skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wolfram Alpha Launches $50 iPhone App
I just wish the spam bots were smart enough to identify sites that add nofollow to links. If that worked, it would be such an easy fix.
It doesn't have to be this way. I've looked at the French university system and it makes sense. Unfortunately, with the Barcelona agreement, they are switching from the pretty decent system they have to the anglo-saxon model.

If you are unfamiliar you are given a license? for each year you complete. So you would receive Bac+1, Bac+2, and a Bac+3 is the equivalent of bachelors. Employers specify how much time and which degrees they are looking for when you apply for work. I've seen some only require a Bac+1 and a few want a Bac+3.

This is completely unlike the US model where if you are 1 or 2 semesters away from receiving a degree (I'm sure some of you have a few friends like this) you are only a highschool graduate no matter how much time you've invested at the university.

Also, I'm a 6-year grad, 1 was working, 1 was cooping, 4 were actual university time. My final year was a straight year (May-May) of school. It was hard, physically, because during the summers my school tried to cram an entire semester (4 months) into 4 weeks. While this looked doable on paper you end up chewing through a lot of material, disregarding it, and then repeat the following week. I remember nothing from my summer courses.

If your schedule didn't mesh perfectly with the courses then you might have to wait a year until a required course becomes available again. I pushed, shoved and begged my way into every class my final year. Because I wasn't an athlete or honor student I had to wait for enrollment. This wasn't my timeline, just the realities of the university system. Knowing that I would be kicking around campus until spring made me desperate.

Universities have been kicking around the 3 year degree for years and decades. Until they, fundamentally, change how courses are distributed, how schedules are dictated this thing doesn't have a snowballs chance in hell of gaining any traction. I've heard the same thing for years, 3 years means less pressure on classes, less cost, and the continuous use (no breaks) of knowledge. But the reality is whether you do it during the fall or the spring, the costs are still the same. Comparatively, it's more expensive since summer courses usually max out at 12 credit hours while a normal semester can go to 18 at the same price. Fewer courses are offered, during the summer and the ones that are available are generally freshman, sophomore courses. If you are an upperclassman there is very little for you except a few uni requirements.

College shouldn't take 3 or 4 years. It should be a continuous thing with clearly defined goals. That way someone shouldn't have to be on the line for a 4 year degree. If they happen to find a job that only needs 2 or 3, instead of the nebulouse "some college", then they should feel confident in applying because the employer can gauge their level of education fairly.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=783912 was a Wired article on that topic on HN two months ago; perhaps that's what you are remembering?
It's more like 1996. But still, I am laughing SO hard right now.
The colourful promises of electronic paper
Especially interesting for those who remember this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303780
Era? It was only 11 years ago for god sakes.
This joke only works if "success == having lots of money" in your book.
New York 100
This article is pathologically sick. Couldn't read it any more, to painful.
qmail gives you pain, too. It is completly useless without applying patches, which are mostly of poor quality. And it misleads you to do most unperformant things around it. Like writing shellscripts which fork() like hell for every mail there is to process.
I was with Aaron until

> What other field combines all these arts? Language, math, art, design, function. Programming is clearly in a class of its own. And, when it comes to programmers, who even competes with djb? Who else has worked to realize these amazing possibilities? Who else even knows they are there?

Is this satire?
How does the Rich vs King dichotomy account for the serial entrepreneurs who have fairly big exits (and guaranteed comfort for life) and do it all over again minus the branding/prestige of their previous venture?
the best programmer is the person who have made the biggest difference in people's lives.

it's not measured by the no. of lines of code, bugs,etc.
There are several less known project with really passionate coding, especially http://nginx.net/.
postfix, sqlite and many other projects could be compared with qmail.
and this is about just security bugs. All the other bugs are not counted.
It validates! http://html5.validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fgeocitieslycostr...
Or, as it historically been the case, a browser vendor implements the feature (so it's "supported") but they do it wrong.

As much as people hate to hear it, the only real solution is some kind of browser-version tagging. If it wasn't for Microsoft's browsers supporting browser-specific conditional comments, we'd have a much harder time writing standards-compliant web pages that work the same for every browser.
I hate this attitude. If your code targets my system, I should be able to install it without editing it.
Yet another Adobe AIR clone - in Java
That's why there's a whole profession called "Marketing Engineer" and another called "Sales Engineer" both of whom earn a lot more than the normal marketing and sales people.
The fact that Javascript works inside of SGML comments inside a <script> tag continues to annoy me, more than a decade later.
The legal tactic is the thing. The paranoiac can't be trusted when they say they were given the photo, and even if they fingered the dude, he's crazy too.
I use it occasionally. At first I thought it was a bit of a gimmick, but actually, it's quite nice. Posing for a picture is quite an expressive medium.
A legitimate point. "Eon" might be a better word.

