skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I move the mouse into the empty space in the page, it shows me ads. That's ok. The problem is that it also shows me ads when I move the mouse into a Flash applet (I guess the program fails to detect that as content).
I went to a college in Canada, which are basically regarded as the "lower form" of post secondary, as Universities are for the big wigs.

I graduated from a 3 year Computer Programmer / Systems Analyst program and couldn't be happier. Now working at a retail startup doing all their tech / web/internal development / online / offline marketing and I couldn't be happier

Apart from that I stick in some freelance and my own projects on the side. Currently working on my own startup. I live code, I loves it

So to the initial question: No major degree, but I can code!
И цан’т белиеве ит!
my dilemma: I'm on the east coast so if I attend I would have to fly out just for the weekend. Should I still go or should I fly out to CA to visit friends for my longer spring break in late March?
What language is that? I'm guessing Icelandic; it's a little too unicodey to be Danish or Norwegian, but the words look similar.
MBA,
BA, Economics
BA, French
Université de Montpellier, France
International Interpreter's School Mons, Belgium

Started coding at about 8 or 9 years old on a C64 and Apple IIc/IIe. I have always been a tinkerer of sorts... taking things apart then wondering why I have extra parts left over when I put it back together.

I have done it all, networking, development, support, QA, moving up the food chain so to speak. These days, I spend a lot of time in Project/Process management.
S.B. Math MIT
Sneaking behind IT's back
OK, I just realized that the example in the Arc-challenge might be possible to implement without the use of closures persisted between requests.

If the page URLs are generated from the expression tree - outer expression is "/said", page 2 is "/said/anonymous1", page 3 is "/said/anonymous1/anonymous1" or something like that, the framework could locate and execute the correct expression for every hit.
The framework would have to be smart enough to detect that the "foo" input to the page 2 is used on page 3, so it is passed on in the generated link. This approach could actually be fully scalable.

(But damn! It would be disqualified because the input is passed from page 2 to 3 in the URL. I suppose it would be cheating to encrypt it?)
Браво!
You should definitely become competent in 3 months (not great, but definitely competent).

AWDwR is good. Even before that, go through the Rolling with Rails tutorials (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/12/14/revisiting-rub...) and watch the screencasts (http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts). That will give you a good ground before you start hacking.

Then, like you said, start hacking! An hour each way X 20 work days/month X 3 months = 120 hours, not counting time at home. You've got time, but if you're serious, don't let a day pass without working on it!
BS in Computer Science & Engineering from The Ohio State University. - Programming for the man.

the '& Engineering' just means I took more math and physics classes and some intro to (insert Engineering Discipline) classes.
BS, Computer Engineeering, University of Florida
♫♪♫ to my ears. I ♥ unicode! To ∞ and beyond, ☺
"For example, if a car company wanted to show its logo for 10 seconds in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen, the computer program would find the 10 seconds in which the logo interferes least with the action in the video."

Waitwaitwait... In my experience, marketers want to interfere in the most HORRENDOUS manners...
Agreed.

- Paying Wufoo user
DEMO Went Great, Then “All Hell” Broke Loose.
So. A note to all the "unicode makes this unusable" people -

Apparently, while you were complaining, someone else was solving.
Good guess.
Paraphrasing pg, it's easier for a hacker to learn business than a business guy to learn hacking.
Technorati? Curiouser and curiouser. My site gets 000's of searches for /q/dave-sifry from the same IP, every day.
I don't live in SV, but I had the impression that if you looked around, you could still find a few people who weren't obsessed with the latest tech buzzwords, and you could bounce your ideas off of them. If the population is really 100.0% nerds, please correct me. If you have to take a car trip to find a normal person, then I'll have to change my view about how good a place it is for startuppers.
BA in English and Creative Writing, Oberlin College

Most of a second bachelor's in psychology, University of Pennsylvania

A year-and-a-half in a Clinical Psychology PhD program, University of Texas, Austin

