skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If that works, he'll make more profit at the expense of the community.

I'm sure there are plenty of upstarts who find these videos extremenly valuable, but aren't willing or able to pay hundreds of dollars. I don't think it's in Andrew's goals to do that.
Duplicate, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145648
Is there a way to link to a specific slide in Scribd? I think slide 14 should be required reading.
Most synchronization issues in multi threaded applications can't be automated. Also there are bugs triggered by a specific state of the application that is complex to encode in a test.
I think one of the most important things to point out, for those relying on the appeal to authority, is that, yes, the author of the linked post is a lawyer, but not one specializing in copyright law. Readers should note mikewas is Michael Wasylik, a real estate attorney at Ricardo, Wasylik, & Kaniuk (http://ricardolaw.com), which focuses on foreclosures and bankruptcy in Florida.

You'll have to forgive me if it sounds insulting, but it was obvious that Mike's profession is not in copyright law, because his arguments and applications of case law are sloppy. Please keep this in mind when considering the validity of the posts, especially if one of the major factors in your thoughts are credentials; copyright law is very complex and its applications to software bring about all kinds of issues that don't exist even in the realm of copyright for other media. It requires an incredibly nuanced understanding of the law at hand and legal precedents of the industry.

But I am not a laywer, so perhaps far be it from me to be speaking up.
Accent-Folding for Autocomplete
The problem with this piece is that it doesn't touch on the controversial issues. The purpose of casinos is to entertain. That is a good purpose and they fulfill it well. So the parable breaks down rather quickly because he doesn't even touch on the question of what the purpose of the financial system is and what role derivatives play as part of that.

That's important, because the theory wasn't just that "the market is always right" and therefore we must let derivatives trading run amok. The theory is that derivatives help the financial system to fulfill its role better by making it more flexible, more robust in the face of volatility and risk.

I don't want to go into whether this is true or not, but without discussing the purpose of financial markets, their role in providing finance and the inevitability of speculation, etc, any critique is pointless.
This really surprised me too. I just got one in the Netherlands, and it only cost me €10.
Expand your mind using constraints. Cooking with 7-11 and Cadbury Mini Eggs.
All of the examples you give are functionality, not how the thing actually looks when it renders on the screen.

Is there some way to write a test that determines whether my page renders correctly on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, and Opera? If so, please show me the way.

In web development, these sorts of things end up being a large percentage of bugs filed in FogBugz, and there's no way to test for them but to have someone look at the page and make sure.
Rails and Merb Merge: ORM Agnosticism (5 of 6)
This is even easier for Canada, since the first letter in a Canadian postal code identifies the region (usually a province or territory, but sometimes smaller areas, and in the case of X, two territories).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada#Componen...
There is a factor at work in this recipe ratings systems that is a common bane to all rating systems which present a user with a range of choices. One commenter (pedalpete) noted already that people gravitate high or low. But the larger issue is the number of people that will gravitate toward the current average rating.

This is a natural desire to conform, and it isn't always conscious. If a user perceives that most people have rated this item X, he will naturally want to rate it X, and will even re-evaluate his judgment based upon the ratings of others.

Of course, for an online-rating system with instant feedback, this gives the earliest ratings the highest weight, immediately skewing all the results which follow.

But what effect does the average rating have on a person who disagrees? They will naturally tend toward the opposite extreme. They want to make their disagreement obvious. If the average rating is high, the negative rater will gravitate toward the lowest ratings, when in fact he might have gone 2 or 3 stars had he had no such prior feedback.

This is a rather intractable problem, since about the only way to prevent this sort of feedback would be to hide the rating until the person has actually tried the item in question and rated it themselves. But that, of course, makes a rating system useless.
Serving Static Content from a Cookieless Domain
If "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", where does that leave us?
yes, that is instantly what I thought Tweetc would be actually. Shame I think they missed a trick there.
I agree that work needs to be done to optimize websites specifically for the iPad, but most accessible* websites I can think of now would work just fine.

* Accessible means no Flash, no unnecessary JavaScript, and clean markup practices.
S.F. Chronicle to farm out some sports reporting (citizen sportswriters)
This is a powerful thing to point out. Touchscreens really are a different animal than mouse-based browsing, and in the short term it's going to require building versions of sites specifically for them.

For the same reason, the iPad is brilliant -- you can't scale the desktop metaphors down easily, but the iPhone interface scales up just fine. It may not make a ton of money for that reason, but it will enable the product space, which nobody else has been able to do.
SEO for Startups
It was not, story link is here:

http://gigaom.com/2010/02/23/twitter-to-launch-ad-platform-s...

