skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Cornell

(also B.S., Physics, Case Western Reserve)

I had one formal course in software: Motorola 68k assembly language programming, in college. Three months of super-tedious review for the slow students ("this is a hexadecimal number") followed by perhaps one month of interesting new knowledge ("this is a stack frame"). I never tried to learn programming from a lecture course again.

I self-taught my own way through ArsDigita's web programming curriculum in the late 1990s... reading Greenspun's stuff was what convinced me that software was actually worth doing, and the reading list was great: SICP, Learning Emacs, Fogel's CVS book (hey, that's all they had in the elder days... :), Internetworking with TCP/IP, SQL for Smarties, Tufte, etc.
maybe we should make everyone take some type of programming quiz before they're allowed to comment or submit links?
Tell me more about "the AI?".
PhD in Mathematics (computational physics), 1997. Self-taught at programming from age 14. After finishing my PhD I decided to get out of academia. Didn't want to work as a "quant", hence: software (mainly programming).
Anyone got an invite they can send me?
Arc uses MzSchemes reader (it modifies the readtable slightly to support []-syntax). AFAIK you cannot access the reader API from inside Arc. The reason Utf-8 is mentioned is that it is the default encoding when MzScheme reads or writes files or streams.

I don't think anyone at this point would claim that Arc supports unicode-in-general.
BA in Computer Science from a tiny liberal arts college. I worked as a programmer for 3 years. now I'm back in school, working on a PhD in the biomedical sciences at BCM.
Yep, I agree with the suggestion to remove the term "cash money". Makes me think of a bad hip hop video--remember the Cash Money Millionaires? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_Money_Millionaires)
BS Comp Sci, UC Santa Barbara
B.S. Computer Science, FSU
It must be nice to have the problem of needing to prevent an onslaught of new users.

That's when you know your idea is pretty good.
Gardner, KS. (Kansas City area)
Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Also worked as a software developer at a big online retailer ;-).
http://paulgraham.com/core.html
Ask YC: Mid-sized, livable, hacker-friendly towns?
My wife and I are pretty sure that we're not going to stay here in Innsbruck after this summer (not positive yet, but it's likely).

So... we're starting to think about "where?!". We have a child on the way, and I've "done my time" in the bay area. I'd rather have a smaller chance at making a successful startup than deal with that rat-race again.

Our preference is for somewhere livable, with a decent climate, "mid-sized" (say 100K-500K), with a university, and some topography (dead flat places need not apply:-).

How's Boulder, Colorado? Santa Fe, NM? Boulder's sort of up there on my list. I like Southern Oregon a lot too (Ashland), but it doesn't offer much in the way of job opportunities. My wife is in biotech, so someplace that offers something for her is high priority too (once again, the bay area would be good, but... not with a kid, and having to drive everywhere).

Anyone got a favorite mid-sized town that might not easily pop up on the radar, that more or less fits the bill?

Incidentally, this doesn't have to be in the US. We would be in Padova, Italy if everything else were equal, but the political and economic situation in Italy is not pretty right now. A romance language would probably be easier to deal with (indeed, I'm looking at an opportunity in Portugal).

Thanks guys,
Dave
Haha, I know a few people working as developers at a big online retailer from Waterloo too.
I suggest FST and RST. These are composable, e.g. FFRRST == CAADDR.
Super-duper. I'm not going to use Arc for anything serious until essential libraries are in place.
Made it 1.5 years into an aerospace engineering program before realizing I was wasting my time and money. I was making six-figures and had racked up tons of hands on experience working with startups and Fortune 500s by the time my classmates walked out with a piece of paper and some huge debts.
BS Computer Systems Engineering, Boston University
I've been doing the same thing for a few years now. I try to "leave the house" - shopping, eating out, etc - every day. Having a dog also helps.

I am happiest when I have an active social life (out 2-4 times a week), although this can be difficult to maintain.
BS Finance, University of Dayton, 2006
uhh .. what is I/O psychology? maybe there is some obvious abbreviation that I am missing. but I/O .. well to a programmer that is always input-output and I am having a hard time thinking about what psychology might be involved in reading/writing to disks for instance.
An IP Parable: Bob Dylan rips off an obscure memoir -- the author is delighted
When was the last time you saw a bunch of molecules suddenly become self aware?
I had a similar experience; I submitted a Putnam problem here and there were several excellent proofs and a good discussion.

