skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What these type of people want is to have the "Harvard" reputation when it suits them, and the average Joe culpability should they ever fail.

Bingo.

Elitists tend to focus conversations around where they are going or went to school, where they work, or "who they know". Conversely, the genuinely smart / non-elitists get more excited talking about what subjects of University studies interest them. The minute the issue of "studied @'_____'" enters the conversation, the conversation has taken on an element of ego, elitism and inferiority that detracts from the interesting subject at hand.

Imho, these "Ivy League" (or whatever they're called these days) Universities are entirely overrated. Not to mention overpriced! In fact, it seems kind of stupid these days to expend the amount of $ demanded by them on a piece of paper that, thanks to libraries and the Internet, can be whatever you want to make it.
> They don't want to accept the fact that there may have been guys that could outdo them, but didn't bother.

I guess I was one of these guys too. I perceived striving for best grades as inefficient use of my time. I remembered interesting things automatically, I memorized things useful for applications of interesting things with bit of effort. With the rest, I didn't bother. For much effort on my side reward would be very little if any, so I was satisfied with any grade I got, as long as it was passing grade (it was not always easy to get, lack of interest and reputation in the subject sometimes makes getting passing grade really hard).

I believe that striving for best grades can have significant mental risk because some things depend only on chance and there is nothing more stressful than seeing how your hard effort becoming pointless by silly accident of teacher being in a bad mood.

That changed a little bit in college. There I was satisfied with grades that gave me grade average high enough to get highest merit-based scholarship, because I always liked getting money for something else than my time. With this strategy I ended up as one of 10 best graduates.

Along the way, when current school topics aligned with my interests I was getting highest grades. In case of C++ course after spending week on reading interesting half of Bjarne Stroustrup's book, on tests I was pointing out the mistakes in test questions, and providing two answers, one according to intention of the question writer and other according to exact erroneous phrasing of the question. The grade I got was something like A++ (no one else got it) and it was illegal so on later occasions it was counted as A+).

When topics diverged from my interests other people were doing better. I wasn't jealous of them because I was never interested in competing with them on their ground and I was pretty sure that on grounds that were important to me they could never be significantly better than I was. When I think of this now I never actually felt good about beating them in my domain. I felt that if they were as interested in these things as I was they could achieve similar results as I did.
This has been all over NPR, The Colbert Show, and The Daily Show, and other outlets I follow (it's amazing how precise these advertisers are).

I look forward to watching it, probably via Bit Torrent.
For an overview of PageRank, you should check out http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html
Fair enough, I can see how that was trollish. So I'll elaborate.

Mr. Guo exists in a world built upon a false axiom, "only the smartest make it into the top schools, and that people who don't make it into those schools are obviously not the smartest." Making it into a top school implies top grades. And since only top grades can get you into top schools, only the smartest get top grades.

Since people who have made it into top schools are the smartest, it is obvious that they do not need to demonstrate their intelligence, schooling or other such

This is the thrust of his entire argument, period. Yet anybody with access to the Internet knows that top grades correlate poorly to other measures of intelligence. Being common knowledge, perpetuating notion that top grades = top intellect is clearly a basic untruth (maybe "lie" is too trollish, dunnah).

Therefore (spelling it out formally now),

If top grades != top intellect
and top grades implies entrance into top schools
the students at top schools are not guaranteed to be persons of top intellect

Since we have now formally established that not all the people at Stanford (just using Mr. Guo's school as an exemplar here) are not of the top intellect, we know that there exists people who attended non-top schools who are of the top intellect (or did not attend post 12th grade schooling at all!).

And we also know that, using this article as an exemplar as well, that there exists people who are inclined, like Mr. Guo, to assume that people who did not attend a top school are also not of top intellect, that persons of top intellect who did not attend a top school must therefore clarify this basic truth to persons like Mr. Guo.

The problem with this of course is that Mr. Guo works off of a false axiom, so people who have tried to clarify this to him are viewed as, to use Mr. Guo's own word choice, disreputable?