Can't update - sorry about that!
I'm stuck in a tricky situation, any advice?
Hi there,

I'm stuck in a position in which I would love any advice. I'm in the process of a creating a startup with a friend, we face one problem, it's rather big, neither of us are developers. I've contacted many developers in the UK which is where I'm from and well... none of them will do it for equity, as again we face another problem, we are both under 18 and here in the UK the law stops us from doing anything and everything to make money. For us to incorporate to even be able to give equity away we would have to go through an even longer process then ever again due to our age.

I'm here to seek advice on exactly how we should try to find a developer to work for equity, we have applied to many startup incubators, YC included, however we feel we'll get the same feedback, we need a prototype.

What can we do?
I've believed in simplicity for a long time, the wife not so much.

I'd given up on getting her to buy in, when our house burned down (nobody was hurt). Now we both believe in simplicity!

(also: buy renters' insurance, even if you're poor. Especially if you're poor.)
OpenDNS adopts faster and more secure alternative to DNSSEC
Because you must be between 28 and 32.
Dropbox always appears on this list and I completely agree. The rest are often personal preferences as to what works best for what you are doing.
Communication problems: Sometimes the description of the bug is poor, or the developer misunderstands the problem.

-> Maybe more effort should be placed on improving communication skills for your company? This will greatly improve many other aspects of your business - not just bug logging.

Regression testing. This process requires the handover of code back and forward between QA and development, this causes versioning problems and duplicated testing effort.

-> why? Maybe more effort should be placed on improving communication skills...

Low robustness. The process doesn’t guarantee that the error will appear again in the future.

-> Neither would buggy automated tests - or whom do you need to hire to test the tester?

Bureaucracy. Traditional bug tracking systems switches the team focus to bureaucracy from quality

-> If you care about your product quality and your other team members development goals it's not bureaucracy it is quality. Can't see past mistake occurrences, thus don't see the system as meaningful. Rather the focus should be to take the current system seriously and work on improving it.
He's talking about the relative position of the word "are", I think.
It'll cost you, what, $5k to try it once?

You have your other variables tracked well enough that you should be able to see the difference pretty well and see if it's worthwhile.

If you go for the low hanging fruit first (a holiday) where the effect should be biggest you might get a nice surprise - or possibly not, but at least you'll know for sure.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it faster to use pointers to increment through the array rather than index the array on each successive char? If it is a particularly large string, the array-copy version of the algorithm would be slower. I have also learned to be concerned about page boundaries. Do modern compilers recognize the idiom and optimize this situation?
A Good Talk: how to learn how to to have conversations
I have done exactly the same thing. It's a great system, and it helps me keep my desk neat.

I do have a lot of stuff though, so the cardboard box I got is quite large. I call it by a French name, "garage."
Those paragraphs about being out of the country and acing an exam with just an hour of prep is Tucker Max-esque sensationalism.
It probably says a lot more about the author's college than his amazing methodology.
I bet something can be done with multitouch to ameliorate this problem, possibly introducing modes into touch, but it would require a learning curve to use...
How much younger than 18? If it's within 2 years, you may be well served by spending the time building the software on your own - it's enough time that you can learn the basics of web development (go Ruby on Rails!) and then you'll have gained something from the venture whether you've succeeded or not.

I don't know what the incorporation laws are in the US with regards to age, but you may need to be 18 here as well.
Because it was not yet released?
I was working at the age of 16 in the UK.

Sounds to me like you need a guarantor, someone who is willing to be your company figurehead, I suggest a parental figure.

I live in the UK and I am a developer who would be willing to work for equity if the idea was right. But your problem really is that it's very hard to get someone to do something for nothing. You could always try oDesk can get some very cheap developers on there, knock you up a prototype.

roridge@hotmail.com if you want to email me an NDA and we can at least discuss your venture.
Under 18?

Obvious answer: Learn to code and build a prototype.

Second obvious answer: Go to college and make friends with computer science majors and build a prototype.
I really wish more people would accept that giving me something isn't the way to celebrate my birthday or any other event.
Gruenberger’s prime path (popular computing editor)
Wearing a big black t-shirt from ThinkGeek 2 sizes too big, baggy shorts, white socks pulled up, sneakers, and your hair messy... it's like using the <blink> tag with cyan text on a red background and little animated gifs.
Yes Buzz Killington, you're right. Silly of him to make such an obvious error, wasn't it. So silly, it makes me smile to think of his ignorance.
A few Arduino boards, accelerometers and RFID readers will soon be available to a good home.

Interested!!!
A UK postcode covers about the same area as the 5+4 digit US zip rather than the 5 digit one. You can get a whole town or more in one 5 digit zip code.

I'm not sure many people actually know their full 9 digit zip. Certainly not many of my customers have bothered entering it.
I think you're both missing Patrick's point here to some extent. A broad palette of skin colours does not equal diversity. How many evangelical Christians do you meet in the valley? How many stay at home moms? I think urban diversity is highly misleading - while you might look around and see the signs of diversity, how often do you have a conversation with someone who has totally different goals and aspirations to yourself?

