skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying it should be rule number 1, but every CS student needs to understand they are learning the topic of the course title, not whatever language is used to teach the topic.

You are not in a CS curriculum to learn C++,Java,Scheme,etc.
Alright, prove it. Send in your submission. If it was so easy you should be able to send it in and compete, regardless of whether it's interesting or not.
Easy Deployment with Heroku (Screencast)
RESTful Ponies featuring Mike Malone [pdf]
Yeah, it seems to me fairly obvious that if someone implied before a test that I would fail, and I had cause to trust their opinion, I'm not likely to do as well as I would have because of the nagging self doubt etc. No change on my innate ability to do the test, but the level of application and focus would be drastically different.

(On the other hand it can go far enough as to improve focus, sometimes. "I'll show them", "I failed last time but I know I can do it", etc)
Now, a Royal Mint medal to commemorate Sir Bobby Robson
Skype Founders Assembling Killer Team For New Online Music Startup
A CPU can slow down dramatically when it gets hot. That doesn't mean CPU maximum speeds are unimportant.
Psychology Transcription
Psychiatry reports outsourcing transcription services( Toll free @:1-(877)-323-4707)) for a price tag of a mere 40% of local US services. Psychiatry Reports Transcription and psychology Transcription Services.
In the UK I have found getting rid of my tv completely pretty easy, originally I went from sky to freeview, which has most of what I wanted for £120 a year (tv license), and then eventually just got rid of the tv+freeview and only watch http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ or http://www.channel4.com/programmes/4od

I have found that I ended up watching a lot more varied and interesting stuff when I can search as opposed to just watching whats on.
The new method of debuting new comments at the top of the page -- a good thing, in terms of trying to keep discussion fresh & open to latecomers' good ideas -- may also have increased how rewarding the site is to quick negative posts.

It used to be that the highest-scoring comment on a thread squatted at the top of the page forever (occasionally displaced by some slow-moving boulder of a competitor). These posts acted as quieting blankets of calm over the whole page.

Now, new comments get debuted at the top of the page, and if they can draw a few lightning strikes of upvotes ("yeah! that's right! screw that!"), they get a chance to stay there, or at least contribute some positive reward to the poster.
Sadly the place I live by cable for all the units, whether we want it or not otherwise I might go for something like that as well (it would be far cheaper too, since I would only watch one or two shows).

Sadly it does not appear as if iTunes video store is available in Denmark, so I just read a lot of the free content.
2Leep: A great traffic-building tool for bloggers. Now with a design to match.
It's a sample chapter from his book, not a blog post, so the content will differ from most online articles.
This country has tried to right many (atrocious) wrongs and things have improved largely, but no, all things are not yet equal. Imagine a large maze of (forgive the analogy) rats, some gray, some brown. The maze has bits of food and even material for shelter building. If all rats were released into the maze at the same time, all things being equal - physical sizes evenly distributed etc., each color of rat would survive equally as well. Now imagine releasing only the gray rats into the maze, holding the brown ones back, and imagine all these rats are intelligent - they can pass on information about the maze like where to find food to their offspring, so they become trained. Let's say you conducted this experiment over a long period of time, several years, and then one day you released the brown rats. You can see they would be at a disadvantage, even though they might have the same physical opportunity to the food and materials, the gray rats have "set up shop". Slaves in the U.S. were freed, but essentially just "released". (the 40 acres and a mule was never awarded) This is a crude analogy, but can show how such statistics can exist.
Thanks a ton for the book recommendations. I'll be sure to look them up.
The issue is that I was raised to believe that all Americans, regardless of race, have the same access to opportunities.

I think that is a very important message to send out. You have to get people to believe that they can (and should!) succeed, even once the opportunity is there, otherwise they might not try. [1]

Saying that if blacks get educated they can do better than non educated blacks, though not as well as non educated whites, is lunacy.

Worth pointing out that the numbers, though best for the white group, are not as bad as that.

For men and women, ages 25-44:

none high school college
white 17.5% 8.1% 3.7%
black 26.9% 14.0% 7.4% [2]

So, for each step up in education, the black person has a better chance than the white person on the level below. 26.9% is still a scary large number, though I'd like to think that the no-high school group is only a small proportion of the overall population.

(Also, yes, I've only been to the US a couple of times, but I'm not sure in which that affects my interpretation of these numbers.)

[1] Reminds me of the "How to get women into CS" discussion, I'm sure all the same arguments apply. See:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lblum/PAPERS/TransformingTheCulture.p...

[2] See what I did there, ignore half the data to make my point clearer? Because I felt bad about it, I'm going to include the whole set here:

none high school college
hispanic 13.1% 9.6% 4.9%
other 13.6% 9.4% 4.8%
white 17.5% 8.1% 3.7%
black 26.9% 14.0% 7.4%

Now, before I did that, I hadn't noticed: if you're not going to finish high school, better make sure you're not white or black.