In other words, he's calling them liars.
1. ITER (and NIF) may turn out to be irrelevant: http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23102/

2. It's been a while, but IIRC we're looking at at least 50 more years of U-235 and maybe two centuries of plutonium and thorium (lowballing). I have a hard time believing that there won't be even one revolutionary breakthrough in how we use or generate energy in the next 150-250 years.
RunRev - The World's Easiest Programming Language
I have a professor telling me this is what he wants a project written in. It's currently a terrible mess of JSPs, and I have half a mind to simply re-write it in Django or RoR. How do I convince him to switch from JSPs to Django/RoR instead of this RunRev thing?
So with a 1B valuation from this round - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/16/twitter-closing-new-ven... we are looking at a $22+ price tag per user. This may be on the low end however as with 45 million users it is assuming that all accounts are active.
I don't think that the media love affair with the company is driving all of this. If say half of the accounts are active (daily) and 10% of those are using search (weekly) then they have enough to throw an ad layer and cpa may do o.k. as part of this. If the large part of this activity is taking place via third-party then the ad layer has to be exposed in the API. Anyhow if 1.17B search queries take place annually (maybe this is low end if you include partners) and you have 5% paid click-through on that (assuming all queries trigger the ad layer) you are looking at 58.5M paid actions annually.
No. But that never stopped those guys from bullying. If they understood this then they may have been at the top.
Can't provide a good suggestion yet, but I'll try to make your pool of options smaller: don't go with Chase.

I've been a personal customer for 7 years and a business customer for 3. A little over a year ago I opened another business account for my startup. Last month I went to them for a line of credit (or even a credit card), and even though the branch manager attached a recommendation to my credit application, it was still denied.

Perhaps this is the case with any large bank, but the bureaucracy is endlessly frustrating. I'd go straight to a small-town credit union if we weren't planning to move the business out of state in a few months, so instead I'm negotiating with Wells Fargo.
They are implementing the Futamura Projections. Very, very cool. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of existing tools just weren't built for their needs.

A fantastic explanation by sigfpe: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/05/three-projections-of-doctor-f...

More generally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation
Is somebody eventually going to notice the misspelling in the title of this item and correct it? ;)
Anyone have any experience with this framework? I love doing my prototyping using paper first followed by VectorDesigner so this could be great.
ask yourself: 99 people in a row have just said 'no thanks' to my foobar thing - who's taking the bet the next random person is saying yes?
hi everyone, this is the author --- wow, i totally didn't expect a random rant of mine to be posted on hacker news :) after monitoring comments for a few hours, i finally had to sign up for an account.

First off, I should mention the context of my article: I wrote that (admittedly not so well-written) article from personal observations I made of technical people in various fields working in various jobs at various companies (I don't want to name drop any further, heh). It was just my personal observation that given two people in the same exact job position WITH EQUAL INTELLIGENCE/SKILLS/EXPERIENCE/ETC., the one who went to a lesser-known university was usually more vocal about announcing his/her skills and, in a way, disparaging of people from so-called name-brand schools.

Sorry I didn't intend to make any sorts of value judgments as to how university reputation correlates with intelligence, likelihood of success, etc.

Now I'm gonna have some fun responding to other people's comments :)
Looks really cool, but where's an example / screencast?
Barack Obama is fortunate that these demonstration repression technologies did not exist during the time of Martin Luther King, because who knows if the civil rights movement would ever have succeeded if they did.
SunTrust Business Checking- No minimum, No monthly fee, I use them.
Does .9999999... = 1?
I'm doing freelance contracting and trying to build a development/consulting shop partly for the same reasons you gave: I like the freedom and I think it's more efficient and modern, and frankly more adult & unpatronizing. Lets me work when, where, how I want, and unlocks enough extra free time & energy that I can spend more of it on other things like hobbies, friends, family or other enterprises or personal investments. A net-win overall. Not perfect, has downsides. You have to spend more time selling yourself, and there's more uncertainty about your future paycheck stream. And can be more isolating. And this giant spider hunts you wherever...oh wait. Nevermind that last thing.

But seriously, back to your post, if you do take time off to work on your own product, I suggest you don't burn any bridges employment-wise, and maybe set it up as an unpaid sabbatical with your existing employer, with an agreed upon return date. That way, you have the option of returning to them and that steady paycheck if your experiment doesn't get traction. This is more important because you have wife and kid. Also, use tools/tech that are good for rapid development and experimentation (Python, Ruby, etc.), make a Minimum Viable Product, launch/feedback/tweak/repeat, and don't underestimate the importance of marketing & advertising.

