skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mozilla Metrics: An Improved Experience for New Users of Firefox
I think purchasing will become much more of an impulse decision— much like what the App Store has done with software.
Do-gooder iPhone app GiveWork gets more photo- and web-friendly
can anyone help me find a favorite of mine? Its the one where they are building a program and the employee working on it had been let go from apple, but he snuck in every day to finish it.
Noble thoughts. I'm not a lawyer, so this is mostly a question: if you're dealing in open-source only, and your product is service, wouldn't it make sense to form a partnership firm?

All the things he talks about - a sense of ownership, people managing their own affairs, shared responsibilities - are made explicit when you do it that way, right?
This includes the login I guess...
To hell with anonymity, I'd like to see a version with a "smarter roulette" so I could be paired with someone who I might be interested in talking to.
I think you're looking at binary choices: give up, or forge ahead. Whereas I tend to see it as a question of picking among infinitely many desirable options. In that case, optimizing based on what you're best at is essential.

That actually answers the Zen question, too: don't become independent by learning how to solve every problem, but by getting into a situation in which the problems you're faced with are the ones you're best at solving.
Love it or hate it, flash still counts for a lot of the entertainment sector's web functionality. Apple should admit that many of it's users miss that and will continue do so with even greater poignancy when the iPad ships.

This will rage on until HTML5 is able to replicate and improve on every function of flash.
If your revenue is what you get paid every month by your subscribers, and your cost is your total mileage of fiber (plus switching equipment, upstream connection, etc.), then the more subscribers you have per mile of fiber in the ground, the higher your net income.

More saliently, the justification most often trotted out when US consumers complain about being so ill-served by broadband providers is the higher population density in Japan and South Korea.
Elemental theme framework for WordPress
I think the author is trying to assert the idea of "not hanging around" waiting for someone to come and do it for you.

He's not negating the idea of delegation. I guess you just have to strike a balance.

There are many people out there who will wait days for someone to make a simple html change for them on their site, where they could just as well learn to do it themselves. Its not like they have to learn C# overnight.
betweenness centrality also has a nice interpretation that might make some sense for this application. or so.
More on the TonidoPlug - the geeky stuff
Celery is the best tool I know to mix asynchronous tasks into a Django app. Seamless, painless, awesome.
I almost want to set up a competitor to this (having not read the patent) and sell it for $5 per code. Could one simply ignore such a silly lawsuit? Or would it really ruin me if they sued?

Honestly, a bit.ly clone like this would take an afternoon to do well.
see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1115963
Just as a side-point, although Canada has a large land area for a small population, it is actually much more urbanized than the US.
Good point. I upvoted lsb because that bothered me too, but the problem is what you describe.
We've had issues with single points of failure and are trying to plan for failover and load balancing. I won't argue that this might be overengineered, but this is a full transactional application with 99.9% uptime guaranteed to our clients and with millions of transactions (mostly API) per hour. I agree this is a write-seldom, read-often piece of data. We route based on userid, so we can not have any chance for data collision.
PR: Should You Do It Yourself?
> Looking over the next few decades Will sees an aging, obsolescent America in retreat to a young and aggressive China.

China seems to put so much emphasis on their being a '3000 year old country' so I think we should take them up on that and stop calling them 'young.'
Learning Chinese involves a lot of rote learning and memorisation （at least the writing does). Programming is a flowful activity that I enjoy doing. So I don't really see them as a same.

One similarity: actually using the skills practically is incredibly vital for learning. For Mandarin, this is conversations; for programming, projects. Another: there's a few interesting isomorphisms between linguistics (Chinese is the first foreign language I've seriously tried to learn) and computer science. But overall, learning them has been a very different experience.
Python is great. O'Reilly is coming out with a book soon, "Head First Programming" that teaches programming, specifically using Python. It could be a great first start for you.
I would add that China faces the prospect of, to say the least, internal political instability. Like all postmodern authoritarian governments, theirs is based on the idea that in exchange for sacrificing freedom and autonomy, the population will get very rich -- so if they don't deliver on the wealth, they'll face a great deal of restiveness.

While a few provinces are doing well (Guangdong most prominently), inland China is still very backwards -- and, reportedly, increasingly disgusted with the government. The one-child policy is still enforced there, brutally; despite the almost complete lack of journalists' access to mainland China, I've heard reports of spontaneous, armed "mutinies" among the populace -- attacks on government officials, on account of the one-child policy, or over taxes, or for whatever reason.

China is less politically stable than it looks; for all we know, the next Liu Bang or Zhu Yuanzhang may have already taken to the hills. And if you think that the Chinese government can't possibly collapse _now_, that we'll never see a period of good old-fashioned Chinese interregnal warlordism in the 21st century, I remind you that we saw one in the 20th, when it was equally anachronistic and inconceivable -- the most chaotic period of the Five Races Under One Union was the 1920s, contemporary with the Wiemar Republic and _The Great Gatsby_.

