skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ten hours per year? You mean per week right?
As I see it, main technical distinction between WS and straight TCP is that WS is message oriented, not stream oriented. Basically, the spec demands that all data transmissions consist of discrete UTF-8 messages that begin with 0x00 and end with 0xFF.

The message oriented nature of things in theory makes thing easier for writing client code in JS. However, the simple boundary scheme chosen also implies no binary data (of course that is of limited use in a browser without a JS standard for dealing with binary data).

The other technical feature the RFC proposes is a standard way for HTTP clients to securely request and setup one of these web sockets (even though the web sockets themselves are not HTTP). That alone is significant because getting Comet (the current best solution) to work on all browsers is currently a nightmare.

BTW, if you are interested in doing Comet and not pulling your hair out with X-browser issues, I highly recommend the orbited project (orbited.org) and its sister bundle of JS code (js.io). These projects already provide an interface very similar to the proposed spec. I have used this API and it makes me look forward to Web Sockets becoming a standard.
Your career will be damaged if you question the efficacy of the flu shot, because it is current medical doctrine. This kind of thing has happened lots of times before, as the Atlantic article points out.

Yes, it's obviously true that anyone going stubbornly against established consensus will get in hot water. This is the case whether their position is correct or incorrect. In the first case, they're heroes; in the latter case, they're crackpots. It's rarely obvious to people outside the field which is which, and there's a lot more of the latter.

The contrarianism that I object to is when people who don't have enough expertise in the field to tell good ideas from bad seem to hold up going against consensus as somehow inherently noble, because most of the time they're just going to be encouraging the crackpots. This especially includes anything that glorifies the Galileo-esque "persecuted genius" archetype.

You're treading dangerously close to an argument from authority here. What surprises me about this is that I would guess from your writing that you've got enough experience under your belt to have realized that in every field, the average person is mediocre.

Argument from authority is completely valid when the cited authority is authoritative on the subject under consideration. If someone justifies a statement about algorithms with "because Knuth said so" and can cite where he said it, that's a pretty solid basis to go on. The very nature of science is such that "widely held consensus of recognized experts" is the ultimate authority on current knowledge. This is not a guarantee of correctness, but it's a strong argument that it's the most likely, reliable answer we have and there's almost never a good reason for people outside the field to reject such consensus.

The programming analogy falls down a bit in that the bar is somewhat lower for being considered "a programmer" than it is for being a reputable specialist in most scientific fields. If you narrow it enough to filter out the kind of "programmers" who fail FizzBuzz exercises, I expect you'd find that anything that 95% of them agree on is, in fact, far more correct than random chance.

You and I have enough knowledge of programming to be able to evaluate good vs. bad arguments, and can probably identify lots of places where common wisdom is suboptimal. But what would you tell someone who knows nothing about programming but needs to know how to evaluate ideas about programming? Sure, we know that most programmers are stuck in a rut coding in Blub, but someone outside the field can't tell the difference between "overly structured programming is just obfuscation to create job security, simplify things and use gotos for flow control" and "use first-class functions to make code more expressive and eliminate redundancy".

We'd all roll our eyes at the guy promoting goto statements as a route to more effective programming, right? Well, us dismissing "use more gotos" would look, to someone outside the field, exactly how doctors' reaction to the flu shot issue looks to you.
Would mint.com be a good example of this philosophy..?
Here are some good tips for self-employed apartment hunting in San Francisco:

1) Don't go to a rental company. Citiapartments sucks anyways, they are crooks.
2) Walk around and take numbers off of buildings. The best apartments never go on craigslist.
3) Network hard. You won't believe how many apartments I got because I knew someone. I'm in a place in Nob Hill because I knew a girl who was moving to CT. She'd lived here ten years, and I took the place over from her with her rent control intact. I pay $1300 for a two bedroom with a stunning view of the southern part of town. Of course, when times are tough I also know where to get a $250 office space I can sleep in because of my networking.
4) Bring your own credit reports.

That's really all I can say - I have been under- or self-employed for the better part of a decade, and I've never had a problem finding a place to live. I do have years of networking in this town too though so your mileage may vary.
Somewhat misleading headline. The kids didn't get their sight entirely restored by a long shot. Still, big breakthrough and worthy of an NEJM paper.