I can only speak from a British perspective, but I think London is a good example of this - although it is one of the most racially and culturally diverse cities on earth, it is in practice quite strongly ghettoised by age and outlook. Most people will scarcely exchange more than a few words with anyone outside their professional and social circles. It seems to me that people living in rural communities tend to have more diverse contact as they are much more likely to actually spend time with people who live lives very different to their own.

Out of genuine curiosity, I ask all the folks in the Bay Area - when was the last time you had a conversation with someone who doesn't own a computer (and isn't your mom)? When was the last time you had a drink with someone who is barely literate? Myspace has 51 million users in the US, how many do you know?
Here's a ruby version, smaller more compact and easier to update (probably more correct too):

def state?(zip)
case zip[0]
when 0 then states = ['CT','MA','ME','NH','NJ','PR','RI','VT','VI','AE']
when 1 then states = ['DE','NY','PA']
when 2 then states = ['DC','MD','NC','SC','VA','WV']
when 3 then states = ['AL','FL','GA','MS','TN','AA']
when 4 then states = ['IN','KY','MI','OH']
when 5 then states = ['IA','HN','MT','ND','SD','WI']
when 6 then states = ['IL','KS','MO','NE']
when 7 then states = ['AR','LA','OK','TX']
when 8 then states = ['AZ','CO','ID','NM','NV','UT','WY']
when 9 then states = ['AK','AS','CA','GU','HI','MH','FM','MP','OR','PW','WA','AP']
else return null
end
return states
end
Come on. Isn't this guy making a point about what's in the article?

> He added that the company will make it “explicitly clear that a sponsor” paid for the ad, and make it “relevant and useful, so the user doesn’t think of it as an ad.”
Yes, "the entitled generation"... What about the "had no balls to raise their kids right" generation? Why are we hiring them into management positions if they're pushovers?
First result when googling it: http://www.marvell.com/products/processors/armada/armada_600...
I'm in the process of, I've bought PHP, MySQL, HTML and CSS guides/books. When the time is right I'll be applying for CS too.
I still have a few issues of "Popular Computing". As TFA notes, often these magazines would have the motto “The way to learn computing is to compute.”. Whenever I see Project Euler or others, I recall a few hours spent working through some amusingly constructed problems.
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/joy-of-iterators.html
I'm 17, 18 within the next 6 months. I've started to learn PHP, I've heard that's the best place to start.
What the article does not seem to be aware of is that most Photographic workflow products, such as Aperture and Lightroom, are working in a 32-bit colorspace even if you open an 8-bit JPEG. The reason is simply that to work in RAW consistently, your tools need to be working at a higher bit-depth than the existing RAW images you are trying to use.

Some RAW formats are 14 and some 12. High-end Hasseblads are 16. It is not unlikely that future sensors will go beyond 16 bit. Therefore it makes sense to design the workflow around 32-bit processing. Otherwise you are stuck re-architecting your entire workflow. Witness the number of Photoshop filters which only work at 8-bit.
"A single post on Techcrunch is worth more link wise, than a million PR1-3 blogs posting about your latest link bait strategy."

I don't have a link to provide as proof but I'm pretty sure based off of my memory and anecdotal evidence I've read on the web that links from the big Nerdy Tech Blogs actually drive little to no converting traffic.

So in that case, I would much rather take the million links in the hope that the people who come along that chain will convert better than the half-literate TechCrunch commentators would.
Above 40 good programmers probably are rare, but doesn't have much to do with age, but is more of a generation difference. 40 and below is the same as the gamer generation, starting with those growing up with the first popular home computers (vic20/c64/zx spectrum).

Someone able to write C64 assembler games/demoes 25 years ago, will still be a great programmer today, even if he didn't touch a computer since then. The basics haven't changed that much, nothing that cannot be learned within a few weeks.

Older programmers are probably less likely to jump every new hype. For them it's just the nth way to do same, only without the already collected/own written libraries and tools. That could be a disadvantage when looking for a new job.
"'Washing the fruit' just means running it under the tap for a few seconds, like how you wash your hands when you think no one is watching."

Mark Pilgrim is pure comedic power.
Heh. Wait until you're married and have kids.
Some people might prefer to handle the other side of a business, that shouldn't put them off having a start up company.
That will be useful for narrowing down the states, but it doesn't actually convert zip code to state.

It just converts first digit of zip code to list of states to which it could apply.
we are not talking about traffic here, we are talking about SEO, and link juice is logarithmic, the difference from

PR4^10 links = 1 PR5
I used to wonder why it's so hard to buy gifts for people. Then I realized the answer is that most people already have way more crap than they need.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. In 1995 I was hacking scripting languages and MySQL... and that's what I'm doing in 2010. Hardly anything of substance has changed.

