skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking the same thing myself while reading the article. But playing devil's advocate, they don't exactly teach a lot of theory to education majors either, let alone those in teachers cert. programs.

Personally I decided to put off graduating a few more weeks to take, among other things, a human development course in child cognition because lately I've been wondering how closely the parenting books mirror what's being published in scientific journals. If I learn anything useful then I'll post it at some point in the future.
Viral + Monetizable = StartUp Magic Quadrant
We all have a problem. Trust me.
How to match regular expressions faster than Perl
I'd be interested to hear what you find.
Here in India, the market has essentially been in free fall, losing almost 25 % value in the last few days. (it seems to have satbilized a bit now). Which, in turn, makes it a good time to buy if you are a "fundamental" investor.
Given the overlap in audience, there's bound to be some (or a lot of) overlap in content. Such is life.
I wasn't aware of any scientology connection (aside from the contest founder) until after I won it and my wife & I were at the week-long all-paid workshop in LA. One of the best experiences of my life. They try to maintain a wall between any scientology and the science-fiction contest. None of the judges or teachers, to my knowledge, are scientologists. If you ask the judges, people like Orson Scott Card and Gregory Benford, they'll tell you what a great opportunity it is. The 15 winners I met at the workshop weren't scientologists either. Fun people, great writers.

The people I met who ran the contest were scientologists, and they were very nice people. Hubbard put the money up for the contest as a payback for his early sci-fi career. I also wouldn't turn down a Nobel prize because Nobel invented dynamite and was an armaments manufacturer.
You're retarded if you don't think that programming is one of the most anti-social activities in existence. You only know of those people you list because they are successful writers. That has absolutely nothing with how good they are at programming.

Further, if you think that schools have an substantial share of the blame for women getting into programming, then your misunderstanding of the topic is even greater.
Hah, I'd say that the girls are fortunate. My life of programming is not so enjoyable at all. I just do it because I have to accomplish something big. I guess it's like being a pirate.
Don't you give people advice on your blog as well? Since when YC-accpetance counts as "creds"? None of us is Bill Gates here, chill out.

The blog post does indeed sound childish. It assumes that "beta" (what a stupid beaten up word that lost its original meaning) can be accomplished by just one person working "nights and weekends". Outside of web-based to-do lists, not a whole lot can be built into even a prototype this way.
Someone lacks imagination: there are far worse things that could happen. Also: am I the only one that finds it funny that you're leaving one of the more lucrative careers (nursing) as demand explodes in favor of a more blase job environment?
This topic matters because it is a natural extension of those, quite thought stimulating, lists of traits of the best programmers. Lots of stereotypes are held merely for lack of data. Lets put more data on the table.
50/50 for MIT at large. Nowhere near that in Course VI, though.
$1200 of SSD goodness... why the hell not?
Were/are many of you homeschooled?
Being technical and having industry knowledge is a powerful combination. I don't think the past career in nursing is sunk cost at all...just the opposite.
Hm ... Basecamp is very slow in the last two weeks.
I'm in Palo Alto but didn't see any snow... I guess I should stop hacking and leave the apartment a bit more often!
This week we'll have earnings reports from outside the financial sector, thank god. Hopefully the lack of bad news will stabilize things. A strong Apple earnings report may help out some of the tech stocks.
I ask because his image of hell is an endless expanding country of people who can't stand anyone else. Loneliness can often be a symptom of our selfcenteredness, and this drug is like giving someone painkillers for their broken arm.
I was really surprised when I saw the title of the page. "Humanity's Only Hope" is a nice tagline.
The only way to get through college without losing your sanity is to take classes you know absolutely nothing about and don't particularly care about, other than being vaguely curious. When I stopped taking CS and business classes and started taking stuff like intro to Asian religions and intro winemaking I got a lot happier. Your goal in taking a course should be to learn enough of the terminology, context, and schemas that you can read the rest of the journal articles in the field on your own. (You should also learn to ask meaningful questions.)

Speaking of, I think everyone should take a class that covers the history and methodology of religious study before graduating. Religious studies people, the good ones at least, spend a lot of their time thinking about the same stuff that net natives think about, like how memes go viral and how stuff creates value for users. Even if you're a militant atheist it's still kind of interesting and useful.
Thanks for providing a great example of what we're talking about, Steve.
the parent post is dead on. the guy who wrote the article does not know rails well enough to find accurate criticisms.

the complaint he makes about the options hashes would be solved if someone took the time to document all of the private methods, etc. I like a mix of code + documentations to figure out how something works. Most of the rails contributers prefer to just read the code, which is why no docs exist.
This book is currently getting old- you may want to see if there is another book that has come out more recently that is just as good or better.
1) I highly recommend Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails. I also recommend the Pick Axe (Pragmatic Programmers Ruby book). I do not recommend Ruby for Rails. I bought it and skimmed it to realize I already knew everything in it after reading the other two.

2) B/c it has a great ORM layer (ActiveRecord) and strong ajax libraries (integration with prototype/script.aculo.us) which make it easy to quickly put together a very well organized app that has a lot of UI sizzle.

I also expect Merb to continue to gather steam, especially for people who "get" rails and who want to take it in specialized directions.
Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
JavaScript worm still spreading, infection origin unknown
Also if you are a militant atheist, and you take a religious studies class, you might learn that you should not be a militant atheist.
Good reason to stay away from VCs when possible, and keeping it real.
No. The "older engineer" mentioned in the article is really old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_core_memory

(Search the article text for the first occurrence of "stack".)

See also: http://www.pa.msu.edu/~laurens/cdc_memory/
I think I was in the mad rush to get out of foreign stocks. My fund company was giving me sh-t about selling everything (or almost everything) on Saturday...now I think I know why. They only have about 1 percent cash on hand, and it was probably running low. I was just going by instinct, but apparently everyone else was doing the same. Gamblers only, at this point.
Ha, sorry to hear about the bad exit. And if we qualify the revenue with some dollar figure then I'll even agree to the yahoo thing.
Actually my wife is a teacher of young kids here in Australia and they do quite a lot of developmental psych, even more in the special needs graduate stuff she did. For the higher grades there seems to be very little, which goes some way to explain a lot about the crap high school teachers out there.

Most people seem to feel you need a good high school, but for my kids I really want to concentrate on the early years of learning. Home schooling in high school would probably be a massive improvement, but kids seem pretty happy to be with their friends then.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what you find out. I'm about 6 weeks away from being a father for the first time, so I'm very interested in the topic.
Or at the very least you'll get good at sitting on your hands.
> The use of sophisticated libraries is progress.

Just as the use of sophisticated calculators is progress, but totally inappropriate for a class in basic arithmetic.

> Now we can think at a higher level, allowing us to quickly prototype new ideas.

First they must learn to think.
If you had USB GPS receiver, you could have stamped each frame with lat/long, and later overlaid a map with a path that showed your progress onto the video...
I'm yet another one, though I don't spend much time on yc; I spend more time on reddit and slashdot (not under this name), and actual coding.
I think mint is a fantastic startup.
The problem is, these ironies and meta-ironies are just as old, trite, tiring, and grating as the same thing meant seriously. Believe me, meta-irony on this topic has been done before, many times, and not only based on the irony of an xkcd comic.

It might be the first time you do this, and you think it's funny, clever, and 'meta-ironic' (oooh). I suppose it's somewhat like lists of jokes that people forward around: funny the first few times, and "I'm going to auto-killfile this" after a few years of hearing the same ones.
EBay's Meg Whitman to Step Down After a Decade as CEO
Why? Experts in other fields have no reputation for being socially retarded, and yet they must have to devote enormous amounts of time and effort as well. Do you think da Vinci allowed himself to become socially retarded so he could focus on drawing and inventing, or that Erdos decided to isolate himself from other people so he could work on math? (Which he didn't, he wrote many collaborative papers. Hard to believe someone socially retarded could publish so many papers in collaboration.) Unless you have proof that programming is harder than becoming a great musician or mathematician?

Your premise doesn't make much sense anyway. I think a lot of simple social skills are picked up early, at a young age, before you start fanatically devoting yourself to whatever occupation you choose. I can understand it if you're not a smooth talker and even a little rude, but some of the social mistakes I've witnessed are simple ones like following me back to my room when I've stopped making eye contact and responding to their conversation. Like--FTW, following me back to my room?! When I've stopped talking to you? I really do not think you have to sacrifice a deep understanding of recursion to grasp a basic point like eye contact.

I also disagree with your last sentence. Social retardation is relative, not absolute, and social skills exist online, too.
I'll throw my 2pesos in as well and concur here. Though I do feel the pain of traversing down the call stack to dig up where the magic is. Ruby for Rails has a great chapter on digging into Rails core code which helped me a lot.
So if you look just at the build acceleration part of Electric Cloud then you are correct in thinking that the low hanging fruit is around large projects that use compiled code. But the definition of 'large' turns out to be important. You've mentioned a single large project (OpenOffice), but we see a lot of large projects that actually consist of tens or hundreds of small variants (the canonical example is a cell phone company that compiles variants of the the same code for different target hardware). This adds up to a lot of time (although each individual build may be relatively short).

