skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the grandparent post. We need to define why college exists in the modern system.

In the more distant past, it was purely academic. Research, experimentation, etc. Somewhere in the last century the goal of schools shifted to be an unfocused trade school. "Learn to write well, every job needs that!".

I'm not opposed to either approach, and believe that both need to exist in the world. But the idea of a 4 year college falls awkwardly in between those two ideas.

I think the reason we are in this situation is because we confused cause and effect. Back when college was a much more limited institution, the smartest and best connected went to school. They then got the best jobs, and earned more money. People saw that and said "Aha! College leads to better jobs". What they missed was the "Aha! Smart people get the best jobs!". So the push to get everybody into college started, since it would guarantee the student's financial future. That of course hasn't been sustainable, and it has ruined the bachelor's degree as a useful resume signal that you are part of that top tier of people.

We need to reevaluate how important exclusivity is to universities, reevaluate how kids can be trained for high end jobs (can you do a trade school for computer programming?). It may be as simple as a marketing campaign saying that plumbers and mechanics can't be outsourced and make a ton of money.
If you follow the links then there is reams and reams of historical climate data. Anything beyond that is pure opinion. Form your own.

Im not sure what your trying to prove? It feels like were either doing your homework assignment or being trolled. ;)
It is not an interesting point. It is merely a literary 'trick'.

It is just unconscious use of the rhetorical form 'paradox': it says something apparently nonsensical in order to capture attention, perhaps to express a related truth. The way to handle rhetoric is to recognise it and not be diverted by it, and look if anything substantial is actually being said.

I am not saying it is delibarate, and deceptive; it is more like a cliche -- it can happen accidently in writing something.

Saying "documentation is more important than library" really is nonsense. If you had one but not the other, which would you choose? If you have only the library, you can probably figure out how to use some parts. If you have only docs, you have nothing working at all.

The point of course is: documentation is important. Almost certainly very true. Though it now seems rather mundane. The best treatment for such a situation is not to follow some rhetorical flow, but to search for something more interesting to say. Or just say it simply, express a little enjoyment maybe, and have a brief blog post.
From the outside it appears that many of the YC companies try to stake out a territory, amass a user base with a free service, and then sell or find some other way to make money.

It seems like we don't hear much from those guys--they must have some valuable, hands-on experience to share.
I've always thought that even after four years, that really is just barely enough time to get decent awareness around developing software. Assuming you were a CS major the whole time.

The only thing worse than being bad at what you do is being bad at it and not knowing it.
Augmenting Google Search with SearchTabs
> I think the most amazing thing about this article is that it was written (or at least bylined) by a sitting senator.

I did a double-take when I saw then name, then skipped to the end to see the byline. Yes, it's the same one. (Didn't know he used to be president of the University of Tennessee, either.)
I think the best way to improve college would be to ban the practice of granting degrees altogether.
I'm using pydev right now... it seems ok. I'm mainly interested in refactoring, which it seems to have. I'm wondering if Spyder has it. I don't see a reference to that in the docs.
The fight for original material
Read it, it'll do you some good.
You guys talk about undergrad like you're there for the education. Hackers, moreso than 'normal' people, need college to develop social skills and other soft subjects. Grad school is for real learning.
What languages are these? because I have never used a language where the standard library was not flexible enough.
They might enjoy the "Bing Is Not Google" backronym but obviously they were more interested in the sound effect in advertising (sounds better than that annoying "Ya-hooooooo" Yahoo! uses) and the possibility to use "bing" as a verb: "Bing it" vs. "Google it." (Xerox-ish trademark dilution isn't as big of an issue as gaining the initial mindshare.)

Based on the reactions of people I've watched TV with, the Microsoft advertising is doing a great job of getting the name out there and making people feel good about the brand. Everybody is curious about what nonsense the characters are going to come up with and a few of them even imitate the "bing!" sound effect. But, I asked a few of them if they've actually tried Bing and they said no. They all just use whatever's set in the browser's search box and they see prompts for changing the default search engine as a commonplace annoyance ("Every time I download a program, it always want to install some toolbar or something.")

