skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, your approach is good and should work pretty well. However, in my academic experience, the perception of "done" can be deceptive, even for a well defined problem. The purpose of the saying is to make people wary of thinking they are done.

Similarly, it is said that the point of debugging is to find bugs, not to remove all bugs. Again, the idea is if you think you've found all the bugs, you're probably wrong.

However, you may well be one of the lucky individuals who can understand the entirity of the program in one go. And, it is good to attempt to do so, even if you usually can't. Thinking through the entire logic of my programs helps a lot as I debug.
Here's a page with a number of implementations:
http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/code.html
I would like to access all my comments. I use this site like delicious to store interesting links that I find, and share them with others.
How does it make money?
The breakthrough for myself as a programmer came from intro CS classes....it may seem odd but I would still recommend going back to the core CS topics of data structures and algorithms, focusing on the implementation - on what kinds of language features might be used to implement these things, and how the language interacts with the hardware. Just pick a promising field of study - encryption, text processing, compression, search, whatever. Choose a common and well-understood algorithm in that field, do all the research you can, implement it, and then try writing something around it.

The key for me was to have some code of a non-trivial complexity to play with. This would be something that you would be willing to rewrite four or five times and really master. Having an interesting application in mind helps one get there, but one can often flip states between "interesting app" and "interesting problem" in programming.

It's not in vogue nowadays, but Knuth's Art of Computer Programming is chock-full of this kind of "programming exercise" and it makes a pretty good reference too.
Usually coders put together a prototype and then develop the final version by either (1) fixing the prototype, or (2) developing it from scratch. When time becomes an issue, it's natural for teams to choose #1 instead of #2. But since the prototype is rarely designed with the exact use in mind (or even with things like security) that means lots of stuff to fix and design-around.

Using a good framework, keeping a sense of the long-term architecture needed and following agile/DRY practices cuts down on the difference between prototypes and final products, and is one of the reason (imho) for the popularity of Rails and the 37Signals approach to web development. Most people just flail though.
Programming for just half an hour every day is like having sex for just one minute every hour.
Wait right there, american girls have no style. This is true!
GumGum launch - Rails on the run
It is always good to hagle, but with good spirit, and as long as you are reasonable in your request.

Say something in the tune: I like your company, and I would love to work with you guys, but on the compesation part your offer was in the low range. I got an offer from another company, which I like too, and that was 10k higher and I can't just ignore it. I'd like for you guys to come close to it.

They might come back with 5k more, or not.
The best position to be, is when you have more than one good choice, and have hard time to decide which one to take. you have a lot of bargaining power, (psychologically), as you can walk away from an offer.

Compesation is not everything, what you do matters to.
As for stock options, unless you are one of the first employees of the company, and you are being offered a good chunk of options, they really don't matter.
If you are joining a company that is 50+ people, than most likeley options will be insignificat (unless it was something like a future google or youtube, which is highly unlikeley).

If you are joining the average startup, those options will take four year to vest, and they probably wont be worth much. Actually, there is greater chance they will be worth nothing. So, don't compromise your salary for those options. Consider them just as a bonus, or perk. Usually, you have no bargaining power over how much stock options you get (assuming you are joining a mid size 50+ employees company). They often are set by the board, and divided way before (e.g software engineers get this much of options, senior engineers get more, etc...).
I guess the main issue is, people who are too much into free software may sometimes loose their grasp of reality

You frequent slashdot, this site, the serverside and number of other FOSS wikis and blogs, and you start to think that most ppl would agree, that x is better than y and that MS is evil

But in real life, most ppl havent heard of slahdot, or arc and think python is a myth

And this is why DHH for them will definitely sound like a douchebag, and to be fair, if you compare RoR to a product like Sharepoint (yes you can use RoR to create stuff you can create with Sharepoint) if Sharepoint can do it, Sharepoint will be light years ahead of RoR.
Windev .. What do you think?
I stumbled accross this product a while ago and, it seems to offer the same and more of the features that people brag that RoR offers.

