skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to find the right person for an internship?
If it wasn't for the internship I was given at a well know London based web design firm I would never have got into the business.

Now as a co-founder of my own business I'd like to give a little back by offering our own internship.

We're looking for talented and young developers who work well in PHP and are comfortable using API's.

How do we find these people? What forms of advertising should we use? What sites should we advertise on? Should we try to make the internship 'viral' to get more attention?

I should also point out that although the company is based in the UK we'd accept people from around the world, providing they speak and write English very well.
Beware of Holiday Phishing Attacks | TechJaws.com
Three YC-funded startups were also nominated for Crunchies this year. Please help them out by voting below

Looks like Posterous was also nominated for "Best Internet Application" - any reason why they're not called out too?
Software never is "ready". Software might just be "ready enough", whereas "ready enough" depends on audience and domain, I think.

For example, an in-house alpha test version for a game might be "ready enough" if the software can display a ball the user can control, while a mars rover control system is "ready enough" for actual mars deployment after years and years of testing.
YC funded companies winning a crunchie will have a much greater impact than YC winning a crunchie, YC is already on the map. Very nice way to concede the YC vote in order to get HN readership to vote for the YC startups.
I certainly plan to wait until I find someone that seems like a good fit. But once I get past "developer-heavy" phase of building a prototype I'm going to need someone to help grow my company- and quick. At that point it seems far-fetched that the "perfect" partner will materialize. I may have to settle for merely "good".

Perhaps I'll make it past the point of needing a cofounder at all and will instead be able to go directly into hiring salaried employees. Of course, getting this far on my own would also be pretty lucky.
Unfortunately they are served as 200 OKs (see http://tinyurl.com/yzca7ec)
I feel best when I'm deleting other's code, and accomplishing the same thing with much less code.
Feinstein didn't "block solar energy". She saved 30,000 acres of desert land, that the state had promised would be saved and which was bought with private and federal funds, from powerline developers, including Goldman-Sachs (who could care less about the environment).

(I think solar power is the cat's meow - and don't usually like Feinstein. But there's plenty of land that's already messed up that can be used instead. And, in fact, Feinstein is already at work on it.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/business/energy-environmen...

"On Thursday, Mrs. Feinstein introduced legislation to provide a 30 percent tax credit to developers that consolidate degraded private land for solar projects."

A lot of developers thoroughly enjoy messing with environmentalists. But Green doesn't have to be a trade-off. For once Feinstein did the right thing.
Lapham's Quarterly - A collection of essays from across the ages on issues (religion, money, war, medecine...). Really helps you gain perspective.

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
So the source engine is a demonstration that continuous refactoring actuallz works well for a long time? :)
what kind of salaried professionals do get paid based on productivity?
Justin Frankel is the doubly rare combination of being extremely skilled at programming and being able to leverage those skills to make tons of money. Most uber-programmers aren't so rich.
Aron Pilhofer at DocumentCloud also comes from the NY Times and their CloudCrowd project is also great for this purpose

http://wiki.github.com/documentcloud/cloud-crowd
Also see this submission of the Wired article about using social networking to facilitate SETI@home style computing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746147
I want to second Make magazine. Even if you don't do anything in the zine, the reading is great.
actually no they don't. All they care about is results.

Same goes double for me. Sure I could have coded the thing up myself. Wasted a year, two, building the product, made 2-3 extra features. And for what? To get a "good job, but it's just another answers site" and a pat on the back? Screw that, I'd rather use those 2 years to build up my content and traffic.

Content is all that matters anyways. Content drives traffic, content gets users to stick around. Who wants to waste 2 years building a site, only to have to start out with 50 users a day traffic numbers?
how long until it will be available?
I beg to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Inches_of_Snow
Rock and Ice and Climbing have gone downhill (I've been reading them since the early 90s). Alpinist (http://www.alpinist.com/ is a far better journal, though it is likely twice as expensive as both R&I and Climbing put together.
Nullsoft was bought by AOL in June 1999 for US$80 million. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_2
Resources for Students - Assessment, Teaching and Learning
This move makes me want to vote for YC. Dilemma!
I don't know anyone here that uses centimetres over inches. IT's what we're taught in school and used on legal documents but everyone I talk to always speaks in inches.
ATI Stream SDK v2.0 Released
Steering a combine via GPS (and an Arduino)
That's one of the most warped analogies that I've ever seen.
national geographic adventure

triathlete

bicycling

time out new york

the economist

the new yorker
You can add Clojure's "Leiningen" to that list.

http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen

Description: A build tool for Clojure designed to not set your hair on fire.
"Worth it"? Depends on what "it" is. There was a time when college wasn't about vocational education ...

