proof or test suite. Therefore I would claim every system in the wild is more than likely not bug free(or at least not proven to be ). Your train ride home should be safe though because (at least when I worked in industrial automation) there are rules against software in safety devices.
Agreed, although it's easier to reinvent oneself shortly after college (in my experience) than in college.

Socially, college is very similar to high school. Real life is radically different. In some ways, it's worse. In others, it's better.

I think the best social experience can be had in late college, when you're old and mature enough to reject the bullshit (hookups, binge drinking, gossip) and still surrounded by brilliant, interesting people. My hope is that the OP will be wise enough to skip to this phase, which is "late college" for most of us, much earlier than the rest of us did.

College provides you great opportunities to meet fascinating people, if you're wise about how you do things; if you're not, you just end up expensively wasting time.
A more interesting worst case would be one where the 16 slots take turns in missing the cache, so that almost everything is read from the cache, but there is still the penalty for a cache miss between every two SIMD instructions. But if you write your code in that style you get what you deserve :-).

Even some current architectures [edit: like, for example, x86] have instructions that give hints to the MMU that the program intends to stream some part of the memory in the near future, I guess these will rise in importance when more programs have to avoid these kinds of problems.
1. No beard or moustache until you're old enough to drink. Goatees are OK.

2. There are core programming skills, and there are technology-of-the-week skills. Instead of worrying terribly about the latter, worry about getting your core ability to design and test efficient, maintainable code. Definitely play with functional languages instead of the enterprise-y fad-of-the-week.

3. Don't hang out with other geeks all the time. Branch out as often as possible. This will help you be a better programmer, businessman, salesman, and will probably get you laid more.

[Edit: added some explanations]
Learn Clojure. Learn Haskell. Learn Erlang. Learn Mozart Oz. And you'll suprised that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to write robust highly concurrent code.
I find two letter codes more usable:

EN English
IT Italian
AR Arabic

Of course you can separate them from the language name by a different font or background color.
Any of those you said, can happen to anyone, anytime. If a family is living paycheck to paycheck, something like this happens, they can be financially ruined and become homeless in just a few months.

Not sure why kingkongrevenge is so harsh.
Believe it or not, I wasn't familiar with that site... "thank you" ;-)
From experience: if you drop out at 19, know that things can get seriously fucked up. Now I'm 21, and the startup I stopped out for for nine months went nowhere. It can also throw a wrench in your college experience.

Just...if you want to learn what I learned from it, it's this: learn tech in class, and don't bother with nearly anything else. Except IP law and corporate law, and if you seriously suck at writing, which it appears you don't, learn to write well.

Also, I have no idea how, as a practical matter, one goes about ignoring grades.
I think too that for a lot of people, they travel the year after they finish school, so they're a little older as well.

Mostly though it seems to be that once you realize there is a whole world out there with people of every shape, size and belief, you truly see all the possibilities of life.
I am one of the founders of http://www.electric-cloud.com/
sigh

From the article:

Now, before you jump up and down and tell me that "insert-your-favourite-concurrency-model-here addresses these problems", I know there are strategies for managing the complexity of these tasks. I did concurrency theory for a living, so I know some approaches are better than others. My point here was essentially to illustrate why it is important to manage complexity when doing concurrency. It's definitely not just a case of "you can't do concurrency so that means you are stupid". I'm arguing that pretty much everyone is bad at concurrency beyond some simple patterns of interaction that we cling to because we can maintain a good mental model by using them.

To elaborate, things like the technologies you mentioned may provide better mental models for concurrent development, but I'm not convinced that they have solved concurrency in its entirety.
1. Remember that you will probably not graduate with a 4.0. Your first C is going to hurt, especially if you were an A student in high school. Just keep going.

2. Don't worry about the impact of switching majors or programs. I started my school in the computer engineering program, hated it ~2.5 years in, and switched around a bit. I'm now graduating with a degree in pure mathematics. Study what you love -- the jobs will come.

I'm afraid I'm starting to ramble, so let me get to the main point -- what you study means nothing after you graduate. Where you study means (almost) nothing. What matters is who you meet along the way, and your actual accomplishments while in university.

Study what you love. Meet facility, upperclassmen, and other students. Work on writing something cool and useful. You will get more out of school than if you spent your time grinding for a perfect GPA.
I came back to doing maths after a gap of over a decade. I found the student survival guide very clear and useful. I imagine it would be excellent to someone who is not good at maths.

I read the guide every evening while I was cooking (its not a difficult read) and my maths improved greatly.

http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~jenolive/
http://www.amazon.com/Maths-Students-Survival-Self-Help-Engi...
In the comments:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/self-enforcing...

someone brings up the situation where there is only one item (Grandma's antique mirror) and how you can use the shotgun clause to determine who gets the item.