You can for example use Windev to build CRUD applications in minutes without any code from a db schema

So what's your opinion on this products one ones like it! If you can go past the lame advertisement of this product isn't this thing just a better RoR!! Or what RoR will one day grow up to be!
I'd be happy to see the "larger version" of the image. Unfortunately the href of the a tag is missing: <a><img src="internet425.jpg" /></a>
In order to truely benefit from this, you'd have to ensure you're not just translating the PHP into Lisp.
Eh, it's happened before. Mike Stoppelman's gotten his looks talked about on Valleywag, as has Ben Ling.

Pretty people getting called pretty: it's not sexism, it's a compliment.
The latest comments on Venture Hacks: Founder Edition
Some good Friday-morning thoughts in the latest post.
Skinny columns are a hallmark of newspapers, mostly because they're a lot easier to read. I'm not arguing that the design was great here, but if you look at CNN's stories, they're not all that wide, either.
The most interesting problem in physics?
I doubt whether this "censorship to increase productivity" would apply to places like Iraq and Afghanistan where soldiers cannot provide their own Internet.IMHO that is where the military would want to really want to clamp down on posting of "sensitive" information.

Even in ordinary companies I doubt whether restricting internet access leads to improved productivity. A worker intent on wasting time will find a new way of doing it if you restrict his internet.
Scripting GIMP with Scheme
Ubuntu's a fine OS, but it's not really to be compared to Windows or OS X for general purpose computing, mostly because it's not popular enough to merit serious 3rd party investment.

Wake me up when I can apt-get install photoshop-cs3

PS: I code all day on Ubuntu.
K2C
The New OS Landscape: Real Competition
University of San Francisco Law Clinic Joins Fight Against RIAA
EC2 is built on Xen.
10 second opinion (based on no knowledge whatsoever) - looks like something for the corporate parameter tweaking suits to play with and not a developer's tool.

If you want to target .NET then surely you use Visual Studio? If you want to write Java apps then (?) Eclipse
Did you get this working?
DARPA to fund development of modular satellite technology
MyBLogLog Launches v.2 of service
Never Complain. Only Ever Code.
Negotiate a 6 month review instead of the usual one year. If you're any good, you'll get your first raise 6 months early. You may want to say something like, "The salary is not quite what I was hoping for, but I want to get started here so badly, I'm willing to accept it. I plan to do such good work that we'll both see that a 6 month review makes sense." How can they say no to that?
I think I prefer this adage:

"the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product"

(from http://www.pacifict.com/Story/)
New Google Health Screenshots
Salesforce.com: Why the model is working
Will New Blu-ray Drives Suck Your Laptop Battery Dry?
Company gaming Google search results leads to $2 million in revenue
I think the real problem in this case is being unwilling to cut features, and having too large of an initial feature set.

The last 10% always takes a long time, but it sounds like things are getting out of hand here.
Robin Williams Saves the Day at TED When Tech Fails
How to 'Google Bomb' an Enemy
"Always program first and blog second."

I sure hope that was output, not input.
LinkBlip: get notified when someone visits a url
What If Bill Gates Never Made Software?
Shout List Icons
I usually don't mind, but really, the whole first page was about nothing else than her looks.
UsWare vs. ThemWare
XP costs $200--half the price of the machine!

That's why I am willing to endure the pain of making Linux work. It's wonderful, but lags in driver release.
Online photo editing
I also bought a Vista-preinstalled laptop. I haven't had any problems (except that Java lays out things a little differently), but I don't use it much. I installed Fedora and use that machine as a dual boot. I use Vista when I need wifi, cuz the drivers aren't available for fedora yet.
The Common Lisp Directory has a list of online resources (tutorials, references, books, blogs, etc.) here: http://www.cl-user.net/asp/tags/information
This website has the prettiest interface I've ever used online.
It's a shame no-ones blogged it this time like auctomatic crew, draftmix did
It's not that everybody hates Java; it's that nobody loves Java.

