skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the list, thanks! This is what I am looking for - there are certain things that I am pretty sure that I need to know better, but with my lack of applicable experience, I don't know which of my notions are correct and which ones will lead me down an unproductive path.

I too have been amazed at how little databases have been taught in my CS studies. For example, this previous term I was required to take a VB.net course. In this class, integrating a database and an application was mentioned in chapter 12 of a 12 chapter book (the shortest chapter of the book, at that)! My meager exposure to databases in my databases class was hardly sufficient to provide me with what was truly required to bring together databases with application development - sure, I knew how to query and how to join tables in SQL, but I had no real clue to how this pertained to my previous C++ or Java classes.

Thanks for the insight thinkcomp!

-Matt
Thanks jmtulloss,
I have played with SQLite a little and thought that might be a good course of action for my learning.

Thanks for the support :)

-Matt
I don't think I could pass Steve's interview - that's why I had to start my own company :-) Hmm, I wonder if I should sack myself...
A couple months ago, he wrote an article about how he thinks that the ideal blog length is something that takes between 10 and 50 minutes to read, because then more of it gets stored in your long-term memory. Not surprisingly, that article is also quite lengthy:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...
You should know that the world is starting to slowly figure out that programming is not like a manufacturing plant at that finding the cheapest possible labor to do it is sub-optimal.

As such, you should (hopefully) have better opportunities as a developer now than was the case a few years ago.

I'd recommend finding a team that you'd be really happy working with and can learn from. The standard deviation on compensation is not that high in your early career -- but that on fun and learning is. Pick the right group to work with, it makes all the difference.
It may be personal. I remember reading his analysis of MBIA on valueinvestorsclub.com in 2002, and he was just as down on it then (though at the time he used kilobytes of prose instead of megabytes of numbers).
It isn't trivia. You can "get things done" a lot faster when you don't have to A) google all week for the answer or B) try out multiple half-baked implementations.

I don't have an issue with Gooogle's requirement to know what you are doing, but unfortunately I think the interesting jobs at Google are becoming few and far between.
He interviewed me, or I interviewed him, depending on your perspective; but after Google made their offer (obviously, before I decided against accepting it) rather than during the main interview phase. This was largely a response to the recruiter screwing up and not scheduling any interviews for me with anyone in Google Research.
I think there is a fair chance that much of the semantic web dream (i.e. "the internet organizing itself") will arrive pretty suddenly, with exponential-like growth.

There has been a very long period of ramping up, experimentation and hype, but it may only take a few good tools, some well written blog posts and some serious incentives (e.g. Yahoo's embrace) to tip it from dream to reality.

This announcement may not actually reflect the tipping point, but its a certainly a good sign, and a major step in the right direction.
kinda sad when you put it that way.
I think we can safely assume AOL is no longer an issue. Anyone still using AOL dialup?
Potentially the worst article I've seen on HN. It spends several paragraphs stereotyping women, damning them for caring about looks, and then promoting the author's superiority for basically being smarter than them. (He understands the social hierarchy thing, they don't.) Then, without irony, he appeals to Natalie Portman, who is someone that is - wait for it - attractive.

Girls like guys who look nice for the same reason guys like girls who look nice: it's more attractive.
Mssr.Byrne Hobart, thank you for an excellent link. Your blog is also quite good. I'm going to have to dig around more.

Having played with the actual Excel spreadsheet, this seems like something that probably could have been done with Mathematica using less horsepower...or am I missing something?
I often wonder whether the semantic web is really Web 3.0. Shouldn't it be more like Web 2.5?

(Or maybe we should drop the revision numbers altogether?)

Seriously, I wonder if we shouldn't be thinking bigger. Adding "meaning" to web pages is important, but it seems like a smaller goal on the way to, I dunno, maybe the realization of The Metaverse (ala Stephenson). Or something big like that.
I guess you would have blamed Google if it had rained that day too.

I don't blame Google for the US Senate's lack of backbone, either. However, the legal situation, my dislike for what I saw of Silicon Valley weather (I like humidity), and the urban sprawl were all factors in my deciding that it wasn't an environment I would enjoy.
This is great news for the Web. Very bad news for Twine though.
The Semantic Web isn't complete until it's machine readable by an AI
I didn't know it was possible to bite without being angry...

It's a reference to fishing -- gruseom was suggesting that my parenthetical comment of "yes, we do exist" was bait (which he was going to take).
He didn't take a job at Google because of something a 3rd party (the U.S. Senate) did. What's to respond to?
"US Senate's lack of backbone"

Take this argument to reddit, please.

(Of course, if this gets downmodded immediately, then we'll all know that won't be necessary. Reddit has arrived here.)
The bottlenecks would be in the backbones, and fixing that means more equipment and more lines. Rub money and smart people together and you can fix that right quick.
Even The Devil Needs a Little Online Reputation Management
A hilarious comic of how even the devil needs some help once in a blue moon. Hell he has a reputation to keep up with!
It is machine-readable by an AI. The question is, where's the AI? ;)
I wonder how long until we start seeing the $49.99 ebook.
Had the jeans. Had the kicks. Had the day-glo. No mullet. Was that the problem?
Oh, I thought it referenced a dog biting someone in the arse. :|

Thanks for the clarification!
The Famous 2001 Article Outlining Tim Berners-Lee's Vision for the Semantic Web
I don't know too much about it, but I would assume that generating random values would be more efficient if it was built into hardware than if the software had to process it. So, instead of running through calculations to come up with multiple random values, it would be a streamlined because the processor would have it hard wired in.
>Tacky clothing and pasty physiques can be like second hand smoke.

But without the cancer risk.
>Anyone still using AOL dialup?

You'd be amazed how many people in US are still on AOL. They all use IE and some of them are still on 56K modems.
User With a Tattoo of Your Logo? Check.
Sorry about that I pasted the wrong one. I can't edit it now though, too much time has passed. The first page has the most interesting tidbit, that the number of applications to the iFund exceeded their expectations in the first 36 hours.
I agree with the guy, but my problem lays not in not knowing how to be more productive. The real issue is to get to actually follow those tips.

Every now and then I see myself buried in work and having to work 24x7. When I get like that, after solving the most imediate problem, I kinda reboot to the point where I actually follow good guidelines for productivity. After a few months, though, I get all burried on work again. My goal is to make this cycle so big that I progressively need less reboots. But it's hard to keep on track all the time with such a distractive and beatiful world around.
You might want to play with Git instead. SVN is very, very easy to set up and use:

svnadmin create ~/svn-repo

svn import myproject file:///home/you/svn-repo/myproject

svn co file:///home/you/myproject myproject-workingcopy

Work in the working copy as you would on any SVN project.

I spawn new branches whenever I start a new project. I've also tunneled it over SSH, HTTPS, blah blah blah, but it's boring now. Git is probably the future for big projects IMHO. (Although GOOG gets by with Perforce, which is basically SVN with some extra hooks)

Version management is a thought habit. Would you walk a tightrope without a net? Why write challenging code without one, then? Similar to automated regression testing, it's just another habit that offloads responsibilities onto the computer so that you can work on more interesting things.

If you haven't built at least a trivial application in *nix, even just something like a server for Dopewars, give it a shot. Obviously it's rare that you'd need to do it for a job, since most of the interesting protocols have good implementations, but you'll have more insight into when the standard implementation is actually a really bad idea... that is to say, rather more often than you'd think! It won't take more than an afternoon or two if you've done as well in all your CS classes as you say. (One thing you might like to do after that is go back and look at the twisting road the Subversion guys went down as they implemented their DeltaV protocol -- considering that these are old Apache developers, it's enlightening to see that they followed plenty of dead ends, too) For extra value, do it on an embedded system, with its totally different constraints. (If you have access to something like the Xilinx rig that we used for the CPU engineering class I took, so much the better -- FPGLAs can't help but become more popular as vertical markets are more automated)

There are so many opportunities out there for someone with a good grasp of both the theoretical and practical aspects... if you really like building things, you ought not to have any problem finding a job to suit you with your degree.
Couldn't see it at first, then enabled via NoScript. Might be something to consider if targeting technical markets!
I may be unusual, but I have more free time in the summer, while working full-time programming, then I do during the school year. But maybe that is because I'm taking 17 credit hours (5 CS classes, all upper division) at once. I probably put in 60-80 hours a week, no exaggeration.
Why won't Craigslist allow cross site search? Would it aid the scammers too much? Surely they could afford the server resources. There are many sellers willing to ship goods, but I would never know unless I used a service like this.
I'm working on a variant of this SOA model using (don't laugh) IRC and JSON. Pick your language, and hook-up.
What do you think of Cyc?

http://www.cyc.com/

Argh. 8week cut me off.

Bad grammar today. Meant to say 'isn't complete until an AI reads the semantic web' Time to go back to testing.
""shortly after the US Senate voted away the right of Habeas Corpus""

I am foreign living in USA, and this troubles me a lot. I basically have no right, and can wisked away at will from any american agency, and have absolutely no right to do anything about it if I was labeled a terrorist.

I come from a allay country of USA, but still the lack of abilities to appeal in court, is very frightening, almost fascistic.
except, you know, not... when you factor in their push into online advertising and consolidation/acquisitions as well as their publications.
i think the biggest difference for me was this:

the "best" solution isn't always the right solution.
Not Bank of America. Although they have banks in many countries, their account information is not connected. Don't be like me and learn this the hard way.
Neo-Victorian Computing
Well, actually I'd like to pay my rent and live (in €) with this money ...

Will see if I earn enough to travel after breakeven (and I don't think I'm going to the US soon).
A Congressman who can code
whoah ! It's time to limit your exposition on the US market !
But I understand, that's it's not easy, if you stop being on a market, you might never be able to come back.

Good luck, I feel your pain.
CVM JIT Constant Pool Dumps
The only part of Cyc I've looked at is OpenCyc and that was a few years ago when I was heavy into AI in college. I think it's a great effort!
enom seems to have some issues as well: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/09/025222&f...
Shite . . . that's scary!
Pitching Guy Kawasaki in an elevator
Generally, you're better off communicating about yourself in terms of opinions "it would drive me crazy to work in a cube", rather than "working in a cube is for crazy people". The second is guaranteed to offend, the first, not much.
HSBC is quite good. They even mail my account statements, etc internationally. Plus, if you have about $30k or more in your HSBC you'll probably get invited in HSBC Premier and they'll have you covered for relocations, etc.
Paste it in this thread, maybe? ;-D
Fotoblur public beta launches
Loving it so far. I tried Google a few years back and discarded it within weeks. I would write an article critical of some programming language X and especially critical of trying to program in X without experience, and the ads would be for "Learn X in 21 days."

I dropped it quickly. Even though Google ads produced clicks and revenue, they clashed with my weblog's basic philosophies. But in the trial so far, the Snaptalent ads are for the kinds of companies that seem to fit with my weblog's direction.

Congratulations, everyone!

http://weblog.raganwald.com (ads appear for individual articles, such as http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/11/i-think-it-funny-that-as...)
That's the whole point of the article, isn't it? SEO will be the motivation.
Spam Plants
not relevant to this site.
Stumpedia.com is truly a community built and driven social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. It does not depend on bots, algorithms, or company insiders to make decisions on the relevance and ranking of search results. Users are encouraged to create custom content pages for any possible search term in the world and links that will help people find relevant results and answers to their search requests.
Another Way To Virtually Explore A New Neighborhood: MapJack.com
Check it out. It is much better than google street.

" Mapjack.com showcases a new level of mapping technology. What others have done with NASA budgets and Star Wars-like equipment, we've done on a shoestring budget, along with a few trips to Radio Shack. Specifically, we developed an array of proprietary electronics, hardware and software tools that enable us to capture an entire city’s streets with relative ease and excellent image quality.

Our coverage area doesn’t stop street-side, we also include walking areas such as Parks, Universities and famous walking streets."
Check it out. It is much better than google street, and build in the spirit of HN. So far it seems they have only SF mapped.

" Mapjack.com showcases a new level of mapping technology. What others have done with NASA budgets and Star Wars-like equipment, we've done on a shoestring budget, along with a few trips to Radio Shack. Specifically, we developed an array of proprietary electronics, hardware and software tools that enable us to capture an entire city’s streets with relative ease and excellent image quality.

Our coverage area doesn’t stop street-side, we also include walking areas such as Parks, Universities and famous walking streets."
Graffiti art to boost your inspiration
I'd say that you're doing the wrong thing.

I went to school full time (min 12 hrs) and worked full time (min 40 hrs, sometimes 2 jobs) the entire time I was in college (hey graduated with only $7k in debt though!). There is no way I'd have been able to, let alone wanted to put in 60-80 hours for course work (still graduated cum laude, 3.5+ gpa). Either you're in courses that you shouldn't be or you're doing too much "extra work."

JMNSHO though...
American comp - sci deficit, Bill Gates testifies before House Committee
I use the shell as a development environment. In this world of SPE, Eclipse, and XEmacs, developing C/python/Java/others in a shell with vim, grep, sed, less, find, is starting to become unconventional.

I just cannot tolerate the mouse-clickiness of all mainstream IDEs, neither the extreme use of the control+this+control+that of emacs.

My primary reason to get into vim was the promise of short key bindings, very easy text editing/rewriting and no mouse. It fullfilled that promise: my wrists have not hurt again ever.
First off, feel free to start interviewing now. Most places have a 1-2 month lag time between initial contact and the day you start the job.

Second, don't feel obligated to take the first job offer you get unless you're ok with drifting from job to job like some people are. It's better to have some focus about your career and doing what you enjoy. If they offer and you honestly don't think it's a good fit keep looking.
Beyond technical skills, there are also people skills:

1. People make bugs, you make bugs. Playing the blame game is not productive, even if and especially when it really is the other guy's fault. Learning how to be diplomatic is important.

2. Big companies like to pretend that we are machines, but we are not. Be aware that your coworkers have egos, feelings and emotions, and they do not behave like machines. Machines don't try to hide their bugs instead of fixing them because they don't want to look incompetent, for example. Machines won't get hostile and obstructive if you don't like talking about their pet dogs during lunchtime.

3. The interests of the company are not always or not ever aligned with your own self interest. If you do good work but your boss doesn't know about it, it's like you didn't do it. A good manager will reward you fairly for working harder. Don't accept pats on the back or "employee of the month" awards for unpaid overtime. Only accept substantive incentives, like larger bonuses or faster promotions, etc.

4. A lot of times there are genuine incentives for an employee to intentionally write obfuscated code -- it makes it more expensive for the company to fire her. You just have to deal with it, and recognize that you should also have some similar kind of leverage with the company.
I never code in a mega-syntax language (Perl, C++, C#, Java 5) if I have the choice. I feel that I'm lighter on my feet and able to move between environments better by sticking with languages that have more terse syntaxes.
I feel like there is a focus on what I would call trivial details built into the assumption that a good candidate should be able to explain how all of these things work in an interview. There's a huge difference between not knowing why you might want to keep a binary tree balanced and not knowing how red/black trees work off the top of your head. If you've heard of them and know what they're good for, you can look them up in a few seconds when you need them.

Of course, a talented hacker will know the details of some data structures and algorithms. I'd be far more impressed with a candidate who could tell me in detail about recent uses of a couple more unusual data structures and algorithms than with a candidate who knew all the classics in detail but nothing unusual.
I have a similar approach for Java:

- as functional as possible, using classes almost only as namespaces.

- lots of little inner classes as data tuples.

