skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ran the Digital Underground on Hypermart. Oh, AOL.
I'm surprised it took him so long to get it together (he recommends a month.)

I created an entire app in less than two days that has consumable in app purchases. It has a RoR server component as well as the iPhone component and supports the asynchronous callbacks and such. Maybe it was easier for me because my background is in server side programming?
They might be okay on the DX due to the bigger screen. But I agree that PDFs on the Kindle 2 are completely unusable.
Gladwell's books are not scholarly research. They're more like hipster coffee shop conversations, and should be taken with a healthy dose of rigorous skepticism, even though they are usually quite enjoyable.

I think Gladwell would largely agree with this description of his writings, or at least with the part that says that his writings should be approached skeptically and that they don't purport to be scholarly. From the article "Malcolm Gladwell's Method" in the Wall Street Journal on November 15, 2008,

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html?mod=...

an interview by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg:

"[Q:] Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?

"[A:] No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."
First my Geometry teacher taught how to write simple programs for our TI-83s.

Then in IB HL Math in 12th grade, my teacher decided to have "C++ Fridays". After that, I entered college as a CS major (and vocal performance, but that is another story).
> and drink plenty of milk

I believe that milk contains Vitamin D2, which is has a low bioavailability. Vitamin D from your skin, created by UVB exposure from sunlight, is Vitamin D3, which has a high bioavailability.

So, it's not true to say that milk is a replacement for sunshine.

Of course, there are Vitamin D3 supplements that you could take.
As a gifted student, I asked our school for a computer when I was in 7th grade.

They gave us a bunch of wires, a soldering iron, and instructions for making a homemade radio or some such.

As a Freshman, the local Radio Shack had the TRS-80 and I spent all of my time bugging the salesmen as I played games and tried to tweak it. A friend wrote an app and made $800. Eight-hundred bucks! Then our High School got one of the first computers, a Commodore Pet. There was a guy named Roland who always signed up for it, was an arrogant jerk, and generally ticked everybody off, so I wrote a game called "Kill Roland" that became quite the local hit.

Then I wrote my first contract program, a bookkeeping app on an Apple IIe. Then a program for a comic-book store, etc.

After that I went into the Marines, wanting to do "real work". Several times in my young life I tried to swear off computers for other stuff I loved more. Each time, no matter what I was doing, I ended up hacking together solutions. So, for instance, after I got out of the Marines I started into management at Domino's (while taking a full load at the local college). Within a couple of months I had created a series of linked spreadsheets that handled all of the store's paperwork. I clerked at a truck-shop -- ended up writing a dBase III program that handled inventory, maintenance, driver payments, and taxes. (I also found them 100K in overpaid taxes from previous years)

I tried freelance writing. I love writing. Ended up writing a bunch of articles for newspapers and magazines. Wrote some sci-fi even. Got to meet and interview famous people like Clive Barker. But within a couple of months, yet again, I was installing Macs at the local weekly newspaper, filling in for the CIO at a local company, and teaching graphics programs to guys who wrote print ads.

So I finally just gave up and went into consulting. Didn't seem any point trying to fight it any more.

I didn't pick hacking. It picked me.
Rntoday.com - place for travel Nurse Tips.
I found my travel nurse job!. Find your dream nursing job at Rntoday.com I simplified my travel nurse job experience with tips from rntoday.com.
in germany at least, we have 10 or 16 amps rated, on 230V, and cables have 1.0 or 1.5 mm^2 cross-section per wire.

what is 12 and 16 "gauge" and what voltage do you folks use?
Ask HN: Which vertical search engines do you frequently  use?
Ask HN: Which vertical search engines do you use?
To be honest, my Dad gets the nod for buying me a VB book that included VB5 back in 5th grade (1997). But, I'll have to say that you (with that AOL-Files.com site) and this guy named "Oogle" inspired me with the "hacker" curiosity by about 6th grade. In this case it was all black-hat though =)

Oogle released the VB source to his "proggie" and I did the exact same thing... I went through the code learning how everything worked and started VB programming on my own... faders, punters, etc, oh the good times. =) What was the name of your prog?

I am so happy to know that the peson who ran AOL-files is an HN member! That site was a goldmine.
Apple's Tablet?
Holy cow! Is this 1st April? Unbelievable.
They implanted an electrode to a disabled guy's brain, powered it wirelessly and it sent them back wirelessly signals representing audio frequencies of what the guy wanted to say. Decoded on a computer with 50ms latency, 89% accuracy on vowels.
1.) BRIEFLY study a language. Then start hacking on and tweaking other people's code. The best and quickest way to learn is by doing, not reading this and that.

2.) I don't really remember the "before programming" phase of my life as I started very young. But I guess I wish I knew #1.
Looks like a mechanical problem waiting to cost you more money.