Anyway, I think the name was a great choice.
the decent programmers I've worked with all have a passion for software and learned it informally. Uni is notoriously bad at training software engineers.
Instead of graduating in 3 years and getting work experience in the 4'th year, students should stay in school and get work experience (*ternship, coop, research) in the 4'th year?

Apart from being an opportunity for the college to take an "internship fee", "computer fee", "student activities fee", "PIRG fee", etc, what purpose does this serve that 3 year graduation would not?
It really hope it does well and I love the direct marketing blitz attack on the iPhone... It's about time Apple had some real competition and Google is really the only company that can give them that..

I just feel bad for the established players.. They're going to have to watch as their core markets erode even further.
Thank you, sir, for this detailed reply. It's really useful, especially these parts about 'mental meaning'(each man have his own mental picture of the word dog') and about descriptions in the new language. Yes, oxford's dictionary of synonyms is enough for practicing English.
And of course, personal communication is the key. But some times it is very difficult to pass trough a communication border. For example, I have many Nepali friends who speaks some subset of English (very similar to that I'm speaking) but it's impossible for me to start learning Nepali language from them, because of limitedness of our English.
Spoiler alert, dude.
I'll take your data over my anecdotes anytime ;)
Qingy - A directFB login manager
Bing is not so awful.

Actually, I like Bing better than I thought I would; for one thing, the background pictures :-)

Also Microsoft is very generous with providing free REST style search and spelling APIs (it took about 2 minutes to write a Ruby client, which I posted here http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/06/ruby-client-for-search-an...)

I am pretty much "anti Microsoft", but I try to not be dogmatic about it :-)
To spot an alien, follow the pollution trail
How many jobs outside of software development have the folks had who say this? I've met plenty of weird people in three or four different lines of work.
Whole hand.
Saw that too. It's at 3:03. Anybody has an idea what's written around Tux?
In the meantime, one could use JavaScript to detect a browser's capabilities, and add a flag via a class on the body or html element.

For instance, with jQuery and a getStyleProperty helper[1]:

if (typeof getStyleProperty('borderRadius') != 'string') {
$('body').addClass('unsupported-border-radius');
}

... then in the CSS:

body.unsupported-border-radius {
... alternate code goes here ...
}

[1] http://thinkweb2.com/projects/prototype/feature-testing-css-...
Worldwide ebb for Facebook
The ports system also doesn't do updates if you're following -stable, which is a really big deal for most people. Plus its SMP support is incredibly poor.
sorry didn't see that. fixed it.
Random users Google Voice mail is searchable by anyone?
New rocket engine could make trips to Mars realistic
Yes, let's bleed an extra cube-farm year out of every serf.
Private Google Voice voicemails exposed through ... Google
HubSpot has now raised $33m... and is growing fast
I see his gripe with it. There's nothing more irritating then seeing a whole bunch of spam comments on one of your sites. The worst is the compliment spam that is so hard to filter.

But what it's taught me is to be a better developer, and to learn new anti spam techniques. I feel bad because the site probably meant a lot to her. He should have helped her out more.
I looked but couldn't find much. Guess John Deere doesn't think it's a good idea to mirror all of their ads on YouTube :-(
Linus, RMS, Guido, and others. I can think of so many other names.

You know what, even John Resig's jQuery software is served by millions of servers, running in billions of web pages every day.

This all "THE BEST" thing, is somehow pointless IMO.
Freelancing an Art or Commodity?
Wrist pain is what caused me to switch to dvorak 5 years ago. It has been worth it.
2.7 was the first CD set I purchased. Haven't regretted it.

It was their 'man' pages that sold me. Complete and helpful. Their great documentation is one of their unsung accomplishments.
This is slightly off-topic as it's not about djb, but about qmail. Still:

I have some experience with qmail. While I agree that it's generally very nice and certainly incredibly bug free, that quality comes at a price: Lack of features.