I'm reminded of the chapter (70) in Cryptonomicon where they were dividing the assets of an estate. All of the children got to rank items on 2 scales, emotional attachment and dollar value. The choices on both axes were scaled to between 0 and 1. Then they were going to use software to determine an equal split on both scales amongst all recipients.
Things like this are probably what made the Internet Explorer. Mistakes should not be carried with you, eliminate them as soon as you can.
Slightly off topic I suppose, but makmanalp is making an AWESOME point here. No one knows you and it's your chance to get out and do what you really want to. I was in the closet for all of high school and fairly miserable because at the time I thought my friends would stop hanging around me should they find out. This fear kept me from making a lot of new friends in my first year, especially since one of my friends from high school was my roommate. It kept me from joining the GBLT club which would have made my transition to university much easier, and let me interact with more people like me.

This is your chance to meet new people who have the same interests as you. Changing from a high school where very few people are interested in technology to a college where your entire program is filled with people who share your same general interests creates an awesome environment to grow and share ideas. The group of friends you meet in classes the first year can lead to an awesome experience in the second year, as you find people who you work well and agree with who will want to be roommates in later years. Can anyone say hacker house?
You might want to check out Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier. It explains how to dice as well as cards over a network without being able to cheat. It also goes into many other areas in great detail.
I had T9 activated and it automatically choose the Greek word.
Wow, that is a pretty reasonable price. When do they expect to ship?
"How intoxicating for someone just 32 years old."

Maybe. Asshole thing to say, though.
"Is the new" is the new "fucking annoying".
Yesterday's "speed reading" seed article claimed:

Increasing reading speed is a process of controlling fine motor movement--period.

as if the most important part of reading were increasing the rate at which symbols mechanically tickle your retinas.

This essay more closely reflects my experience. Create an environment that improves concentration, that allows focus, and the effective reading rate will skyrocket. We battle endless distractions that all conspire to prevent submersion in a text.
Nice site, looks alot like campaign monitor
"under pressure and time constraints"

Isn't that the situation during a startup and some companies?

If someone is not able to use a linked list, how are you going to trust them think of/implement something new and harder?

And I never said mistakes are unacceptable.
Yes, http://avecora.com , http://ramamia.com , http://tickrtalk.com , http://classleaf.com , http://adaptance.com , and http://debateware.com
GPM
I founded Spark::red http://sparkred.com "The Best ATG Hosting Provider", with a couple of partners. ATG is a niche expensive (but amazing) eCommerce software package. All the partners are technical architect type folks.
Cloudera is fast becoming the defacto commercial Hadoop brand. At the least, they have assembled an impressive collection of Hadoop celebrities.

As I understand it, they are still doing mostly consulting engagements. While lucrative, I expect them to build a product soon, if they are not already doing so. Anyone care to speculate?
But I thought Google was the new Microsoft?

How many New Microsofts can we have? :)
That's depends on what you want to learn and for why, well, some people want to understand the formalism of a theory, as theoretical computer science or theoretical physics where others are only interested in applications, so I will take a generalist approach in the topics, yes topics not books, that I will advise you to learn. Unless the book is awful (and there are many out there that are) it will makes no difference which book you pick, you generally will not "read" a math book, the only case in which you will is when it's a book for divulgation (as Polya's "How To Solve It"). For me the basics is:
Statistics (Descriptive and some Probability),
Calculus, the idea of Limits, Derivatives and Integrals (for Multiple Variables) and applications,
Linear Algebra and also some Applications (there are many), numerical Linear Algebra is totally necessary if you want to apply it in the real world,
a basics in Differential Equations,
some Numerical Analysis.

If you want to learn things closer to computer science then learn something of Number Theory, some Enumerative Combinatorics and Graph Theory as well.
The list is extensive because I come from a mathematical background. If you learn at least a bit of these topics them the next step will be apparent for you.
And Stephenson then went on to mention, through Randy and his uncle (or was it his father?) that the problem itself was incredibly difficult, and they were going to borrow some time on a huge machine to solve it.

And then Randy cheated, anyway.
I'm 34 now. Nobody has cared what happened to me in my early 20's since I was about 25.

I think college is less relevant, in a constantly changing social and technological environment, than it once was.

It used to make sense to front-load one's life with education, concentrating on schooling into the mid-20s and then starting to work. Considering education to be an investment, it was only logical to pursue it as early in one's life as possible. With such a rapid pace of change, however, this model doesn't make sense any more-- much of what you learn in college will be forgotten or obsolete in 20 years. In my mind, it makes more sense to start working at age 14 and spend 1 year out of 5 in some kind of schooling.
During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation.

