skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
at some extent i agree with you. My reaction when i saw they copied the form was pretty much the same.

Although most people here agree that implemention and execution matters more Why should someone trust their ideas with them if they copy so open without a note and lets be serious good ideas dont come knocking the door unless you really cope for.

However lets dont trash them just yet. i dont know even how is life in colorado so i cant comment on that except that it really doesnt matter because you wont have a life during start up anyways but i am pretty sure for someone not living in US anywhere would be just fine plus you could easilly relocate after you get traction and investors which they seem they can get you
Yes. Doubly so if you're asking the question.
Hot Lava Software to Represent Mobile e-Learning Technology at SALT Conference
"Good fortune flows from good relationships", believes LinkedIn co-founder
Seven Reasons Why a Scientist Believes in God
Pownce Launches
network-algorithmics is just soooo cool. really, what you must be reading after stevens.
Start-ups are a cut-throat business where very few succeed. The less serious you are about it, the greater the chance that you will fail. And to be frank, working on your startup in weekends probably won't get you ahead of the pack.

If you want to do a successful startup I think that you it needs all your attention.
> I guess it's like being a pirate.

Being a pirate is an end unto itself!
Interesting. But how do you define "worthwhile", when deciding what to pursue besides happiness?
want to learn to 'quick-learn' 
I am from the cubicle world. Do read lot about the startups and PG(Paul Graham) articles. I want to build something good in python/java(jython). I started this 2-3 times and left.What should I do correctly to leave this vicious circle..as I hardly do anything remotely to this at my day job.Can someone who emerged out successfully from the similar situation( and doing good independently/working with alike people); help me to catch up on the learning curve.
Sounds good - I read parts of the first chapter, about the filmmaker, and it is very scary. I knew about those issues, but somehow hadn't thought that it would be so bad. If you think about it, in fact most of what we do today is already illegal, like publishing photos on Flickr. There could be part of a building visible in the background that is copyrighted... I remember a case in germany were an artist sued a city for publishing photographs of a sculpture that had actually been funded by the city.

Makes me wish to strive for a "creative commons" lifestyle. I don't even want to listen to unfree music anymore, or watch unfree films, or read unfree books. I would like my government to pass a law that whoever wants to build a building in my city has to put it under the creative commons license so that people my photograph it freely. And so on... (Thereby, if a filmmaker ever wanted to make a movie about my life, they should have no problems doing so ;-) )

Yes, artists have to live somehow, but human society also builds on the free flow of thoughts. The only irony about copyright laws being perhaps that now finally capitalism will stiffle free thought in the same way that communism did, thereby losing it's evolutionary advantage.
Why jython specifically?

Regular Python (CPython) is probably better for most uses.
Not only that, but they had to speak Latin!
Yeah, yeah I was... was just thinking about that over breakfast.
How to make cracking your programs a little harder
"tree vs. hash thing ... It's a throwaway point"

If you had read more than (some) of my comment you might have gathered that was my entire point. The first page of your post was a throwaway point... nothing to do with your actual point, which seemed to be Radix Tries. It would've been nice to dispense with the distraction was all I was saying.

I know that given a lot of collisions that hash tables degenerate into linear insertion and lookup... and I did point out that binary trees are better for several things, but I still maintain that you can't just outright claim one is better than the other for every situation.

Oh, and as for failing the job interview... not really sure why that was necessary. You don't make a stronger point by being a dick about it.
It may be a nice satirical tagline, but it's by no means a good tagline according to Steven Krug (http://www.sensible.com/). I'm by no means a Steven Krug fanboy, but if you've read "Don't Make Me Think" you'll kringe at "Humanity's Only Hope." It doesn't tell you anything about what the site is or does.
oh dear. this brings back painful memories. a couple years ago i drove from cali to illinois. starting out it was all nice and beautiful in cali. all this lush green and drizzling rain. then i crossed the mountains into nevada. well everything went to shit there and it never got better. 3 days of dry, repetitive terrain

in short, if you live in california, stay there
you are right; i was amazed with "grinder" java load test codebase and their jython usage..so thought java and jython..nice things to start first
Walk 3.5 miles a night in my shoes, and you won't have to wonder why I'm changing careers.