The one thing that's different is my attitude.

Sometimes I feel that I know too much about programming to be employable as a programmer any more. So much of our industry is about foolish waste. Half of all projects fail. Most of the other ones are rotten ideas that make life worse for everyone. Few managers (or markets) really have the patience to build good software, or the maturity to listen to advice about what might be better.

When I was in my 20s, I was dumb enough to commit crazy overtime hours to making projects work, even if they were ultimately doomed and stupid. And this served me well in the job market.

In this environment, experience may not be an asset. It seems to me that the ideal programmer, in an economic sense, is someone who obediently writes unmaintainable code quickly and is unaware of the future pain they are creating for themselves and their customers, or is unaware that all their work is likely to be forgotten in a few months.
The way to eat healthy is to eat food, which is to say, don't eat a lot of processed stuff that resembles food. There's no salt, high fructose corn syrup, refined carbs, etc. in pretty much all whole foods.
Wow. I was not expecting to read "paster" nor "mysql" in that presentation!
Move to a boat, that will solve the problem instantly. I have roughly 16 square meters of indoor living area, and that has to accommodate kitchen, sleeping quarters, bathroom, steering, a sofa and a table where 8 people can eat for when I have dining visitors. For very natural reasons you just don't have a lot of stuff.
I've sent you an email. Thanks.
Ground for future studies

1) increased sample size, multiple institutions, multiple age ranges, multiple programming languages, multiple native languages, correlation with Spearman's g

2) controlling for confounders (see "Table 1" of all medical trials)

3) randomization of instruction

4) better history of pre-exposure (surely someone in a university computer class is taking it out of an interest that developed before enrollment)

5) parental professions, levels of education, and annual earnings

6) latency effects -- did people "come around" later, how long do the effects last?

7) frequency effects -- does a burst of lots of programming exposure kick someone over a knee in the curve (as is done in language schools)

8) amplitude effects -- does intense instruction yield intense results?

Overall I liked it.
"...predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise."

A later paper by them backs off:
http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper3.pdf

Abstract: Learning to program is notoriously difficult. Substantial failure rates plague introductory programming courses the world over, and have increased rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research into teaching methods and student responses, there have been to date no strong predictors of success in learning to program. Two years ago we appeared to have discovered an exciting and enigmatic new predictor of success in a first programming course. We now report that after six experiments, involving more than 500 students at six institutions in three countries, the predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise. We discuss the strength of the effects that have been observed and the reasons for some apparent failures of prediction.
Use a wise consistency.
Foolishness is part of a foolish consistency. A well-reasoned consistency is nobody's hobgoblin. This is not, of course, to say that well-reasoned consistency precludes foolish consistency in other areas.
Thanks for the explanation!

I'd also like to take the time to point out that you can get similar functionality using the vim-style keyboard hotkeys in gmail: j/k to move to the next/previous conversation.
There's some confusion between "compressed sensing" and "L1-minimization" in the comments and the article.

L1 minimization here refers to trying to represent the image as a linear combination of basis functions a1 f1+a2 f2+ ... by minimizing objective function fit(a1,a2,...)+sum_i |a_i| where "fit" represents how closely the reconstruction fits the image (for instance, squared distance). The second term in the sum is the L1 norm
of the parameter vector, and it has a special property of being non-differentiable at 0, and often causing individual components a_i to become exactly 0 during minimization, hence resulting in "sparse" solution vector.

Compressed sensing refers to the idea that when the image is sparse in the chosen basis {fi}, it's sufficient to take a small number of random measurements of the image. We can then compute "fit" approximately which gives us a different objective function that we minimize. The result will be close to what we'd get if we used the original (full) "fit" function
1M/1M: Looking For A Pilot Entrepreneur To Invest In
Entrepreneurs, I am looking for an entrepreneur with whom to pilot a new service that will be part of the 1M/1M initiative. In collaboration with an outsourced product development company in India, we will invest engineering resources to bring a product to market for an early stage startup.
For a few apps, I've used census data to derive city and state from zip code.

It seemed like a disruptive flow to me too, until I asked for zip without showing any other address fields. On change, the address and prepopulated city and state fields slid down above it and address got focus.
Fair enough. Your points are correct, and for this reason I'd advocate not working at a personal loss for more than 6 months, and only for equity (with the caveat not to put money or time into a business that you can't afford to lose).

I'm not advocating working in startups to the detriment of all else, but I think it's worth doing when young, if you'll learn a lot by doing so. That said, if my current project were to fail, I'd probably use the experience to get into grad school or a place like Google (on better terms than I'd be able to get without the experience, I hope).
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras