skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is some good general advise. On the hiring/interviewing section I'm not sure if I'm in agreement. If he means a 30-60 minute interview [[by each person that will be working with the candidate]] then we're in agreement, if he means in total no way.

Anyone doing hiring should read Topgrading ( http://www.topgrading.com/index.cfm ) and even if you choose to not follow the full format you should be making conscious choices to do something different with good reasons behind it.
One can reject AGW and accept that humanity is causing long term damage to the ecosystem. Your comment reads like a noble lie,

"well maybe the science is a little shaky, but we need to implement these policies {driving less, energy reduction, limits on emissions, etc} so let's just get on with it"
That's the point - you don't start a new project every 2 weeks. You start off with an idea easily adaptable to various scenarios. Then adapt each time, target new people, and observe if the variation makes you required $1 a day. When you have nichified a codebase that nothing more can be squeezed of it, you start on the next.
I don't feel like any of these are particularly compelling examples, particularly if you are familiar with more languages beyond Java and Python which are used for comparison in the article.

In both the file handling and mutex example, blocks seem to be serving as a substitute for proper lexically scoped variables. In Perl, for example, we would use a lexically-scoped file handle to ensure the file is closed when the variable goes out of scope. The same technique is the standard way of implementing mutexes in C++.

As for respond_to, I've never understood how it wasn't just a baroque rewriting of a case-statement, but perhaps someone can enlighten me as to why blocks are superior in this situation.
It will take years to make 400 projects. Looks like a full time job to me. Allow me to explain....

You make a project today. 1 buck. Another project tomorrow. 2 bucks. Wait a minute. I can't like off of two bucks.....

You will need another job to provide that needed income to live off of. Especially to pay bills. It will take years
I think the odds of creating 400 money-making projects without one of them becoming a real success are very low.
I think if you try to create 400 projects, most will make 0/day and a couple will make 10/day. Then you optimize those. Slowly you end up with a small number of projects generating a half decent amount money.

This is actually a great way to prevent yourself from choosing a local maximum in the product space. You climb a bunch of hills a little bit.

(edited)
I'm not saying it is impossible to write and sell good software and keep improving it. I'm saying that a lot of people have tried it and do not have the neccessary advice and reach to make the software successful.

Look at all the Review my startup posts. I have only ever seen a handful actually become successful. Most just seem to fade off.

I'm not saying you NEED to be from that group to do it successfully. But it is difficult. What you did, has not been replicable by most of the other people here.
The physics say it won't happen

Does it? That's a very strong statement. We are still very ignorant of the subtle workings of the body.

There have been numerous studies and as I see it the jury is still out. Mobile phones have only really been in common use for a decade; that's less time than it takes for eg. lung cancer to develop. I'm not "worried" as such, but I'm certainly open to new data, and think it's rather too soon to declare absolute victory to one side or the other.

Anyway I wasn't trying to say this study is right or wrong or anything really. I was just commenting on the instantly dismissive attitude of many of the responders to this article. I think such dismissiveness is unwarranted.
One of the projects was putting thirty ninja videos on a website. When that project becomes a real success I'll buy you dinner.
If you take his definitions of in-crowd vs. normals to be true, the in-crowd has the prerogative to choose energizing startups and work on exciting projects without putting much thought into making money early-on. The normals have bills to pay, kids to send to school, and sick family members to take care. For us normals, money is always a large (though not the only) factor in making decisions that relate to our career, projects, and products.

I would love to leave everything and work on some of my ideas but too many people rely on me to have a stable income at this point for me to just abandon them midstream. This doesn't mean I'm doing nothing. I'm slowly changing my life around so I can get to where I want to be. But at every project I look into, I have to consider how much money I can potentially make and how soon would I see a cash flow. The normals aren't all dreaming of being the next MS/Google. Just like the in-crowd, we want to make good products that users would love. We just have a lot more baggage and need to make sure our dreams don't get in the way of our loved ones' care.
Yehuda Katz is always able to remind me that there is so much Ruby I don't know.
The issues in Congo are troubling/horrifying but as it pertains to Rwanda, the atrocities were made ever more stark by the fact that estimates place up to 1/5th of the population being murdered. Further, it didn't help that the Congolese government backed by France at the time backed the Hutu government in Rwanda that committed the atrocities. I admit I'm not as familiar with the details of what's happened in the DRC so I should have specified that it was what I found most troubling about the Rwandan massacres/genocide. I won't defend the atrocities in Rwanda (and committed by Rwanda in the DRC), though I will note that a key issue to peace has been that members of the former Hutu government fled into the Congo and have also launched attacks from there ever since.

