skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the problem. You are considered ignorant if you don't know anything about Pushkin. But it's perfectly normal or accepted to ignore who Enrico Fermi, Alan Turing or Paul Erdős were. We're all ignorant about something but, in society, literary ignorance is frowned upon much more than scientific ignorance.
from http://mauitian.livejournal.com/11166.html

The last thing you need to know about girls has to do with love. Even just thinking about girls is likely to cause you more emotional anguish than anything else in your life. And it's not like getting mauled by a bear -- that kind of pain goes away after a month or so. No, love, when it goes bad, is worse than pretty much anything. So, why mess with it? Why not just avoid girls altogether? Well, I must admit I've asked myself this many times. And the answer is: can't help it. The emotions and drive are too strong to deny. So, just do the best you can. It is, actually, pretty damn good to have a girlfriend when things are going well. And try to make the best decisions you can, even though your brain isn't really running the show.
I am usually a Java developer, with years of experience, so my outlook might be different. But I just started a Ruby On Rails project, and my impression is that "Programming Ruby" and "Agile Web Development With Rails" should be sufficient to get you going (OK, and maybe some HTML tutorial somewhere, don't know which ones are good in english).

I think "Agile Web Development With Rails" has been dissed by the "rails community", but my impression is good. It shows exactly the examples you'll need (like how to create a login form).
Ask YC: Web based database design
I remember someone advertised a web site where user could create the database schema online; create tables, manage their relationships (similar to ms Access "Relationship") etc. I have searched for hours but couldn't find it. I will apprecite any help about this.
Maybe he as Aspergers syndrome like the character Jerry on the television show Boston Legal.
blist?
I also think this is a case of nothing more than operant conditioning.

I once saw a demonstration of how they trained a mouse to navigate an obstancle course (supposed to be a cross-section of inside a house wall with joists and so on) for some movie. When trained, the course took the mouse about 20 seconds to run and it looks like it must be one really smart mouse. But really, it learnt the route one step at a time over a period of days. I suspect a similar technique is used here.
I disagree. If you use name recognition as a proxy for knowledge (which is probably a poor metric), than you're probably as likely to have heard of Turing as your are Pushkin. The set of people who have heard both is likely to be much smaller, and by inference, more knowledgeable.

On the other side of the argument, you could argue its easier to understand the contributions of someone like Pushkin than someone like Fermi. But this too is probably true only on a superficial of level.
I'm pretty sure that VCs (which predate the internet) considered these issues.

I'd be surprised if outside investors (which predate VCs) didn't consider them.
When using MIT Licensed Software, is attribution necessary?
When using MIT licensed software (e.g. rails plugins) in a commerical venture, is attribution necessary? And if so where is it placed?
What specifically are you looking to learn though?

Do you want to learn about digital hardware - how chips and components are constructed using AND, OR and NOT gates? This will give you a pretty good idea of how hardware works, but the projects will be limited to you, a breadboard and some switches - not terribly exciting stuff.

On the other hand, if you want to learn build simple robots and such, you'll have something neat to do, but at the end you likely still won't have an idea of how a CPU works or GPS chip works.
You're right. It's not.

The word "hacking" has, in the media, taken on a meaning which is different from the meaning that it had originally - and the meaning that you'll most often find around here. Sadly, though, the use is so common that arguing against it is pretty much hopeless. It seems that outside of the hacker community (proper sense of the word), you probably shouldn't call yourself a hacker, since the first thing that will come to people's minds is this.

This isn't hacking. This is 'cracking' - and a more disgusting form of it than usual, a form meant to physically harm people.
I said that, as we all know, it hurts people. If you can't justify good reasons to do it anyway, or come up with an argument it doesn't actually hurt people, then it's a bad idea.
Or just do it, and ask for forgiveness later, as necessary. Your chance of being "caught" in a medium-to-large lecture is pretty low.
not really, depends on who you hang out with;-)
Reminds of me Joel Spolsky's quote, to which I agree with to some degree.