Nursing is only lucrative in California and Boston. If you're anywhere else in the country, the pay is generally abyssmal compared to the responsibility and the stress. In what other industry can you work 12 hours straight and barely have time to go urinate, much less eat a lunch. At one point in my career I could eat a Big Mac in under 45 seconds. Why? Because I had to. That's literally all the time I had to eat.

I'm not leaving nursing to go work in a cube farm. I'm leaving nursing to be a serial entrepreneur. I'll be able to work 2 or 3 days a week, and spend the rest of my time coding and starting a business until I can get paid enough to devote full time to the business.

So, what is the worst that can happen to this young man? Taking a year off to live off of savings to start a web app. Please, if I have no imagination, tell me what your worst case scenario is.
Interestingly, a lot of people would probably say this is all very unprofessional, hurting my future chances, bad career planning and what have you. But my experience has been to the contrary: Because I have met a lot of different people and done a lot of different things I tend to have a broader perspective on things. And nobody has ever held anything I have done against me.

So my point stands: Just do it...
Humans Interupting Algorithms: Wales v. Calacanis on Human Powered Search
Interview with VC Pioneer Thomas J. Perkins (of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers) - Part 1
You make a good point.

My problem is that I'm tired of all these articles proclaiming "Skub considered harmful"[1], "Why Skub sucks", "Skub on rails sucks!" or "Skub ruining CS degrees".

But it just goes round and round and round.

Someone says something bad about Skub then another 6 blog posts pop up defending it and how the author is a douche. Then it just burns through the blog-sphere like a wildfire before burning out. Ready to start again!

[1]: http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF020-Skub.gif
'Accelerating' Advice from Microsoft's Dana'l Lewin
Has anyone had any experience with these types of programs from "big" companies, e.g. the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program, or Adobe Ventures, etc.? Ones where you are essentially showcasing their software (or hardware) and they give you "support" in return.
For hash tables you need to compute the hash function and execute an equals operation. Computing the hash function might take longer than traversing a tree. For example, if you key is "sdolkfhasodfgkokjhdfgfnaryksfdksfdgkjgf" the hash function will probably take every single letter into account (>20 operations, didn't count), whereas a binary tree might only need to look at the first letter at most nodes. So at least for relatively few entries, trees might perform better than hashtables, O(1) nonwithstanding.
i was quite impressed with nevada, not so much with wyoming: got stranded there for 3 days due to a total white out, and thought i was going to end up in the ditch for sure. turns out that traveling 80 in early January isn't the best of ideas.
IBM's response to OS2 Open Source petition
MyBlogLog API Could Be A Game Changer
Tumlbr, FireEagle
Yeah, I've a very good solution : stop upvoting those stories.
But, if you specifically didn't vote for it, it is on the frontpage, so the majority of the group here think this kind of story is worth the energy.
Too Little, Too Late for Pownce?
01/22/08: Russian markets drop 7.5%, termed a 'massacre' in the local press
I am glad you are self analyzing yourself. Wag of the Finger at you, You got me Wrong!

Igor The Troll
RSS feed still broken.  Thought pg said it was fixed?
$ date
2008-01-22 13:17:24 +0000 Tue
$ wget -qO- http://news.ycombinator.com/rss |
> tr \> \\012 |
> grep -c comitem
29
$
The R Word?
Hash tables are NOT O(1). You just failed the job interview.

tptacek, what do you think they are?
The hash table O(1)/O(n) question is a classic job interview gotcha. I didn't mean to be a dick.
You're ignoring table load factor in your memory comparison, you can attack any dictionary "in terms of memory", I conceded the O(n)/O(k) lookup thing before you wrote this, and why do you think "balancing" a red-black tree is expensive?
FOMC cuts surprise 75 bps
FOMC cuts from 4.25 to 3.50.
Actually you can time the market, because:

* it is a dynamical system, not a random one, and theoretically can become predictable in the short term

* economic policy is very politicized and Central Banks do unreasonable things on purpose (like keeping artificially low interest rates).