I'd guess that those who do say "I love Java" probably don't know any other languages. Maybe if the only choices were Visual Basic 5 and Java...?
Rails Rocks
What's this nonsense about Ruby being a "web language?"

That chart needs a thorough s/Ruby/Rails/g
"I consider this method (Proc#curry) to be trivial"
It's job was to provide a gentle path away from C++. I'm not interested in a gentle path away from C++, I just want to write good applications.

I don't hate Java though. I can't complain because I do all my Java programming in Scheme.
When he said the advanced stuff was too advanced I figured he was referring to SICP. When he said the basic stuff was too basic I thought he might have been referring to HTDP.
Great, funny diagram. I think a bidirectional arrow between C# and PHP is sorely needed, though.
FriendFeed is non-beta before Gmail :)
50 72657465 6E74696f 75732063 756E7473
My goodness this is a well made application!
About a month ago, I was talking to a man that sells hardware and support to small businesses (almost exclusively non-technical ones at that) for a living. He said his company spends a surprising amount of time downgrading Vista machines to XP - the majority of Vista installs sold to business customers come back for downgrading.

Whether it's an unsatisfactory experience or unfamiliarity that's the cause, it's a losing proposition for Microsoft if that's a common pattern.
Has anybody had any experience with TTD with something like rspec for rails? We're considering switching to that for some of our internal development applications, but I am curious to see what others think of it.
I took a brief look at this, and it does seem like serious competition for Snipshot. The Snipshot guys need to get on the ball and implement red-eye reduction. That's the biggest issue for point-and-shoot photographers.

Snipshot does cropping better -- It's more intuitive to constrain to the photo's original proportions. Snipshot also works entirely in JavaScript -- no flash plugin required.

I recently added an option for ourdoings.com users to integrate with Snipshot. I'll keep an eye on picnik too, though. They also have an API.
Agreed, Rails has made web development even more fun and powerful than it already is.

In addition, Rails has also helped explode Ruby as a language. This is what pg should be doing for lisp, creating an easy to use, elegant framework built upon lisp. I haven't tried Arc yet, but I hope all the developers take a few cues from DHH and Rails.
Why Am I Passing? Good thoughts on VC logic process
A friend of mine said something to me one day that really struck me - "I don't think I'm humble enough to be a programmer". He has done programming in the past, he knows what's up, and he knows that you need to put aside your ego and spend just hours figuring out one tiny bug (that ends up being something stupidly obvious in the end), days perfecting the last .1% of your project, and so on. It's humbling. Not everyone can deal with that. It's just as much of an aspect of a good coder as anything else.
Holy...when I was working at my last job (a financial software startup), I joked to my boss that we should port our software to the PS3's GPU and run a cluster of PlayStations. The math in quantitative finance is rather similar to the sort of massively-parallelizable vector calculations in computer graphics. Plus, I had this amusing image of hedge fund managers slaving away at their Dell workstations while the PlayStations were all locked in the server room, crunching numbers.

I'm impressed that someone actually did it, which goes to show that there's no idea too crazy to implement.
Ah, the fond memories.

The professor I had for my AI course taught 100% via the Socratic method. It was one of the most challenging courses to prepare for because you had absolutely no idea just how deep you would personally be challenged to discuss for the next class. Really taught me how to be prepared thoroughly before an event.

Sadly, this caused us to go so in-depth into the material that we didn't get as far as I would have liked. But the course clearly helped ground me in ideas we explored more in later studies.

