skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Professional CSS books and tutorials?
I am currently reading this book http://www.amazon.com/Pro-CSS-Techniques-ebook/dp/B001DA0FII/ref=pd_sim_kinc_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2 and enjoyed it. I also enjoyed yesterdays post on selectors, However, I am looking for more information on CSS's best practices and details of implementation. Any books or links?
I think you're only considering static typing as an efficiency benefit. I'm equally as interested in its program-correctness benefits.
If Open Source is Big Business Then Whither the Community?
Twelve Months Notice
Actually, the article says that Ophcrack does deliver the original password:

> The computer will restart and Ophcrack will be loaded. Sit back and watch as it does all the work for your. Write down the password it gives you, remove the disc, restart the computer, and log in as if it were you own machine.
Can you elaborate on the "had to" part?

i.e., was it a contractual thing, a legal thing, or just an accepted practice? Or a request from your previous company which they wouldn't budge on?
In my college first year, we programmed in two languages Fortran and scheme. It really made me a better programmer. Scheme rocks.
Does an anecdote about Stallman hand-parsing HTTP headers really qualify as a case against Linux on the desktop?
Looked like ordinary chemist's flasks to me.
This is a great idea in so many ways, and JGC does a great job of laying them all out. I hope he's as successful as this as he was with the apology.
The Term Paper Layout Helped Me keep Money
I needed to save money. Who doesn’t now days. Life is really, really expensive. I live thirty miles from where I worked. A total of a sixty mile commute every day. My apartment was really expensive
Is it still slow in v2.0+ ? They quote 1.0 sec commits on the Firefox 3.5 repo test (vs. 1.1 for hg, 0.35 for git). ( cf. http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-b... )

The http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ site, sportingly linked to from the top of the page above, also has some comparative numbers (must click headers to show), but I don't see version numbers of the programs tested ...
As someone who has been using Gobby for real-time collaborative coding recently, Etherpad is appealing because it is amazingly temping to link Etherpad with SVN. Imagine being able to have each author's changes automatically checked in to a repository on save.

One of the most limiting factors of Gobby is that access control is virtually non-existent, and it has no integration with any sort of version control. Hooks and scripts are required to hack up source control systems.

It seems like a startup would do quite well to create a service combining Etherpad and SVN (or another flavor of version control).

All that said, Gobby is a pretty fun solution for private collaborative editing. Watching colleagues fix your mistakes in real time (and doing it for them) never gets old.

[1] http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/
It's pretty cultural. The contract is a two way street. Most people don't do what you describe because they wouldn't want the company doing it to them. People probably also worry about burning bridges.

Since it's a legal contract violating (by leaving) it could lead to lawsuits.
We have a strange semantics mis-understanding. I don't feel self-conscious playing those games. Nor do I think I or anyone else should. Your comment makes it sound like we should. I tried to explain why I think that is mistaken.

Your comment about impoliteness is baffling, since I never said anything about your tone.
There are a bunch of alternative PDF readers, I don't know if they are all full featured but I have never run into something that didn't work for me in Sumatra PDF or Foxit Reader.
Lifehacker did a roundup a while ago of PDF reader alternatives: http://lifehacker.com/5328211/five-best-pdf-readers
Agreed. Infrastructure is one of those things that the article kind of glazes over, but still thought it was interesting. Given Russia's socio-political nature, however, it just might work.

The main problem with SV these days is that it's not a cost-effective place for startups any more:

Average monthly rent (2006): $2,162 (two bedroom, two bath)

Average monthly rent (2005): $2,111 (two bedroom, two bath)

Average monthly rent (2006): $1,754 (one bedroom, one bath)
Average monthly rent (2005): $1,613 (one bedroom, one bath)
Median monthly rent in 1990: $825
Median monthly rent in 1960: $162

Source: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/com_info/by_the_numbers.php

Doubling in 15 years? Rent is one of those things that essentially amounts to a sunk cost, in the long-term. I think Silicon Valley has seen its glory days, and the greedy insanity of the property managers/landlords/etc. will ultimately do the place in.
There might be something worth saying on this topic, but this article doesn't say it.
Haven't used the app yet, but one thing I would suggest is re-doing your voiceover on your very prominent product demo video and making cuts between demoing key features. I can understand your accent just fine (although it couldn't hurt to have someone with a very neutral english accent do the voiceover) but the quality of the audio is really poor.
Ask HN: What % of equity should a CTO get?
Hi all, I'm a HN regular posting anonymously because this contains sensitive information.

