skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best way to do this, is whatever idea you have, try and build it using Ruby on Rails. You may make some mistakes, but the best thing about Rails is that many of the architectural decisions are made for you. You only really need to worry about the syntax once you get the hang of it.

Lots of the other advice on here, about learning C, and SICP, and emacs and CS fundamentals is nice but not necessary. Learning it will be very hard for an absolute newbie to get anything out of. It could demoralize you.

Thats why I'd advise to actually start building whatever it is you have a startup idea for. It will give you traction. You will definately struggle, but at least you'll have something concrete to show for your efforts. And I'd use Rails. If you run into problems you can always go the rubyonrails IRC channel or even ruby-lang. You'll get the hang of it. If you are going to take this route I'd recommend the Rails book by DHH.
With that disclosure you can probably be expecting a few applications for the idea :-)

And I'd love to use it if somebody gets it right.
I've seen some of those videos before. I believe the chimp was called betty, but nevertheless, they gave it/her make up and it started drawing on itself using the mirror as a guide. Another clip showed it immitating one of the handlers putting make up on and it started using lipstick on its lip, instead of its face.
Torrentspy shutdown
Friends of TorrentSpy,

We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.

The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.

Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.

It was a wild ride,

The TorrentSpy Team

"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like." - Justice William O. Douglas
>He happens to prefer to play one side of the line of scrimmage.

Or at least prefers to play on the side he feels is an underserved market.

Most people want a news source that agrees with them. If a fact doesn't support your views, it must be a lie, right?

In the TV news market, this means that left wing types are split between CNN, CBS, NBC, etc. Murdoch figured this out, and right wing types all watch Fox.
one way to do it is to use procmail to filter incoming mail and piping the ones you are interested into your python program which will take the rfc822 message on stdin. the email module (http://docs.python.org/lib/module-email.html) will let you parse these messages.

this is provided that your MX dns entry points to your machine and that you have the appropriate ports unlocked, of course.
I won't claim that they are the best books ever, but I think they have some merits that make their success understandable.
From my experience, I wouldn't say the guys on Wall Street and in the City are "out there dancing". Most of them are in there, working 16 hours a day, up to 7 days a week. Think about supply and demand. Would they be getting such high salaries if the job was actually pleasant and fulfilling?

There are exceptions, of course, but the average fresh-out-of-college Wall Street employee isn't having much fun.
Is the Intel vs. AMD chip war back on?
I thought the cutest part of the story is that they are from Limerick.
1.9 is a development release. Ruby uses odd numbered points for those. The refined, "stable" version of 1.9 will be 2.0.
It's still a waste of time. There will be enough problems to learn from, no matter what he chooses to build. No need to introduce artificial problems.

I think one of the ways to spoil one's career is to litter one's life with artificial problems that one deems necessary for success. I feel reminded of the Japanese criticism of the MacBook Air recently.
Marc Cuban: "The Internet's dead.. [it's] for old people."
WTF?
Ask PG: Where is the saved link?
There used to be a link at the top called 'Saved' that had all the posts I had upmodded on it. Now I can't find that.

I used that as a sort of bookmark list, and it'd be great to have it back. Thanks in advance!
You know, life kills.
One site I really like is http://ffffound.com

It's an image bookmarking site where people post images they find around the web. I'm pretty sure all the images are copyrighted, but it links back to the original.

The site is currently invite only to register, but the people they've got tend to have pretty good taste in images.
Myth Busted: No extra geekyness conferred upon eyeglass wearers
Yes, focusing on casual gaming. Would say more, but we're in the first iteration and NDA pretty much prohibits leakage.
Yes. We usually copy and paste the collected license text(s) into an appendix in our technical documentation. If there is no documentation, the README is a good place too. For a website with no deliverables, I would place a link to the collected licenses from the About page.
Men are from Video Games, Women are from Social Networks
The man who made lists to fend off depression
Disagreement Hierarchy minus 1 (DH-1). Flamebait.
Ha ha ha ha... This Marc Cuban dude is a funny guy.

Thanks for the laugh :-)
What are you expecting to gain? (not much to lose)

Stanford Continuing Studies: "We have a generous drop policy which allows you to attend two class meetings to "try out" a course."
It's unfortunate that Flash is still a proprietary domain, given that it's become both increasingly prevalent and useful. I've put a substantial amount of work into developing a Flash game and have discovered, as I follow the market, that a lot of games are incompatible across different versions of the plugin. Fonts go missing, graphics features behave with different levels of performance, and worst of all, on some versions of the plugin, errors that elsewhere went ignored cause exceptions and terminate execution, resulting in the game becoming wholly unplayable.