Is it worth spending 4 years learning about the history of your country and culture? Seeing a lot of great movies or concerts? Hanging out and enjoying life without lots of burdens before joining the rat race? Having the time to explore a lot of options to find out what you're really good at, or maybe discover some field or some country or some culture that you didn't know existed that changes your whole life?

College is what you make of it. It can be more than being trained like a lab rat. Some people even find friends who hire them later on!
Oops, will fix.

Edit: fixed.
How did he get that good?
What's the deal with recommending Dropbox to be voted best in internet, but Posterous not? I like em both, though Dropbox is a bit better imho.
The only people who get paid according to their productivity are the ones that own their own business, individually or collectively (in a partnership). Everyone else is paid "market rate" which is the lowest rate someone else is willing to accept to do the same job, and is able to deliver. These are completely different compensation models.
100% agree with this, less code = less maintenance. Very few people truly understand this and why it's important.
If you like Design News, consider "Machine Design" as well. Very similar. so you'll probably qualify for it as well.
Another area WordPress wins is in upgrades. A few years ago I was burned by a Plone upgrade that failed. That made me stop upgrading the site because I couldn't figure out how to move forward. I finally pulled the plug on the site. I have a bunch of WP sites and upgrading may be a pain because of having to disable the plugins, it's always worked (knock on wood!).

WordPress also has an understandable database structure (it may make any serious DBMS person gag, but it's simple and malleable) and there's enough info out there that you can learn how to do just about anything if you look hard enough.

Unfortunately, I'm about to need something more CMS-like than WP for some upcoming sites, so I have to figure out what to do.
Fine Homebuilding

WoodenBoat

I like to keep the back issues.

Everything else I either read online or get from the library.
(Though with the obvious caveat that code golf for the sake of code golf is not a good idea either. Readability is important, and sometimes, writing the naive code that is easy to explain and understand is better than the slightly more performant code)
Circuit Cellar Ink. Strongly recommended.
Start your own business (even if only a consultancy) and look at your bank account each day. That's the raw, true measure of productivity.
You could probably hack Javascript function to work with the BioEra XMLServer. Something vaguely similar to AJAX but I wouldn't consider it "standard" AJAX programming.
See reply to other q asking this
The only three things I hear referred to in inches are height, woodworking, and paper sizes. Everything else tends to be metric. (23, lived in BC/AB/SK/MB/PQ/NB, your experiences may vary.)
I wasn't talking about building a site etc. Just addressing that one statement. users Really love cool stuff.

What you have isn't something with cool features, your right it is content. That kind of site will take a year or more to build up. But it is the same process your pouring scorn on :-) there is still no guarantee.
true and false are lousy arguments is probably the easiest to implement and most helpful tip on this list. I can't count how many times I have been reading a piece of code and forgotten what the "true" indicated in a call, or even seen code like:

Frobnitz(true, true, false);

Maybe in Eclipse/NetBeans/etc, that code is meaningful with context-assist, but it certainly isn't readable for me. This also reminds me of a point that I can't seem to find in this list - "Options" objects help more in simplifying interfaces/configurations than many other solutions. It changes something like:

Foo foo = new Foo(someObject, 3, 42, Foo.USE_FROBNOB, 27);

into

Foo.Options opts = Foo.newDefaultOptions()
.handler(someObject)
.numThreads(3)
.maxConnections(42)
.build();
Foo foo = new Foo(opts);

And allows for easy removal/addition of params.
Usually I hate meta-commenting but I'm sick of items behind paywalls being posted here. Please stop.
I'd disagree with your description of "super-productive", that sounds like normal-productive with time to fool around. Do something productive with the extra time (either more coding or, better, something else business related like running the finished app past someone who might have to use it) and there might be a chance of hitting "super-productive". (fast + time wasted = normal speed)
Stripping Reddit from your life with /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com
Ask HN: angel groups versus individual investors
I'm wondering what your experience has been with raising funding from individual angel investors versus going through angel gourps/networks?

The most common advice we've received is that angel groups tend to be less pleasant to work with, and take far longer to make a decision (and this has been backed up by our experience.) However, we're based in Canada, so that may simply be the climate here.
The New Yorker (One of the only magazines I find that has to be read in person and not online)

Should subscribe to The Economist too, but being a student 1) I can't afford it and 2) there is too much to read in a weekly magizine of that status! The Economist is one of the most real news sources out there. I highly recommend getting a subscription if you can afford it.

And interesting note: my subscription to Wired just expired after something like 10 years (since I was 16). I just couldn't stand it any more!
Because slow programmers don't program first. They program last, and do "big design up front" on paper. This is because the cost of a bad idea is hours wasted, and despite the logical coherence of various "expected value" arguments, students are loathe to risk having wasted multiple hours doing the wrong thing. Because humans' internal risk functions and utility evaluation functions are not linear and bayesian, people who code slowly also code differently, and those differences further slow them down with the goal of having less wasted time. In an effort to reduce their variance, they unknowingly increase their time-to-solution.
I agree, Climbing has been getting more noticeably worse than R&I, but my coworker gets em every month so I have a subscription by proxy.