---

Leber's congenital amaurosis (LCA) is a group of inherited blinding diseases with onset during childhood. One form of the disease, LCA2, is caused by mutations in the retinal pigment epithelium-specific 65-kDa protein gene (RPE65). We investigated the safety of subretinal delivery of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (AAV) carrying RPE65 complementary DNA (cDNA) (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00516477 [ClinicalTrials.gov]). Three patients with LCA2 had an acceptable local and systemic adverse-event profile after delivery of AAV2.hRPE65v2. Each patient had a modest improvement in measures of retinal function on subjective tests of visual acuity. In one patient, an asymptomatic macular hole developed, and although the occurrence was considered to be an adverse event, the patient had some return of retinal function. Although the follow-up was very short and normal vision was not achieved, this study provides the basis for further gene therapy studies in patients with LCA.
> Of course there are companies that can handle this for you, but then you take a hit in the profit.

I guess on average that should not be worse than stocks --- the public companies have managers, too.
It's always been a case of severely underpowered hosts. I've gotten slashdotted several times, and frankly it's not that much traffic (anymore, anyway)

The biggest problem seemed to be sites running on hosts with far too little memory, far too low maximum number of Apache (or whatever) processes, or mismatched maximum number of Apache processes and database connections.

Though I'm sure there's at least an order of magnitude difference depending on the post.
Universities are excellent for their library membership card, the rest is just very expensive icing.
Unfortunately they now require a plugin and launch from the web, they used to offer an exe of each browser you could download. Its too bad, was one of the best tools available for browser testing.
I think you're forgetting the most important part of college: meeting smart people your age. Certainly possible to do elsewhere, but very easy at college
What I find odd is that there used to be quite a bit of research in this area. Read older software development books they reference papers research more often. i.e. Code Complete vs. agile programming books.
I second that. A decade ago my son was looking into schools. None of the ones in the poll were on his list, but CMU, Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford from yours were. He also looked at Washington and Harvey Mudd, and ended up going to Berkeley.
"Use VB.NET or Delphi for the front-end user interface."

Or, you could use something that's cross platform like Python.
Do you think 10 hours is naive? Maybe it is, I have no idea. I guess biggest risk is ending up with a renter that doesn't pay, and then having to go through courts to get them to move out.

My landlord is having an easy time though. He spent a few hours posting an ad in the paper, showing the apartment to potential renters and doing the rental agreement with me, and now he is just getting a nice monthly bank transfer. Hopefully I could enjoy a similar experience.
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Property managers usually get roughly 10% of the rental income and handle paperwork, screening renters, phone calls, minor repairs, etc. You still have to pay for major repairs (new fridge, AC, burst pipe), but depending on your situation, you may consider hiring a PM.
Yes, it might be a good idea to get such a company to handle the details for me, I haven't really looked into how much it costs. I wonder how this is different from just buying the stock of some property holding company directly though.
Perhaps an analogy would help:

Most car accidents don't kill people.

Seat belts have been proven as an effective defense against injury and death in automobile accidents.

It would be unethical to perform a study in which you ask humans to undergo a car accident without a seatbelt.

Anyway, that's how I understand it. I guess you could read up on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Belemont Report, Declaration of Helsinki and Nuremburg Code to learn more.
Your point is good, and I don't see it as a rebuttal of mine. In particular, a vaccine can be both mildly effective AND, yet, so much more effective than placebo that to perform an RCT is immoral.
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If I had to guess I would assume that a manager/rest of team set the bug tracking software system prior to his arrival.
"The more code lines you have removed, the more progress you have made. As the number of lines of code in your software shrinks, the more skilled you have become and the less your software sucks."

Actually, I think that often it is possible to write code in less lines, but it becomes more cryptic and harder to maintain. Certainly for application code, more lines of code can mean that it sucks less. I have often rewritten my own and other people's code to be more readable. I'm not sure this manifest metric holds true, not for me anyway.
There is a lot of confusion as to what is called a 'bank', so it is difficult to understand the author's analysis. I believe there are several business models in place:

1. Traditional deposit/lending.

Essentially, banks fund themselves short-term through deposits and then lend long and medium term to businesses. This duration mismatch is always risky (think of 'run on a bank'), but one can argue that banks perform essential function in the economy by analyzing credits and channeling savings to small/medium business.

2. Transaction business

It is common for a major bank to have a lock-in onto most of day-to-day transactions that people conduct. Salaries get paid by wire, then get withdrawn through many of cash machines, letters of credit are written for international trade transactions etc. For large corporate business, an international bank can arrange financing for a new oil field, then distribute this funds through its international branch network. This business is not particularly high-risk and it is not 'immoral' however you look at it. It is simply passing money around.

3. Securities and derivatives trading

A broker firm who sits between the issuer of securities (or derivatives like swaps etc.) and the buyer of securities/derivatives is not supposed to expose itself to much risk. That's why they are called a 'broker'. Godlman Sachs is a broker, and so was Lehman Brothers. They don't do deposit/lending business of any significance. Of course, in real life they do proprietary trading as well and can get hurt (like Lehman did, who carried a lot of unsold junk in its books). These institutions can also can hurt others, stuffing their clients' books with crap assets (like sub-prime mortgages etc.). But then... buyer beware, isn't it?