I've also discovered a way to consistently crash the Linux plugin.

I'm hoping for either a suitable, market-accepted replacement to come along, or for an emulation like Gnash to get up to speed with the newest versions of SWF.
Hmm. Interestingly enough, I haven't had a single problem with Flash in Ubuntu. Not one.

Mind sharing said way? >:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo_incident

Sometimes when you shout "shut up, you water buffalo", people misunderstand.

It might have been more effective to simply shout "shut up" and leave out the part that can be misconstrued or misunderstood.

In other words, calling programmers "lions", referring to "zoos", and anointing a certain set of activities as "natural".. do these things help or harm the underlying message in the essay?
Thinking Outside the Company’s Box
I don't think that undermining the speaker is a valid way of arguing. It is irrelevant who states the argument; an argument is as equally as strong whoever makes it. I can copy and paste another's argument verbatim, and then change all the "I" references to "person X" references, and the argument would be identical.

What you can do is refute evidence. So if the speaker presents one of their own claims as evidence, you can sometimes invalidate that claim by undermining the speaker's pathos and ethos.

NOTE: When I say valid, I mean it in terms of determining what is correct, not what convinces people.
Comcast Adjusts Way It Manages Internet Traffic
It's in your profile right under reset password.
Volunteers use modern technology to put names to unidentified bodies
Eric Raymond is an excellent writer and you can't go wrong reading this article.

Also, learn how to do mathematical proofs. I don't know what the best way to do this is. I learned from 10th-grade Euclidean geometry class. Maybe you can pick up a good book on Euclidean geometry that has a lot of exercises in it.

Finally, pick up a good book on Lisp that has a lot of exercises in it and do all the exercises in it. Winston and Horn is good. "The Little Lisper" is also good.
That's an act and I don't trust him. For the real thing, watch Steve Wozniak.
Behind Every Great Inventor, Many Others Whom History Forgot
My co-founder and I took a seminar on entrepreneurship offered jointly between the engineering and business schools at USC. It was actually pretty similar to YCombinator dinners -- every week someone (occasionally multiple people) came in to talk about their own experiences as an entrepreneur, answer questions. etc. Unfortunately, unlike YC, it was at 7:30 in the morning, which was tough.

It wasn't focused on software, or any one field at all actually, so there was a really wide range of speakers. I have a hard time remembering many of the individuals, but a lot of the overall lessons have stuck with me I think. I have a long set of notes I should really look over, I'm sure their are things that would come in handy right now.
A fellow econ major?

I'll echo most of the advice already given here, but because your an econ major, I'll add something else just for fun: Try to do a research project or paper or whatever on some trend in the IT industry, like the history of the OS market or even the respective market territories of different programming languages. This won't teach you to hack, but it may help you set priorities as you learn, and it will help you if you attempt a startup.
it makes it a lot easier to eat them or force them to do work if you do that
The skills to pay the bills |
It's the same reason we aren't showing each other pictures or playing each other music right now. Written word is the best way to convey almost all kinds of complex information. If you have the time, that is.
Increase your alexa rank and page views |
I once dated a girl who said to me: "Barnes and Noble? What's that?" and "I've only read two books in my life."

But she was the one that broke it off.

Now I'm marrying someone that I worked with in a bookstore.
Most school charge roughly 50% of regular tuition rates to audit a course (attend lectures without earning credits.) They will usually allow you to complete all the coursework and get feedback as part of the auditing arrangement. Getting caught attending lectures without being enrolled can have implications beyond just being kicked out...you're essentially "stealing" an education. They can charge you with theft or criminal trespass. As someone who has a criminal record for trespassing, I'd advise you to just enroll in any course you really want to attend ;-)
How much is your blog actually worth?
It depends on the subfield. I've heard that I-bankers work crazy hours - 16/7, as you say. But my hedge fund friends usually work a pretty standard 9 hour day, 5 days a week (well, occasionally they'll be researching financials on a weekend, but it's because that's what they like to do). And they take pretty frequent vacations.

There's an element of risk-transference in the high financial industry salaries. When times are good, lots of money flows into the financial industry, which props up salaries. When times are bad, firms go under, people get laid off, and salaries drop. However, the loss is never entirely born by the employees - after all, somebody out there lost all their principal because Bear Stearns imploded. So on average, Wall Street employees will make more than people in steadier, more risk-free jobs.

Same goes for entrepreneurs, for that matter. If the company does well, they get multi-million-$ payouts. If the company folds, their investors bear part of the loss. So on average (mean), an entrepreneur will do better than an equivalent employee, even though on average (median), the entrepreneur ends up with nothing.
Ask YC: xbox live gamertags
yeah, when you cant stand looking at photoshop, textmate, or a browser any longer, you're probably on xblive. lets share gamertags
mine is baptistj
offbytwo
How about law school? Would auditing law school classes on IP help?
Although, I did enjoy the reference to a slashdot meme.
A lot of these descriptions are very specific. It doesn't matter what kind of computer you have or what tools you use. You just need a computer, a text editor, and to choose a language to start in. I highly recommend Python. Its a really simple one to learn and is great for web dev.

Download it here:
http://code.enthought.com/download.shtml

And here's a nice beginner's guide:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide
You can check his Linkedin profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johngibbon

His resume says "
Built 8 new products and enhanced 19 existing products over 14-year career. "

I'd ask him which products he built.
Let's remember that this is not "capitalism" in a classical sense. Federal Reserve policies have created "financialism" where leveraged speculation has been exceedingly profitable. The typical leverage of a hedge-fund is 5-to-1, even 10-to-1. Meriwether of LTCM fame ran a "conservative" fund this time with 14-to-1 leverage.

That kind of leverage is the direct outcome of the 1% interest rates the Fed ran for a while (banks borrowed at 1%, lent to the hedgies at 4-5%, pocketing a nice spread, and the hedgies used that cheap money to run their own leveraged speculation ...) They get 20% of the upside if they win, and get to walk away if they lose.

The net result is a transfer of wealth from productive classes of society towards speculative classes. This is what primarily caused the heightened inequality we witnessed in the last several years. I say all this as an entrepreneur with a libertarian bent.

From an individual point of view, it is perfectly rational to speculate this way. It is the Fed policy that created the incentives to speculate.

My point is that Wall Street riches have not been fairly earned in a capitalistic marketplace, but in an artificial environment fostered by the Fed.
The fact you will not use the word due to shame makes me think of Gresham's law which states: "Money overvalued by the State will drive money undervalued by the State out of circulation.",(from Wikipedia). In this case the bad association the word brings pushes its use beyond the comfort zone of those whose intentions are good.

Also, the positive image of good hackers is no doubt appealing to the more nefarious computer users and so only increases there desire to use the label. Combine these pressures with the fact that the negative version has already captured the popular mind and it would seem you might be right that the battle is lost.
Only for comments. Submissions themselves cannot be downmodded.
i think video and pictures are useful for a lot of information (less than writing, but a lot). but in general they are more expensive to do well. but examples include charts, maps, and graphs, and also pictures of scenes usually work better than describing what it looks like in English.
i am loving this razor sharp thinking and critique; it must be emblematic of the hacker type but i appreciate it. i am from the music world where everything is fuzzy and sort of. i mean, who writes a critique of disagreements? coolest thing ever. nice contribution to elevation of species.
Start-ups and Legal Fees
Given your econ major, surely there must be some interesting problems you have come across that you would like to attack by writing some programs?

Python is a great language to dive into. Easy to learn because it intentionally left out most of the boiler-plate fluff from other languages and lets you just express your solution in a direct, concise fashion.

If you get to the point where you need to crunch large number sets, check out scipy and numpy (just google). Takes a slight effort to set up initially, but then allows you to quickly process lots of numbers. Linear algebra, optimization, etc.
WOWIO: Free Books + Free Minds
"is a society that sends so many of its brightest college graduates into a capital markets monkey pit maximizing welfare?"

It's not "Society" that is sending people into jobs in banks, it's individuals making individual decisions to accept individual contracts. That's their right, as it should be and there is no act of theft involved.

I don't understand why this chap feels that he should object to that. Nobody's forcing him to do it.

The paragraph that begins "It helps that investment banking has a low barrier to entry" doesn't make a point, nor does the one following.
Regularly read Wikipedia articles on computer science, programming, logic, and perhaps mathematics and/or linguistics topics. Get Firebug and inspect the code of sites you like. Start building something with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Constantly improve what you're working on, and don't be afraid to ditch what you've got and start something new.

Focus on JavaScript. Watch the SICP lectures, read Doug Crockford, Raganwald, John Resig, and pg's Arc source. Learn the ins and outs of emacs, vim, TextMate, or Eclipse. Play with Lisp, Python, Ruby, and Io and read others' code in those languages, then apply what you like to your style of writing JavaScript. Try out the major JS frameworks (jQuery, Prototype, MochiKit) and settle on one of them. Then rig up a server-side JavaScript solution (Jaxer, Helma). Pick an interesting domain and learn about it until you find an overlooked problem you can solve, then capitalize on it.
unfortunately the press have sensationalized things here, we never claimed to have made "millions" and we know this deal isn't the "we've made it" one it's being portrayed as. i'll blog about our thinking behind the sale in more detail. here's the nutshell version:

- we were at an inflection point. our initial launch went well, we were getting traction. we had three choices: angel, vc or acquisition.

- this particular acquisition gave us a cash component that made us each very happy (i worked out that it'd have been almost 7 years before i'd have seen this much liquid cash working as a corporate attorney at one of the world's largest law firms).

- our upside hasn't been capped. if we deliver the value we think we can, we'll make at least the same (if not more) than if we'd kept growing auctomatic independently and sold for tens of millions - not many early exits keep that potential upside while substantially derisking the downside (stock of a public co will always have some value, unlike a startup where it's all or nothing).

- the Live Current guys are fundamentally great guys. they've given us freedom to go away and build things how we want. of course we're going to be held accountable if we don't deliver but there's no issue of "9 - 5 hours" or "office politics". we're still working essentially as an independent company. we're not being exiled to vancouver - we'll be back in the valley after a few months to build out the teams we want to work with.

given all this we felt this was the right decision. we can only deal with the situation in the present and right now, we're ecstatic about the deal and the future.
As someone who works on Wall Street, I'm getting a kick out of etc. etc....

I don't think it's quite true. Most of the people I work with are pretty smart, but I haven't come across too many geniuses (I am certainly not one). Wall Street draws different types of people: the type of "talent" attracted to a corporate finance/investment job is very different from the type of "talent" attracted to trading. Different kind of intelligence, different tolerance for risk, different personality.

One thing is for certain: investment banks and hedge funds aren't going to be hiring as many people in the next year or two.
I think the term "griefer" is more appropriate. I hope it continues to gain currency.
I don't think you can argue that excessive leverage is the result of low interest rates. LTCM, which was levered around 30 to 1, operated in an environment where the Fed funds rate was around 6%, not 1%. Likewise, Japan has had extremely low (even 0%) overnight interest rates since the 90s, but there hasn't been an explosion of Japanese hedge funds to the extent that there's been an explosion of American ones.

People have found ways to lever themselves rather through derivatives, rather than simple borrowing of cash... e.g. if you want levered exposure to a portfolio of high-grade corporate bonds, you don't borrow money and invest in cash bonds. You get an investment bank to structure a bespoke synthetic CDO tranche which, according to your single-factor Gaussian copula model, gives you exactly the risk and return that you want. If you want levered exposure to interest rates, you don't borrow money and speculate on Treasury notes; you pay (or receive) on an interest rate swap whose notional amount is far greater than the amount of cash you have. With the current state of derivatives regulation, people will be playing these games whether Fed funds is at 0% or 10%.

I will grant you that giving fund managers a call option on their returns isn't a great idea. It has the advantage of being cheap, since the value of a call option is less than the underlying. But at the same time, the value of a call option increases in value as the volatility of the underlying increases. So not only do hedge fund managers have incentive to get good returns, they have an incentive to get volatile returns as well -- this leads to perhaps more risk-taking than is necessary.

Edit: and the funny thing is that JWM Partners, Meriwether's post-LTCM fund, is supposedly down 20% this year. To be fair, they apparently did a pretty good job from 2000-2008 or so.
"But I'm left to ask: is a society that sends so many of its brightest college graduates into a capital markets monkey pit maximizing welfare?"

This is the part of the argument with which I take issue. Allocation of investment is the heart of a capitalist economy. In a socialist economy, investment is dispensed from a central location. In a capitalist economy such as ours, where there are many competition-driven individual firms, we benefit from each of them making wise investment decisions.

Investment firms literally decide how we spend our accrued wealth. I can't think of a better place to send our best and brightest.
Multicore Programming? Yawn!
when they're this old, they should be auto-downmodded. the article is 7 years old, and I'm pretty sure blinkenlights.nl is older than that.