At programming.reddit I got "try homework.reddit.com"
Hacker News now supports "utf-8", a way of storing text that supports characters from languages other than English.

The excitement comes from the fact that Hacker News is programmed in Arc, and the change to Hacker News implies that Arc will soon support utf-8 too.
Arrington says it so that I don't have to:

"But it’s not clear that any of them are in a hurry to become a 'relying party' (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to their sites)... Everyone, of course, wants to be an ID issuer, since they get to 'own' the user."

Is 'own' the genteel way to spell p0wn?
£!
What programming tasks should you be able to accomplish to be considered an "A" ranked Hacker?
I'd like to know where I rank against my peers. How can you figure out if you're at the top, middle, or bottom of your field?
(pursuing) BS Computer Science, BA Philosophy, Duke University
What kind of site does it make YC if this is how to get karma?
How to Reduce Plane Boarding Time by 4x
This is the best use of MCMC to hack "the system." Perfect "surprising result" for a Y Combinator application.
Maryland is great. You can live in Columbia, MD and be between Baltimore and D.C. The IT salaries are very competitive and the cost of living is dramatically cheaper. Tons of great schools and Universities. Mountains 3 hours to the west, beaches 3 hours to the east. It gets a little too cold Dec.-Feb..
Darn.

At least you were kind enough to let us know.
Somerville, MA fits the bill pretty well, for sufficiently small values of "decent climate".
Or just wait for the GTD fad to pass.
Giants in Combat
I've been thinking about getting an MS in HCI. How did you like the program?
PG does a lot to maintain news.yc, but it's probably his reputation that does most of the work. My sense is that the people responsible for turning reddit from what it was into what it is see him as "elitist," and don't want to be associated with him.

Which is fine with me...
The Three Must-Have Rails Books for Beginners
They left reddit and came here
BS Comp Sci - University of Kansas - 2005
I have to agree. As a Mass hacker working for a small software company, the Somerville/Cambridge area is quite nice. Although the climate can be, and I am being as frank as possible, unbearably shitty, it is a nice place.
What are the benefits of living in the U.S for startups/tech?
I currently live in Canada, and from what I can see there is no benefit for me to move to the U.S. Ever. Healthcare, cost of living, etc ..

But it's obvious people live in the U.S in this kind of industry for a reason. Why is it?
Serialized hash tables.
.(; sɹǝpuoʍ sǝop ǝɹnssǝɹd ɔı1qnd ɟo ʇıq ǝ1ʇʇı1 ɐ 'ǝǝs ¡ʍou ǝɯosǝʍɐ sı ɔɹɐ uı ʇɹoddns ǝpoɔıun ¡ɥɐɥ
I think the problem is when people start commenting for the sake of commenting... And the more polluted your user base the more likely that is to happen. I mean, i'm not going to lie, i know very little about programming but i do find interest in reading the stories and comments regardless of my own inability to code. I knew that i had nothing to bring to the table to that conversation, so i minded my own business and tried to be a good observer. Once the user-base becomes to crowded people get a false sense of entitlement, not necessarily because they feel like the have the right to comment, but that they need to comment. I feel that if a social news site is going to succeed they have to find a way to curb that need as the community grows.
I suggested that at reddit about 6 months ago. Right around the time of the digg exodus. and I was called a Nazi/elitist/asshole. But I was right.

http://reddit.com/goto?id=2c2ux
I guess I wasn't really thinking about why choose those names. If it was just that you could have whatever you like - I like (hd x) and (tl x) but that's me. Or even (0 x) and (1: x) could work. A rose is a rose and all that.

What I was really thinking about were things like why have pairs as a primitive and why enshrine the idea of lists as pairs linked up in a certain way?