Another option for striking out on your own is to ease into it gradually by first becoming a contractor/consultant. The work you do is similar to salary/staff in that you're writing software for other folks, fixing bugs, etc. except you have more freedom/time/control to work on other stuff, like a product/service startup. And you can blur the line by developing a product/service whose design was informed by, driven by common demands from, or was a by-product of, your contracting work. That was the 37Signals route I think, and lots of similar stories out there.
I can listen to music but it can't have any lyrics that I can concentrate on. It has to be electronic or jazz, something that puts me in a certain mood but I can still kep my concentration intact.
Apple rejects iSinglePayer iPhone App
Cool to see another lisp with remote stuff. I've been doing distributed computing with newLISP for 4 years now. http://www.h-i-r.net/2009/07/network-programming-and-distrib...
The Formula for Happiness - Happiness = P + (5xE) + (3xH)
I emailed with that same question just before I posted it here.
fair enough, that does sound pretty elitist ;) sorry if i offended people with that language.

but the rest of that sentence says "... , I have seen a wide variety of personalities and egos amongst computer scientists and software engineers."

the point of that paragraph was to establish that i had experience in interacting with CS people from a variety of backgrounds, both from so-called elitist places and from less elitist places (i suppose i should've also listed the other lesser-known places where i've worked and gone to school, but since by definition they're not well-known 'elitist' places, you probably wouldn't have heard of them anyways)

wow, had i known that my article would someday be posted on a news aggregator site, i would've definitely been more politically correct in my word choice :)
You are an idiot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches
His arguments are not built on that axiom. Never does he claim that the "only the smartest" people make it into the top schools. His argument is based on signals (such as grades and pedigree), not actual intelligence.

His claim is that some people who lack one signal (academic pedigree) will try to compensate with another signal (elitism).
And, one imagines, a willingness to work more than four hours a week.
Google found this video of the t400 for those interested:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evk-Ln_TFLA

Apparently some people like the screen; some absolutely despise it. Here's a complete review - warning, bad music incoming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKNxecHXUAU&feature=relat...
wow, that is quite a stretch from what i said or implied in my article! Here is my central thesis:

"Thus, I assert that given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one who did not go to a name-brand university will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery as a form of compensation for his/her lack of visible status."

i'm sorry that i didn't make it more clear up-front (and my intro about school grades wasn't the greatest choice), but the central tenet of my article is that i am comparing people "with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills". in other words, i'm asking you to compare identical twins, one who went to a well-known university and the other who went to a lesser-known university. i'm definitely not saying that one is smarter than the other :) quite the opposite, actually ... i'm controlling for intelligence/technical-skills

i really hope that i didn't write or imply any of what you accused me of writing, namely that i somehow feel that people who didn't make it into a well-known school are "not of the top intellect" ... if i did, please please point that out, and i will immediately take down the offending portions of that article. i don't want people mis-interpreting what was meant to be a simple statement.
I find myself doing this so often.

Please, please, imagine yourself talking to someone and saying that.

You do not say, in real life, "You are an idiot [because you didn't know this fact]" to people you have never met before.

This is the Internet. There isn't enough civility on it anyway - at least do your part and don't detract from what exists.
I think you misunderstood his arguments. He did not in any way denigrate the non "name brand" schools.
I don't get the hate for this

Every front page article on HN gets a lot of hate, regardless of topic or viewpoint expressed. I hope nothing I write ever gets to the front page here.
This is rather depressing. I've been a huge ThinkPad fan, on my 3rd T-series at the moment... a T61p that still wore a IBM sticker and can't praise more for the wonderful WUXGA screen... but guess Lenovo's corner cutting is finally catching up, hopefully this is just a isolated case.

I'll always love and remember the thinkpads (at least IBM era) for their tank like qualities; being able to use the laptop as a blunt weapon in a fight and later using the same laptop to code and blog is a good feeling.
Mono not Chasing Tail Lights
Have a look at this little paper by Richard Gabriel http://www.dreamsongs.com/NewFiles/WhyOfY.pdf
I was researching various Thinkpad models for a friend (and out of idle curiosity at the non-Mac laptop market) the other week, and found that complaints about the display quality are true across the Thinkpad line, even including their pricey MacBook Air competitor, the X300. Pretty surprising, given the Thinkpad reputation for quality.
Your boss will weigh you now
this is the author here ... since this post seems to have spawned the largest thread, hopefully i can address it at its root. i now realized that this was a horrible way to start the article, for several reasons:

1.) it makes people debate grades vs. intelligence vs. likelihood of eventual success, etc.

2.) it reminds hacker types of how schools only rewarded the teachers' pet kids who bothered doing inane homework and studying a lot for tests and didn't have proper incentives for people who liked hacking in their spare time rather than spending all their efforts trying to earn A+'s

3.) it makes people think that the point of my article is about intelligence, getting good grades, and being admitted into an elitist school

I think all of these detract from the main point of my article, which is to make a very simple claim, which i've observed to be true in my personal experiences:

"Given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one with less-reputable external marks of status will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery."

i guess the moral of the story is that i should be more concise in my writing ... smaller attack surface ;)
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I didn't mean what you are explaining is wrong.
Sorry, I was typing a bit fast. This should be ok.

