aneesh

If you code in Perl, the NYT released a nice Perl profiler: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/the-new-york-times-...

If you want to create industrial/scientific applications, libraries are going to be pretty important. For that reason, I'd recommend Python (see SciPy and NumPy).

I'd also recommend learning R if you're at all interested in scientific data analysis.

Windows Marketplace used to sell third-party apps until 2008. Now it basically just points to store.microsoft.com

Yep, context is key. I recall reading that Amazon found placing the "This is recommended because you bought book X" actually reassured their customers a lot. It seems like people prefer recommendation algorithms they can understand, rather than complex ones that may be more accurate.

Paul Erdős was quite a character. Read The Man Who Loved Only Numbers for some fun stories about him.

This is quite creditable for Atlanta. But I wouldn't say "Move over, SF". This includes all businesses, from new ice cream shops to new biotech companies. SF probably still leads if you look at tech startups.

LaTeX is pretty standard for typesetting math/CS texts of any length. You can use your favorite version control system, and write a Makefile to build a PDF/PS document.

If you want to make it easily readable on a webpage (and not just a PDF download), you may want to use html.

I remember a psychology study that showed people recognize www.yahoo.com as a url more quickly than yahoo.com -- with the latter, you don't see the ".com" until you get to the end of the phrase, and that's when you realize it's a url. I can only imagine that getting rid of the .com would make things even worse.

Maybe the RescueTime folks can tell us the impact on office productivity in that period.

Assuming zero interest :-)

Then just install Mathematica :-)

His salary covered the child support/alimony, as well as the mortgage.

> "But with her take-home income averaging only about $2,400 a month, we didn’t make enough to cover our bills because my take-home pay was going straight to the mortgage."

What the heck are you buying if $2,400 per month can't cover your expenses after the mortgage payment is taken care of?

As an interesting data point, many Asian languages don't have a concept of capitalization in the language at all.

To stop their slide, and grow their market share again (which is, I presume, the goal of the IE team at Microsoft), Microsoft basically needs to get Firefox users to switch back to IE. Everything becomes a lot simpler when you think about it like that.

Firefox made it dead-simple for people to switch from IE to FF. The whole install process for Firefox takes maybe 120 to 180 seconds, from the time you click "Download" to the time you are up & running. And Firefox imports all your IE data in one click, and also recognizes common IE shortcuts. Ctrl-E is IE's shortcut for the top-right corner search box -- it also works in FF, try it!

The reverse is not true. It's hard to switch from FF to IE. IE takes 10-15 mins, plus a restart to install (at least it did when I installed IE8 it a couple months back). It doesn't let me import FF data, and it doesn't recognize FF shortcuts. By making it so hard to switch to IE, they have basically made it impossible to grow IE's market share. Is it any surprise then that IE is dying?

There's a similar service at genderanalyzer.com, based on UClassify's API - http://blog.uclassify.com/gender-text-analysis/.

It thinks Sergey Brin writes like a woman: http://www.genderanalyzer.com/?url=too.blogspot.com

Ah, okay. But I was getting at the doctors' reaction to this proposal. Judging by a few of the comments on the article, doctors don't agree with that proposal. But is it because they're concerned for their patients' well-being, or because they're concerned about the possible loss of income? Both are plausible reasons, but they each invite different counter-arguments. How are we supposed to know why the doctors oppose this, and how credibly should we take their argument?

Did you read the article? He doesn't think this would be "cool"! He's saying that this could be used to identify people who thought they were anonymous. The main point he makes is that people consider the fact identification is difficult if someone has only one location, but overlook that it's much easier if someone has two locations.

It's so hard to get good information on this issue because so many of the people we get our information from are themselves key stakeholders in the process. Of course the general public wants more doctors. That would generally mean lower prices, lower waiting times, etc. And of course the AMA will insist we don't need more doctors.

This is the most persuasive argument for structured data I've seen so far. Google's biggest limitation is that it can only help you find things that someone has put on a webpage.

How does the server know the CVV2 code that was generated by the Emue card? Or, given the card number, and other variables like time of day, is the CVV2 code determined by some function?

There's an important fact not mentioned in the article: schools and students often have incentives to take more AP exams. For example, I was in a school district where AP exams were free for students. And the schools often get special recognition based on the number of AP exams taken. Indeed, the oft-cited Newsweek high school ranking simply ranks schools by the number of AP & IB exams taken per capita; it doesn't matter what you score! (Citation: http://www.newsweek.com/id/39380). Clearly, students and schools have almost nothing to lose, and a lot to gain by taking the exams.

Given this perverse set of incentives, the only thing that surprises me is that the number of AP exams taken isn't growing faster! (We're still at about 0.3 AP exams taken per HS junior/senior)

> "if you know you want a technical major but you're not sure which, choose Computer Science."

I disagree. If you know you want a technical major but you're not sure which, choose Math. It is the common factor that all other technical fields share, and it will give you the most options. Major in math, then go to grad school in CS, Physics, Economics, or even Law. But majoring in either CS or Economics makes it difficult to go to grad school in the other one.

And most of the "benefits" of majoring in CS that he mentions don't actually require you to major in CS. You merely have to have an interest in programming, which is easier to pick up on the side. On the other hand, try teaching yourself abstract algebra.

Further, the analytical thinking skills that university-level math gives you serve you well in many fields, including computer science. But all that said, if you know what you want to do, definitely do that!

That makes no sense - the more books they sell, the more money they lose. No business should sell below their marginal cost for any length of time unless they're really desperate for market share. What's more common is selling the hardware at a loss, and reaping the profits on the e-books.

Given the age distribution of HN readers, it's clear many of them are still in school. So their responses to this poll may not be very meaningful, at least not in the same way as the responses of those no longer in school.

You can bypass a version check to upgrade directly from Windows 7 Beta to RC: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/07/delivering-a-qua...

Yes, you're absolutely right. I made that assumption, and justified it by seeing that Compete's numbers matched up well for the past 12 months (Compete unfortunately only goes back 1 year, hence I went to Google Trends).

Well, Torpig obtained credentials for 8310 accounts, so I'm guessing that's just a $10-1000 estimate of the loss per account. But from my experience, $1000 per compromised account seems quite a bit on the high side for credit card accounts (I have no idea about average loss for stolen brokerage accounts).

Edit: From the pdf

"A report by Symantec [37] indicated (loose) ranges of prices for common goods and, in particular, priced credit cards between $0.10-$25 and bank accounts from $10-$1,000. If these figures are accurate, in ten days of activity, the Torpig controllers may have profited anywhere between $83k and $8.3M."

As an aside, these amounts are a good reason you should you your credit card instead of your debit card.

Looks like you'd have to go back to 2006, but yes, that was the case not too long ago.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace.com,facebook.com&...

I've used MySQL extensively for personal projects (all of mine have been at a pretty small scale). I've also used both Oracle and SQL Server for projects at large companies.

There's probably not much of an advantage in the database engine itself, but the SQL Server suite shined in 2 areas: analytics and reporting. The 2 add-on components made large-scale data mining & model-building much simple, and also automated the generation & delivery of complex reports tracking many metrics. I could probably do both with MySQL, but only with much more effort.