Actually, even through the public lumps all three above business models into 'banks' category, I would stick to orthodox definition and separate them into 'commercial banks' (doing (1/2) above) and 'investment banks' (doing (3)).

So why so many 'banks' gone bust recently and why there is so much pain around?

It is because 'commercial banks' from category (1/2) above took the easy path and stuffed their balance sheets with securities/derivatives with embedded nonlinear risk. They were supposed to do straightforward lending to businesses, yet they went into buying 'AA' rated securitized junk. The same applies to insurance companies who also have to carry assets on their balance sheets to off-set their promises to policy-holders.

And now populist press are blaming traders/brokers for greed and irresponsible behaviour of commercial banks managers.

As to the questions 'why do they make money', we need first to define which 'banks' are we talking about. Investment banks? Commercial banks? There could be another post altogether.
There seems to be some tension in your argument regarding the use of code.

If everybody would reason the way you did then we'd be stuck at version 1.0 of just about everything because nobody would get off their asses to do something new every now and then.

So it's a treshold problem. At some point the tension between that which is available and that which has to be done becomes so large that someone will stand up and says 'let's fix that, once and for all'. This person will then put in an enormous amount of time on top of what it would probably have taken to fix just the original problem.

And that's exactly how progress is made in the software world.

So, the premise you make is an idealistic one, in an ideal world, such libraries and bits and pieces should be available, for sale, well documented and 100% applicable.

In reality that is definitely not the case.

You are right that many people will fall for the 'let me do that' temptation when in fact they would be better served by using something off the shelf.

To keep your engineering analogy alive: If an engineer working on a car even could go and make his own bolts then that would be the road to total madness. There is lots of standardization and materials knowledge available to 'hard' engineers that is simply not there for 'soft' engineers, and because the price of the tooling is essentially zero the threshold for re-implementation (hopefully in a novel and better way) is very low.

Maybe it's too low, but that's a policy decision, not a technical one.

And if you are not under a deadline and simple trying to get the hang of stuff nothing will teach you better than to re-implement some of the better understood algorithms, especially queues, lists stacks and so on.

These are the staple of many larger structures and to understand them well (and how tricky they are to get right) is essential knowledge.
You're missing some major ones with top notch CS departments

Yes, that was intentional, because the universities you kindly mentioned are familiar as universities with strong CS departments. I appreciate your other comments about chances at Brown and Columbia relative to chances at the other universities, and especially the specifics about UIUC. (I've been to the campus. We live near a different Big Ten university.) I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.
I agree this is a key point. Software bug rates are not comparable to scurvy incidence rates, and developer productivity is not similar to the number of bricks a laborer can move in an hour.
Re. sub-stories, have you checked out the "tasks" feature, which is disabled by default?

http://pivotallabs.com/users/dan/blog/articles/965-story-tas...
This is the primary advantage of the ivy league schools. If your goal is hacking, there isn't a lot that you'll learn at school that you wouldn't self study. Aside from meeting people, the primary advantage of college is providing an account of how you spent your time while you teach yourself software engineering.
If you ever want to create something better than what's out there, you'll have to program itself, and if you want to get to the situation where you can create something better than what's out there, you're going to have to do a helluva lot of programming, not just read documentation and try to fit together other's people's software with the minimum effort.
The risk is losing a lot of someone else's money, of course!

Of course, the financial sector in general is still a risk-taking operation, even if the individual employees bear little to none of that risk (leaving aside, for the moment, the whole "fail badly enough and the government will save you using everyone's money").
What is cost of attendance for an American student at a Canadian university these days? I get the impression that an applicant shopping for need-based financial aid offers (most applicants I know) has better chances of finding an affordable place at a United States private university, which is what seeded the list in my poll.
They are hiring a FS guru so if you know any good ones try to get them to apply and make the next one better.
Very nice, coherent tutorial on a new widget!
I think another point to emphasize is that using a third-party solution shouldn't in all cases be a long-term solution.

Consider keeping such a chunk of code around only long enough to get the product shipped and paying for itself. At that point, make an attempt to justify keeping it around, especially after seeing how it fits into the big picture of your product.
Fortunately, academic pursuits only require compromises in terms of politics. ;)
The Rubik's Cube is not an original puzzle.
Agreed. I would broaden the #1 Rule of Programming to be:

SOLVE PROBLEMS.