I note further that it isn't just former members of the Hutu government that have seemed to run amok in the DRC, the LRA that has had a history of attacks into Uganda and kidnapped child soldiers have also found shelter in the DRC.

It is a complete mess though even in the Congo, the history of direct French involvement when it came to mercantilism can be traced to just prior to the recent civil war (ie oil contracts). A big part of French/Belgian legacy (and a recent one at that) has been the tribalism that was allowed to flourish if not even encouraged.
How old are you? What do you already know? What is 2/3+4/7?

Do you know what an electron is? Do you know its charge? What does V=IR mean?

What is sqrt(-1)? What are the solutions of x^2-3x+2=0, and how did you find them?

Without knowing things like this it's impossible to know whether to recommend Horowitz and Hill, or something like this: http://www.makingthings.com/teleo/products/documentation/tel...

Just try typing "Introduction to Electronics" into Google and see what you get.

Finally, Why? What do you want to accomplish - where are you trying to get to?
Yeah, this prof is going to be moving to a tablet PC soon because it's just too expensive to keep him supplied with transparencies.
Which books are right for you depends on what in particular you're interested in, and what your level of aptitude for this area is. For a sequence of topics, here's MIT's; I'm providing the course numbers, match those against the on-line versions at the OCW site: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm

18.01 Single Variable Calculus
8.01 Classical Mechanics
18.02 Multivariable Calculus
8.02 Electricity and Magnetism

6.002 Circuits and Electronics
6.003 Signals and Systems

That will get you a long ways.
It is clearly about the politics. If you take the time to read the article and examine the 'inaccuracies', you'll see that they have nothing to do with the science but are misstatements about things like alternative forms of energy.

The data HAVE been released, HAVE been scrutinized, and the overwhelming consensus among people who have spent their lives studying the climate is that the Earth's climate is warming and that excessive CO2 production is the likely cause.

The fact that some people try to advance their cause (alternative energy) or overestimate the effects, does not change the scientifically arrived at conclusion.
Deconstructing Creativity: The 4 Roles You Need to Play to be Fully Creative
Building fun into your software designs
Facebook Repeatedly Deleting Hong Kong Opposition Groups
You Got Design Right – Now ‘Write’ Design | Inspired Magazine
Guys you had a very informative discussion here nevertheless I am not interested in knowing if it is a good career whether is has good opportunities etc. Of course nothing wrong in your assuming it so given the way I had framed the question.

Motive was to do a self study in that area. I am very sure that security concerns at all levels will only increase over the next 10-20 years and there is a scope for lot of innovative stuff.
Ask a ninja is ridiculously popular and probably started with a bunch of videos.
If I remember correctly, MIT doesn't distinguish between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which helps to product EEs who can program and CS majors who understand hardware.
I think the idea is that each project gets an initial small period of launch work, and then after that they're mostly self-sustaining for their economic lifetime. "Optimize for time." In that case, half hour/month may be enough.

The 1$/day and 400/month figures are just for illustration. The idea is to crank on multiple simple things that share characteristics. As you optimize for time, you're also optimizing for "crank," getting better at cranking out simple things.
How on earth are you supposed to create and maintain 400 "projects" at once?
I guess I should have said sounds like a "strategy." It dislike the strategy because it's not why I program. I don't program a million things to make a million dollars. I program because it's a passion, and unless I misinterpreted the meaning of the post, this strategy is...heartless.

I take into account that "in-crowd" has it easy and "normal" doesn't. I could image myself writing a similar article; however, instead of the goal being "make 12,000 a month", the goal would have been "Find followers so that one can make a reputation which will allow one to find a well-liked job (could be continuing to make small apps)" And hell. I'd sure as hell point out that if one attempts to make money from those apps, then one can help subsidize his living costs and manage to raise enough money to send his or her kids to private school!
This is a sure-fire way to create a lot of spam and hack products. The creative element of fostering a project and putting real intellectual effort is gone, for sake of trying to turn a measly profit. There is nothing artistic or genuine about what he is doing here. There is no soul in these products.

Of all the products and software I use, there is soul in every single one of them. Safari, Tweetie/Twitter, Hacker News, iTunes, Adium, Fireworks, TextMate, Sequel Pro, zsh, Firefox, and all of the websites I read. They each have something to be proud of. If you are making software and services that you cannot be proud of and are only there to make you money, then you have chosen a path that is less meaningful and will not bring you the kind of happiness and security that I think most software creators are looking for in building software.

Feeding your family is one thing, but creating and harboring what is effectively spam is not the only way to do it. Labors of love are perfectly capable of making you money, and with the right amount of luck, and much more preparation, you can find yourself rolling in the same dough as these bottom of the barrel money makers that this writer is scheming.