"You can learn a lot about somebody by the books they've read. And I've always thought that if you read all the same books I read, you'll come to think like me, too."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html
Take "Free Public Wifi" to the next level
For the rest of you startup guys out there: Don't do this google is _very_ difficult to read and a strain on the eyes. Anything but black text and you will lose users.
I'm always suspicious of adults who list Harry Potter as their favourite book.
How a stroke feels, and so much more
Wordpress gets a new website, plus 2.5 is finally released!
Open-source Patent Policy
thanks for your reply; no, that one was something much more simpler. I was looking for something kids can use to design tables unserstand their relationships etc. I'm sure it wasnt flash. Havy use of javascript , I think.
I used to feel that way, but not so much anymore. The difference for me is that I think reading good literature or maybe even watching a good film can help make you a better person, depending on how you define "better". Sometimes literature can bring up ethical or philosophical issues: consider how "Antigone" makes you think about the relationship between citizen and state, "Cat's Cradle" discusses the dangers of technology, or "Less Than Zero" sheds light on the alienation and social dysfunction of the wealthy suburban middle class. It's easy to think about the tragedy of child soldiers in Africa, but it wasn't until I read "Beasts Of No Nation" by Uzodinma Iweala that I realized just how horrific things really are. Reading classics like "The Odyssey" or Dante's "Inferno" will help you understand Western culture in general. Certain novels are important from a historical point of view, e.g. "The Jungle" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin." This is one of the reasons I prefer reading to most other forms of entertainment: a movie or a video game can be fun to watch or play, but beyond that, there's usually not much else there.

I'm not suggesting that people only read fiction for self-improvement or to make you better at conversation: there's nothing wrong with reading something for it's own sake. Is reading something for its own sake better than watching a movie or playing a video game for its own sake? Probably not.
The best measurement of code quality
Ha, how did I never see that?
Internet Video vs Digital TV
You might want to consider adding:

DH2.5. Denial

The form of this response is the basic "no, it isn't", without any other supporting details. As such, it falls below "DH3. Contradiction", which at least tries to advance the argument, even if not very well. Monty Python's "Argument Clinic" provides a well-known and amusing example of this.
((less mean) people)
Semantic Search and Semantic Web, Two Different Things
have you read it?
A lot of people think they can't help it, so don't seriously try to.
Mostly a linkjack of:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...
The Economics of Gawker Bloggers
Solar Start-Up Expects Cost Competitive With Coal By 2012
Cabel Sasser of Panic (indie Mac company) on software dev, etc. [video]
On a related note, I saw an old interview with William F Buckley about his show Firing Line. He mentioned that he had a chapter in an earlier book that described various debate tactics used by his guests. He described a few in the interview that I immediately recognized in online comments, too. Sadly, I don't know which book has this chapter.
Outsourcing in the future will be more like current freelancing
Where My Traffic Comes From (Hacker News brings more traffic than my.yahoo.com..)
Assuming knowledge of basic computing, I would say the progression for a beginner is as follows: html, css, javascript, backend language of your choice (php,asp,etc.), databases/SQL. You can stop here if all you want to do is build a website, just keep in mind that web programming is only one branch on the massive tree of computer programming.

It should also be noted that building a website is also an exercise in graphic design, writing, and user interaction design. Anyone of those other facets can be equally difficult to learn and master.
From your passions, try to do what you like at your best. The rest will follow automagically :)
Not everyone needs to code in a startup. It's good to have someone that is more inclined to bizdev than hacking.

You should however be familiar with the hacker's arsenal of tools like Trac, Subversion, Eclipse, etc.

The first order of business in a startup is to build something that people want (after PG). More and more that something should solve some real business problem - not just another me-too social network .

I'd think your economics background could be put to good use in today's climate. Do feel that you have to be a coder - but find someone that can. You'll have a good team.