On the web application side we do have customers because quite a lot of them are actually writing in languages like C++, C# and Java. Build acceleration is helpful there. For companies that are doing something like PHP then our build management tools (Electric Commander) are more appropriate since they are used to coordinate deployment of a large site.
Bubble Bert:

http://img444.imageshack.us/my.php?image=berterniedj2.jpg
like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end
Here it is: http://lessig.extf.net/thefutureofideas/download-pdf
Hmm, and I think I'm gonna cheat on my girlfriend before she has the chance to cheat on me. That sounds like a perfectly healthy relationship. Right?

Not so surprisingly, maintaining a positive work relationship and a positive romantic relationship requires the same skill set. Not so surprisingly, poor performance in the first facet seems to correlate with poor performance in the other facet.

By the way, I tendered my resignation last Tuesday. I am starting my own business because I am holding myself to a higher standard. Making money is easy. Being congruent with what you value in life is the hard part.
Robert Dewar (the prof behind the comments) has the largest laser disc collection I will probably ever see. Thousands.

He would throw parties in his huge 5th avenue penthouse apartment in Manhattan. They would usually involve choice science fiction screenings on a projector, often biased towards Star Trek.

The jolliest Ada lover evar.
He he, I was kind of thinking the same thing: in my (jaded) opinion, girls are more likely to simply choose the career that is most fun, because they can always marry and have children, so no financial worries. So if few women choose programming, perhaps it tells us something about the job...
It would definitely be more motivating to go to work every day if there were some female colleagues.
Chemists solve biological challenge by modifying protein creation
Who did Kill the Software Engineer? (painters and photographers)
of course there is safe ground: the truth.

you don't have to actually be right, you just have to have the truth as your only motivation, and then no one can fault you.
people are talking about it. there are much more difficult subjects.
I like geeks. I'm not a very good geek myself, but I can mostly follow the technical discussions, with lots of Googling.

I can't speak for other women, but I hate it when people exhibit a lack of social skills, and it especially infuriates me when they're not funny or overly shy.

Aside from confidence, health, social skills, and ability to entertain and amuse, I think the only thing society can define about male sexiness is the prestige of his financial prospects. Perhaps some other woman will have more input.
As I said I haven't taken the class yet, but if you haven't already, check out Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence. It's really scary to realize not only does EI play a much greater role in future success than IQ, but that the brain is 85% percent formed by age five, after which EI is basically fixed. The good news though is that maximizing this is mostly a function of doing easy things like holding your child for the requisite amount of time each day and such. I guess my point is that it seems important focus first on the stuff you can't fix later if you mess up.
Let's hear them!
if i try to give you an example, one of two things will happen:

- i will seriously offend you

- i won't seriously offend you

so either you'll hate me, or think i'm wrong. i don't see how i can win.
I'd say the definition of sexiness has changed. Now "sexy" is dashing, promiscuous, childmen. The qualities essential for good families are not considered very sexy, whereas they used to be moreso.
I don't think I "offend." I seriously can't think of anything that offends me. I might consider you immoral though, say if you thought genocide was a good idea or something. But, I'd do this on principled grounds and explain why.

However, many people's profiles are linked to their real selves, so this isn't a non taboo area for them.
I'll try to talk to you in private, then. The added constraint of writing for everyone else is too hard. Send contact info to curi@curi.us
Maroon on Techstars
Yeah, my outlook improved once I had more control over my life and didn't have to live in the socially backward world of public school. Once my social worth became dependent on the actual productive things I did than on my ability to fit in, I had higher self esteem.

That's why I think the US is pretty cool. Just think, in many countries people have to live in public school society for the whole of their lives.
Perhaps you should cut down on the beans then?

Here in Innsbruck, there's no snow at all, which is pretty odd for January, apparently.
CSS Thesis back from the dead
A while ago, a really awesome CSS gallery went down for the count. It was unique because it wasn't covered in flashy ads. No crap, just cool sites and a simple voting system. Click to vote. Well, a friend of mine and I decided to bring it back from the dead for designers to enjoy again. Built in CodeIgniter, running on Nginx and a small Slice from Slicehost.
Cool I'll have a look. Freakonomics analysis of schooling also suggests that early years are also more important.
Wondrous.

How is it that the book "Heron's Automata" that they mention hasn't been translated yet? I would have thought scholars of ancient Greece would long since have run out of works to translate.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B422F100-B4CC-4F17-89...
That's not abortion, that's infanticide. But, still relevant, I suppose.
If I kid can't say "I think, therefore I am" and mean it, then...
Investors look for milestones being reached. Perhaps you should make yourself some milestones, and begin doing what you have to do to reach them. Give yourself a time table, and if you fail to reach those milestones, and fail to see things you could change to reach those milestones, then your startup has failed and it's time to change direction (possibly including shutting this one down and doing something else).