From ac.scm, it looks like the current set of primitives are:

(define (ar-type x)
(cond
((ar-tagged? x) (vector-ref x 1))
((pair? x) 'cons)
((symbol? x) 'sym)
((null? x) 'sym)
((procedure? x) 'fn)
((char? x) 'char)
((string? x) 'string)
((integer? x) 'int)
((number? x) 'num) ; unsure about this
((hash-table? x) 'table)
((output-port? x) 'output)
((input-port? x) 'input)
((tcp-listener? x) 'socket)
((exn? x) 'exception)
(#t (err "Type: unknown type" x))))

So why that set? Why have chars and strings and symbols? Why have integers and numbers?
the past != the future

statistical "facts" != your own experience
I actually like the climate. I think it runs in the family: my aunt is moving to Donner Pass (yes, that Donner), voluntarily.
I live in Austin, TX and find its size to be manageable, although it is growing fast. Is that too large for you? It has the University of Texas, its in the 'Hill Country', and has a lot of smart and creative folks. I don't have a car and ride nothing but the Capital Metro bus. The average age is pretty young here, so there are a lot of parties and such, which is a plus for some but minus for others. You will like it if you are into: lots of coffee shops with wireless access, live music (South By Southwest is just around the corner, and there are concerts all the time), lots of bars, the Texas Longhorns, attractive people, and some yuppie/hippie types. Lots of people hang out at Zilker Park (where the Austin City Limits Music Festival is) and run around Town Lake.
Does anyone have figures for acceptance rates from previous years? I'd like to have a rough idea what my chances of getting to go are.
Still there? It'd be nice to speak with fellow Hacker News readers on campus.

(in progress) BS, Computer Science, University of Florida
I grew up in a suburb of St. Paul. I've been around for the past couple weeks, but I'm going back to California tomorrow.
Looks like news.yc is getting pretty close to the shark ramp.
Romanic language and decent climate? Most of Spain is full of lovely mid-sized towns. fitting those bills. What else is "hacker friendly"? Heck, any rathole is hacker friendly, all I need is coffee, cigarettes and somewhere to plug my laptop into.

Oh, you have family. That's different. Still, Spain's nice and Portugal might be, too.
Are we Elitists if we really are better?

You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.
> I think the problem is when people start commenting for the sake of commenting...

Commenting is hard, let's go shopping!

http://reddit.com/user/consultant_barbie
You can also look at http://hackrtrackr.com/ . It was developed in response to a lot of questions like this.
Seattle is pretty good too.
milwaukee, wisconsin, GE medical
The 'biotech jobs' thing is the problematic thing about Spain (and likely Portugal as well). I think. Anyone with good local knowledge is welcome to correct me. Otherwise, it has certainly crossed our thoughts - we went to Madrid, Sevilla and Granada on vacation a few years ago and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit.
Hint: many web stacks suppport server-side sessions. Via cookies.
farscape! if you dont know what that is, you owe it to yourself to watch it.
I'm from Eugene, and don't think I could handle the weather there again, let alone further north, although if other people reading this are curious, I'd have to put a word in for Portland, if the climate isn't a problem for you.
You need to be less subjective if you want a reasonable answer. Metrics are out there for things like salary, number of users, lines of code written (for open source stuff at least), number of appearances on David Letterman..
Kevin Mitnick's is also pretty cool: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranh/106709219/
You might want to consider Montreal, Quebec.
It's a very lively city. It's more populated than what you're asking for (1.6M), but it has 4 universities, and the city itself is on a mountain (mount royal, not a very big mountain), which is itself on an island (the island of montreal).

You can e-mail me if you want to know more about this city.
iratsu at gmail dot com
Could you offer a better solution? What would your solution offer that octets do not? Random character access? No, because not a single unicode encoding offers easy random character access (because they are made of possibly several codepoints, which, in some encodings, are made of more than one basic "chars"). Gylph, word and sentence segmentation? I guess not.
Spend an hour or so learning Ruby, then dive into Rails by creating something like a to-do list. Since you're already competent in Java, you should have no problem learning Rails in three months.
We're distributed and for the most part it works fine. We get together once a year at SXSW to work/learn/party.

Right now we're at most 5 hours apart in time, which isn't bad, but when we tried going fully "global" by trying to hire someone in Germany we discovered there's an outer bound to how far apart you can be.

We use irc, email & skype.
Move to Coimbatore, India.

Great climate, natural beauty, five big engineering colleges, low pollution, low living cost ($300/month=great life), many libraries, awesome eateries etc.
Boulder's great - good community of hackers. Startups work together to throw fun events (private hack-a-thons, discussions around new technologies, etc). They've got some great New Tech Meetups, The Boulder Open Coffee Club, etc. Good group of VCs in the area as well.
Your point taken.