I subscribe to the Alpinist Newswires RSS and do check it out online occasionally. I'm preparing to do the regular northwest face of half dome this August (first big wall), it's just one of the places I've been looking for inspiration.
Yet another Economist subscriber here, for international affairs.

American Scientist, for science written for generalists. Bimonthly, so I'm not drowning in unread back issues (ever tried staying abreast of Nature?). To my eye, less sensational than New Scientist, and less editorializing than Scientific American. Worth it for the columns by Henry Petroski and Brian Rice even if you read nothing else.

Reason, for American libertarian political trash talk. I maintain the subscription only because my not-exactly-libertarian wife enjoys it. Domestic front propaganda, if you will.

If all three were taken from me, I would miss American Scientist very much. Highly recommended.
I've actually been quite impressed with the Rolling Stone. Matt Taibbi reminds me of a modern day Hunter S. Thompson, and a lot of the other contributing authors write some interesting stuff too. Much better than Spin.
That is roughly equivalent to saying that the true measure of an employee's productivity is their salary. What are you measuring?
In the Dark Ages, you mistakes were passed down to your children and grand children - seriously. It's only the rise of a mercantile society that allowed children coming up not to be judged by their parents and grand parents.
I think if you make it an initiative for the submitters to submit the lowest common demoninator, we would rid ourselves of the duplications. I have to believe everyone on Hacker News knows how URLs work and can see that something like this:

?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+startup%2Flessons%2Flearned+%28Lessons+Learned%29

is not needed as part of the submission URL.

And to cover all basis, if you don't know if it is needed try it before you submit it to HN. Delete the above portion of the URL, hit enter and if you still get the same webpage you have done your due diligence. Finding a correct algorithim for this might be tough, but if we put the pressure on the submitters themselves we might get something done.
Just a side note; what's the need for using an url shortener in a non character count restricted environment?
I really don't like clicking a link I don't know the real destination for.

If I'm not the only one who feels like this there is, in this case, unfortunately a risk that Ron has already "lost" two or more votes.
If you view computer programmers as mental ditch diggers, then the idea that one could be so much more productive than another seems crazy. But when you see it as a creative endeavor, it's completely rational that some could be orders of magnitude more productive, even infinitely so.

For example, when you have a hard problem (like a networked 3d game with physics) that is beyond the abilities of a developer A (he can't solve the problems at hand, no matter how much time given), but not developer B (a creative thinker who can solve the problems quickly), then I think you can literally say Dev B is infinitely better than dev A for those hard problems. Because it's going to take you infinitely many developers A's randomly poking at their keyboard to solve the problems. But dev B will solve them in a reason amount of time.

Now dev B isn't infinitely smarter, but for certain tasks, he's infinitely more productive. The point is the productivity differences are highly context dependent, and the greater the creative and cognitive load of the tasks, the the greater the measurable productivity differences between the highest and the average developers.
economist

+ my acm membership comes with their magazine.

everything else i get online.
Y SIN EMBARGO magazine #22, cap.it.all/off
Yes - the article assumes that brakes operate by converting the kinetic energy of the car at a constant rate and thus this is the limiting factor.

Yet with decent brakes most of us do an emergency stop as hard as possible without skidding, so the limiting factor is the traction with the road.
A Replica of an 18th-Century Organ Rings Clear and True
Thinking teaching Development to college students
One guess: practice?
This is exactly how you are supposed to do it. Similarly with "getters" and "setters," for those who use them.

Don't: setName(String name)

Do: setId(idObject idObject)

Makes it easy to expand the interface later.
Actually, I've always seen kLOC as a divisor: defects/kLOC, branches/kLOC, etc. Even metrics like functions/kLOC are useful, if you believe in small functions.
My personal experience is that "earworms" are caused by not hearing the ending of a song. For me its usually the song that is playing when I walk out of a store, or the song thats playing on the radio when I turn it off.

If I know the song well enough and I am able, playing it out to the end in my head gets rid of it.
I'm totally taken with Fossil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(file_system) - which versions the filesystem.

Does Plan 9 cover any of the other things he discusses?
I wish I could dig up the source, but someone claimed that Google was issued a patent for a method of using editorial preference in their ranking algorithm. The guess is that they use it to give preference to large brand-name websites. In general, this is understandable, when you're entering shopping queries in google the national brands are more relevant than their horrible business-unit-based website organization would normally have them rank. And, as the article points out, there are exceptions.
Tell HN: My iPhone accessory based cycling computer
Basically every programmer I've worked with agrees that kLOC is a terrible way of assessing productivity. I think it's only "standard" in the stupid section of the industry (which, alas, is much bigger than it should be).
The power of isitchristmas.com, now on the iPhone
These are pretty much all trade rags, so recommendation is based on if you are into the field or not. As an EE/software guy I have a wide range of technical interests.

