skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Arc internals: Macros
So your premise is that this isn't just text and the entire shirt is a string? I think I win this one. Although, if you can make a whole shirt out of just one string then I will concede the point.
because java is the kingdom of nouns

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...
Things like this make me wish (a little) that I had been an electrical engineer rather than a CS major.
Don't worry. No Child Left Behind changed all of that.
You could do this with a CS background, I think. Relays are very simple to understand. If current is flowing from A to B, then current can flow from C to D. Otherwise, it can flow from C to E. They way they work (conceptually; I've never taken one apart) is that running current from A to B powers an electromagnet. There's a wire tied to C and the other end is pressed against E by a spring. The electromagnet pulls on the spring and moves the wire from E to D. They're just little mechanical if-then-else constructs.

If you run a wire from B to C and connect a battery to A and E, you'll get a nice buzzing sound as it oscillates between states.
Why syntax matters [proggit]
You probably don't need that much free time each day. Doing something constructive for even half an hour a day can really add up over weeks and months.
So, let's say someone creates a service that creates an online store application only for shoes (let's call this shoestring) compared to an online store application (lets call this Viaweb).

Although, the 5% who sign up do matter in determining Shoestring, it still matters that this application have something that bests Viaweb, whether it is a better interface for shoes, or whatever the one key ingredient is in differentiation. All I'm saying is that this app should have that key ingredient. It may be better as a FB app that can be sent to your friend ("hey, you wuz in my dreamz thinking of foodz").
Lessig, Dyson and Boyd Join LiveJournal's Board of Advisors
Net censorship is a trade barrier
The 4th reason es muy importante. So instead of working at Google, get Larry and Sergey to respect you in the morning when they buy you.

"Buying startups also solves another problem afflicting big companies: they can't do product development. Big companies are good at extracting the value from existing products, but bad at creating new ones."

http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
Ask HN: Do you think that the large number of sites within most categories means that it will be harder for a new player to enter the market? Or do you think that it doesn't really matter since most of them are very similar? Or maybe none of the above?
There have already been a bunch of academics studying the version control histories of major open source projects, for example as a means to gain insight into why open source development "works" (i.e. is able to produce very high-quality software). One of the cool things about studying an OSS project is that everything is public, and the vast majority of the communication happens via an archived, digital medium: you can correlate VCS history with mailing list activity with bug tracker activity with website traffic logs, for example.

An example paper related to this idea is
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhanivonhippelusersupport... ("How Open Source Software Works: "Free" User-to-User Assistance", studying Apache)
Australian Startups Carnival: Revealed
I like it.

Don't expect to get huge, but this is a cool app for your portfolio and if you start pulling huge traffic you could make a couple hundred a month in ads.

Try making a facebook app with the same functionality? Sometimes those get lucky and get huge and making facebook apps is a decent skill to learn.
Startup Essentials Program from Sun
I think its not Peter Norvig who coded that stuff, its students/contributors who kept doing the exercises in the book and someone finally put all of it together...they have implementations in various languages..you can find a link at norvig.com...this is the text book we use for AI for our grad course. Good standard book.
Wow, just about perfect... sixth photo down, it seems to be in his bedroom. And there is a Home build CPU 'ring',yow!
Paul, Do you guys use any web framework for python ?
haha.... ouch. I have to use Java at work (J2ME) and it is not that bad. J2ME is more similiar to java 1.2 and doesn't have the overbloat of the latest versions.

But I do agree, especially with the design pattern part. I have a co-worker that loves to boast about his "knowledge" about design patterns, and he is the kind of dev. you described on the second part of your comment.
Details and some videos about developing new traction control software for the Tesla Roadster
Hack the MacBook to have multi-touch, win an iPod Touch
It's not "hating", it's called productive criticism. When I ask for a feedback on our product the thing I fear the most is a bunch of OMGs. I've seen that before: people say nice things because they want to appear nice, gain karma points, get rid of you with your questions, whatever.

What I value the most is some critical thinking, harsh even, because nothing is "great!", everything we do typically sucks until a few iterations.
Evaluating a job offer?
Hi guys, I'm about to take my first job out of college/grad school and I don't really know how to evaluate my offers and whether it's appropriate to haggle. Also what are some good resources to learn about the mechanics of stocks, vesting, etc?
Users dependent?
Dollars earned?
Java is surely a jack of all trades... might not be a master, but does its job pretty well..

Another interesting blog on languages : http://www.sysprog.net/quotjava.html
My favorite : "our development cycle is much faster because Java is interpreted. The compile-link-load-test-crash-debug cycle is obsolete. (James Gosling)"
Paul,
have you considered personalising as a method of minimising trolling?