MS Information Systems, and MS Library Science, Drexel University, Philadelphia

Web developer at a not-for-profit medical publishing company, doing Rails and pretty much anything else related to the web.
With all the lolmemes flying around on the net, I think the superintelligence that would evolve from it would be superretarded.
Røv og nøgler! PG succumbs to the demands of political correctness! Will we soon see mandatory static type declarations and CSS in Arc?
I agree. One rule of thumb I try and follow when trying to learn something new is to promise myself to spend atleast 10 min working on it everyday. Which normally leads to about 20 min to shift your mindset, and invariably you end up spending more than just 10 min :D

One way to approach this is just start by building something really simple. A to-do list (yes, I know there are millions of them out there) is a good app because you can make it as simple or as complicated as you want. Its an idea that can scale.

Another thing to do is to watch some of the screen-casts as pchristensen correctly points out. RailsEnvy has some good ones to, and if you feel like spending the money, PeepCode has some good ones.

One way I learn is just to hammer myself with information. Read as much as you can while not coding. Most will not make sense at that time (but when it comes to learning anything, isnt that true early in the game anyways?) but every now and then you will be like "Oh yeah! I just saw something about that last week!" and it all comes together.

[Quick Update: I see that you did not mention that you know Ruby. I would spend a little time looking up Ruby too, because IMO, Ruby is far more than Rails, and regardless of whether you end up using Rails, your Ruby knowledge will help you better understand Rails, or any of the other frameworks out there like Merb or Hobo]
இது தமிழ
हिन्दी
To je výborný !
Good point - and I have thought about moving...

But there are three profound advantages to Denmark (which is where I am based)

1) Danes are smart... I went to the valley on an exploratory tour a few years ago to gauge the standard, and I was really disappointed. I might of course not have met the right people, and my sample could have been bigger. But seeing what comes out of the valley everyday I think that it is not totally off. I think that it is no coincidence that the hackers behind turbopascal, Delphi, c#, PHP, c++ and Ruby on Rails are all from Denmark. A friend of mine even got disqualified from a hacking contest (hack together a functioning system in one hour) because they thought he must have gotten outside help...

2) Because of the restraints we face (the whole ecosystem of startups is severely lacking), our cultural heritage and our education system we have a great knack for designing smart systems. I and my peers often wonder how upstarts in the valley can spend so much money and come up with stuff that is so badly designed and so bloated. Both programatically and design wise.

3) The girls are beautiful.

That said there are of course many advantages to the valley, primarily momentum. This part is almost impossible in Denmark.

Edit: I don't mean to sound as a selfrighteous idiot, so I hope it doesn't sound that way :-)
BS Applied Math

BS Comp Science (both at Appstate)

Former Java programmer; current language is Ruby, professionally.
BA Mathematics, Rice University.
BA Mathematics, concentration in Comp. Sci. from University of Rochester. Graduated a year before they had an undergrad Comp. Sci. degree--there was already a graduate program. Oh, yeah: I'm a programmer.
You got me on that last one, you're right.

Sharks have outlived us by a million years, so in evolutionary terms they are definitely more successful than us.
I sometimes visit my friend's office - setup my laptop and work in an empty cubicle / conference room for a few hours, go grab lunch with my buddies and then head back to my office; I try to do this at least once a week; My other option to break the monotony is to sometimes visit the library and setup shop there (especially if I have to read/review/reference materials )
Maybe half of a theater degree? I completely failed out of college, then tried to make a living as an "artist," then accidentally stumbled into a programming job at a start-up. Now I'm a principal software engineer.
With all due respect, that's misleading. I'm talking about the application of the turtles meme to a very specific software idea, the one which Alan Kay called recursive design and that you happen to be writing about. As far as I am aware, this particular use of the turtles metaphor was introduced by Avi Bryant in a 2005 post and popularized by him in various interviews since. Surely credit should be given where it is due, especially when an idea has a well-defined origin. It's like writing a whole post about Blub without mentioning "Beating the Averages".

(While it is true that the wikipedia page contains a reference to Bryant at the bottom, it's a very obscure reference, and this could hardly be a more specific idea. It's very possible that Avi got it from someone else in the Smalltalk world, but if anyone knows of an earlier published reference I'd be curious to see it.)
MS in Industrial and System Engineering (thesis in Systems) from Ohio University. Learned programming as a mix of self-study, and great mentoring by a professor at OU.