The moment you start adding stuff: Server-side filtering (like sieve), LMTP, virus checking, spam filtering, virtual users - all that stuff you need to run a modern mail server - you will have to patch qmail.

And by manually patching your installation, you are picking up responsibility: Now that you are not running stock qmail, but something you patched and installed yourself, you will no longer be able to rely on your distribution for security fixes and you'll have to keep updated and repatch yourself.

And while qmail is beautiful and bugfree, the same can not always be said for the additional patches, so you WILL be patching.

If you get all the patches for the functionality you need to actually play together that is.

If qmail solves your issue and you are prepared for this, then go with qmail. If you need a ton of functionality built-into your mailserver, probably go Exim and if you need good compromise between featureset, architecture and security, then you'll probably take postfix.
Bing is not [a] greedy algorithm?
I think one of the major things that the CLI has in its favor is the ease with which an experienced user can guide a new user. The experienced user only needs to the tell the new user what to type, and when to hit enter, which can easily be accoplished via phone, email, IM, etc.

Navigating a GUI over the phone is a skill that few possess.
92 quotes about debt that’ll make you think, laugh, & tweet
I simply can't stand it when someone's solution to a problem is "I know, I'll put the code inside a comment!"

Now, as a human looking at a syntax highlighted source file, my parsing is broken. All the differently-colored comments that I should be able to ignore suddenly have to be scanned because they might affect runtime somehow, and certainly any machine-based parser gets unnecessarily more complex.
In Haskell, what you are talking about sounds like type-based search. Like, if you know you're looking for a function of type `[Int] -> Int`, you probably want `sum` or `product` (which are of the compatible type `Num n => [n] -> n`). Am I right?

My first guess is that this kind of search is possible in other languages, yet easier and more accurate in Haskell and ML because their type system is paranoid, not because it is expressive.
Unbelievable. Well, believable, I worked a short stint for a bank as a programmer and it reminds me of what happened back then.

Too many chiefs and very few indians.
I have to agree with you on JQuery. It runs on multiple browsers too and performs exceptionally well. It's gotta be one of my all time favorite pieces of software.
a bingo!
Exactly. Credibility + access to all the .NET libraries. The question now is, why not use it? Esp. if you're already using LINQ.
First, Android is already light-years ahead of Windows Mobile.

Second, from what I've seen of the SDKs, Google is doing quite a bit (most notably with their manifests) to maximize the reach of the platform (e.g. netbooks, automotive systems, set-top boxes) without unduly burdening cross-device portability.
Halcyon Days - Interviews with Classical Computer & Game Programmers
I've been really enjoying this series on marketing. I hate to go off-topic, but does anyone recommend his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany?
It really does seem a bit pointless. Why not just say "djb writes great, beautiful code - some of the best I have ever seen" and leave it at that?
What is this, the Hill Valley International Programming Tournament?

People have arguments like this all the time in the sports sector, and at least there you can come up with all kinds of statistics and recordings, but what do you have for programmers? If they produced Open Source, you might have the end result of their work, but that would exclude a large part of the work force. And even then, what are your points of measurements? Just the amount of bugs? Total? Per year? Per line? Meh.

And as a final, somewhat unrelated note: Which I have nothing against Mr. Bernstein himself, I've got a pretty low opinion of most djb fanboys I've encountered in the past...
MooTools: The Open Source Magic Behind Cloudera Desktop UI
jQuery gives me goosebumps whenever I get a chance to work with it.
24 Hour Pitch: Create an Online Startup in a Day
It gives the student an opportunity to get a taste of the working world before making their first major professional decision. That, to me, is worthwhile.
This could easily grow into a dating business.
If IBM or Oracle announced their official commitment to Scala, that would be a comparable scenario. It's not just F#, which has been available for a while now. It's that it's now a first-class citizen in all respects.
Sorry to be blunt, but stop bitching and fix the problems. I don't think this type of give-up attitude goes over well on HN.
Disks used to have multiple arms.