As you pointed out, people do things on forums that they wouldn't do in person. IMO, this is partly because they're hiding behind a handle and partly because their target is.

I'm not sure how you'd go about making accounts have more personality and identity, but IMO that would be considerably more effective than just instructing people to behave like they're face-to-face. They know they're not.
Krugle gets an automatic win in my book because it seems to be the only one that can search Common Lisp code.

On Google and Koders, setting lang=Lisp turns up mostly Emacs Lisp, and "lang:cl" gives only Tcl code. (They distinguish between CL and Scheme, but not Elisp!) O'Reilly has no language selector, but searching for a Lisp symbol just turns up a lot of Emacs Lisp books. And Ucodit can't seem to find any Lisp code at all.
I've used Java successfully on a number of projects. If you have a good IDE a lot of the fluff is taken care of for you (try writing Lisp in Notepad, it isn't much fun either).

I see Java as a good C++ replacement. I refuse to write anything in Java that I wouldn't want to write in C++ (for example I've refused to do web programming in Java).
The best ''Java'' theme I have ever seen was the old Perl Journal issue with 'Special Java edition!' on the cover.

It a cup of coffee in which damp cigarette butts bobbed about.

God I miss TPJ. Say what you like about the language, there has never been a significantly more interesting programming journal (to my knowledge) than TPJ.
There are some fantastic libraries in Java.

Your approach to it seems reasonable, although I find myself writing extension modules (for R, PHP, Python, Perl even) in regular old C... not because I particularly dislike C++ or Java, but because if I can get away with just C, it's less likely that I'll step in a template-error or uncaught-exception shitstorm with a 10-page backtrace.
Very well said. If I needed to hire Java programmers I would probably advertise a Python position. This would weed out 90% of the junk candidates.
Obvious fix: procedurally generated plotlines to match the procedurally generated terrain. Bit hard (generate races with mutations and factions and famous individuals of those factions and historical events involving those individuals and factions, then breed some family lines and run the economics to force feudalism, industrialism, capitalism and so on to spread across the world as it's explored and make some stereotypes of how each part of the world sees each other part, then create some famous bits of media using a combination of the Hero's Journey framework or some soap opera cliches and said stereotypes &c &c &ccc) but only on the level that, say, Spore is hard. Once it's done it could probably be used with just minor tweaks in thousands of games, though; perhaps even changing the writing profession to be a sort of make-up artist for such story skeletons.
how much is it really?
Thanks for pointing that out.

I should have stated this in my comment, but I don't like C++ much (which is why I'd rather use Java over C++). But I absolutely love regular old C. It's a beautiful, simple programming language. I think C is a perfect language for implementing programming languages, libraries and operating system.
Google Sites - What's All the Fuss?
I go there. I have a good hacker friend who's been approached by other students or ex-students several times to form some sort of startup or to do other little programming projects. So far, they have all been miserable failures. No, not even failures, because they never even really tried. So what if people here are smart? I don't think they are nearly as motivated as most YC.ers think they are--god, just go to any meeting of a student group after the first couple weeks of the quarter, it's a shitload of, "Yeah I would've liked to go but I had a paper and a problem set due..." Same thing with the little projects that just fizzled. Of the wannabe entrepeneurs I've met here, nobody has shown the kind of commitment pg seems to think is necessary. I met them. They're still in school, still trying to balance a startup with getting their degree, still unable to commit themselves and take the plunge.

I think the vast majority of Stanford students, or other elite students anywhere, are admitted because they put their schoolwork first. Sinking lots of time into any extracurricular, including entrepeneurship, is a sacrifice a lot of students aren't used to making and would have trained themselves to not make in high school, and in fact, such a sacrifice could have royally screwed them out of getting in in the first place, and almost certainly would have if they had gone to a very competitive high school.

Seriously, FUCK STANFORD and don't worry about it. Just find a good school that's not too much pressure to get into.
I've found Practical Common Lisp to be the best book to get me started with CL. It covers the fundamentals nicely but it does everything in the context of real applications so you walk away from the book having actually built something useful.

As far as problems to start working on, the best way I've found to learn a language is to start making tools/utilities for myself. Then I'd start learning everything I need to implement that particular tool. Pick a task that you wish was simpler or more automated and write a tool to do that for you.
When I think about doing this myself I immediately start coming up with flimsy excuses for why I can't. I believe a lot of doing a startup well is daring to put yourself out there to be judged. This is right in line with that idea (to an extreme). Brave and commendable.
That's hilarious.