Eh, and there goes my unqualified optimism too. If you're hispanic/mixed/other and didn't finish high school, you've still got a better chance than a black person who did. Oops.

[3] And another point: I'd like to see the relative sizes of these "race" groups. I'm sure in the long term, that "mixed" group is going to become the largest.
I think you're doing the same thing as the "good" knuth algorithm which, as I read it, always exchanges the random card with the one at the decreasing index from the end of the deck.
We don't have a TV (by choice).
I'd never heard of this guy or his speaking, so I looked around for something. Here's a 1-hour lecture on innovation, that is at least quite entertaining, and possibly informative:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amt3ag2BaKc
E-gad not the "40 acres and a mule" meme again.

Do some research. This was a promise made by a Civil War General to a specific bunch of people which was later rescinded by the president. There was no general law or promise that such would be provided to every freed slave. It happened for a brief period, in a relatively small location (Georgia) And it happened 150 years ago.

Aside from whether somebody was put into harm's way because his great-great-great grandfather missed out on the free mules, I just wanted to clarify that historical point. It's one of those historical revisions that seem to grow with the retelling.
Ask HN: A web magazine about song writing
I had an idea about a "web magazine" about song writing. I would interview songwriters about how they work, what they thought while composing a song, why they arranged it that way... a little bit like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci-yIVsDIdk but in text.

I would take snippets of a song and have it decorticated by the artist.

To monetize, I would sell 3$ or 5$/month to people to have access to the interviews before everyone else. Maybe put ads but not sure about this...
D'oh! Yep. There it is.
IQ tests come with a lot of social and cultural bias. So, for example, immigrants tend to do more poorly and members of an outclass tend to do more poorly (for example, historically this meant Black Americans tended to test poorly). I would think one thing going on here is a kind of harm to the social orientation of the test-taker. If everyone "hates" you, what's your motivation for being "agreeable"? And if your answers stop "agreeing" with what is socially valued, your test score can be hurt.

Does this mean you are dumber? Not necessarily. It's common for extremely intelligent children to test poorly because they are unable to gear their answers towards the test's expectations. One simple example: A child may fail to classify the picture of a "whale" as a "W" word because they know the type of whale it is (such as "Blue Whale") and aren't sophisticated enough to know that the test makes the assumption that children of a certain age won't have such specific information. A very socially savvy child may do better on such a test than a child whose interests are more "technical" (so to speak). Anecdotally, very socially savvy and socially oriented kids of high IQ often do a wonderful job of hiding how smart they are in order to fit in better. They may routinely shoot for roughly average even though they may be capable of substantially better performance than all their classmates. If no one likes you or accepts you and there is no fixing that, why bother? And if not bothering means you classify the "blue whale" as a B word instead of a W word because you feel that is more accurate and precise, your score may suffer.
Lose Weight While Pregnant and Avoid Stretch Marks With These Two Secrets
Microsoft Threatens Bountii for Exposing Bing Cashback Flaw
Dan Fischer's still around! Small Internet: I used to be a moderator on a forum he owned.
What does the equivalent code in the latest version of Python look like?
Mediterranean Food Patterns
...Photoshop referring to Photoshop.com, their photo editing web app, not its more impressive namesake.

All of Adobe's copy seems to make this distinction, it's a pity this blog couldn't be bothered. It's not the Photoshop Mobile App, it's the Photoshop.com Mobile App (for Android).
Some nice graphs: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001015.html
How to Search for Web Related Government Contracts
Ask them to invest in your company
Hi. It looks like you're fairly new to HN. Could you explain why you're suggesting Scheme, suggest particular projects or things to read, etc.? It will be far, far more helpful for everyone involved than a one-word answer.

Thanks.
True, that. Now if only we had a valid metric for one's mind's maximum speed. IQ ain't it.
Geek story hour: Parser of death
Why would they all be working on the same thing? If you've got 20K+ employees, 100+ developers isn't all that many. Hundreds of departments across dozens of businesses leads to a few dozen projects going on at once. Add in the maintenance of apps that are often 5-10 years old taking up a large chunk of those resources, and 100 developers isn't really all that many.