Sometimes you do this by programming it yourself, sometimes by doing it off-the-shelf, but if at the end of the day you've solved someone else's problem, they will give you money.
He definitely got the most thunderous applause of the day at DevDays simply because so much of the day's talks thus far had been horrible. I was following the Twitter feed of the conference and after his talk many people remarked that he had basically saved DevDays Toronto from being a failure.
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In truth, most of this conservatism is cultural rather than driven by any cost or fundamental technical issue.

Though heavy exceptions do apply when dealing with system call interfaces to hard real-time kernels used in avionics software and medical applications such as heart pacemakers.
Most any decent school for CS will have at least one student group that is very project oriented. It's not just a matter of meeting people, but rather meeting people who can help introduce you to new ideas and work on projects that are beyond the easy scope for a single person. Plus, if you're interested in anything hardware related they'll likely have better equipment available than a lone student is likely to.
I would argue that you should go to the most rigorous school with the smartest potential classmates across all fields.

From your list I'd go with Rice, though the differences in the end may really come down to personality and chance (room mates, friends, profs, etc).
An Apple-branded big-screen HDTV might explain the 'mystery shipping costs' forecast by Apple for the next quarter. [1]

I'd love to see in such a true Apple TV:

- 2 iPod-connector docks

- video-camera

- built-in infrared corner-LEDs (to support Wii-style pointing-controllers)

[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/20/apples-sauce-34-billion...
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Thanks for sharing!

Here's what my analytics looked like when someone submitted my http://www.patiencepractice.com site to Digg: http://imgur.com/p3gpd

I don't have my server set up to alert me when it starts getting higher traffic. Does anyone have any good tips on how to do that? I'm running this on Linode.
Yes, but you could still meet interesting people your age without being 50k in the red.

In reality, the most interesting people you would like to meet are neither your age nor at your school (truth is, most are probably long dead; that's where the books come handy, to make the communication of knowledge timeless.)
I thought they used Ada?
you get 50% bounce from spikes from reddit, slashdot? or you get 50% bounce rate normally?
There is something to be said for writing code you can be proud of. I'm always working on finishing projects faster and not introduce bugs in the name of speed.

I can't see a furniture craftsman recommend that you just buy a chair at IKEA.

This philosophy leads to becoming the IKEA of software.
If you haven't done this already, you could buy an apt. and live in it. Might be the simplest real estate investment.
I'm biased but I think Georgia Tech has a good CS program.

Atlanta doesn't have as big as a web entrepreneur presence as some cities, but it's easy to get started in a city that is significantly cheaper than most. There are regular meetups where local entrepreneurs get together and talk about what they need and how to make the city even better for technology startups.

A brand new coworking space has opened up: http://www.ignitionalley.com/ Setup in part by HN user timdorr
If your developers can't be bothered with decent log messages, they're just going to subvert this by typing longer but unhelpful messages.
>This philosophy leads to becoming the IKEA of software.

As in the most succesful?
If you don't want to lose the money, don't simply 'bet on one horse' and put it in a house / websites / whatever. It makes more sense to get a properly diversified portfolio of index-funds / ETFs.

I think the best investment you could make is to put that money away in a lifecycle fund. (E.g. Vanguard's 'Target Retirement 2040' fund https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0696&... )
I.m.h.o. the best thing about a lifecycle fund is that it's a set-and-forget investment. It's deviation will get less in time.

Of course, if you're a bit more of a control freak (like me) you could create your own (properly diversified) investment portfolio. In that case I would suggest you have a look at 'The smartest investment book you'll ever read'.
a. You're discussing the color of the bikeshed

b. ATC systems often use languages that pre-date Ada.

c. The point remains - often the technical people don't get the choice of language. This is the most relevant point when you put this in the context of the discussion from which it branched.
>> Of course, you have to get over the fact that you're in central Illinois

As someone who lives in Central Illinois, I'll take issue with your comment. While it's not quite the same as living in New York, there's a lot to like about living here. There's plenty of things to do, and you're only two hours away from either Chicago or St. Louis. Post-college, it's a great place to raise kids. The cost of living here is ridiculously low compared to places like California.
Would definitely do, except I won't be in this country for long.
The last time I heard this question asked, the answer was "no". Apple also won't allow you to tour their campus. I've spent time inside Cisco, NetApp, and Sun, and in addition to the fact that I don't think they tour either, I can tell you you probably don't want to bother. The truth is, most of the big tech companies are cube farms.
Client relationships primarily. Bankers make money because clients don't have a relationship with an bank, they have it with an individual. Hence the individual is worth a lot of money, hire the individual and get their clients.

Some individuals are paid a lot for individual specialist skills (analysis, prop trading, etc.) - but these tend to be in the minority.
What the Web Sockets Protocol means for web startups