If you feel to taste Scheme again, check out mine http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/ . It has string-split :) Seriously, it aims at being a handy tool for day-to-day scripting.
YC winners have to move to the Bay Area or Boston.
"Then, thinking further, are there any programming languages that rely on the sorts of math where f(f^-1(x)) is simplified to x without being evaluated?"

Mathematica?
"Relative to other programming languages, Ruby and the Rails framework can be particularly onerous just to install and configure."

WTF are they talking about?

sudo port install rb-rubygems
sudo gem install rails
rails myproject
cd myproject
script/server
B.A. in Art and Photography. I was working in the mail room of a financial company here in Chicago when word got around that I was an art major and that I was into computers. The CIO came over one day and dropped a 4" stack of HTML print outs on my lap, asking me to build a company newsletter website. I haven't stopped web development since. (I can't believe that's pushing 10 years ago).

I dropped out of grad school (computer science) a few years back after completing 1 year only because it wasn't enjoyable. It felt like high school, no enthusiasm, like every HAD to be there. Classes were painfully slow and sequential, stripped of any creativity.
"(incidentally, what could we call Smalltalk/Scheme/Forth to group them together?)"

Axiomatic Languages?
Can you write a compiler? Are you comfortable in freedom languages? Can you grok functional programming?

Those are a few good questions.
Holmdel, NJ. Home of AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Avaya, Vonage and general telecommunications. Lots of brain here. Population is 20% Asian, so kids get off on chinese new year (today). Schools are very exceptional, and the selective High Tech High School nearby in Lincroft is top 50 high schools in the country. A decent home around here is between 400-700k, probably a little cheaper for townhouses.
Stay away from Santa Fe! I lived there for a few year and it's not hacker friendly. It's a beautiful place, but when I was there there wasn't much of a hacker community. Also, it's expensive there and it's hard to find jobs that pay well outside of Los Alamos and city/state government. If you're white (I'm not), you'll likely encounter racism and you'll likely have a harder time in city/state government than if you weren't. If you're a freelancer, you'll have a hard time finding customers that are willing to pay a decent amount for your services. There's also a large current of snobbery and defensiveness in the culture which is distasteful in general and which doesn't really nurture hackers.
In about an hour the Grog in Newburyport, MA is going to have a "North Shore Web Geek" meetup. I think we're about an hour north of Somerville.
You know, stuff like:

powerbook.local 102> sudo port install rubygems
Password:
Error: Port rubygems not found
Pittsburgh, PA (Oakland, Squirrel Hill) is a great place.
Housing close to the city can be found pretty cheap.
CMU, Pitt Med School, RAND.
It definitely has topography.
Has a small biotech community.
Shouldn't Clayton Bellmor's say <div class="Website-Designer"> ? (class instead of id, hyphen instead of underscore). I guess maybe he's saying he's unique.
Thanks for the info, I'm city shopping right now and I'm planning to check out Austin at SXSW. Any Austin tips for me? I try to avoid having a car at all costs, so it's good to know you've found that feasible.
I wouldn't say that Slashdot's secret is in the voting algorithm...it's in the voting allocation.

Not every Joe Douchebag gets a vote on Slashdot. You need to have been around a while, and you need to have a reasonably good reputation to get mod points. IMO, the downfall of Digg, Reddit et al. is that they let everyone express their opinion by voting. I think it's a bad model.
Gwenhwyfaer suggested TAWDry languages.
Paul is chill ;)

I doubt YC becomes like reddit, main reason being that the community here is extremely good at downmodding arbitrary posts.

Is it the goal of YC to become enormous or to provide a news sharing area for serious programmers?
I'm in Pittsburgh until I leave... the biotech community mostly consists of UPMC but they have a huge presence in the town. There are some medical device startups here but the lack of angel/VC funding minimizes the startup presence.

Housing is very cheap here; it's one of the few housing markets in the country with the peculiar property that a monthly mortgage payment would be less than rent on an equivalent house. I wouldn't recommend raising a family in Oakland, which is turning into a student ghetto all over, but Squirrel Hill's a good neighborhood.