Short version: I've been managing everything technical for my friend's startup, and was asked to join as a CTO, in exchange for equity. What % should I ask for?

Long version: this startup is run by my very good friend. He is an amateur coder, and developed the code base himself part time over a few years. When he was ready to invest $ to make the site grow, he brought me on board on a consulting basis. I found, hired & currently manage a small team to work on the site, and he pays for the budget. Before I came on board, the code base was pretty terrible: all the development was being done in real-time on production server, never any testing, full of bugs, etc. When I came in, I did stuff like introduce version control, create a staging server, code/schema refactoring, automated testing suite, automated builds, bug/issue tracking, etc. I also manage the team itself, and we regularly have informal meetings where we talk about high-level stuff for the site's direction - you get the idea.

Right now, I put in about 10-15 hours of work a week, out of which I bill for about 5, using a heavily discounted rate (about 1/3 of what I bill others), because it's my very good friend. Before I came on board, the site was developing slowly, but since then it's been growing at a very good organic pace. It is making some money already - not much, about $200 per month, and it has about 1000 daily users. It's not profitable by a long shot (obviously a dev team of 4-5 people costs a lot more), but I believe it has the potential to be in the future.

I want to offer that I don't take any $ myself, contribute about 15 hours a week and take a %. My friend (who is the only owner with 100% equity, btw) have a great relationship, and he actually brought up bringing me in as a CTO himself, but all talks about money are uncomfortable (for me), especially with friends, so I wanted to ask here - in this situation, what's a fair % to ask? Some examples with references would be ideal. Or some kind of a formula that makes sense to calculate it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!
Your Computer Really Is a Part of You
I continue to not understand why it matters if Linux "makes it" onto the desktop. Linux on the desktop already works for those who use it [no duh].

Is anyone out there really interested in writing software (for profit) on the Linux desktop? I assume that is why "Linux on the desktop" matters for some people. Otherwise, why not just let OSS people keep scratching their own itch?
Thanks, as you demonstrated, it does not includes the password hash, searching on google I found that the password is stored in /var/db/shadow/hash/, a file for each user, I'm reading these:

http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2008/06/24/2

http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2006/04/28/os_x_pas...

I will do some experiments at home, but I have no clue how to clean an OS X user's password.
Why do we ignore 'real-time' results from Google search?
See my comment here for a list of resources: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088887

And an addition to that list: http://www.railstutorial.org/book
"'Gets-things-done' people prepare for technical interviews, such that they don't flub simple questions."

So, let's be clear: you're admitting that you're screening for a trait that you assume is correlated with the trait that you actually want. I don't grant the assumption, but it should at least be explicitly stated.

"The danger for the employer is that lots of Computer Science PhDs end up not writing much code during their research, and may not be a good fit at many tech employers."

How many computer science PhDs have you hired, let alone interviewed? I'd wager that it's not enough for you to be able to make this judgment with any confidence. And even if you're right, how does asking questions about linked-list reversal address the question of the tendency of a person to do practical work? Aside from tech interviews, I've never once in my life had to write a linked-list reversing routine.

Look, I'm not saying "don't ask coding questions" -- I'm saying that we need to start being reasonable. Don't assume that a candidate is a no-hire simply because that they haven't pre-memorized the algorithms for the questions that you're asking. It's ridiculous that we're screening people based on the number of silly tricks that they can memorize from interview question websites.
Most Common Early Start-up Mistakes
25 years since the first domain name, Symbolics.com, was registered
It's all relative.
Then we need to encourage people to be better parents.