It's my impression that they stopped because of alignment issues, something like "it's hard to read something with one arm if it was written with a different one" and/or "it's hard to keep writes by different arms separate", not because of cost.
"... the attribution sink for quotes about ..."

What a lovely phrase, thank you
Bing Is Not Google
(read this message with a background of "arguing about the best programmer is anyway silly")

djb is in no way the best programmer of the world, but he is a very smart programmer, and probably an even better mathematician. And now, my arguments about why he is not the best programmer.

1) djb software is not the most elegant software around at all. Actually trying to write high performance and bug free software his style is the most procedural possible, with very little abstractions layers.

2) his software is well known to be uneasy to configure. There are qmail hackers around. When there are <name of a unix deamon>-hackers around it's a bad sign about the quality of the interface between the program and the rest of the system and the system administrator itself.

3) Djb played no role at all in the programming languages world. AFAIK he never suggested some new idea for programming languages or new directions that are now considered important. You can't be the best without being influential in the field.

4) Djb newer wrote big systems that were crucial for the programming world. Qmail and djbdns can disappear tomorrow and everything will be up and running anyway. GCC or the Linux Kernel are a different matter.

I can continue, but I think 1+2+3+4 are already enough to deny the argument aaronsw is trying to push in the article.
I don't know...can we really trust all browser vendors to only claim @supported for a given feature when it's genuinely compliant, including all edge cases?
Hey, we both seem to have the same values in simplicity as I've just launched an alpha of http://nimbu.net/ (dead simple website monitoring) - I like your easy signup process
I used C++ when I worked on game AI and a few Nintendo U64 games, also for some virtual reality stuff for Disney and SAIC. Right choice for the games, in retrospect probably not for VR.

C++ is fine when you need high performance and can live with more expensive development.
Lots of people do:

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/lean-startup.ht...

http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle

and many, many more. I've probably seen 15 positive reviews of it on blogs I read.
What's even worse is I've used Drupal just enough to know that stopping link spamming is as simple as installing the right plugin. I haven't done it in years, but I'd bet it's even better now since there's almost certainly an Akismet plugin.

*Edit: just typed "drupal ak" in Google which auto-completed and took me to just such a plugin. I'm sorry, but if you can't figure that out, you have no business on the web.
This is a decent work-around. There's two reasons why it's an inferior solution:

1. It slows down rendering or causes a potentially huge reflow when the feature support classes are added.

2. The specificity of body.unsupported-border-radius .box is greater than the original rule, and this is going to cause issues with the rule ordering.
Re: A Local + Server Text Editor Using Chrome
Followup to the post- "A Local + Server Text Editor Using Chrome"

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-10-04-n43.html
Your syntax highlighter can be trained to understand that syntax and not color it like a comment.
Allegedly, Verizon is softening on these fronts. I expect Droid to include WiFi and GPS at launch.

My arguments for that position:
1. Droid specs on phandroid (and other sites) include WiFi and GPS. Given Verizon's involvement with the phone's development it would (at the very least) strange if they crippled them. Also, do you think Google would have been involved with Droid (as opposed to letting Verizon run with the open-source code on their own) if they knew Verizon was going to cripple it?

2. How long would it take Apple to mercilessly expose the "iDon't" marketing campaign if the iPhone has features (WiFi and GPS) that Droid doesn't?

3. I remember reading (sadly, I don't remember where) that all future Blackberrys on Verizon will include WiFi. If that's accurate, Verizon must be softening on WiFi and there's no good reason to cripple Droid out-of-the-gate. In fact, I wonder if Droid's WiFi is what gave Blackberry the leverage to insist on WiFi for their phones as well.
I meant no offense!