Edit: I just had the terrifying thought of this sort of website coming back in vogue circa 2020 because it's "retro".
Ok, ha hah, everybody posts "Bing is Not Good", let's get some originality here:

Bing is Not Gratifying.
Bing is Nothing Great.
Bing is Notoriously Godawful.
Bing is Nefarious Google.

Or to be really rebellious one can find positive acronyms for Bing. :-p
Why do they have to make 5-minute video of that? What a waste of time. I hate watching video tutorials, reading is much faster for me. Never got the idea with rails screencasts for example.
You pitch SSD parallelism as if it's a good thing, but another way to look at it is that you have to have I/O concurrency to get full performance out of some SSDs. Many common workloads have an I/O depth of 1 and thus won't get as much benefit from SSDs as people may expect.
Organize meetings and get the people.
I've found that you can skip prereqs if you speak to the instructor and give them a good reason. Some of mine were the prereqs were full so I was going to take it next semester while doing this one. Taking an equivalent under a different college. Or just generally knowing your stuff (ie. conning your way in).

Enrollment is automated so the computer won't let you override the system, but the dean certainly can.
How many CSS hacks are necessary because a browser acknowledges support for something or doesn't support something versus having a totally broken implementation of something? In otherwords, this wouldn't fix at all being able to conditionnally choose CSS for IE's busted hasLayout oddity, nor would it allow non-hacky CSS to work around different box models, because we didn't even have names for these things when they were discovered and parsing bugs were discovered to allow some browsers to see the rules and others not to.
Just looks like a standard modern day myspace page...
Intel and Indilinx SSDs are saturating SATA today for sequential reads, but that's generally not why people use SSDs.

Ironically, many SAS controllers can handle fewer IOPS than an Intel ICH SATA controller; SAS 2.0 controllers are supposed to be better in this regard.
Right. But building public policy on how we should react by basing it on pseudo-scientific foundation is casino. You may win, it's just very unlikely.
Naturally, Hypertable and HBase, two of the more prominent and technologically advanced solutions aren't even included in this article.
These things that programmers argue about are more important than most people (including the author) realize. If we were to make the common analogy to bridge building, using a ton of global variables isn't like building an ugly bridge... it's like building a bridge that will fall down the first time an unexpected type of car drives over it. Software is rewritten because of bad design decisions. Let that sink in. When's the last time you saw a bridge completely rebuilt from scratch because of some bad design decision? If that did happen, don't you think that people would adamantly oppose that design decision any time they saw it?

"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp." -Monty Python and the Holy Grail
I am deeply impressed at the depth and subtlety of this joke. All the worst excesses of HTML 2.0, rendered in perfectly valid, well-structured, completely readable HTML 5.

It's not the language you use, folks. It's what you do with it. Bravo!
The Feminization of Science Fiction (and Fantasy)
The most obvious choice I'd say.
daemontools and tinydns are far, far better examples of brilliance than qmail, in my opinion. Especially tinydns comes far closer to meeting modern needs than qmail, for its domain. I'll never go back to the horror of bind config files.
[his friends were saying] Your company is growing 100% year over year. It's profitable and throwing off cash. Why not wait another year and let revenues double again, which will make the company six times more valuable

If the company is reliably growing at 100% (which it isn't, there's always a risk), this expectation is reflected in the valuation -- obviously, actually growing it and overcoming the risk is worth something, but it doesn't scale linearly as is suggested.

In all fairness, his following explanation actually takes this into account, my point is just that the replied to a strawman.
I wouldn't, not in that way at least.

Apple's been really good about jumping onto up-and-coming trends, particularly recently.

IBM's adaptation was the opposite: do nothing. The mainframe market hasn't changed much; the only real change has been that making mainframes costs more now, so IBM's main profit now is in consulting... for mainframe work :)
Thank you for the summary. Not sure why I had to watch a video to find this out. (And still didn't watch the video so I don't know what else was discussed.)
A change in personal goals. If you're 25 and have the opportunity to sell your startup for $5M, you would most likely take it. Now at 27 you're bored, and have millions in the bank. You don't necessarily need to be rich any more, but being king is fun. You start another company.
I love djb and his tools but, as someone who hacked djbdns extensively for a research project, I think the project misses empathy for other programmers. It's hard to follow, poorly documented, and too clever sometimes. That said, if we judge code only on performance, then yeah it's rock solid.
In other words, if they didn't offer the free website, or if their iPhone app didn't require a net connection, I'd easily consider the $50 price justifiable.
It was also pushed along by the Vietnam war. Kids didn't want to be drafted, and a lot of teachers didn't want to see their brightest as gun fodder. The only way to get around the draft was to get into college. Thus began that sneaky grade inflation problem that all highschools and colleges swear doesn't exist.
Even in 1998, I think that this would still be considered an eye-sore. Well done though!
Craig Newmark On The Future Of News Media
How many submissions about the same history, but with different authors, do we need?
Ask HN: What is the right way to ask for feedback twice?
If a site is submitted for a HN review once, is it ok to submit it a second time ? If it is ok, will circumventing the URL filter be acceptable to the community ?
This was a really interesting insight to Dawkins' character. Thanks for sharing.
Bing is a Nockoff of Google.
Did you make changes that you want people to review? That's probably OK.