Electronic Design: new developments in electronic components and circuits. Been a subscriber for 15+ years.

Machine Design: new tech & tutorials on older mechanical engineering technology. I think it's better than Design News :-)

Embedded Systems Design: the once-thick canon gone skinny. Good, but the website is better.

Communications of the ACM: automatically get it as an ACM member.

The above I've subscribed to for 10+ years!

IVD Technology: Covers In-Vitro Diagnostic medical instruments: my industry. The only trade journal in this specific field I know of, so I guess I have to recommend it.

Military Embedded Systems: it's a fun read sometimes, but mostly just a PR vehicle for various manufacturers.

LED Journal: the latest in LED & lighting technology. Good for keeping up to date on the field.

We used to get Smithsonian and probably should renew. Of all the magazines I've subscribed to over the years, that was probably the best.
I've been working on this since the first day Apple released the accessory information for an iPhone. It works quite well and even have some professional cyclists and triathletes test it. I'll be releasing the rest of the site and applications over the next few months. The plan is to have everything ready in March including availability at your local bike shop.
Research thoughts
50x? Really? That means they achieve in a week what the 1x programmers achieve in a year. I'd say its more likely they are infinitely more productive (as in produce things the 1x programmers could never produce), but those kinds of projects are rather uncommon.
i'd be afraid of dropping my phone while playing this game ... seems easy to slip out of your hand while you're running around/ducking/tapping furiously on your screen. some sort of wrist strap (like those that come on digital cameras) would help, though
sure, but supposedly if you were playing with your friends, then everyone would want to play fair, or else it's no fun :)
YC is not competing with their fundees (different categories), they are competing with Ron Conway, to whom PG would like to yield his support.
It's measuring the amount someone is willing to pay you for your work. By an economist's definition, that's your output. If you divide your output by number of hours worked, that's your productivity, again by economist's definition.

I make no claims as to how useful these definitions are. There's a reason why economics is called the dismal science. But terms like output and productivity do have accepted definitions - so yeah, the true measure of an employee's productivity is almost their salary. (It's actually revenue / employee / hour, so if an employer keeps most of the money as profit, it's still productivity. That's why the grandparent suggested "start your own consultancy".)
No, he's saying you have to take it upon yourself to turn "potential income" into "realized income".
Everything is a project, even this
Your points are valid, and indeed 15 million deaths is the official estimate: scholarly opinions suggest the real number might have been 2 or even 3 times higher.

But perceptions of such matters become skewed by context. Given that the population of China was at the time somewhere around 6-700 million, this loss of life probably seemed marginal to the leadership of the time, and we might also remember that half a century ago the quality of information was considerably poorer; sputnik was the bleeding edge of satellite technology, and it's doubtful whether China even had computers, never mind a nationwide telephone network or even adequate roads.

Now this doesn't absolve them of responsibility, but nor do I think that such deadly economic calculus is limited to their adoption of communism. A century prior, when Britain was the leading global superpower, a famine wiped out the Irish potato crop for several years running (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Irish_Potato_Famine). The English government, which ruled there at the time, did nothing much about it, even though it could easily have been alleviated thanks to the proximity and availability of grain and other foodstuffs - indeed food exports from Ireland to England actually increased, because the native population were too poor to buy as crops had failed. The population collapsed, with about 1-1.5 million deaths (out of a population of only 8 million) and a similar number for emigration (which is why there are so many people of Irish descent in the US and Australia). Of course, in the context of the whole British Empire, this did not seem like such a significant number, and the government of the day viewed it as an embarrassment rather than a tragedy, to the extent of asking other countries not to bother sending food aid and attempting to blockade some that did so anyway.

Now at the time Britain was a limited democracy by today's standards and practiced mercantilism rather than a true market economy, and knowledge of agriculture and economics was basic; but the scope and severity of the problem was well understood, as recorded in parliamentary debates. It's a sad fact that having the basics of modern democracy and economic freedom do not inoculate any government from presiding over or contributing to monstrous levels of suffering in a misguided assessment of where its interests lie.

When we critique Marx and his intellectual heirs, as I agree we should, it's worth bearing in mind that he and his contemporaries had abundant reason to believe that capitalism was a morally bankrupt economic philosophy.
Obviously, you could write a stored procedure to make a move here and then create some logic elsewhere to play a game, but it'd be neither efficient, nor interesting. So, what other ideas to people have as to why this might be useful?
The Tablet Computer Will Not Save Journalism