I hope he was intentionally trying to mislead someone... you'd think he'd know better! :)
Certainly 16 PS3s is no Blue Gene. But perhaps good enough for a lot of problems and hopefully cheaper to build than using standard desktop/server hardware (since you get the PS3 hardware at a discount).
Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs
To me it seems like Google sites isn't much more than all the other free sites you can generate all over the web. Am I missing something?
I've yet to see (in a store near me) a laptop that even comes close in features with what a MacBook Pro offers and that doesn't look like it was designed by monkeys.

If you know of such a laptop, would you mind posting a link to it? I would definitely take it into consideration if I finally decide to get rid of my MBP.
Finding the OS X Turbo Button
"Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?"

As a hill-climbing algorithm, wouldn't this approach tend to result in the local optimum rather than the most general truths?
You're probably right. Personally I refuse to work anywhere that would require me to use a Windows desktop for development.
The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% takes the another 200%
I'm fairly convinced that anybody who thinks Windows is a better desktop machine has never used Ubuntu.

Just think of how long it would take you to install XP from scratch on a machine and get all the drivers, service packs, updates and tools you need installed. Then imagine being able to get all of that done in under 45 minutes.

Imagine having better eye candy and performance than OSX or Vista on hardware that is less than half the price.

Throw in the benefits of developing on the same platform you deploy on. Welcome to Ubuntu!
I'm surprised FreeBSD is that high...
Well - for the moment. IMO they're kind of stuck at a crossroads between open and commercial:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2008/02/21/android-comme...
What Does the Internet Look Like? [pictochart]
sounds like a business venture
You will never finish the last 10% of a project. In software you're never more than 90% done. EVER.
"For example, youtube was simply a better product for the market than google video -- even though the back-end technology was supposedly worse."

I know I'm going to get hammered for saying this - but I don't think back-end code is as important as a good user interface, a well designed site, and a clear vision. Your users don't get to see the back-end code, and they don't really care how it works. And servers and bandwidth are cheap, so it doesn't matter much that your code isn't well optimised.

What does matter though is that you have a clear value proposition to you users, and that they will understand this within 5 seconds of arriving to your site. This is much more important than nice and clean back-end code.

I have a bit of experience with this - I started thinking about doing a web based project management tool around a year ago, and since I didn't know any good hackers that weren't already occupied with something else I thought I would learn how to code and just do it myself. And interestingly I found that the hard part was not the coding, but the usability and flow of the site. The coding part is basically just getting stuff in and out of a database. But the flow is really hard to get just right.
I quite like C++. Java is a nice language but is absolute hell to develop iterative web applications with at any reasonable speed. You need a sophisticated in-house division of labour to really use it effectively.

The real danger of the java language is that it's hostile to lean/agile development. If you're in a market that iterates quickly, that can be a real problem. If you work for a bank... less so.
Bad browser sniffing techniques by John Resig
eyeballs will still be used but attention metrics will become more and more important. stuff like bounce rate, time on site, number of clicks/actions, and so on. someone can come up with a refined formula for all this but the adoption is based on the advertising platforms (adsense or ysm), not so much the regular users.

the day that google changes it, let me know. that's when it's actually important.
is there a linux client for rescuetime? i see some vague links on launchpad, but is there something semi-stable?
Hackers are still not representative of the mass userbase that startups are looking for if they want to be big. This matters because hackers will value different things than normal users. RSS springs to mind as an example. If, for instance, you do a webbased tool to keep track of your tasks one of the first things a hacker might look for is a rss feed so that he can put it on his feedreader along with all of his other feeds. Normal people won't even know what RSS is.

So even though you do a non-hacker product, hackers will still value features that are of littel importance to a normal crowd.
Thank you for your praise. :)
Wouldn't it be easier to use "full" Cell processors? Are they much more expensive than PS3s? I assume IBM sells other computers with Cell chip?

How do cell chips compare with modern graphic cards, I think they can be abused to do a similar thing?
I just started programming (always been the biz guy, but thought I might as well learn to hack) and I have a habit of never starting a new module before the current one works without any known bugs. This might take a bit longer, but when I'm done I'm done - and usually there are only minor bugs to be fixed.

Is this not the normal way of doing things, or am I missing something? Or is it simply because I only do simple stuff? (currently doing a website with user profiles, different sorts of to-do lists, ratings, gannt charts, a blog tool, calendar, and some ajax thrown in for the hell of it)

Where, in your experience, does this last unseen mountain of work come from? Am I about to be hit hard with something unexpected?
Introducing technology failed horribly (in one case, at least; our smartboards fared well) at my school when Neil Bush tested Ignite!. Introducing technology to schools is tricky, because in most cases it's not essential to teaching. Often, good teachers are nervous to change what works, and the bad teachers are usually unable to make it work well. If you want more interactivity in education, I'd advise you draw up a sample curriculum and offer to work (for free) with the school's star teachers to develop the technology around their curriculums.