I personally dislike it when people resubmit without having changed anything, but that's just like... my opinion, man.
Reminds me of my first site I did on angelfire.
I figure as long as there are major changes and you respond to the things raised in the first one by fixing/changing them that actually is a really good thing to do, it shows that you take the feedback serious.

If you do it could you maybe add a link to the original thread as well ?
mindreader :)
Google also has Webmaster Tools that will show you your keyword rankings.

http://google.com/webmaster

Sometimes it doesn't do a very good job at reporting though. I think it only suffers on one-worders. Anyone else notice this?
The CEGEP system in Quebec is quite good. 3 years High School , 2 years CEGEP (sort of like community college), and then 3 years university for a bachelors. Foreign students like I was do a year 0 (they really call it that, at least at McGill) at a university, and then meet the Quebec students in our major the next year.

So like the French system, there are more chances to get off the train and have a useful credential, plus many students do the freshman year close to home for less money.
The fact that he went so far as to register a hilarious (and pertinent) domain name just to pull it off is icing on the cake.
That would be true, except (in theory) the purpose of spamming isn't to put links out on websites, its to put links out on at least tangentially related sites, so that you can game the search algorithms better.

That means it doesn't matter if its no follow or not, you're still getting benefit. You may not be getting a direct benefit to your own site, but at the least you're hurting a "competitor".
I think you're probably right. The number of tech-savy early adopters who are going to have the Alexa toolbar installed is quite low I would say.
Summary: A scientific illustrator collects deformed leaf bugs in areas with increased radiation, especially around nuclear power plants. She illustrates the deformities with watercolor.
Cheap Brochures Printing Are Famous Throughout The World
Not to be confused with Daemon Tools :)

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_Tools
Understanding the Cloud
that seems like a pretty good idea, has anyone ever thought of this on the ELF-based platforms before?
If he has an MBA? Probably nothing.
An era is defined by events. There was a Netscape 4 era even though it only lasted maybe 4 years. We will hopefully soon be out of the IE6 era. An eon is a measure of geological time.
On the Internet eras last for three years. Anything made in 2006 now counts as a lasting part of society; anything made in 2003 is ancient and wise.

Two days ago I was browsing an old forum and saw Jason Kottke, Derek Powazek, and Dave Winer's names, circa 2000, and Kottke sounded like Kottke and Winer was being an asshole. Hard to believe those guys were around nine years ago. I was barely double digits.
There are many startups here so I suspect that many of you are considering saving some bucks by going the cloud computing route. Which vendor(s) are you looking at?
Free Videos Online - Watch TV Online - Free Video Clips | Veoh
> He should have helped her out more.

I fully agree with that. I would do that for strangers, not doing it for your wife seems rather rude. It would take less time to put a 90% solution in place than it would take to write that blog post.
Evolution favours superstitious beliefs
> you don't really want that "better C++" of yours after all

I want it because it is an interesting project in itself. But I hear what you are saying.
I was mostly speaking of hiring within family.
I did a google site search about firefox .net vulnerabilities on HN but it dint turn up anything relevant in the top 5 links.
Here you go: http://kato.sourceforge.net/kato.html
I heard an interview where Dawkins said something like "if there is a God, He must have evolved." Maybe he was joking, but it didn't sound like it.

Evolution is a biological process. It would have no bearing on a being who created space and time.

Biologists should not presume to trump philosophy and theology, any more than preachers should dictate which biological theories are acceptable.
Actually, Apple's attitude is "look at these dorky idiots that use PCs". At least coming from this Win/Linux PC user who cut his teeth on Apple, that's how it comes across.
If you're going to edit his response you should say as much.

The full response (which actually sketches some ideas) was:

Mr. Wheatley: Scaling is the most important thing at the moment. We have a few ideas around media-based businesses, premium offerings and offline distribution like photo-printing.
Your point is roughly "it doesn't give me information relevant to the situation." The point you are responding to is "it doesn't give information irrelevant to the situation." Both points can be right, and, in this particular case, both points are right.
Dawkins does not believe that theologists have any special insights to offer on the mysteries of life. In his view, anyone's opinion is just as good as that of a theologist.
Windows 7 streamlines computers
What bothers me most about the NoSQL movement is that it seems to be in conflict with a central tenet of our community: to avoid premature optimization, especially when at the expense of of expressiveness or correctness.