BFEA-wise, the technical challenges revolve around the intersections between the various projects - message queues, batch servers, databases, storage (and more storage). Proponents of independent teams tend to dismiss these challenges, resulting in an overall environment that is more expensive to implement and manage. (for example, sure, that obscure OSS project may be _perfect_ for the task, until the one guy that knows it leaves, and you have to pay someone top-dollar to ramp up on it)

To be fair, there's usually a lot of room for improvement, efficiency-wise. To continue to be fair, I don't know that the success rate of small dev shops is any better or worse than the large: there are more failures than successes, and many more "good enough" situations.
Matthias Ettrich (KDE Founder) Receives German Federal Cross of Merit
Ask HN: Changing usernames
Hi folks

Quick question. Around the time I was signing up for HN there were some OpenID related issues and I was unable to access the original account I created (with the handle that I use everyone else on the web). Ended up creating this account, which has worked, but it's always been strange seeing this handle up against my name because I don't use it anywhere else. Any suggestions on whom I could contact to merge the two and bring some balance to the Force?
OK, a bunch of others recommended it, but I'll add my voice and recommend SICP. There are lots of good books on programming, but it is the best single source. After that, decide what parts of programming you like, and come back asking for more specific books.

Good luck.

Oh, and the stuff Mahmud said about your professors and industry types being phonies is largely true. Not always, of course, but often enough. That you're even on this site suggests that you're prepared to think deeper than them.
Link Dot Net offering services at a 30% discounted rate in Karachi
It's a closed shop. SEOmoz estimates that the top 100 Digg users are responsible for more than half of the content that reaches the Digg front page. Furthermore, there could be as few as 20 'superusers' who are responsible for submitting 25 per cent of Digg's front-page stories. If you do the maths, you'll realise that anyone could set up a company with that many employees and have a far more interesting and diverse front page.

The title of the article is in definite candidacy for troll-bait, but the above quote is quite interesting. I think the next successful social news dispersion site will be one that figures out how to eliminate that "cliquish" nature of such sites as digg, reddit, et. al. in order to really clear away the fluff.
You "wish" more blacks could be more like him? How many black people do you have intimate conversations with to base your opinion on how "most" of them are like?

I'm curious - what's your opinion on what other races who aren't white should be more like? I mean in your perfect world where white people just dictated how everyone should behave.
Storytelling Tips from Salesforce's Marc Benioff
"Test-Score-Differences Fallacy 1: Nonfixedness Proves Malleability

This fallacy uses evidence of any fluctuation or growth in the mental functioning of individuals as if it were proof that their rates of growth can be changed intentionally. IQ level is not made malleable by any means yet devised (Brody, 1996), ..."

- Linda Gottfredson, Logical fallacies used to dismiss the evidence on intelligence testing
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies.... (PDF page 24)
I agree completely. There's a huge value to learning a number of other languages and they will help you approach projects from different conceptual angles, but most important is the ability to approach a project. You'll learn more about how things are really working under the hood and the limitations of your chosen language by building one substantial modular project in that time. Visual feedback is definitely hugely important too. I couldn't agree more that working on it every day is essential, if you want to get great, code isn't a job, it's life. Just like learning Japanese, if you want to really internalize what you're learning, you have to immerse yourself.
Very good point. That pretty clearly points to issues with education/culture (as it relates to dress, speech, expectations, etc...)/etc... NOT race.
I wouldn't call my professors "phonies", but it's true that many of them were certainly poor programmers. But that's fine, because they're professors in a CS department, and CS is not programming.
Looks like you slowly talked yourself around to my conclusion. Black people, especially the young ones, seem to have a really unfortunate position. It seems qualified optimism is the only reasonable response to this data. At least if they get educated, they can do somewhat better for themselves. Though lesser educated people of other races will probably do better.

Also, for more good news, take a look at the numbers for blacks compared to others where the age is 15 - 24.
Will Microsoft become the General Motors of software?
email pg http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=374196
This is a good idea. I've certainly seen great comments (that I may have disagreed with) at some negative score, and terrible comments with scores of like 23.

A "I think this is a good comment" or "I think this is a poor comment" is certainly different from "I agree with this" or "I disagree with this". The later seems to be how the voting system ends up degenerating into sadly.
Dear Dropbox I want to give you money, but my way?
I love dropbox. But I don't think 50gbytes is with $10/month so I stay a free member. Mostly so I don't actually lose anything if I decided to cancel later.

You see there's a psychological barrier to me opting in. How about a one time payment plan? Compete with portable drives with a one time fee and soft guarantee of reliable online storage. I don't want to have to keep paying $10/month, but a one time $X dollar fee would flip the switch in
my head to opt in.

Just a heads up.
Yes, I know it was rescinded (after Lincoln's assassination) before it could be extended to the rest of the subset of freed slaves. I was pointing out the "imbalance of the maze" was apparent even back then.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "rejection reduces short-term performance"? It makes sense that someone who has just been rejected would have a hard time focusing on an immediate task- their brain is still stuck trying to understand and ameliorate the rejection.

My question is, what are the long-term effects of a single rejection? Or even the effect of multiple episodes of rejection which aren't due to being poor or some other variable? I can think of many people who face a lot of rejection but thrive anyway, sometimes even because of rejection (i.e. they become more experienced, or they use rejection to motivate themselves). Entrepreneurs, for example.
Why version control is important for solo developers
They've fallen off a bit lately, definitely go watch the older ones.