Bachelors in Production Engineering from Bombay, India.
This distinction is a very important one. It's one of the big questions we work on with startups building stuff that's ultimately intended for business users: do you come in through the official channels, or force your way in via rebellious users? All other things being equal, I tend to prefer the latter, because (a) it's cheaper, and (b) it causes you to focus on building something great, which is a clearer and more reliable test than pandering to big companies' present taste in technology.
BS Information Systems, University of Texas in Arlington
working as database/web developer
B.S., M.Eng. C.S. Texas A&M University. Programming for the man (but working on a little bit of just about everything on my own at home). Really. Desparately trying to figure out how to get going with a startup without having to go to the freaking Valley, Boston, or NYC.

Daggum Californicators.
BEng Software Engineering Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, London UK.
Ask YC: Telecommuting startup teams?
I've been finding for our development, marketing, etc. that is matters almost nil where we're located. It's just so easy to do things remotely using Skype, IM, good source control, etc.

What are you finding? How many of your startups are entirely made-up of people who come in and sit in the same place together?

What kind of problems do you foresee for a small distributed team?
Great article! it is not really about perl and it is a great read around here where there seems to be the idea that lisp (or ruby or python) is the only way.
What's your startup?
Desperately trying to figure out how to get going with a startup without having to go to the freaking Valley, Boston, or NYC.

You can do it, if you can find a good cofounder where you are. When people like me talk about it being a net win to be in the Valley, we mean no more than that. It gives you an advantage. But it's far less important than the quality of your cofounder(s).
There is definitely a difference, and my goal is not to become a scientific programmer - I'm not smart enough for that. I am just curious as to how it all works, and my goal is primarily to better understand the process. So it is just basic CSS, javascript and PHP.
Computational Science (2nd Division) - St Andrews University, Scotland.

Writing software that bills gas pipelines.
Paul Graham rocks.
Futurama! That's counts as a sci-fi show, right? It also has sweet tech, like the smell-o-scope.

Ooh, and Chappelle's Show. That's a great tech show. The Haters is Time have a time machine, and then there was that episode where Chappelle visited the interwebs and punched out the spammer. That was awesome!
CS BA NYU, Robotics MS CMU
Ååååh another Dane on the ropes :-)
Soggy
No degree. I've been programming professionally for 20+ years. Usually better off than my peers salary-wise (since the beginning). Generally regarded as the best amongst the programmers I know personally (which is a bad thing, in my view). Started several companies. Most failed. One sold. Have had a 9-5 job for the last 3 years (telecommuting from home). Title: Senior Programmer Analyst. Actual Work: developing new products (programming).
Hey arooni - there are some places within the "close" icon that aren't active (clicks are registered as ad clicks). Also, there's lots of flicker on your demo page (win xp / ff 2.0.0.11). Actually, it looks like your demo page is still under development, there are some other problems with it. Also, your photo on the "team" page is really dark.

Good idea. I don't like the name; can you emphasize "clean" rather than "empty" or something? cleanads.com was my first idea.
if you guys are curious about BCard printers, i've had great luck with overnightprints.com

i got 1k glossy cards for $66 shipped. http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1209/570761163_37e0cf1493.jpg
As an Icelander, I must surely ask what pushed you to use Icelandic as an example. :)
Ph.D. Computer Science UCLA 1997
Oh yeah and B.S. Computer Science University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1991
Well, not quite. I gave Patrick an early version of the code, a couple weeks before Arc was released, and he immediately sent me this fix. I just didn't get around to incorporating it till now.

There's a difference between things I don't care about, and things I'm actively against. I don't care about character sets and css, so those things will no doubt gradually get better.

Classic static typing, however, I think is actually a bad idea in a general-purpose language. It makes languages weaker. So it's never likely to happen in Arc itself. However, one of the explicit goals of Arc is to be a good language for writing other languages on top of, and I can imagine plenty of languages for specific types of problems (e.g. circuit design) in which static typing would be a good idea.
That it would look foreign to the maximum number of people.
Three undersea cables seen fixed by weekend
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking
You don't need to major in computer science to learn to program properly. You definitely don't need a degree in business to be an entrepreneur.
I think it worked for 50, but then it busted on 100. I only tried a couple of calls.
One ingredient is coming sometime today, I believe.
Read a book. Then, build something.
ARM to show Google phone prototype next week: source
Google planning China online music tie-up: report
There is a lot of money in that market, good luck

I think the bottom line is us (publishers), use Google ads because we want to be in good terms with whoever is bringing the people, if you work around that you will make it big.
Patent court affirms Kodak win over Ampex
I read this and agree that he has a good mastery of Silicon Valley folks.
A TiVo newbie’s nightmare
OpenID Welcomes Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM
Hypersonic jet unveiled
TV migrates to cell phones
В самом деле браво!
The best way to learn any toolkit is to build something using it. That's particularly true in the case of RoR, since it's very geared towards fast prototyping.

If you don't know Ruby, get the pickaxe book. I'd also recommend Agile Web Development with Rails:

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Ruby-Pragmatic-Programmers...
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-2nd/dp/097...

Also check out PeepCode; it gets rave reviews:

http://peepcode.com/
Physics degree, University of Lisbon.
PhD in Atomic Physics.

Started programming with 16, started to love it when I wrote the code to run my lab automatically (adjust the lasers, pump the vacuum chamber, run the electron gun, calibrate the spectrometers and do the measurements), while I was downtown having a beer with my friends. Did it in ansii c on a eltec os 9 lab computer using a camac crate.

I still had to type the thesis myself.
Some expect Microsoft to raise offer for Yahoo
Don't take it to personal...I'm not even near the valley, but:
* Politicians say this about Washington
* Movie Stars about LA
* Bankers about NY

You can be anything you want and excel at it anywhere in the world, but its the BIG LEAGUE perception in each respective profession of being in that city/region, take it as a complement not an insult ;)
Yeah, deliberating on my last comment...

Wufoo is the beez neez! I'm envious of their skill. They have executed their idea perfectly, with a great interface and usability. I'm looking forward to FOWA Miami just because they are going.

Any of you Wufoo-ers want to meet up?
Yahoo CEO hoping to thwart Microsoft
Consumers can scan bank deposits at home
It's not true that static typing always makes languages weaker. It makes map more powerful, for example: the desired type of output sequence can be inferred rather than having to supply a first argument of the same type like in Arc.

I used to agree with you, by the way -- static typing in most languages feels like a straight-jacket. ML wasn't enough to change my mind. It took Haskell.
AT&T Catching Up With Expanded 3G Network
'Digital divide' widens between rich and poor countries: UN
A surprisingly large percentage of great programmers I know are Danish.
Degree in Computer Engineering - Marquette University
php/c#/vb.net

learning
as3/ruby/linux shell
Cobra language slithering to open source
Thanks, grandma.
Z SHRTR BTTR?
Kind of boring by comparison: B.S. Computer Science, Gonzaga University. Working on my Masters thesis in Philosophy to be done in May. Been working continuously as a programmer (mostly legacy support) since January of 2006, with a few other internships before that.
Go spank the monkey in an outdoor and semi-public area.

Trust me, works 50% of the time, every time.
Atlantis space shuttle launch today, live video
Run this:  python -c "import this"
i ♥ python
Torvalds Offers Linux Community Advice On Microsoft's Threats
I think the complaints were more about how pg was originally saying that he intended to never support Unicode. That said, people should realize that UTF-8 encoding/decoding is the zeroth step to internationalization with Unicode.
What year? You were in my department.
I don't understand why CSS or HTML are being mentioned during the design of Arc. These seem like library issues and your announcement of Arc was spoiled IMHO by the "rant" about HTML and tables. This is only made worse by the Arc Challenge which seems to be more about the design of libraries for HTML/HTTP etc. than the language.

What am I missing?
California Company Introduces New Mobile Linux Platform
Tamil++; // (இது C)
Nâh, dâh zèn we maui klâh mei...

(define Y
(λ (m)
((λ (f) (m (λ (a) ((f f) a))))
(λ (f) (m (λ (a) ((f f) a)))))))
Wikipedia to the rescue: "The butter is melted and the flour stirred into it (slowly but surely), until it is has blended with the butter." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:S.Örvarr.S)
Thanks. I like your suggestions to read and eventually hopefully grok it. I think it's interesting how nervous/unconfident I am to actually start learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails (Pragmatic Programmer advice to learn a new language every year aside).

And about doing something daily - it's a nice benefit that a job lets us get paid while maintaining/expanding our knowledge of the programming language we primarily use for that job.

I'll build my first to-do list (after this weekend - prepping for my first party on Saturday - was too scared to do it alone, so asked a friend to co-host, overinvited, she overinvited, 41 people have RSVP'd yes?!)

It's all about getting started and doing something daily so you don't regress. There is no such thing as failure only feedback, I've heard. It's true.
Ask YC: who are midwest (great lakes) hackers?
who here is a midwest hacker in the states of minnesota, iowa, wisconsin, illinois, indiana, ohio, and michigan?

the other midwest states i consider midwest(great plains)
what ingredient is that?
Thank you. It all adds up. The habit I'll have to break - stop falling half-asleep on the train. To actually make use of the time the long commute affords.
People love thorn. Anglos used to have it and now that it's gone, they miss it.
I doubt anyone would have commented on the tables thing if pg hadn't made a big deal out of it.
What needed to be changed? I am no character encoding guru but I thought that treating strings as opaque octet sequences was good enough to "support" UTF-8. i.e. Unless you actively break it, it should work by default.
It's hard to believe that someone paid $300,000 back in 1972 for the current IBM logo.

PS - the new xerox logo is atrocious.
pg didn't say that. people just made it up.
普通话
BS Math, BA Philosophy, EMT-B certification.
people did view source on hacker news, saw tables, and brought it up. pg didn't make a big deal out of it first.
Shopping Carts Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
OOoooh a cryptic foreshadow of a YC company launch?
No degree, some CS classes, lots of books.
Here's what worked for me:

1) Do the grunt work:
Make sure you have a basic understanding of Ruby syntax, especially how Hashes and method arguments work. The code in most Rails books, and even the code generated by Rails itself uses lots of syntactical shortcuts (ex. not putting () around method arguments, not putting {} around hashes). This can be really confusing since the majority of Rails methods take in at least one Hash as an argument. It's critical that you understand what your data structures are and what's being passed.

2) Dive in:
Find a simple project to do. Make it something close to the Depot application (or whatever the example app is in the newest version of AWDwR), but not exactly the same.

3) Documentation:
I heavily use the Ruby core documentation (http://ruby-doc.org/core/) and the Rails api (http://api.rubyonrails.org/). These are absolutely critical when you're debugging and you need to know what's going on behind the curtain.

If you're going to be working on a train without an Internet connection, I would strongly suggest that you get yourself a local copy of the Rails api by running the command "rake doc:rails" and that you get really friendly with the "ri" command which gives you Ruby documentation.

4) Tinker, tinker, tinker.
Look at other people's code. Install plugins and try to understand how they work. Constantly tweak your app to do something new or improve something it already does.
Bringing it up about the website is a separate issue from bringing it up about the language.
Spring 1999.
I think we're agreeing more than disagreeing here. My assertion was that business domain knowledge and internal workflow were far more important than programming languages or algorithms as a determinant of business success.

Revealing the market niche you hope to fill isn't revealing your secret weapon -- not in the Viaweb/Lisp sense, anyway -- it's giving away free copies of your business plan.
No degree. Taught myself how to code when I was kid. Started a Computer Engineering degree, but I would get bored and stopped going to class. Switched to Econ, but never finished that. Started taking classes I wanted in an order and grouping that was never going to get me a degree. So I left. I've been a programmer ever since.
Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I graduate in May, looking forward to working full time on my startup after that.

I-L-L!