As they say, don't eat your soul to fill your belly.
Apple has huge spikes just after each of the last 2 iPhone releases, and large dip before the lastest release.

Apple has been very silent on the WebKit mailing list for a few months prior to the iPad annoucement.

It won't be too surprising if Apple has a few patches queued up that they will commit when iPad ships to customers.
Ask HN: Innovative ideas in security domain ?
I plan to design an explosive detector which will cost below $200 and will be able to detect explosives in a Car or Person in less than 6 seconds.

Assuming that I succeed in doing so do you think such an equipment will be a hit? Especially in countries like India where very mall, multiplex has metal detectors, personal frisking etc?

What other devices do you possibly think of that can help me make money?
Wikis are forever sustainable, even if it is horribly outdated.

However, depending on the niche you occupied, you barely get enough money above your domain cost renewal. Beyond a certain point, it is not worth your time to invest in it.

For me, it helps that I can wait a few year before bootstrapping my next website, along with freelance work. That wiki is still earning me money.
I'm not sure your conclusion necessarily follows what he's proposing. He's saying: find 400 things that each make $1/day -- it's a thought experiment as much as it is a proposition, BTW.

Some people would certainly make 400 spam blogs or something else equally useless. I don't think that was the author's intention, though.

I wish I could personally say that every single thing I do has my heart and soul in it. I can't, for reasons outside my apparent control. I bet I could find 400 things I like enough to spend time on, and that's enough for me.
How To Grow A Twitter Audience
Max is proposing that it isn't that difficult for a programmer to find a way to make $1/day. Max -- care to elucidate?
What My User Survey Taught Me
I'm always perplexed when people try to generalize about gender issues.

Obviously, VCs haven't fundamentally changed during the past couple of years, as the decline set in. If they failed to recognize the value of funding female entrepreneurs in the past, and still fail to do this today, then this factor is basically irrelevant to what caused the recent decline.

If, instead, the issue is that VCs, now that they are down, should be alert to broadening the range of investments to others that are clearly good, but that their myopia has prevented them in the past from recognizing, then this factor is not a cause of any decline but really represents a potential missed opportunity for them looking forward.

This, then, is a call for VCs to broaden their outlook as a way of speeding their recovery. That is a valid point as far as it goes. The person harmed by prejudice is not just the direct victim but also the perpetrator, who lives in a shrunken and less vibrant environment and suffers accordingly.

What VCs do in this area, though, will have little or no impact on the number of female entrepreneurs who are drawn to startups. The cause of the dearth of women in this area lies much farther up the chain, having to do with why women might be less drawn to get the particular technical training needed to become a founder and the like. Until that changes, whatever the VCs do will, in my view, have little or no material impact on this issue.
Ask a Ninja is so popular that he/they (I'm unclear) appeared alongside a bunch of stars in SF recently -- in honor of Conan O'Brien, whom I presume was there as well. Holy cow.
The problem using a case statement is: what are you casing on? In order to properly do content negotiation, you first need to know all of the possible provided formats, so you can negotiate against the "Accept"ed ones.

In order to do it with a case statement, you'd have to repeat the list of provided Mimes: once so the content_type method knew how to negotiate, and then once for each switch in the case statement. Using a block here allows us to make a native'ish case statement that eliminates the duplication.
I'm not a big fan of creating that many products since it seems like you're forcing yourself into a churn-and-burn corner (and you'll probably be building systemic weaknesses into your model, like being one Googlewhack or AppStore reordering away from penury). However, the core insight about creation being one more process that can be scaled is potentially pretty big.

You can even use it in the service of the one big lovingly-handedcrafted adequately-supported non-sucking product that you're supposedly not capable of building/marketing/etc. For example, everybody and their dog has done "photo sharing website", and if you're coming to the Internet today with photo sharing site #85421 you're probably not going to get too far. However, you could probably do fairly well with the same tech and a focus on wedding photographers. (I happen to know that pond is well-fished, too, just an example.) And you could roll out new facets of your marketing/product creation strategy to target each niche you can identify, big and small.

For example: I very much doubt that I could make a software product about a subject as niche as owls of Asia while still adequately devoting time and resources to supporting/maintaining/improving it, but I'm pretty sure with an established product adding a bit about owls of Asia to the marketing mix is pretty much just a bolt-on-and-go sort of maneuver. (You might ask "Now is there anyone in the world who will actually pay money to do something associated with the owls of Asia?!" I have evidence in the affirmative.)

Edit to add: It seems Max and I independently chose owl-related niches as our practical examples, since he posted before me and I didn't see it. What are the odds, right?
How To Manage And Upgrade Your Life Device Drivers
My conclusion stems from his primary example: A collection of ninja videos slathered with adsense. It's half-way to a spamblog, but he considers it something to be proud of.
Ask HN: Hacking Android, what's out there?
I'm thinking about getting an Android phone, either Nexus One or Motorola's Droid. I'm a programmer and I have a few ideas in mind, absolutely non-commercial, personal little hacks.