Of course, China eventually becoming powerful is almost inevitable; sailormoon points out that their sheer numbers argue for that, especially when combined with a culture which, though nominally Confucian-Legalist, has a very real "go-getting" idiom. This is the other side of China: the brash, independent style of the world of mountain and river, ultimately tracing back to the xiá (侠), the knights of the feudal Zhou dynasty. It may be some time before this happens -- their current postmodern authoritarian government has to either reform or be overthrown first, I think -- but it will arrive.

For further reading, look up Boye de Mente's _The Chinese Have a Word for It_.
http://www.nucalc.com/Story/
I have been thinking about this same problem. I get the HARO newsletters, but 3 times a day is just too much to sift through when 9/10 there is nothing remotely relevant.

I want something half way between google alerts and HARO. I monitor a few keywords and whenever there is a reporter asking for something that includes that keyword, I get an email.
I don't know, it all sounds a bit too good to be true. I love working on open source software myself, so I wish them the best of luck, though, because if it works out, it sounds like a dream company.
The other comments here confirm what I suspected was true about most hackers - we never learned the "basics", or at least not at first (at least not the "basics" that this blog post seems to take as fundamental to our trade). We just became obsessed with the idea of making things, and did so without doing anything right. After enough screwing up and causing yourself headaches, you revisit the basics, not because it's something you feel like you "have to do" to learn to program "properly" (whatever that might mean), but because it makes doing what you wanted to do in the first place easier.

I don't think I know of a single good programmer that learned to code in such a horrible grueling manner. If you're not making shit from the very beginning, then you're never going to learn to love it, and if you don't love it, then you're not going to be very good at it.

One of the most important traits of a good programmer is that while they work hard, they barely consider it work. Especially at the beginning, where the work:play ratio is practically zero. The boring programming grind should only start when you're doing work for other people that you don't care very much about; if it feels like that before you reach that stage, you're doing something wrong. Find a nice easy graphical language to play around with while you learn about functions, classes, I/O, and algorithms; you can start worrying about mastering the LAMP stack once you've realized that the programming part of it is easy and fun, and the LAMP part of it is just another set of technologies whose quirks we learn and put up with in the name of getting things done a bit more easily.

I think the real problem is that the blog post might be right: you do need to know the basics to get very far in programming. But the basics of programming have nothing to do with hard library-specific study and grueling memorization; they involve loving to build things and make them work, thinking logically and experimenting with all sorts of code just to see what happens. The rest comes pretty naturally once you have that down.
I was expecting something completely different by the title. I was thinking of how, when you grow older, your curiosity dies because it takes too much effort to satisfy it.

This worries me. I have a friend who was saying the same thing, but he was uninterested in doing anything about it.
> Good point. I guess I believe everything they tell me on CNBC. ;)

CNBC's audience is investors, not wall street folk.
"Second, there's a difference between a subsidy and loans. GM and Chrysler got loans."

General Motors is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States Treasury. This is a point of some significance and worth avoiding glossing over.
Agreed, and keyword alerts is one of the next features I'll be adding. I skipped for launch for simplicity.
When I am using a real Jabber client.
Japan . . . was and remains a stable, functioning democracy . . . China is a fundamentally unstable autocracy

Why is this obviously wrong assumption about the stability of democracy vs. autocracy so pervasive? Stable democracies (USG) are stable, unstable democracies (Weimar) are unstable; stable autocracies (Louis XIV) are stable, unstable autocracies (Louis XVI) are unstable. As a criterion for good government, stability simply doesn't give you a clear reason to choose one form over the other.
From what I understand parsing is a solved problem. Parsing exactly like 40+ different C compilers for which you don't have source is a different beast all together.
This has nothing to do with technology. It's all 70's as all the rest.

it's all politics.
I've never used a Zune, and probably never will... not because of anything that Microsoft has done, but because I'm well served in the iPod ecosystem. They might be great products, but that isn't my point. I'm not trying to say that Microsoft doesn't make good gear, but that in music players they aren't defining the market. So far, they are playing in a market that is defined by Apple.

Even Apple in this regard wasn't very innovative. They took a concept that had already been proven in the marketplace (MP3 player), and made it better. I had an old Rio MP3 player back in the day, and it was a pain to get music onto it. When the first iPod came out, it was much more useful because it was easy to get my music on there. The innovation was in making it simple to buy music from iTunes and put it on your iPod.

I'm curious to see what the new Zunes look like when Microsoft announces them next week. But I suspect that it will be evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I have to agree with this. I know quite a few people who love doing 'menial' jobs such as this. (seriously).

Getting paid, for them, is a bonus.
I know Chinese as a second language. (For many years my occupation was Chinese-English interpreting.) I am still learning programming, even though my first exposure to programming (BASIC on time-sharing terminals) came much earlier in my education than my first exposure to Chinese. Good teachers can make a huge difference.

Any subject is hard as you get deeper into it. Chinese pronunciation is hard from the beginning for a native speaker of English because of the need to attend to phonemic tone. Chinese grammar eventually gets to be plenty hard, although I find it congenial compared to Russian grammar because it is mostly based on word order and function words rather than on inflection.

As for what is hard about programming, I HEAR (but don't know from personal experience) that learning to think recursively is hard. Pointers are hard, I am told, for many people who learn C. Thinking about programming from a functional rather than imperative perspective is hard until one studies a functional language thoroughly (usually).

Whether it's learning a computer language, or learning a natural human language, one has to get out of the world of instructional materials and into the world of actually communicating with them machine or the foreign person. It's the live situations in writing new code or conversing about new topics that really test a programmer or a language learner.
Amusing Comment Thread
I upvoted it because Erica had the best web hosting company I ever worked with and I miss her running her service.
Not if they are blocked.

As the internet becomes more and more central to the dissemination of information, I think it is more and more critical that there be some mutually agreed upon 'neutral' channel for communication between people. Because the alternative is that all access to very large and extremely important populations is cut off from your message completely. For instance, non English speakers in China, Indonesia, Iran, and Vietnam. The worst part about it is that in the days of broadcast, you would just say OK, and proceed to have US Government funded radio broadcast into whatever country. Fast forward to today, and how many of those kids are walking around with a radio? Very few probably.
I love how he mentions "water damage" in the list of things that can happen to a server. That made me snicker... who doesn't hate those leaky datacenter roofs!
When you comment on a comment
Actually I agree with you. I think what I did not communicate well in the post is exactly what you said - I have more ideas than I know what to do with and the rate that I think of things to build is exponentially greater than the rate at which I can build them.

I am not someone who will learn something conceptually just for the sake of knowing it.

The point is that, what I learned from Chinese was that if you just suck it up and force yourself to learn the basics for a while (no matter how much you wish you could just get back to building things) that you can actually become better faster. That is the part that's painful - the actual making-of-things part is way fun.
Kathlyn Hendricks, a relationship expert (_Conscious Loving_ is a fascinating book for the engineering mind dealing with relationships), offers this advice for when to leave a personal relationship (point 2 of the audio). Maybe it's applicable when pursuing ideas as well?

http://www.hendricks.com/QA2

"Have you worked on the relationship so long that the amount of pain you feel overshadows the possibilities? Time to leave."
Hah, no, but the same sentiment of wanting to help out the domestic automakers that motivated the bailout existed prior to the bailout itself.
I'm having trouble tracking down a citation, but Marketplace pointed out that this is the first of these recalls to happen since the burgeoning of social networking. Pintos got written up in newspaper headlines. The SUV/Firestone debacle probably got snarky bylines on Fark. The Toyota "crisis" happened in the full bloom of Twitter et all. The commonality of foreign cars means that Bob can post to Facebook to warn any and all of his friends that they should check their driveway for any of the recalled models.

Furthermore there's an angle on the story: Toyota's reputation is build on reliability. I can't speak for the Pinto, but I don't recall Ford's SUV having that reputation. With sentiments currently against big business, suggestions of deceit are juicy linkbait.

Beyond that, some speak of Toyota's timeliness in issuing an apology. The Asashi, 2nd leading Japanese national newspaper, accuses them of apologizing too late. I personally wouldn't know how much weight that holds, but I find it interesting.
Well, it's kind of hard to tell, since we're combining our MongoDB nodes with other services too (Hadoop DFS datanodes too, to name a common example). We're running MongoDB on 12 different virtual dedicated servers, comparable to a dual core Intel Xeon with 4GB ram.

But I can tell you that you really shouldn't worry about MongoDB and performance, unless you want a really high load on a single server; I've heard it being able to do 20k write ops / sec on a single commodity server. From what I can see, our results kinda line up with that: MongoDB performance certainly isn't a problem.
> Probably the biggest reasons why teenager are unemployed is labor laws.

Is that really the case? Are there people that want to hire more people but it's too expensive? It may just be that there isn't enough work for them anymore because business has been reduced.