Cheers
The reasons are the same as they usually are: with a higher-level language and more dynamic environment, programs are smaller, easier to write, and easier to change.

There are libraries for integrating Lisp programs with .NET and SQL. I'm not sure about Windows services, though. Check that first.

Are you asking as a programmer trying to make up your own mind or because you want to make a case to a manager or decision maker?
s/Do/Don't
I know the feeling - I get it sometimes as well. I don't think it's a "correct" feeling, though. Certainly fiction can be as intellectually stimulating as nonfiction, and the fiction/non-fiction line is an artificial construction anyway.

One way to get over this feeling may be to keep in mind that the raw accumulation of knowledge is not really that valuable anymore - certainly less valuable than mental "agility" (for lack of a better term). In other words, we can look up any facts we need to know pretty easily, but being able to put order to those facts and make correct predictions based on them is a skill that takes practice. I think that some fiction may be better at fostering that skill than most non fiction - especially labyrinthine stuff like Neal Stephenson, Tolstoy, or Thomas Pynchon.
Nice prediction, Nostradamus.
That's a really neat idea.
I'm a programmer, and I wouldn't mind brainstorming with you if you wanted to try and put together a simple implementation. I'm just thinking that implementing components like resistors, diodes, and what-not sounds like a lot of fun.
If you want to get a taste of the whole thing:

1. Install Ubuntu.

2. Start using emacs (maybe with "Learning Emacs", O'Reilly, as mechanical_fish suggests).

3. Learn some Python (maybe with "Learning Python", O'Reilly too).

4. Use webpy (http://webpy.org) to develop a simple web application.

5. Learn how to program SQLite (and thus basic SQL) using Python and make your web application use a database.

6. Make your application public (http://vpslink.com might be enough, $7.95/month).

The 4th and 5th are "minimalistic" (for a web framework and a DB engine), least "complication", because the goal should be (I think) completing a simple project in a few months. From this you might get a glimpse of "the forest", or "connect the dots" (of web programming).

After that, if you want more, you can now go learn all of what others have very appropriately suggested: SICP, some system administration, PostgreSQL, Ruby (+ on Rails), git (or Bazaar), Data Structures, Algorithms, Test Driven Development, PHP, etc.
Signs that you may be suffering from homepreneuritosis
Mozilla Prism: A fancy name for a technology as old as the browser
> It owns internet addresses such as perfume.com, cricket.com and brazil.com.

Is this supposed to be a good meter of a company?
Hm, I just tried it and downloaded an image I found in that way. But then upon closer look the license requires attribution and disallows derivative works.

So the search function of flickr is still not good enough, should be more finegrained with respect to the license options.

And why does flickr not have an "add to favorites" button? Puzzles me every time I visit the site. It just goes to show that usability is apparently overrated as a factor for success...
Two more keywords: vim. mercurial.

;)
How do you account for disagreeing, not with someone's conclusions, but with the means that they used to arrive at them?

I usually think it in vain to post a comment on something that I fundamentally disagree with, because I rarely find an author with a strong point of view who has not already found a choir to preach to, so that speaking up would be futile—I would be drowned out, or villanized.

The only kinds of comments which seem to me to be worth making are those in which:
You agree, and offer some novel corroboration;
You agree with the conclusion, but disagree with the means;
Or you raise a question, without treating of the conclusion at all.

The obvious possibility would be to reproduce the entire hierarchy, but to a different purpose.

DH0: "Stop agreeing with me, you're making me look bad."
DH1: "You should let someone else make that argument."
DH2: "That (arrogant,presumptuous,juvenile) tone won't go over well."
DH3: "You're going to offend people who believe X."
DH4: "I heard an argument Y against this," or "How do you solve problem Y"?
DH5: "Have you considered solution Z' to problem Z?"
DH6: "You're formulating your own belief incorrectly."