But within a week of the new engine being announced (or rather renamed) it was pointed out by TC and other news outlets.
No Such Thing As a Healthy Tan
I am a fan of Eclipse with Pydev for mid to large size development, but it is not really built for interactive work with the interpreter or for quick, off the cuff scripts.
man, this is the man!
http://cr.yp.to/djb.html
Does your site rank lower in Google than you think?
Google’s personalization of search can make you think that you rank much higher than you actually do.
I did much the same thing. 1 year at community college, 2 years at university, graduated with a BS in math/physics. It's been a while so I don't remember all the details, but I'll roughly sketch out how it works.

Year 1: Calc 1 during the summer, calc 2 fall, calc 3 and 4 concurrently in the spring. Take other standard intro courses (Physics 1-2, Chem 1-2). Goal of year 1: make sure no prereq requirement stops you from doing year 2.

Year 2: Basic senior level/grad courses (quantum mechanics, math methods, functional analysis) and whatever other grad courses are offered. Fill in distribution requirements.

Year 3: Whatever other senior/grad courses I missed and fill in assorted distribution requirements (literature, intro prob&stat, etc).

I think the main trick is to take hard courses first. Then you can load up on credits without doing much work (my senior year I took 36 credits, which was nowhere near twice as much work as 18 credits). For example, stat mech (in year 2) was hard. Thermo took about 4 hours of work: 2 hours refreshing stat mech before each test.

(For those who weren't physics majors, statistical mechanics == derive thermodynamics from first principles.)

In short, it's doable. You need to know your major and plan ahead, but it's eminently doable. The hardest part is fighting with the beaurocrats who will try to stop you.
I don't think that answer is necessarily "we have no idea" ... could just as easily be "we have some ideas/plans but most of our resources are going into scaling"

I'm assuming this is their first round since the YC money. In that case, it's not like they could have gone out and hired a VP of sales or had time to integrate an ad platform into the site.

I have no clue what they're doing, but there are several off-ramps between "here's our marketing plan" and "uh, we have no clue"

The demographic that DB seems to draw is highly valued. It seems to attract a younger group than Twitter and (just from my limited browsing) seems to attract a good % of females. I probably would have tossed $25k into that initial round if someone would have invited me :)
I think this is true even with classical art forms, like painting and photography. If your intention when creating is artistic, then what you're doing is art. If it's strictly business or for money, then it's turned into a trade, imo.

I think a cobbler can create a beautiful shoe if he puts his heart into it. I also think the same guy can make a bunch of utilitarian boots for people. It's his intent and motive behind what he makes that separates it between art and commodity. I think the same is true with web design or programming.
See also previous discussion here on HN about this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=793205
http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=[Int]+->+Int

Unrelated to that link: "Paranoid" and "expressive" are... hard to relate to each other. I certainly can't call them opposing forces in type signatures. It's a more complicated relationship. Type signatures that can carry lots of information can be both very "paranoid" (excluding many possibilities) while at the same time being very expressive (permitting many possibilities). In English that doesn't make much sense, but it makes perfect sense in the context of something like Haskell's type system, or other similarly carefully-crafted ones.
I think there is too much pressure for a lot of high school graduates to immediately attend college for this to be feasible. A lot of people spending $100k+ on tuition probably spent at least half that on their high school tuition, so the whole "oh just wait until you're ready" thing doesn't really hold water for the parents that are paying the bills.

The real problem, I think, for these students is not in their inability to choose a major (since the large majority of them choose something), but in their lack of experience to provide them a basis for understanding what they are really interested in combined with external pressures regarding what are acceptable fields to pursue.
Blob robot's uncanny approach to ambulation
> I meant no offense!

none taken, hence the :)

> But within a week of the new engine being announced (or rather renamed) it was pointed out by TC and other news outlets.

I completely missed that, I was pretty busy with other stuff when bing launched.
Probably fairly similar to Hadoop. From what I've learned thus far, dealing with outages pretty much boils down to replication. http://sector.sourceforge.net/tech.html looks like they can scale and replicate, and have some other nicenesses to boot.