There's a whole lot of topography and global warming has made our winters a little better.
BSE computer engineering and economics, Penn, but don't use any of it at my startup!
I think it's like going to LA - yeah that's where most of the major deals go down, but 8 out of 10 waitresses are also aspiring actresses. If you take a random sampling of people in the valley, you are much more likely to find people trying to break into the business than people who have already made it.

I've talked to some people about why silicon valley is where it is and some say it's pretty arbitrary, some even claim that a new "silicon prairie" if you will, could be started here. Then the temperature goes from 52 to 12 with -11 windchill and, suddenly, we realize all over again why we too want to move to California.
The Titanic reports on the iceberg
If it makes my life easier, they can all own me.

Wait, that came out wrong.
What didn't you like about the bay area? Mountain View or Sunnyvale seem to be the perfect fit for what you're looking for!
Why not live in the bay area, enjoy all of the awesomeness, and opt out of the "rat race"?
Not at all...it doesn't seem to have any affect on how I think.

Then again, how am I supposed to tell if I only know how I feel as a bilingual person? I spoke chinese and english as long as I can remember.
Wow!

The third one down, Antonio Diaz (Artifice Studios), is my best friend and God Father of my baby-to-be (found out today I'm having a girl -- Whoo!).

Glad to see his work getting some recognition. :)
Ah, La Belle Province. It's been 5 years since I moved to the US, but I still have to go home for some Poutine - it's just not the same when I make it at home.
Does Icelandic have the 'th' sound? I've heard that English is the only European language with it, but if Icelandic has the written thorn, maybe you have that sound too?
wow thats beautiful.
Different people have different ideas of serious. To me, exploratory programming is fairly serious, because that's the kind of programming that generates ideas.

Arc is already capable of supporting some subset of applications that are serious in your sense. News.YC is at least moderately serious in that sense.
there is a very different pattern of karma for comments in "big" threads.
Cells - Bringing modularity to Rails apps
So am I, but I've flown to San Francisco for the last 2 years for this - contemplating applying for another year to go out and network. I have to admit, I partied a little to hard the night before SS last year with some fellow hackers and was very late for the sessions.
"I am the Co-founder of a growing company" is fine. You really don't need to get hung up on this.

Call her Queen Amidala if it'll let you get back to creating value. Sounds like you've got a well-balanced team, an idea you all believe in, everyone's happy with their shareholdings - move on!!
Amen -- as someone who has sold startup software the "official" way, the back door is definitely better.

It limits the possibilities of what you can offer, though, if your product needs proprietary or "difficult to obtain" data (i.e., data that the actual user can only get through one of his I.T. support guys).
Anyone have and idea what this will cost when out of beta?
Two come to mind for me: Columbus, OH and Champaign, IL.

Champaign seems pretty close to what you're looking for, but it's definitely too flat. That's why I'm leaving.

Columbus has Ohio State right there, and is as booming as you're going to find in Ohio. It's a beautiful city for the size and there's a sizable tech industry there. It's a place I wouldn't hesitate to live, but I have yet to do my time in the bay area and look forward to trying that for a few years.
For Hackers: How long to learn .Net?
I'm a non programmer with no coding knowledge who is working with a .Net/Java programmer of 9 yrs on a startup. I'm keen to be able to help out, but expect that would take years. At the very least, I think it will be useful to understand how difficult certain things are and what is involved in tasks. What is the best way forward for me to learn (any resources that help speed the process up and make it interesting are welcome) and how long would it take?
Half a BS in physics, half in Economics, both UIUC
Newspapers Dying - News Thriving
How To Explain Stuff
Milwaukee, WI
On reflection: your reply is ♫♪♫ to my ears. I ♥ good points...

Edit: heh, "thanks grandma" has even more than that.

Edit: btw it's funny that i'm still being upmodded
I've read this before...

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

The PEP system is another reason I also love python.
Fixed. The port was actually "rb-rubygems", not "rubygems".

I'm no rails fanboy by far, but it's unfair to claim that rails is a hard environment to use when in reality rails goes out of its way to make RoR development dead simple.

</nitpick>
Personally, I think it would be easier to find someone like that on the Internet.
I think an IDE implemented in JavaScript would be rather inefficient, but that doesn't matter with modern hardware.