The good pseudocode in that book always struck me as fairly easy to reproduce in Python-- it's great to see some of that captured.
Geek feast fatigue…and the key rule for startup success
Social networking finds for the week
Why does the windev image have mac close/min/max buttons?
Facebook Denies Role in Morocco Arrest
If your wristwatch tells the date, check it today! (Or tomorrow. Will it even let you set today's date? Mine did.)
Thanks bonsaitree, we need a reality check once in a while.
I think pretty much programmers of every language think they are superior to every other one. The 'dummy' languages think it because of ignorance... or because they earn more money than someone at the same skill/intelligence level on a 'smart' language.
As long as you tell them that it's actually a Java job as soon as they get in the door... and then you'll weed out another 90% the candidates :)
Welcome to China.
Not a bad idea, but they built it at sea level. In geological time the sea level is anything but stable.
Oh yea... and as a perl programmer I consider myself superior to both C (which I've had the misfortune of coding in), Lisp (don't know) and Rudy (sounds nice??).
Cool we're social site - who knew...
Repricing Microsoft's Future
"Blah, blah, blah... I've never used a Framework before... Blah blah blah... This is the best thing I've ever experienced... Blah blah blah."

Color me wrong, but I hate posts like this, just not cool.
I think it says 'only savants should apply, idiots are welcome'.
Wow, this is pretty slick. Never thought I'd use an online-based photo editing tool, but I can see myself using this when I don't want to open up Photoshop on my other computer just to make a quick crop/edit to something.
"Nobody hates Java, it's too generic and plain to generate such strong feelings."

http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=%22I+hate+java%22&hl=...

Only 20 entries, I am surprised.

I use java every day and honestly, I wish I could throw it down the well. It's a shame that GUI building in python is not trivial, neither consistent nor relatively bug free.
Well, although I did enjoy the rails framework quite a bit, it's certainly not the first framework I've ever worked with. I've built applications with struts, ASP.Net (1.0 and 2.0), JSF, Django, etc, and I really do think rails is my favorite yet. My apologies if that offended you at all, I'll try to retain a little more cynicism next time.
;)
Rails fapper...we all know only real programmers code in Ramaze :-) oh you could also throw in Lua as well.
Heh. Java gives you a stack trace. There are a few cases where the jvm is out of memory and can't, but even then you get a lot more information than "bus error" or "segmentation fault".
Thanks for the pointer to lispdoc.com. Any idea why it doesn't find Seibel's unit testing chapter when I search for unit test (or +unit +test) (or (and unit test)) (or unit and test) (or "unit test")?
America, Europe and the management of danger
I find it depends on the type of work I am doing.

Creating a new module - a daily commit.
Bug fixing - a zillion commits.
GUI work - a zillion commits.

Since it was right before prelaunch, and presumably a lot of GUI/bug fixes, seems right.
what a useless article. wow, rails rocks because it has mvc, you don't have to write sql statements and it's written in ruby!!!1! ActiveRecord is really one of the worst things about Ruby, largely due to DHH's hatred for DBMSes more complicated than MySQL 4. Also someone needs to tell him how RoR scales, heh.
Reasons I will never use Vista ever again:

1. Could not share a printer. Seriously. A plain generic HP printer. On a Windows network. XP shared it just fine, Vista would not share it, for security reasons, I suppose.

2. Vista refused, totally refused, to allow me use Microsoft's javascript debugger. That's Microsoft's Vista would not allow me to use Microsoft's javascript debugger. For security reasons. Seriously.

3. Vista takes interface design in a whole new direction. Adventure Gaming: Your goal is to share a folder on your network but first you must find the Lost Network Settings! And watch out for the security alert trolls! No! You clicked a dead network connection! Now you must wait 10 minutes for Windows to search a network that isn't connected! Doom!

Vista == giant steaming poo poo
David Flanagan went to MIT (lived at pika like sanj and me) and is one of those "functional programming kids." I can understand him being miffed that he just put a book out about 1.9 that doesn't cover currying.
I think your post has gotten garbled in transmission. What you meant to say was:

"Welcome! You'll find that you'll enjoy using frameworks; they are really great."