I have absolutely zero interest in their official Java-based SDK. Google's front page on Android development stinks XML at me. I can comprehend Android idea only from "Linux in my pocket" point of view, and that's the kind of tinkering/development I have in mind (taking existing unix apps/utils and porting useful parts of them to run on mobile devices).

Where to go? I tried searching Google but the Internet is just filled with SDK/NDK blog posts targeting commercial developers.

If one wants to hack on mobile Linux, is Android a viable platform? And if so, there must be a community around it, where do those people hang out?
Please don't think this a trollish answer but, why not just ask the people behind the various HN apps how they're getting their data.
Win the War, Write the History
Using your mac without the mouse
Thank you for the advice. I tried it, but unfortunately, unless I miss something, and although 5c compiler is there and seems to work, the problem is that header files (e.g. stdio.h) are missing (the golang is installed at /opt/go, containing /opt/go/pkg/linux_arm and /opt/go/bin).
I've always felt that blocks were Ruby's gimmick. They're neat, and I'd like to have them in Python. But I get the feeling that this is just a bikeshed issue. People show them off because they're easy to understand. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

However, I get the feeling that they're not Ruby's strongest feature. Python's coolest features (metaclasses, descriptors, and other things) wouldn't make sense if you'd just read a blog post on them. I suspect Ruby is the same way.
If you want to accept Maestro payments you have to implement 3DS or face a £25000 fine - at least in the UK.
Google Chrome extension displays the latest Twitter reactions for a web page
I'd be shocked at this. I'd understand not differentiating EE and CompE, but not CS.
well..i'am 25 years old and i'am very much eager to learn,i'am pretty good at algebra but i've got no knowledge in physics nor the essential math needed to learn physics and essential physics needed to learn electrical engineering,i'am stuck
> Pressure sensitivity? Editing SVG nodes?? Holy crap

They are fundamental complaints about canvas thus far generally, although I note colorillo.com can at least save in SVG.
I do think some "green" policies (alternative fuel sources, such as solar and nuclear) make a lot of sense whether or not AGW is true, and in those instances we should act before the science is in. But I didn't mean to imply such an either/or, "you're with us or you're against us" position.

My point is that such extremes of position do exist, and that there are people who genuinely believe that since our habitat has been (mostly) ideal for thousands of years, that it will continue to be so forever, and that it is impossible for humanity to alter that, despite centuries of heavy industry. And those folks have their head in the sand w/r/t science and reality, every bit as much as those for whom AGW is unquestionable dogma.
Funny, the main reason I read HN is to procrastinate and avoid doing other things.
Even Real [Networks] figured out how open source the majority of their code base while retaining support for closed technologies such as h.264.

The only reason Adobe can't open their code is lack of effort.
I've written this before on this board but if you want to understand these gender differences, read accounts of women who have undergone sex changes to become men.

When undergoing testosterone treatment, many of these women say things like "I became more interested in making money and more career-driven" and "I understood math and science better."

Testosterone gives animals drive and aggression.

There are more entrepreneurs and inventors who are men because men have more testosterone. In fact, with hyenas where the females have more testosterone, the females are the more aggressive sex of the group and dominate the males. Women have some testosterone which is why there are still some women entrepreneurs and inventors but much less than men which is also why there are much less of them than men.
Is there a good link on more information about this?
If you want to make $1 a day, go search for a keyword. Like Owls. Then find a bunch of videos of owls in YouTube, put them on the site and call the site OwlVideo.com. In a week you will be making $1 a day.

Or if you prefer to program for the desktop - go wrap ffmpeg and make an AVI to MP4 converter. Def make $30 in sales in a month.

Or if you prefer to program for the web, make something that parses Apples XML of new iPhone apps, put all that text on your website, slap adverts on it. There is $1 a day.

Or you can copy the bible and allow people to annote it. Put on web. There ya go.

Find a commonly done task like file uploading. Write a wrapper script for this in PHP. Sell it on a scripting site. $1 a day.

Make a wordpress theme and target a specific group. "Theme for Doctors". Make it premium and put it for sale. $1 a day.

It's easy, you just need to think in the right mode.
Did you set the "in crowd #" at 400 twitter followers because that's what you have? Because 400 is pretty low, I'd say the number should be closer to 15,000
One of the reasons I write now is to grow my popularity, so that one day I will have enough reach to be able to build something big and grand and people will actually notice.
Interview with Daniel Brusilovsky, The Writer That TechCrunch Terminated