While normalized relational databases are indeed slower than key/value stores, they also foster data integrity and the ability to compose arbitrarily complex queries with little effort (assuming one actually groks SQL). One can always optimize trouble spots in a relational database later on (possible even with a KVS), but using a KVS from the get-go is bound to lead to pain.

If we happily use Ruby, Python, et al. while chanting the mantra of premature optimization being bad (and rightly so!), why does this not apply also to databases?
Solar Innovations
I'm aware of both those definitions. My contention is that, in the context of the internet, 11 years qualifies as "geological time".
Very suspicious of all the hype. Vista had a lot of over the top enthusiasm and we know how that one turned out.
I'd been a fan of Sector/Sphere and Dr. Gu for a while. But here is the biggest problem of the benchmark: "replication is disabled" for maximum performance, which means these are not realistic benchmarks for large scale clusters (> 200 nodes), where node failure is the norm. I suspect that Sector's replication algorithm is not up to par with HDFS', which uses fairly sophisticated replication pipelining for maximum throughput.

The most interesting thing about Sector/Sphere is that it doesn't use TCP/IP for transport but their own UDT stuff, which has its own pluses (more efficient on high latency links) and minuses (stability issues due to lack of wide usage/testing)
Yeah, only slightly obnoxious. Nothing worse than somebody so relatively new to a field that they still think it objectively is better/cooler/more fulfilling than every other field.
Best Buy Opens First 24/7 Store
If Verizon’s Droid Is Good, That’s Bad
Documentation is more important than the library, in terms of quality. Obviously you need the one before you can have the other, but I'd take a slow and slightly buggy library that I know how to use over a more functional one that I'll never figure out.
> There is no master plan.

As much as I am an atheist, I still think no one can ever make that claim. He should have said, there is no evidence yet of a master plan, or there probably is no master plan. This same thing would apply to the existence of God. Unfortunately this logical fallacy (of prematurely concluding the nonexistence of something that theoretically can't be proved to not exist) beholds too many atheists.
Twitter was started by an already successful founder (Biz Stone); Facebook was a profitable company that did sell itself (through further investment) to re-position as a world-changing company.

As an entrepreneur you are in the best position to change the world after building a profitable, sustainable business (vs initially aiming to change the world). You can do it over and over with the same venture (like Jobs, Zuck, Wolfram, etc) or you can build, sell and then repeat (Andreeson, Thiel, etc). Either way, changing he world is about iteration, persistence and taking advantage of the world changing opportunity when the time is right. Of course you can get very lucky, but statistically, as an entrepreneur the best way to change the world is to build a profitable company and then repeat.
Mostly counting the incoming money and thinking up new titles for the business cards.
There is no master plan in the same sense that there is magic cookie monster.
Using hacks to work around bugs, is tolerable, perhaps. But for the common case where a feature is only partially implemented across a swath of browsers, I think feature inspection works great. It won't be a panacea, but it will be a step in the right direction.
The reason he says this, is that evolution by natural selection is the only process that we know of that describes how complexity comes to be.
I still make sites like this. Its fun.
It's a mistake to lump philosophy with theology. Philosophy requires no "givens", which is to say it is a valid field without requiring you to make any assumptions to partake in it. Theology, meanwhile, requires you first to assume the existence of God, and I'm one of the many many people who think that's a ridiculous beginning to a field of study. It's like if Nietzsche began his books by telling you his concepts and thoughts were only worth consuming if you first assume that we're living on a gigantic turtle. Preposterous.

I like religion-as-sociology, however, and there's where the "evolution of God" concept is most fascinating. If you haven't read Douglas Adams's speech "Is There An Artificial God?", it's worth the read.

Evolution is a biological process. It would have no bearing on a being who created space and time.

And bullets bounce off of Superman because he's from Krypton.
10,000 million dollars on R&D next year alone is not an insignificant amount and an awful lot of fertilizer for a voracious tree that yields a lot of fruit other than apples.
GNU: GNU is not Unix. Bing: Bing is not Goddammit
U.S. spies buy stake in Twitter, blog-monitoring firm
It's definitely not accurate. It tells me I rank top 10 for a lot of single word keywords, but it's not true.
SCO fires CEO Darl McBride, architect of litigation strategy
What exactly are the accomplishments of philosophy, aside from logic which is better studied by mathematicians and computer scientists?
MapReduce is about hiding explicit parallel primitives like threads and MPI from users (programmers): You only need to implement two functions map and reduce in a typical framework.

Yes, you can certainly implement MapReduce with MPI partially, but typical MapReduce framework like Hadoop also handles fault tolerance transparently to users.