Also, especially if you have kids, Nova is pretty solid.
why would anyone vote this comment down? I think this is a good thing, and you can get more than enough entertainment from the net these days anyway.
"It's common for extremely intelligent children to test poorly because they are unable to gear their answers towards the tests expectations."

That's so weird. I distinctly remember this happening to me in third grade, but I never knew that it was an established phenomenon.
Instant Sex: Has the Digital Age Destroyed Relationships or Made Them Better?
Interesting.

It makes me realize how much whether one begins with lists which allow cheap insertions or not affects both one's choice of algorithm and one's thinking.
Interesting ramifications for the startup that's struggling to make sales. Extrapolating on this finding might indicate that a startup that meets early failure is more less doomed to failure since those failures pile on one another and basically make them dumb and mean.
Here's an awesome comment:

Perhaps your time would be better spent becoming a better perl programmer than to learn a new language? :)

Seriously, it's unfair to compare bad perl code that doesn't use common idioms. If you write bad ugly code you've got nobody to blame but yourself.

If it was something I was writing for myself I would use something like this. It's something I probably wouldn't use in production but it's a fairly decent example. The advantage over your example is that the sort comes after the grep, thus avoiding sorting records you are going to reject anyway, the same with quotes.

my @recs = sort { $a->[0] cmp $b->[0] } grep { $_->[1] eq '1' }
map { my @r = split /\t/; [map { s/"//g; $_ } @r[34, 27, 17]] } <>;
print join("\t", @$_), "\n" for @recs;
if you would like to play it beyond just swinging back and forth to get out there is a walk through at http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/amiga/file/575157/16381 the javascript version would be Scene #2 in that walkthrough.
Uh, dude, I'm not making any immigration-related argument. All I'm saying is that those racist employers seem to have a really narrow kind of racism: "we hate black americans, but not black haitians or senegalese."
Celebs shell out big bucks for security
Wow. Weird. You can drop a zero-day remote vulnerability in Vista and not get a C&D. The MSN people must be touchy.
Thank you! I was really disappointed with the comments here - mostly mindless IQ bashing. The real revolution in psychology is happening right now, and I fear the people who should be most interested and in a position to benefit the most are exactly the ones who'll ignore it as more freudian bullshit.
Won't that explode somewhat performance-wise once you have more than a handful of cards? It looks like something along the lines of O(n^2)...
"The boss took one look at the speed test, and shook his head. ‘We can't ship that,’ he said, ‘it's far too embarrassing. We'll have to deliberately slow it back down again, and ship lots of incremental speed upgrades.’"

Classic.
It annoyed me when I heard that some guys slapped their name on that algorithm (having "invented" it independently for a game). It seems like another of those not patent worthy obvious things. Why is it obvious: because you should realise that there is a random number generator in your programming language. Therefore shuffling is silly. You want to assign the cards to slots determined by the random number generator directly. From there on it is pretty straightforward. </brag>
Because here Microsoft loses Money. A Vista Remote Vulnerability means Microsoft's customers lose money. :P
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How a Vision Consultation Assists In Optimal Quality and Value
As an active member of the TV Ad Fraternity, I have been studying the psychological aspect of various features that both directly and indirectly affect the output of a project.
I spent 7 years helping to build one of the largest speaking bureaus in the country before leaving a couple years ago to launch an unrelated startup. Couple observations:

The business is dominated by celebrities. If you are an event planner often all you care about is getting people to show up-- so you'll pay $30k for a celebrity who is a lousy speaker over $5k for someone who is a real expert.

We made a real effort to develop some tech related speakers but it was difficult to do. It's not worth it for a large agency to book 1-2k engagements. More importantly, if you want to have a speaking career you have to be consistent in your pricing. You can't charge someone $5k for a speech and then give your next speech away for $500. Most tech speakers if you tell them they can't accept any dates less than $5k they really don't like that. Often what has gotten them recognition is giving away their content (both on the web and speaking) for free or nearly-free and so the shift is hard to make because in the short term they have to turn down free exposure.

Sadly most of the tech speakers making 10-20k are total wankers. You've probably never heard of them and they are mostly full of shit. They haven't done anything particularly remarkable but they have their pitch down and know how to sell it to bureaus and CEOs. I've seen people walk away with $15k for a one hour talk about how second life is the future of business accompanied by a walk through-- and the audience walks away with a big chubby. What a joke.
Yes, this is like Jester, but jQuery style. Very nice work!
The article doesn't give enough information to tell what's going on or even to Google for the context.
Working for New Scientist massively reduces the capacity for critical thinking.
Draw it out.