One important thing to keep in mind: Don't repeat the same actions and expect different results. Two years is plenty of time to know that what you're doing isn't working.

Also...1,000 daily visitors is practically comatose for a site that isn't selling something. An ad-supported site needs hundreds of thousands or millions of visits per day to make you rich.
1,000 visitors daily to an ad-supported site is practically nothing. Maybe two or three bucks, tops. We get more than that to our documentation wiki site (which has no ads, and I wouldn't consider adding them because I believe it would cost us more in credibility to include them than it would make in revenue).

If the site is selling something, then 1000 a day can be a good start. A one man shop selling some sort of digital goods could do very well with that many visitors.
An interesting issue is that what you can or cannot say, depends a lot on how you say it. If you talk in a way that is easy for people to ignore, you can get away with almost anything -- people just won't pay enough attention to understand what you meant.

At the other extreme, if you take ideas that are currently say 90% accepted, and you talk about them in such a way that the other 10% feel strongly pressured to change their minds, you can seriously offend them. You can generate resentment, by saying there is no reasonable middle ground, and the wrong view is wrong, and elaborating in detail on how bad it is, and why it's so bad, and how they are hurting their friends and family and themselves by not changing their mind, etc... Even if all that is true, and even if there do not exist any half-decent arguments for the 10%-and-declining view.

You can even offend people who agree with you, but who think you're putting it too strongly, or something. Even if they have no rational reasons for saying your claims are too strong. They may not even consider it a matter of truth, but instead a matter of being nice, or something. Most people think that way, some of the time.

What you are actually talking about matters too. On some subjects, it is easier to trigger defensiveness, on others, harder. So there are some "least possible to say" things, and they are a lot worse than discussing sexism.

PS I think you may have a typo with that double negative isn't + non.
This reminds me of something a couple of old oil prospectors told me a few years back. It went something like this:

"You're going to bust your ass, no matter what. You might as well bust your ass for $10 million, instead of $10,000."

That's stuck with me. If you aren't working on a huge opportunity, then you're probably selling yourself too cheap. The thing I've been surprised to find is that no matter how small a market is, you'll have competitors and you'll be dividing up the spoils. You might as well work in a field that is huge, so that the percentage of the market you can capitalize on equals millions rather than thousands in revenues.
Advice for Startup CEOs
The story of stuff
I think YC is better than Techstars, but between Techstars and "just move to the valley", I'm not sure that the latter is better. It depends on what sort of connections the Techstars guys can provide you with.

And I'm not so sure Boulder really is that bad, either - there are a lot of guys who made their cash in the valley and then wanted to live somewhere that's not an armpit who have moved out there.
both wins come from only storing the edges corresponding to significant bit differences.

Of course I used compressed suffixes, but it didn't help much as compared with hash tables.

you could find a PATRICIA tree has even better memory footprint than whatever hash table you use

I don't think you can demonstrate that Patricia has a better memory footprint than a good hashtable. In fact best radix trees are much worse.

Of course, all data structures share the DoS problem.

You can attack radix trees in terms of memory usage, while hash tables are prone to serious performance attacks.

In all cases, the attack degrades performance to linear search.

Not true. I don't think you understand these algorithms and O(n) complexity very well.

The question how a hash table degrades when attacked highly depends on how exactly conflict resolution is implemented. Among other methods is, for example, expansion and rehashing, and you can't tell for sure if it degrades to linear search or not.

And radix never degrades to linear search - never.

Of all the "mainstream" data structures, balanced binary trees are probably the hardest to attack this way.

They are prone to a very specific attack when you make the tree to re-balance often.
I wanted to be. Does that count? :)
> I have a lot of respect for women who like the idea of building novel applications but don't want to get their hands dirty with the programming/computer science involved.

It seems to me that you were making an assumption that didn't fit the parent poster's actual circumstances. (Not entirely fair, since I have the benefit of hindsight and having read her reply. ;-)

I have a lot of respect for people, regardless of gender, who actually know how to do things, so perhaps my bias is showing. (Don't worry: the "big picture" ideas guy, and the fluff-spinning Ph.D. who can't code to save his life, both earn an equal share of contempt. Partly because they're basically the same person. :)

But I really couldn't bring myself kowtow to either of them even if they happened to be female, which, frankly, is partly why reading your post leaves me feeling a bit repulsed. (Sorry, I know this sounds awful, but I can't think of a gentler way to accurately phrase it).

> This is kind of like architects who want to design buildings but would rather leave implementation details to engineers.

> That's the way it should be.

All the really interesting architecture of recent decades has been done by architects who could think like artists and engineers.

Your ideal architect reminds me of the stupid king in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who disregards the "implementation details" and builds his castle on a swamp.

Definitely not the way it should be.