So, combine the economic imbalances waiting to be resolved (like negative savings rate etc.) and a market crash that you see taking place right now - and you can predict start of a recession quite well.
Isn't this just a short term solution ?

In the longer run it will raise inflation, especially with the unemployment rates being as low as they are.
yeah good point I missed that. good for a ballpark figure. however people should be going a little deeper than this when they start. could be good for startups to get a quick number for the amount money they need to have.
No, the D word.
Some good advice in there.

But the best advice is this: be lucky

:-)
interested? Of course. Miami, Orlando or Tampa?
I wouldn't jump the gun just yet...
Miami, or Ft. Lauderdale meetup is what I am trying to coordinate.
That's High School. If you go to college you're supposed to be interested in the courses you choose.
Delphi? SoftIce? Ah the memories... the Copyright link says 1996-2002 and the most recent technical comment is from 2005.

I'm sure there are some applications out there which really need anti-cracking, but based on my experience with OSX apps if I was a shareware author I think my time and effort would be better spent running a support forum.
Fed cuts interest rates to 3.5%
Sorry to be ignorant, but what's a Mark Twain story ?
I think you should. If you lose your job because of recession, it makes your decision making even easier.
"Just do it..."

...with the porn model.
I guess the same people always say: find something you love, and preferably something simple. Conceive a very simple project and stick to it until the end. Launch as soon as possible, though ("the end" could be a stretchable thing).

What were the 3 things you started and didn't finish, and why didn't you finish?

I suspect the technology doesn't matter all that much, unless the documentation is bad (this is were Java shines, still the best documentation around).

Some starting points for simple projects: Google Maps, Facebook applications.
There's a lot of money in Boulder - far more than the random towns Matt mentions. As far as quality of life goes, it's utopian and not very expensive (4br house in a great part of town for $2200/month). The pace is a bit on the slow side, but I can't speak to the pace in the bay area. I'm headed to a tech event in Boulder in early Feb to get a better feel for the size of the startup community there - I know a number of people out there are working to improve the community. Could TS help? The stats on the TC article are good - 80% funded? It's not Silicon Valley, of course, but if the community there is enough and the access to additional funding rounds is enough and this recession hits it's a beautiful place to weather the storm.
Ben looks unhappy
Seven reasons why I don't believe "scientists" who believe in god... And the maths was faulty, too...
I think it entirely depends on what kind of website / startup you're creating.
IMO, hand coding a known algorithm in a generic fashion using Java does not involve meaningful thought.
... and I shoulda been nicer in my original comment. Applying radix tries to routing was pretty interesting. Sorry to pick nits.
Google Best Place To Work Two Years In a Row Says Fortune
Rock star coders
Most of our CS students suck at CS
The wife of my brother in law is a homeschool evangelist.

The bad side of me wants to commit this list to memory so that I'll be prepared the next time I see her. :-)
I called your actions stupid not you. Anyway...

From what I have seen 95% of CS graduates don't understand how algorithms mesh with hardware. Sorting 20GB of data requires more RAM than they are going to have access to. So if they want to sort things quickly they are going to have to think about how access times alter an algorithms efficiency. So now we have an "easy" problem that exposes students to real world issues. Hand coding for a specific amount of L1 / L2 cache might have some value based on time constraints as is limiting the number of memory allocations by the OS etc.

IMO machine vision or other "hard" problems don't really help students at the introductory level as they use known methods by rote as apposed to rediscovering classic solutions to reasonable problems.
I agree that using sophiscated libraries is progress. That isn't the issue. The issue is that computer science graduates should learn how and why those sophisticated libraries work, not simply that they work. And, the best way to learn it is to do it.

Would you rather have brain surgery performed by a surgeon who learned his skill solely through telerobotics, one who actually cut a few heads open in his lifetime, or one who built the telerobotic system and cut a few heads open in his lifetime? I'll take the third.
What "iteration" means, and is used for in Agile development.
I'm only going to touch on a side point of this article:

"Respect comes from what you accomplish"

Only partly true. You need to sell your accomplishments; they don't sell themselves.
A couple of years back, googling for "suffix array" got you advertisements for jobs@google. I'm not sure whether Google HR ended the program, or just migrated to more obscure search terms :)
The list, so the moderately curious need not visit the actual link:

First: By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by a great engineering intelligence.

Second: The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of an all-pervading Intelligence.

Third: Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless little creatures.

Fourth: Man has something more than animal instinct - the power of reason.

Fifth: Provision for all living is revealed in such phenomena as the wonders of genes.

Sixth: By the economy of nature, we are forced to realize that only infinite wisdom could have foreseen and prepared with such astute husbandry.

Seventh: The fact that man can conceive the idea of God is in itself a unique proof.
A Beginner's Guide to Data Warehousing
Interesting. If I ever manage to hack a sf story together, maybe I will reconsider the contest. I think also Scientology has a much worse reputation in Europe than in the US (I am in Europe).
If you're into podcasts, then there is a good introduction to the topic in this presentation http://tiny.cc/lessigmp3
If you're really into Jython and GUI stuff then why not take something simple like this:

- http://treeline.bellz.org/index.html

and redo it to get rid of the PyQT dependency. I used that for tracking test configuration data on linux boxes but gave it up when I switched to OSX a few years back. PyQT is a mess on OSX.
that is not true. Hedges are especially mindful of the winds of change that news can bring about.
You're ignoring table load factor in your memory comparison

I believe I don't ignore anything, I'm measuring precise memory usage by two identical programs doing same thing but based on different algorithms. I also believe I got the most out of radix in my tests. The 4-bit version of radix wasn't trivial, but it was reasonably fast and the mem usage was twice as better than the 8-bit one, as I said before.

But even speculatively, on paper if you wish, radix consumes more memory than some good hash table implementation.

Upd. forgot to mention, I did some more optimizations as well, like compressing the pointer tables in tree nodes.
> a bit more effort on repelling socially retarded men

What would she suggest? Gaswagen?

A lot of what gets called "social retarded" behavior results from high-functioning autism, and isn't really curable. Working with computers is a final refuge for many people who for one reason or another are treated like revolting mutants by the rest of humanity.
One easy way: open source it.
Anyone who puts down "business programming" so easily either has never done it or is flame baiting. I suspect the latter.

Long gone are the days when the "system analyst" met with the users, wrote tight functional specifications and handed them to the "business programmer". In any organization that actually gets anything done, the two are now one position, the "programmer analyst", and it's been that way for 20 years now.

And what does a programmer analyst have to do?

- examine and understand almost any business situation

- solve technical and logistical problems

- present ideas clearly and cleanly

- organize and manage time and tasks

- play nicely with others

- and, oh yea, code

And where do you find people who can do these things? Lots of places, but the 2 that come to mind first are from work experience or college experience. Nobody actually believes anymore that you'll use anything from class in your work. But it can be a very good place to develop the life skills needed to be a programmer analyst.

Nobody's going to ask you to write a linear programming model using the simplex method to determine how to allocate continuous inventory to customer orders. (OK, maybe they will.) But they will wonder why Mary and Joe can't seem to figure out how to use Program ORP560 to generate this month's performance metrics. Is the problem with them or the program? They'll tell you to figure it out and fix it. Count on it. And count on college to help you become the kind of person who can do that.
Wait for it:

...

HYPERINFLATION!
I think you "probably" should go for it, however, my advice is to at least attempt to write a business plan, do some financial calculations, etc. Try to figure out at least some of the hidden costs (time OR money) that will bite you as you start your company.