I'm sorry but I don't get how they detected life on Earth. I can accept/imagine a few ways for tracing various chemicals/elements on a planet's surface and atmosphere from space but how can one detect life?
Not only that but the reporter says "and possibly vegetation". So their results aren't conclusive?
I think he mostly hopes for something like REYES for games, which would improve quality somewhat (motion blur and DOF look nice), but that's probably never going to become part of the fixed-function pipeline. That's why he's calling for a "back to software" approach.

WRT Larrabee, I agree with you, and I wonder if the scientific market can recover their development costs.
Wouldn't the two people not cutting wait 'til the knife was in the middle, and then try to yell 'cut!' as fast as they could? First person to yell "cut" would get half of the cake, and the other two would get a quarter apiece...
Using Twitter as a Collective Mood Ring
While some cases are trivial, and MapReduce is pretty trivial, sharing is an integral part of doing most things practically applicable. In other words, the majority of real world applications of concurrency are hard.
I noted that from the article. But nowhere did you mention how these languages fail to allow for complex concurrent modeling, which they do. You simply discussed your viewpoint without context for how these languages do not competently allow for massively concurrent programs- that's what they're designed to do.

And I'm not saying they solve "concurrency in it's entirety". I'm not even clear what you're trying to express with that statement.
don't forget The Advantage, who do indie-rock versions of Nintendo tunes w/ live drums, bass, and dual guitars -- http://www.myspace.com/theadvantage1
# Python Application Development with Aptana PyDev
Why not just a menu of the written-out names of the languages, with each language name in its own language?

"English", "Deutsch", "Português", etc.

Depending on how many languages you're supporting, you might just make it a short list of links up in the header, at least until one is selected.
I wonder if this applies to blogs that talk about products and link to those products using affiliate links?
I wouldn't go that far. While I don't think college matters, "work" matters even less.

The beauty of front loading a life with education is that one can explore different avenues without any societal or personal pressures to perform before they are mature enough to do so.

I'm all for personal projects and starting side businesses as early as one can manage, but I wouldn't want that to be the societal norm because it would corrupt the experience, exactly as it has corrupted the college experience.
Well put. Similar sentiments from me on GeekStack http://geekstack.com
Just so someone says it I hope everyone remembers Microsoft had a monopoly with Windows. Apple doesn't with the iPhone. The most optimistic estimate puts the number of iPhones sold by the end of 2009 at 45 million. Compare that to an estimated 4.3 billion cell phone users worldwide and 260 million U.S. users alone.
Agreed. It'll have to be a measure of energy consumption per mile. Consumers will also have to develop an understanding of the relative cost of different energy sources.

Maybe we rate cars in Miles/Joule and rate energy sources in Joules/$. Makes the math pretty simple.
That electricity cost is based on a single location. My electricity is 12.5cents per KWH, regardless of time of day. That turns into about 3 cents per mile, rather than 1 cent per mile quoted in this article.
You might ( won't say will) end up in business with those people too!
Rolling Deployments with Capistrano
All parties can say cut, including the cutter. If he calls it, he gets the part behind the knife, just like any of the others.

In the above scenario, the cutter has an incentive to yell cut as soon as the knife passes the 1/3 point, then each of the remaining people has an incentive to yell cut when it's passed half of the remainder (or 1/3 of the total).
What qualifies as a founder? If its a one man startup doesn't that give them every title? :)
Let me clarify: I'm a big fan of most of the languages you've described. I think they do a really good job in the problem domains they are designed for.

My only point is that the domains they are designed for are constrained. I don't mean this as a negative - I consider a general pthreads-style implementation of concurrency to be constrained by the ability of people to reason about that kind of concurrency, probably to a much larger degree than a considerably more elegant implementation in a modern functional programming language.

I would argue, however, that such languages simply make it easier to construct concurrent programs that follow certain patterns. They provide useful abstractions for managing the complexity of concurrent interactions, which I think was my original point, and which I think is brilliant! What is missing is something that provides good-quality abstractions, high-quality static analysis and very strong safety guarantees in the general case.

Think about things like mobile processes, "ubiquitous computing" and software with huge failure tolerances by virtue of being able to reconfigure and coalesce resources at will.

And hopefully the flow-on effect of that would be to essentially stop horrible concurrency implementations being used in languages like Java and friends.
Speaking as another Brit I really don't get it. Leaving aside differences in pronunciation, the only thing that separates the two dialects is a few minor spelling/vocabulary differences. I don't remember ever bothering to change from US to UK English on sites that support both. The one exception might be if dates are involved, in which case it is confusing to have the US order.