window.onload= function() {
setTimeout( "myHotDog.getCondiments();", 3000);
};
It's more like saying NBC is an advertising company. No, they create content and sell ads beside it. Google gives us great search results and sells ads beside them.
I swore off Thinkpads when my $2K (at the time) T60 couldn't drive an external 24 inch monitor without horrid text flickering. Thinkpad's "solution" was to buy a $350 dock that had better external monitor electronics. Um, thanks, but no thanks.
I was wondering when somebody was going to put out a consumer-grade LCD so terrible that a consumer actually noticed. Even Macs use sub-par panels and nobody seems to notice. I await the day when I am not considered a "Professional" for requiring S-IPS or better panels -- I'm tired of paying a near-50% markup on my LCDs.
I think in general it helps to be more polite in general, especially in forums or discussion boards.

At least the respondant was good enough to quote a source.

However, in my view as the civil rights protesters were 1 arguing for a greater (or at least closer to home) cause, 2 were set upon by dogs and 3 weren't going around breaking windows, the OP can quite rightly be called stupid for not looking into the facts a bit more rather than just mouthing off.
Thank you. That is exactly what I'm thinking of doing. Take unpaid time off. Launch my product early (2 months into the leave, hopefully), interact directly with consumers, implement, improve, and hopefully have something that I can work full time on at the end of 4 months.

Re: your point about isolation, this is why I like the WFH approach. You give people freedom, but you still work as a team. It seems more win-win to me overall, than striking out on my own.
Ask HN: Seeing points again?
I can see the points again. I take it that I'm not alone (or seeing things due to lack of sleep :) ) ?
Does "duct tape programming" mean "no design", "no elegance"?

How about those pictures that you can see on wikipedia in "duct tape" entry ?

Apollo 17 with duct tape
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Duct_tape_apollo17.jpg

Model ship made with paper and duct tape.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Modelshipmadewithpaper.jpg

I think Joel Spolsky implied "duct tape programmers" to be those who are pragmatic and get things done, those who do not try to show off unnecessary techniques but focus on solving problems, those who do not try to play toy problems with all wonderful constructs but solve real problems with simple elegant lines of code.

Did I misunderstand what Joel's essay mean?
Hi Confusion, I totally agree 100% with all of your points. I have absolutely no problems with people who choose to devote their energies outside of their schoolwork. My gripe is with kids who don't do that well in school but then vocally brag about how smart they are in particular school topics. A contrived example would be some kid in your high school class who is a solid B student but is always bragging about how he knows the material inside-out. I think that if you want to brag about how good you are in class, then you should probably have the grades to back it up, since by definition, grades are the metric by which people judge you in a particular class. I'm in no way saying that kids who don't do well in class aren't smart ... I definitely know people who didn't get great grades but are amazing hackers.
It's business has nothing to do with search directly? I can only assume you are being semantically pedantic here and using "business" to mean literally making money by selling a product. But even then I disagree with you. Yes they make 97% of revenue from selling ad-space next to search results. But without the search results that ad-space is (nearly) worthless. So how can you say Google's business has nothing to do with search directly?
You know what? You're right. I would probably have also used profanity in person. If I were feeling frisky, I absolutely would have taken a swing.

If you are an adult and you don't know about the lynchings, fire hoses, attack dogs, and other atrocities during the civil rights movement in the States, and you make an off-hand comment about Dr. King, you deserve less than my contempt.
My 2 cents. I am not "experienced" in that I haven't yet achieved my millions, but experience has told me "forcing" myself to continue hacking away when I'm clearly experiencing physical fatigue only leads to more lost productivity down the road.

For example, forcing myself to continue working at my computer when I don't feel like it will lead to eye strain, back pain and anxiety. I will often wake up with a headache after such marathons. I refer to this as burnout. Burnout is very real.

In my early years of programming I could work non-stop because I was doing something new almost every day. And for someone that likes new experiences, it was exciting. But after years of experience, programming in-and-of itself feels more and more like labour.

Don't get me wrong. I still love programming, in general. I've just become more focused on the end-results of programming--of what it makes possible, what it does for people. The act of programming itself, while being something that will always be a significant part of what defines "what I do", is no longer something that can sustain my interest full time.
There might be enough here to build a distributed tulle space out of, like GigaSpaces.
Without passing any judgement whatsoever, I'm going to leave this link here :)

http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/advantages-of-name-brand-s...
Users I talked to seemed divided (at best) about the desirability of hiding comment scores, so I brought them back.

At least one good thing came of this experiment, though. There's now a new function for ranking comments, with a faster time decay. I should have done that before, but taking away points made the need for it more obvious.