Regardless of whether the effect is cultural or genetic, smart people have smart kids. Although I'd like it to be cultural, I tend to think the latter. In either case, we want to encourage smart people to reproduce.
Facebook, Google and eBay slam Digital Economy Bill
Wasn't he more like a VC or Angel Investor?
I don't think what Chris Dixon highlights here is exclusive to the startup world, but it's pretty close. A friend once gave 2 month's notice, then extended it to three after the boss begged him to stay, but as soon as he left he was a persona non grata, still dissed behind his back.

There are some other industries (big time consulting, for example) where transience is expected and encouraged, and it's a fair question to ask about that type of commitment up front. Particularly if you're up front about your intentions or expectations during the hiring process, people will be more willing to be understanding when you want to move on, and those recommendations, suggestions and connections can come in handy.
If they ask, that is one thing. If you offer out of the blue, that is another.
I've always got the impression that Haskell's lazy properties makes it hard to reason about code performance. You can force high-performance code, but that requires circumventing the beauty of the language. Has this problem been solved?
Are there any videos of a full flight? I only saw an indoor test flight. Wondering what happens when you get a strong wind - a good control system is going to be needed to keep the thing from total failure.
I tried it yesterday, and I was horribly disappointed. Printing a 13 page document took so long (>30s) that I kept killed the process, thinking it had hung. Acrobat 5.something ripped and spooled the same document in maybe a second.
That may be true for your average webapp; perhaps even for a reddit or farmville, but it's not for an innovating algorithm.
Sex Pistols were a boy band. A marketing creation.
Only commercial orders for now.

From the company's site:

"Martin Jetpack is currently accepting enquiries from commercial customers. Please place your initial enquiry through this site and we will contact you directly.

It is expected that early orders for sales to private individuals will commence late 2010"

EDIT: removed [sic] for "enquiries", as MW dictionary doesn't contain it but others do.
Along the same lines, who writes software for the Any desktop these days? What was the last piece of software you paid for that ran on your desktop? v.s. how many times have you given out your CC on the web?

All things being equal people will stay where they are. So when software moved to the web there wasn't any incentive to move OS's. The only shift I have seen is the shift to Apple where there is a hardware incentive. But even then they buy an Apple laptop and just run Safari.

Edit: and even for linux heads OS X is pretty nice. I get git, gcc, apache, a command shell, Qt, emacs, vim, bash, webkit, etc. Even valgrind is on OS X now. Given that the software is close enough then looking at the hardware it caused me to get a mac laptop.
Reversing a linked list is not an Alan-Turing-level problem.

I've used the reverse-a-list problem (and others of a broadly similar kind) in interviews. It shouldn't matter at all if a candidate hasn't read or written any list-manipulation code in years; that gives them the chance to sit and scribble some diagrams for me and work out how to do it. I don't mind much if they don't end up with a beautifully neat solution. I want to know things like: Did they check for edge cases? Did they blunder around trying things until they got code they couldn't prove was wrong, or did they work out something that ought to work and then implement it, or what? Did they ask themselves questions like "what facts ought always to be true at this point in the code?"? If they produce an inelegant or inefficient solution and I say "So what happens if you do X?" or "Could you do anything about Y?", do they panic and freeze or do they get thinking about the question? These are not a matter of having crammed their heads with algorithm esoterica. They're a matter of being reasonably comfortable with code, and being a problem-solver rather than a copy-and-paste artist.

I'm quite sure there are plenty of software developer jobs that can in fact be done by someone who's fundamentally not very comfortable thinking about code, and/or who has little interest in problem-solving or little aptitude for it. It happens that those aren't the jobs I've interviewed people for, but they're real enough and collectively they probably account for a majority of the value added to society by software development. But when you're interviewing for a job that does call for independent thinking and fluent code reading and writing, that sort of question -- if used correctly -- is very valuable.