But I don't think that your bounds hold here. DH0 is still maximally unhelpful, but DH6 may be just as bad. DH1 may be the wisest advice that you can receive. DH3 is less helpful than DH2 (better to be asked to express your beliefs more politely, than to be asked to conceal them). And DH4 is more polite than DH5 (better to solicit the author's opinion on a difficulty, than to obtrude your own).
Digital and analog circuit design are art-like activities and doing them with grace requires knowledge of many other levels of abstraction all the way down to physics.

It is possible to lack these fundamentals and become a decent designer by doing design and filling in the gaps as you go but that is the exception and not the rule. And I have only ever seen this exception happen with the help of a real-life mentor and access to some fancy lab equipment.

It should be possible to formulate the teaching of EE into a more project-oriented manner but you need to realize this would be a nontraditional approach. When I studied for my EE degree we followed a program that has been roughly constant since the 1960s, starts close to the bottom and expands in both directions at the same time. They sprinkle design in the whole time but you do not get to do full designs until junior and senior year.

So finding this book might be tricky because EE is traditionally taught in a completely different way than you would like to approach it.

One thing worth looking into would be a class at a local college taught for either local motivated/gifted HS students or for physics majors which teaches you a bunch of practical EE stuff. The class would be lab oriented. Teach you the use of test equipment, building and debugging circuits, some theory. Objective is to get you into a place where you would have some hope of being able to come up with designs and make them work without having all that "foundation" knowledge. This would help you get to the point described above as you would have your mentor and access to the equipment (at least for the duration of the class-- make the most of it!)

If you are local to Boston the Harvard Extension School used to offer two such courses-- one for digital and one for analog. I believe the courses were designed by the author of "The Art of Electronics" and in fact used that text. (I did not take them but a friend of mine did.)

Neato, you can still take those classes; poke around http://www.extension.harvard.edu/ for:

* PHYS E-123a Laboratory Electronics: Analog Circuit Design
* ENSC E-123 Laboratory Electronics: Digital Circuit Design

Happy hacking!
The Story of the Ribbon: Rationale Behind Office 2007 UI
Good catch. There are quite a few submarines in this one.
It was those damned shiftless minorities, not our commision only salespeople. A salesperson would NEVER lie to close a sale.

Thanks Sarah Silverman, for making racist humor ok for rich white people.
i agree. being a hacker is more of an attitude toward the world than any one set of skills. skills can be learned easily, adjusting your entire outlook on life takes alot more work.
and the reason for changing the title was ...?
After Microsoft being attacked for years about mediocre (awful?) interface design, this presentation really proves that some serious, deep thought has been put into the new version. Given that the new interface is the first that I enjoy to use, I think it paid off.

An interesting factoid: Many Office users spend more one-on-one time with office than with their spouses...
Not sure I agree with that order. I personally know people who have learned SQL before php or other backend language. You make a good point about the other elements in website building. It can be invaluable to have a good designer/user interface expert type on your team. In my experience _most_ hacker types are weaker in those areas, myself included.
I have been developing in c# and ASP.NET for around 8 years and developing professionally for about 15 years. I have been looking into lisp/scheme and just wondered what other people thought. I have dabbled with python, ruby and smalltalk recently aswell, however people do seem to like this thing called lisp. I have been trying to work out what the fuss was all about. I want to be able to develop quickly and do find the Visual Studio environment and the .NET framework very helpful when you are looking for functions. However i get frustrated with how verbose the language is and I do miss the ability to modify the program at runtime which I was able to do back in my FoxPro days!!
The 'C' Programming Language.

if you do not like C programming,

"How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python"
to learn python.

available for free on the net
I think the point of the A List Apart article was to get your visitors involved before requiring a full sign up. Show them your app is actual valuable and useful to them before you require any commitment on their part. Once they're engaged a small sign-up form or an activation email is no longer a hassle.
Stars wars on telnet! Yes.
growth = d(size)/dt
Goddamn, trolls are causing physical injury to people now? I gotta step up my game.
If your goal is to become a surgeon, don't start by learning to cast your own surgical instruments. Same principle applies here - hang with the econ, then hire a guy with stains all over his shirt when you're ready.
Someone else mentioned this but I want to give another boost for the lab manual for the horowitz and hill's art of electronics - it's a little dated but still a great resource. For example I remember doing the project where you build a simple analog to digital converter. I had read the theory behind these devices many times without comprehension, but building the project illuminated it.