Also, one thing that saved my bacon was having an actual customer pay me money for what I was doing - and give me feedback as a result; some things I thought were valuable, were not valuable to the customer.
Or, It happened in the HR department. Smart, capable coders that didn't get a bingo on the keyword soup get overlooked. Especially in the large "hey you kids get off my lawn" kind of organizations this gentleman is talking about.
Just the last few years of high school.
I think the most you can count on is probably high quality marketing. E.g. you get a broken link like the one for Plentyoffish on this page:

http://microsoftstartupzone.com/accelerator/country.aspx?c=e...
Greenplum (open source database) Takes $27M Series C
the economy is a complex system and is affected by things like positive feedback, phase shifts, emergence etc so its not that predictable
Might Google Buy the New York Times?
WordPress Boosts Free Storage to 3GB.
For problems like this, it seems like Amazon's EC2 is hard to beat.
75 basis points wreaks of desperation.
Good point.The first question on the FAQ should probably cut right to the chase, too:
http://bug.gd/search/faq
Definitely a short term solution. However, Fed has two prong mandate. Unemployment and inflation. In the short run they can try to affect unemployment by cutting rates as the economy goes into recession. In the long run they will have to pay attention to the inflation figures. Given the recent write downs by financial institutions, the way the equity markets outside of the US are behaving, and the last unemployment number, it makes sense for the Fed to try to help out the economy in the short run.
I think grown up men are statistically better hackers than women and children. Sexist, ageist, true. Anybody have scientific evidence for equality? Before replying, please make extra sure that your argument works for women, but not children.
Well - yes I can see the need for specialised training when dealing with a lot of kids with a diversity of abilities, disabilities, cognitive levels, etc. And faced with a roomful (30+ kids) - yeah that's a challenge.

What about 1 kid though? Maybe Mom-with-a-high-school-education is only 25% as effective at teaching a 6 year old phonics as somebody with a couple years of upper division child development and educational pedagogy would be. Homeschooling can still be a win for the kid, however, because Mom can afford to spend 3-4 hours of one-on-one instruction a day. There's no way the (granted: much more effective) elementary school teacher can match that sort of investment of time.
The Art of Registration Pages, Opt-In Practices, and Welcome Emails
"...I will be kicking your ass in fantasy football..."

The nerdosterone is getting a little heavy here.
i would try doing it on the side for a while and then quit when you physically cant manage doing both any more. You could use your wages to pay for outsources to help you build a first release e.g. designers, logo etc. In my view we all waste 50% of our day being unproductive so you might as well get paid for that bit. Also it takes a long time for a site to start ranking in search engines etc and getting traffic so that's another reason to build something slowly first.
Ok, I'll wait a bit longer before jumping the gun.

Granted no one will ever call it a depression. 50 years from now in the history books, sure, but not now.
Compatibility and IE8
Web standards vs. Browser sniffing
The myth of the Killer App
Worse Than Failure
Eh, main drivers of inflation right now are food and oil, neither of which is affected a whole lot by fed funds rate. Food prices are high for a variety of policy/trade/weather reasons (corn has skyrocketed due to US ethanol policy), and oil prices are high because, well, it's oil.
Me.dium Selected to Join Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program
"there should be more women in CS and that the industry is extremely sexist."

I don't think the industry is extremely sexist at all. If anything, it's incredibly equalizing. I do web design, code in XHTML/CSS, and manipulate PHP/ASP/JavaScript -- it's how I make my living. I don't think any other field has such an emphasis on raw skill and talent, and if anyone demonstrates the ability to do it, the field welcomes it.

I took only one course in CS, got a fluff degree in liberal arts, and can never call myself a "hacker" because I'm just a code monkey, but I've been attracted to the technology / computer field since I was 12. A lot of things here are interesting to me, so I read this daily (and sometimes resubmit to reddit if it hasn't already been submitted).

If a woman wants to make it in this field through her looks, wit and charm alone, she won't. She can't expect the fact she's female to give her any edge whatsoever, just like the men in this field do not expect to be given breaks because of their maleness. If she wants to make it through her skill, ingenuity, problem-solving ability and willingness to learn new things, she'll do just fine.