Or

"Once you're done learning the basics you should try out my Project X extension which does Y and Z and is scalable
and only costs $19.95 from my startup. Help me pay the rent! :)"

Or, at the very least,

"I hate all existing frameworks. After you use them for a while you will encounter problems Foo and Bar, for which the solution is to adopt Parrot on Parade, the new meta-meta-framework that I invented last week."

Sneering at new users is not cool. I'm sure you didn't really mean to do that. It's just my cable modem acting up again.
If high-level languages and frameworks make developers happy and productive, and Rails makes those accessible to new users, then isn't Rails ultimately a great accomplishment?
How this founder found the right CEO
You invite people over to use it, and then you make them watch an ad first.
Very slick. I really like the integration with facebook and other applications.

Who's site is this? Is it yours, matstc?
Thank you Stillinmotion, These kind of post were great 2 years ago, but now its such a cliché.
My aim isn't only web application, but the idea of rebuilding a site as a tool for learning is a great idea. Thanks so much.
Think Rails is better than Django?
The color scheme, looks a lot like mint.com
Let me take my own medicine here.

Welcome! You are going to enjoy frameworks! They are really cool!

Those of us who don't have the time to try out so many new things would appreciate an essay on the subject of "why I, as a brand-new user, found Rails so much more fun than Django or .Net". If nothing else, it would be fun to have an iota of actual evidence that I can cite when I'm patting myself on the back for having chosen Ruby and Rails over the others.

Don't become cynical right away. The framework community is awash in cynics at the moment. There's a backlash, dontcha know, because folks are aghast that after three whole years of hard work Fred Brooks is still right: Rails and Django and CakePHP haven't made web programming as easy as sneezing. It's still just web programming. You type, and you type some more, and you get a brief glimpse of joy, and then you fire up IE 6.0, and you burst into tears. Some things never change.

See? Working too hard at the coal face can make me cynical too. So for god's sake have some fun and be proud of having fun. We could all use some enthusiasm!
I just wanted to reply and thank everyone for their help. All of you gave me some great links and ideas. Pat your self on the back News.YC, you guys are about as nice and helpful a bunch as you can find on the internet. Thanks.
Thank you. That was the first thing I noticed too.

It would say a lot more for your products if the applications you say can be built with them are actually applications that were built with them.
My issue with rails is one of tone. There's something very off putting about the use of the word "evangelist" in the rails community. Everyone I've spoken to who uses rails gets this far-away, misty-eyed look when they talk about the framework. I love programming as much as the next guy, but there's nothing out there that inspires this kind of fanatical devotion in me.
here is some basic negotiation advice http://jobhacks.wordpress.com/2007/08/08/offer-negotiation-t...

regarding the comment to mention another offer, that is cool if you really have one. It wasn't clear if the poster was recommending a "bluff" which is not a good idea at all.
More important than the offer is how will the experience increase your value in the market. http://jobhacks.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/career-equity/
Programmers at Work Interview (Charles Simonyi)
Ok, I work in Java all day. I use a smattering of other languages, have developed a number of sites using PHP, and my pet project is in Python.

I don't think you know many java programmers, and it's clear you haven't done any real world java development. Sure, the language has problems, and there are astronaut architects that do silly things, but neither I nor my coworkers rely on "wizards," or are obsessed with factories. Most of us use macs or linux. You might have read a rant that described all java developers that way, but it's unfair. There are VB and C# developers that fall into the same traps you describe.

In any case, if java is such an obviously terrible choice, why does a company like Google use it extensively internally? Either you assume the dangers of being surrounded by morons at Google is high, or perhaps you add nuance to your assertions.
Agreed. Nicely executed!
Timbap - utilises DJ decks to play MP3's, change pitch, etc all from the decks, nice hack!
regarding options and anaylysis, Venture Hacks is an excellent resource, here is a specific post http://venturehacks.com/articles/option-pool-shuffle#more-11
Sir Ken Robinson on public speaking (6 presentation tips)