- lots of recursive functions filling in/trimming out containers.

- the 'final' keyword is the best of the lot.

And no standard boiler-plate "patterns" for which the java language is sadly know (and which make java code unreadable, unpleasant, and altogether a horrible experience).
Recently I've found myself writing out a tricky algorithm in comments at the top of the function. Easy, bulleted English points about what this function is doing. I then find that I can do the coding and simply make a quick comment back to the bulleted list. "# 1. Load users into dictionary", etc.
I'm a big gamer so most other sites I peruse are usually specific to that topic.

http://www.evilavatar.com (vBulletin)

- Sure, it's a news site, but the best part is the forums behind the scenes.

http://vnboards.ign.com (custom ASP)

- The first board system I stuck with. Been around for a while. I've actually been moderating there for over 4 years.
When I'm doing algorithmic work, I rewrite rather than refactor. Perhaps it's just me as a programmer, but it takes me three or four rewrites before complex and nasty algorithms begin to appear simple.

Also WRT abbreviations and again in algorithmic code: I love to use one-letter variables for 'working' variables. It forces me to reread what I've written and really understand what's going on, rather than take shortcuts based on what a variable name might imply.

Business logic "if the account balance is below $100 send a warning email" code need not apply ... for that stuff I just wade through same as anyone else, although I'm more apt to write code that writes code if I'm faced with a particularly high pile of the stuff.
“A Listers" Are Beta Junkies
Take this argument to reddit, please.

Someone asked why I didn't accept a job at Google; I answered.

I don't come here to debate politics, but I don't think politics are automatically off-topic here -- particularly when they influence questions like "should I move to Silicon Valley?" or "should I launch a startup company?".
i buck the trend by building sites that effectively work.
Yeah, Akamai is the best. We do an awful lot of geocoding related functions on Groovr, and have looked at more or less all the available IP geocoding databases. Akamai's the best.
AI researchers think 'Rascals' can pass Turing test
New sales program pays Facebook members
SNOWCRASH for heavens sake.
Adwords is quite a bit more complicated than the cartoon of "your company's app".
Blech, I hate this style of journalism. I gave up reading while slogging through the guy's entire personal history. I never even got to the meat of the article. (I suppose the style works for bio-centric publications like Rolling Stone, though.)

Could anyone post a synopsis of why the guy is supposedly dangerous?
Long story short:

Version Control (Subversion, Git)
Test driven development / Continuous Integration
Waterfall vs. Agile
Practice talking to customers about what they want (not sure how you do this without actually having customers)
Databases (MySQL, SQL Server are decent starts and commonly used)
Apache / IIS (depending on your platform)
Pick a scripting language and learn it well enough to automate things that are annoying. I like Ruby, but Python and others are reasonable alternatives.
Hmm. My understanding is that it strips out a bunch of unnecessary (correction: able to be simplified, not necessarily "unnecessary") elements and makes it easier to write leaner JavaScript. Also easier to have a browser render JavaScript.

Wittens' talk at http://acko.net/blog/jquery-oscms-presentation-slides at the OSCMS was pretty good; basically, JavaScript is not bad, but too much can be overwhelming to people.

P.S. Not always the slowest set of elements to load on a page. A fun little hack: http://www.spaceminnow.com/school
- standard disclaimer -
0) API
1) obfuscate email addresses in comments
2) an effective way to enter code in comments and submissions and have it render nicely (this is HACKER news, right?)
Frankel's latest project: the Reaper multitrack recording software. www.cockos.com
They've been working on Cyc for about 20 years or more. If it were a worthwhile direction to take AI in, it would have yielded results by now.
Gates: Next decade will bring huge software advances
Wanted: Clever Cellphone Developers
It seems that Excel breaks down for models this large. Clearly, computation doesn't scale well. And, even scrolling through all the tabs is a PITA. Do you think the model builders actually used Excel, or did they use something else and then convert it over so that they might "Open Source" it?

I'm interested as somebody who would like to build a better tool for working with such large models.