I've also found the ARRL handbooks to be extremely helpful for getting RF and microwave projects to work without sinking huge amounts of cash on expensive equipment like vector network analyzers.
I would suggest you to start at the client side. this is where all server technologies are willing to end up at.
Therefore start in this order:
1) (X)Html. 2) CSS. 3) JavaScript + toolkit library such as jQuery or Prototype. 4) Python. 5)SQL (and SQLite).

In between read about theories and patterns in software design (Wikipedia is a great resource).

And do not ever be shy to ask whatever you do not understand.

good luck.
The authors are idiots. Of course they would write something like this, they probably make their living off selling these sorts of pie-in-the-sky ideals to people. The whole tone of this article is pretentious and insulting. Personal attacks are perfectly valid forms of argument and communication. If you look at these things in terms of effectiveness, they are usually more practical approaches that yield results, especially in the political realm. One thing they write is:

'If you can't find an actual quote to disagree with, you may be arguing with a straw man.'

That isn't true. Using analog-situation arguments and reductions to absurdity to point out the fallacies of a point is a long-used, valid practice. The central point of their writing seems to be that addressing substance using reason is the most effective way of arguing. They write:

"The force of a refutation depends on what you refute. The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point."

and point out that refutation is the strongest from of argument against some other point, Well, "strongest" is a subjective evaluation and I would like to point out that in the history of argument and in particular political discourse, usually it is the loudest, angriest, and downright scariest people in the argument who win; for example, look at the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s So these people have it just plain all wrong.

There, now, did I miss anything? =)

Great piece, really, I loved it. Thanks for putting it out there!
If I were to lose all programming knowledge tomorrow, I'd send the following to my future self:

0) If you feel confused at any step, use Google.

1) Make an HTML page with Hello World.

2) Add an image to the page.

3) Position the image on the page by adding a CSS style to it.

4) Add a JavaScript script to the page that creates another image element, with another src URL, adds it to the page, and positions it.

5) Learn the principle behind the URLs of tiles at OpenStreetMap (http://openstreetmap.org) by using "View Image Source" in the browser. Hint: the numbers are zoomlevel/x/y.

6) Add a script in your page that creates some new image elements with OSM tiles, sitting seamlessly next to each other.

7) Learn about event handlers in JavaScript (onmousedown/onmousemove/onmouseup), and try to make the resulting map draggable. In Firefox first, then IE.

Congratulations, you're now a passably good client-side webdev.
What keeps the fire burning and motivates you to keep working on your startup
Sounds good. I myself am a newbie programmer; just recently started to learn RoR. I'm busy with my startup, but I think it might be worthwhile to kick some ideas around. Drop me an email if you get a chance (my email is in my public profile).
New anti-running legislation introduced in Congress to stop baneful influence on our children.

Running causes horrible leg and knee problems, and people die every single year from overdosing and running to exhaustion! Running is a gateway sport into the even more dangerous sports including soccer and mountain climbing.
C is not the path of least resistance for the OP. He is neither trying to make a career out of software engineering nor hack on a UNIX kernel.

He wants to be at the fringe of business and software and these days if that's where you want to be you can "get by" knowing only a high-level language really well and hiring/partnering with more specialized engineering talent as needed if the business-side requires it.

Mastering the high-level language is arguably as difficult as mastering C but the leverage you get from the high-level language is huge relative to C for the sort of business/software problems that will be of interest to him.