* Winding means sliding contacts to transfer the power... when they wear and ultimately fail, the failure mode is often overheating due to higher resistance. Now you have heat in a confined space (wall) with poor access. If you call the fire department to make sure there is no fire along with the smoke, they will make sure, which is a good thing, but it won't be pretty.

* The spool must have a spring rewind mechanism... again, rewind mechanisms tend to fail and now you have a cord that won't go back out of sight.
Open source development of a turn-based strategy game. I wish I knew how addicting computers could be, and how much they demanded my entire devotion to ever-changing technologies.
I agree. I didn't get into programming till I was in my late 20s. It was something that I got better at during my 30s. I didn't start making my full time living from it till I was about 34 or 35.
Probably regular domestic cat. They can and do breed.
Tap Tap Revenge 3 Downloaded 300,000 Times First 24 Hours After Going Free
Somehow I expected a new Scheme implementation, called Ponzi Scheme.
I love the Redis project. Whenever I see that a new feature is going to be implemented, I think "Oh, it's an open source project, we might see that in a year." But antirez is so good at implementing new (and incredibly useful features) that it's usually done in a matter of weeks or a few months! Happy New Year, Redis! Looks like there's a lot more in store for the project in 2010.
Unfortunately I can't read the story from my iPhone. They redirect a perfectly good site to a minimal site that doesn't properly follow links, so I'm redirected to the current story list. Clicking on Full Site switches to the proper display but then the story isn't in the list.
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=%22begs+the+ques...

1.6 million

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=%22raises+the+qu...

38.9 million

for what those numbers are worth
It sounds like he hit a fair amount of trouble with subscriptions.
http://instapaper.com
Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?
Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition
For those not familiar with CUDA vocabulary:

PTX =
Parallel Thread Execution is a pseudo-assembly language used in nVidia's CUDA programming environment. The 'nvcc' compiler translates code written in CUDA, a C-like language, into PTX, and the graphics driver contains a compiler which translates the PTX into something which can be run on the processing cores.

(source - wikipedia)
"If our newly-independent programmer does not make 10x the money, we must admit that she is not the 10x programmer we thought she was." Not a good metric. The signal is at least polluted by social skills and geography - in some areas of the midwest, the social construct of the traditional company is much more entrenched than in some places in CA. Also, I'm 29 and I have no family - I could work totally different places and locations than a family man with roots, which opens up my possibilities much more. imho, conflating the concept of profitability and productivity is not a good idea.
stackoverflow, twitter search, searchyc, facebook.
I'm friends with Philip and I doubt he'd consider himself a libertarian. He's more of a _Slate_-style counterintuitivist, although he'd probably object to any kind of political label.
MusicTweets - a WebSockets/Redis powered experiment for Google Chrome
Wow, cspace looks like a really interesting project. The concept is explained well with connect(user, service) is like connect(ip, port) and shows its generic build-on-this power.

I've had problems with becoming demotivated and uninspired on open source projects that don't attract any other experienced developers, even to just shoot the shit about the design and implementation (even if they don't want to contribute code). I don't think this means one should feel bad, it just means the market isn't necessarily there, and as open source developers, we'd rather be coding than marketing. But still, the open source ecosystem as a whole is richer, even if slightly, for an open source release, even if it ends up being unmaintained.
so what happens if you go ptx -> llvm -> opencl -> nvidia gpu? how does the speed change?
1. I started with a little game by the name of ZZT by Tim Sweeney and Epic Megagames (who would go on to become Epic and create the Unreal Engine). ZZT used ASCII characters as graphics and was an engine on which to run games. It came with the map editor and used a language called ZZT-OOP to control objects.

2. It's a lesson I still haven't learned how to follow well, but I've always been more successful just doing things rather than trying to start a large long-term project. I would/still keep getting caught up trying to make a full game or a complete library, and I end up getting caught in planning or setup and never get to the coding part, which is what I actually want to be doing.
<!--[if IE 6]>

GWT has a wonderful, automatic mechanism for this workaround built into its ClientBundle (nee ImageBundle) facility. One especially great thing about it is that the compiler properly omits it for all browser permutations except for IE, so that FireFox or WebKit-based browsers never need to evaluate the above conditional expression...because the code just isn't there if it's not needed.
Alot of them probably come from the Air Force, and pilots in the Air Force basically just fly all the time.
Watch avatar online now
On Lisp is unique. I wouldn't go with PAIP because AIMA has replaced it. But what's covered in On Lisp isn't found anywhere else.
Just create them locally on your computer and use rsync or ftp to send them to your web host.