To put it in simpler terms, McDonald's isn't hiring more teenagers because less people are frequenting McDonald's. They aren't going to hire someone just to stand around most of the time just because their budget allows for them to employ the person.
Custom keyboard in W|A iApp
Oh, and allow them to type a little message to accompany their goofy photos. :)
Wargames: U.S. Cyberattack starts February 16 watched by all
Ah, I was stupidly neglecting the profits from subscribers after the infrastructure was in place. However, wouldn't this run counter to the OP's argument that it's the free market economics preventing this from happening? With the greater profits available afterwards, why wouldn't the money-grubbing bastards invest in it?
New Zealand Botnet Pleads Guilty, Judge Discharges Conviction
The problem isn't the variable cost; it's the $2,000 truck roll per customer.
Yes, it uses Hanson's market scoring rule.
If you feel it is essential for the educated citizen today, then it isn't Google's job to address the lack of broadband in some areas, but rather the government's job. I'm fond of the idea of refreshing old programs like Rural Electrification by changing them into new broadband expansion programs. Whispers of this have been made by politicians including our President while he was campaigning, but as far as I know nothing even remotely substantial has happened to either promote or cancel the idea. Instead it just seems forgotten.
How are you going to get journalists to discover and pay attention to this?
They're eventually going to need (and want) someone to run the sales pipeline.
The Wetware Crisis: The Thermocline of Truth
Is there some kind of mandate that patent abstracts be written as run-on sentences?
I agree. jquery is more straight-forward for the Funcional crowd. which is not everyone. it's almost everyone that do javascript. but even I like to use OO for frontend as it's something i usually write-once-read-four-months-later. and I need that OO constrains to live well with that.

About the documentation. it's a reference guide. it's like reading a well formated source code. and the search feature there is top notch. I like it. That's the main advantage to me. jquery tries to patronize me sometimes.
That's a fantastic question that I don't have the full answer to. I figured I'd use it myself, ping bloggers and journalists I know, post in here, leverage Twitter, maybe do some Facebook ads. I'm open to suggestions.
It sounds like Google will be the "fiber service provider" and you'll have a choice of ISPs.
wow!!, they sound like grumpy prisoners who want into the rec room.
How about a sprinkler system? Or the fire department? Or a flood? These sorts of things are actually more common than you may think.

See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttcQy3bCiiU
also,
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/12/04/rains...
This is a very - 1 GIGABIT/SEC - interesting development on part of Google. They've successfully - 1 GIGABIT/SEC - established unified control of - 1 GIGABIT/SEC - their entire chain of service without strangling competition. Where Google goes - 1 GIGABIT/SEC - so does everybody else, it seems - and I, for one, fully welcome our thoroughly broadbanded - 1 GIGABIT/SEC - future.

There seems to be a lot to look forward to. Say, the INCREDIBLE 1 GIGABIT/SEC SPEED AHAHAHAHAAYES
Social micropayment system by Peter Sunde of Pirate Bay fame goes beta
I love working on a production line. The only reason I moved out of it was money.
Funny. But can you explain how all those people ended up there? It's not like that's the first hit on Google/Bing, or?
Delegation does work when there is just too much to do, but I would also argue knowing at least a _little_ about programming would help you work with your team better. And that goes for anything in addition to programming. I don't really know how to program but I understand the basics from taking a couple classes in school. I don't try to give advice, but I at least can tell when something is going to be hard or easy to accomplish and can say more cogent things in discussions about new features/changes, etc.
No, and here's why.

The goal of selling your software is to make profit, so that's what you maximize. Let's look at some examples for comparison.

Alice and Bob are both selling software. Their per-copy expenses are $1.

Alice advertises on AdWords for $.10 per click, and has a 10% conversion rate. So, her cost per sale is $2 ($1 cost + $1 AdWords). She sells each copy for $3, making $1 profit. She sells 100 copies per month, making $100.

Bob advertises on AdWords for $.199 per click, and has the same 10% conversion rate. His cost per sale is $2.99 ($1 cost + $1.99 AdWords). He sells his software for $3 per copy, making $0.01 profit.

Homework questions: how many copies per month does Bob have to sell to make more profit than Alice? Is it likely that an increase in AdWords bid from $.10 to $.19 will drive that kind of difference in click-throughs?
I've seen a few open source companies that wound up being successful... when just starting out, how do you find paying clients to do services for?
The repercussions of this on the next generation of gaming consoles would be very intriguing.
So many computer illiterate people in one comment thread :) And they all read readwriteweb.com!
Some technical people are probably worse at identifying good programmers than non-technical ones. But overall, I'd say that the very best people at identifying good programmers have a strong technical background. However, would agree that the situation is hardly hopeless for non-technical folks. After all, as far as I know, Jason Fried didn't have a strong programming background, and he ended up with DHH.

I also agree with your top post. While it would be nice to have 10 years of software experience or the technical background to evaluate programming talent, you can still succeed by identifying and partnering with talented people.
What are you talking a out, it seems to have achieved exactly what Google wanted. Is your brain even connected?
Average access speed is dropping because of the increased penetration of wireless access in the US lately.
You write software people want to use. Then you wait. And while you're waiting you write about it, talk about it, and make the software better. Eventually clients come to you.
How to Seed or Download a Torrent on Amazon S3