Also, if you don't mind the plug (as I am an alumni), my mixed middle-high school, Gretchen Whitney HS, is ranked #1 in CA by API, and has a few very good and forward-thinking teachers who may be willing (hopefully) to do just such a thing. Couldn't hurt to ask.
Read "how to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. As a people guy I would say that this is the best book ever written on the subject. It's quite a short read, so really there is no excuse ;-)

Besides it's great fun to read his real life stories and examples, since the book is from 1936. No Meg Whitman or Steve Jobs, but lots of Dale Carnegie and Thomas Jefferson.

If you ar e too lazy or too broke to get the book the main points are listed here: http://www.westegg.com/unmaintained/carnegie/win-friends.htm...
According to
http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDis...
a blade with two cell chips costs $10k. Two PS3s come in quite a bit cheaper than that. Okay, so they don't have as fast an interconnect and as much RAM, but it depends on your problem whether that matters at all.

Modern graphics cards are also useful for number-crunching, but it's pretty awkward to develop general-purpose code for them. Not that the Cell is all that easy to code for with its SPE-local SRAM and explicit DMAs for memory access. As far as I can tell, though, the Cell development tools are more mature, and it wins in terms of FLOPS-per-watt. I suspect the real win for the Cell is that its interconnect latency is tiny compared to your average GPU, which is great for clustering.

The thing that's killing mainstream adoption for both options in the HPC sector is lack of double-precision (64-bit) floating-point support. There's a version of Cell on its way that fixes that problem, however.

Note: I've not written code for the Cell myself, although I have for GPUs.
It's still a lot faster than your average physics department's 32-node Xeon cluster.
Have a look:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
And you find C++ easier for developing iterative web applications?

Just to make it clear, I will never use Java (or PHP for that matter) to develop web applications.
A personal pet peeve: I can't stand it when the bosses bring outside people around, give them a tour, point at you, explain what you do, and never once mention 1) that there would be visitors, or 2) who the heck they are. It's degrading.
This is an overreaction to the extraordinary amount of time wasted by the desk jockeys in the chair force, albeit it's present in all branches. People waste exorbitant amount of time while on the work clock going to myspace/facebook or trolling to chat with girls on yahoo.

It doesn't restrict personnel/private Internet, ie. when you go to a comm center to pay for the Internet or if you install cable into your barrack room. It's not so much censorship as increasing productivity like all major corporations.

Maybe RescueTime should pitch to the Pentagon.
Google won't listen to that anyways.
Actually, by the phrasing it sounds like the educational "system" is to be run around completely, perhaps pitching this directly to parents similarly to products like "Hooked on Phonics."
Teenage Hacker Is Blind, Brash and in the Crosshairs of the FBI
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The Global Seed Vault, a reserve of seeds in an arctic mountain.
GrandCentral SF Homeless Stunt Worked So Well It’s Time For An Encore
Indeed, I was thinking almost the same thing--I'm reminded of [that music app I can't think of the name of at the moment] where you sort of explore a "web" of songs.

This could be quite similar, but with a "cloud" of dreams (heh) with a sort of haunting, serene element, perhaps with vector animations of recurring nouns floating about in silhouette... for convenience and impact, it would ideally be a screensaver. At any point, you could hit a certain key (probably Enter or Space) and instead of dumping you back to the desktop, it would pop up a text editor for entering your new dream, which would then float away into the "cloud."

I could even see adding a sort of MMO element where each person gets a little avatar that slowly explores the "dream world" for them, being moved to a new dream's location on the cloud whenever one is entered. The little avatars could bump into one another and tell you in the morning of who you "met" in your dreams.
Thanks, very interesting.
I have at other times taken your standpoint, but this article seemed rather extreme to me (I only read the first page, mind you). I don't mind comments on the looks etc - in fact I am pretty sure to have read somewhere about PGs "fiendishly good looks". I just felt they really overdid it in that article.

I would have hated the article anyway, because it is waaay to long, but the first page being only superficialities absolutely killed it for me.
I bought a laptop with Vista pre-installed, and haven't had any problems with it so far. I disabled quite a few things when I got it, but in general I prefer it to XP (just for the increased coherency of all the Control Panel and other configuration screens, for starters, and the integration of several utilities (i.e. enhanced battery management) that were ugly OEM system-tray-trolls before.) I write this on my XP laptop, though (which could never hope to run Vista.)
Interesting factoid: one of the potential languages for Sun's VM was a variant of Scheme. Unfortunately, it lost to Java.
Oh I see. Well, that doesn't seem to be a problem with the programmers using Java, per se.