With static HTML, you don't need any databases and it doesn't matter what type of server or operating system your host is running.
I think this is just a part of life in the technology world. There are lots of things that should be better and could easily be made better if they wouldn't totally break backwards compatibility and decades of professional expertise.

It's easy to say that the modern state of computing sucks, but it's a whole lot harder to actually do something about it.
Whoops! I did. Both of them are on the shelf just above my computer so I've got no excuse!

Off topic: What happened to the edit link? I want to hide my mistakes! ;]
From the article, "A quick perusal of the comments shows customers repeatedly griping about"

Maybe if Nick Bilton wasn't in such a hurry he could write an article worth reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge

US household current is 110V, 60Hz and typically 15 or 20 amps on a circuit. 16 gauge is approximately equivalent to a 1.5mm^2 cross-section solid wire, or to 30/0.25 (which I assume means 30 0.25 mm^2 strands).
Not to be snarky but, isn't this kind of like using a metal detector in an Iron factory?

The only PHP code I've ever felt was not headache inducing was that in which the coder was attempting to use a functional paradigm as much as possible.
It doesn't make it useless as all of my site is static except the contact form. To utilize another option just for a few lines of code in a contact form didn't seem practical to me.

I'm sure open to suggestions though.

Thanks for the tip on configuring Apache... I may look into that next time. I've got my .htaccess set to rewrite the urls to extensionless, so it didn't make too much of a difference.
My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school.
This was really frustrating to use, so into middle school I would coerce my dad into getting up an hour early so I could get to the 8086s in my school's computer lab and work in QBasic. After that, he got me a copy of VisualBasic which was much too visual for my tastes but kept me tinkering a while. I also got a copy of Borland C++ Builder at a relatively early age but made precious little good use of it. Around that time, WWW was coming out so I started following web technologies sand playing with JavaScript. My HS chem professor had us do an informational interview with someone in our field, which I did and was offered a job where I started doing HTML/JS/CC work from photoshop templates. I also did networking and picked up on Java there. That's really all she wrote, in the last 12 years I don't think I've gone more than 2 weeks without writing some Java. I still prefer dynamic languages and I can't help but want to dump functions into variables, but it's comfortable and does what I want... plus I can do fun things in JS or AS3 on the front end.
I've mentioned AOL-Files a few times on here but no one responded that they knew it, which surprised me, because a large portion of the community was around 15 at he time, which would make them the prime age right now for founding a startup.

Thanks for the note; shoot me an email sometime.

P.S. For a bit of fader/punter nostalgia, check out these screenshots from my first prog circa 1998:

http://www.mattmazur.com/2009/05/revolution/
I'm female and have a social sciences background. I ended up with a Certificate in GIS due to an interest in Urban Planning. Somewhere along the way, I learned to write a little (X)HTML and CSS as a means to more effectively share information by running my own websites. This grew out of participating in email lists where my ideas on certain topics were popular for a time. I would get tired of repeating myself and then make a webpage so I could link to it and make a few custom remarks via email instead of feeling like I was reinventing the wheel all the time.

More recently, I have decided I would like to learn a programming language to write a simulation, again for the purpose of more effectively sharing information. For a variety of reasons, I have yet to get started on learning a programming language. But I keep getting interested in more technical stuff to serve my other interests that are still more social sciences based. I joined Hacker News in part because having people to talk to about a topic of interest works well for me as an intro to a topic. Taking classes on it would not currently fit into my life.

Good luck with this.
Convince Google to take privacy more seriously and you may have a point. Until then we have no choice but to use tools like this to at least attempt to filter what is recorded.

And the "most people can type" comment is silly. Why have links at all then? Let's just type everything.
No real advice, but I can tell you exactly what I did with very little background (not that I'm any good at it.)

1. Took a biology class that involved using matlab. Found the matlab part more fun than the biology.

2. Went through this course on my own one week: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs1130/2009fa/index.html
At the time, almost of the materials I needed to do the homework was online. I'm not sure if that's still the case.

3. Took a class in data structures and programming in java. I've never worked so hard in my life.

4. Profit! (Yeah... no :P) My current step 4 is downloading open source projects I want to do something to (mostly in python) and futzing with them.
Please review beewulf.com
Please review my website beewulf.com - detects which webserver a particular website run on. Thanks.
It is different. You are talking about an observation made about a prior iteration of English (descriptive). I am talking about arbitrary rules created long after the development of the current iteration of English (prescriptive or, more accurately, proscriptive).
Video Presentations About HTML 5
> It's easy to say that the modern state of computing sucks, but it's a whole lot harder to actually do something about it

Many have told me that spewing hot air is pointless. However, it seems that almost everyone in programming-culture is afflicted with a kind of Stockholm Syndrome and refuses to believe that there has been any kind of systemic decline. If I can cure even one such sufferer, the hot air will not be for naught.

The best (or even sane!) technology does not automatically win, people. Valuable things have been lost. Mankind is effectively stupider for the lack of the intelligence-amplifiers which could have been - could still be.
There are a few texts that are an order of magnitude more enlightening than the remainder. Not (just) in terms of content, but in terms of explanation as well as engagement.

It is well worth your time identifying and working with these. Not to be snobbish; they are just so much more efficient, and enjoyable.
The author reads pg's statement that "People will pay for information they think they can make money from." and hears the negative - people /won't/ pay for information they /can't/ make money from. That setup is then used to conclude: Buy (other people's) stuff via my Amazon Affiliate link. Feh.

People will pay for content, they just don't know it. But really, what people is that? The people reading the content, or people reaching out to content readers. The current foregone conclusion is the latter, and everything-ad supported is proof of that. The same people paying for AND reading the content being one in the same is the exception. Consumer Reports, Wall Street Journal and PBS are the only three that immediately come to mind. Even ESPN, one of the larger old-and-new media platforms, last I heard few are paying them directly, most are through third parties a la cable provider Comcast.
The article makes a number of major mistakes that discredit its whole thesis.

1. My source for the productivity figure is Peopleware. They cite a set of "coding war games" that found a repeatedly measured 10x variation between the best and the worst programmers in their work environment. The productivity difference showed up under a variety of different measurements. There is no vagueness about the measurement techniques or doubt about the figure.

2. The 10x figure was from best to worst, from best to median was (IIRC) 2.6 times.

3. A significant portion of the figure they measured was correlated with environment, and the strongest predictor of performance was the performance of your coworkers. That said their study technique couldn't tell the difference between whether environment attracted the best people, or whether environment caused people to become more productive. (From the point of view of a smart employer there isn't too much difference between those hypotheses.)

4. People accept compensation in many ways, and not all of them involve money. I believe that the better a programmer is, the more apt they are to be willing to trade salary for better work environment, more interesting co-workers, more interesting problems, etc. As a concrete example I have heard anecdotes from many people claiming that people are willing to accept sometimes substantial pay cuts for the privilege of working at Google.

5. Whatever the cause, in the Peopleware study the difference in pay between the top and bottom half of programmers was less than 10%. Furthermore productivity was basically uncorrelated with various factors people look at in the hiring process such as years of experience. That is direct evidence that it is a bad idea to measure productivity by salary.

When you put all of these factors together, you simply can't point to market forces then salaries to discount real performance differences between working programmers.
What kind of cigars? What's the flavor like?
Used to love ZZT. That's one of the games that got me interested in programming.

I rembmer when I was a kid (9 or 10 years old) my father got me a copy of Turbo Pascal and some books about it. I've been trucking ever since.
The Guggenheim Museum & Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright in Lego.

http://architecture.lego.com/en-us/default.aspx

Ordered by Mrs Nailer and shipped to the UK.

I've loved Lego and modernist architecture since I was a child.
My wife and I were both grad students and got dissatisfied. She went to medical school, I looked for a job suitable to someone in his late 20s dropping out of a math PhD with a Masters.

The first job I found was a programming job at a churn and burn consultancy. A couple of months in I was asked to learn Perl. I took that skill to be better job. There I encountered a good programmer who got me started on reading (and incorporating) classics like Code Complete.

Everything else flowed from that.
Two notes against ISP billing, not all Android devices are or will be cell phones provided by a carrier, and when doing ISP billing, as a developer you tend to get paid 3-9 months out from when the customer bought the product because of the multiple stages of financial transfers. (Seen this with BREW previously)
A thought for you: how do you persist the “unlocked” state from one launch to another? You could write a .plist, a database record, or other local file, but that struck me as rather hackable by the pirate/jailbreak crowd.

The problem with this line of thinking is that everything is rather hackable by the pirate/jailbreak crowd, and that they do not pay money for your software anyhow. Drop it in a file and spend the extra engineering resources you just saved on something which will help you market the app.
I think the answer to a conundrum like this is very personal and tells you a lot about what you value more.
I was just going to post something to this effect: Greenspun is busily refuting a claim that Gladwell never makes, which is that American pilots are somehow better, or that they're better because they have more experience. In fact, IIRC, Gladwell takes pains to point out that some of the South Korea crashes had very senior pilots flying.

Gladwell's larger point is that a) modern crashes are composed of a large number of crashes on planes and that b) cultural inhibition of direct communication can contribute to crashes to the extent that a more junior position feels unable to speak directly to the pilot.

I have my reservations about Gladwell, as described here: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/28/outliers-and-blink , but the pilot chapter isn't among his weaker so far as I can tell.