Of course, an interviewer who thinks the point is to say "Write me some code that reverses a linked list" and then vote yes if the candidate does it on the spot and no otherwise, is going to reject some good candidates and accept some bad ones. But an interviewer who thinks that way is going to get lousy results regardless.
The Darwin Awards just got a whole lot more competitive.
Absolutely. The audio is so quiet in your voiceover that even max volume on my laptop speakers and Youtube slider I can't understand a word you're saying. You need to normalize the volume level using any sound editor, and better yet, use a good mic.

If we can't understand what you're saying, how likely are we to use your product?
> “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

This is the one I personally struggle with the most. It is highly coupled with your perception of your personal comfort zone. For example, if I think I'd be happier if I went out and met more people - but I'd rather sit on the couch tonight - that's partial insanity - you will always be afraid of doing those things you are too lazy or afraid (note: lazy and afraid is worse combination) to do.

And if you were say to actually drag yourself to the event but completely went into wallflower mode when getting there, you are proving partial insanity again (e.g. being non-social again) with the added weight of 'why did I bother'.

How to break this vicious cycle? Basically you have to suck it up and be social, not be seeking any particular form of reaction - e.g. goal is literally to introduce yourself/meet people not to have a deep conversation with them. Letting go of attachment to outcomes but initiating so there can be a potentially positive outcome. Really, it goes back to #3 Being Present with whoever you are with.
don't listen to experts outside the area of their expertise.
To me, it even seems mostly made by Canonical (they go into the issue). What I meant is: to they have a technical point, or is it mostly NIH/stubbornness ?

(The desk I'm using right now has an Ubuntu machine, and a Mac; there are quite a few things in which Ubuntu is more pleasant to use than the Mac. In a few years, we may be saying that Mark Shuttleworth is the "Steve Jobs" of Linux, in a good way of course ;-)
Interesting that the EFF used the FoIA just to obtain a copy of this agreement. I would have assumed they could just bluff their way into the developer signup process and then refuse the agreement once they get a copy of it.
Amazon.com's 1-Click patent confirmed following re-exam
I can't speak for all Linux desktop users, but for me, better support from hardware vendors and other ancillary benefits of widespread usage are why I'd love to see Linux succeed.
better source: http://bloggasm.com/new-study-shows-some-correlation-between...

actual paper: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=tex...

nice result, I've been praying that for music for ages.
Getting fired probably reflects poorly on you when they call your former boss, though..

It's something similar in Sweden, though the contract goes both ways. They can't give less notice for firing you than you can for quitting, so it just damps the system somewhat.
Why wouldn't LaTeX also require the OS to be archived for equivalent results? Although LaTeX often uses it's own bitmap based font system it does require X and supporting infrastructure.
Get some Sun: Vitamin D required for T cell activation
Michael Fogus talks to RubyLearning’s Clojure Course Participants
Someone should put together a GTK theme like this.
Sure. (I was replying more directly to, "Java probably had the first tracing JIT-based VM outside academia.".)
Having worked for (and left) a couple of startups, I'd be reluctant to follow his advice. Most entrepreneurs think of their companies as something between a beloved child and a religion. For some, quitting is like you declared their kid is an ugly git. It's better just to sever the relationship quickly before it has time to sour.
I was half hoping it was a pun involving the Electronic Privacy Information Center: http://epic.org/
Porn: Good for us?
Never -- the companies that own the mainstream news are the same ones participating in the secret negotiations.
I have to disagree with a lot of what gregor is saying about energy breakthroughs.

His concept of a "Built Environment" I don't think is a limitation in the developed world, and many of the technologies we are seeing are small scale energy production for the developing world.

Where BloomBox and TeraPower come in is that much of the distribution or materials are already 'built'. With BloomBox, I don't think it is unrealistic to get a natural gas line to most places in North America. With respect to TeraPower, there is VAST ammounts of depleted nuclear material that is currently considered 'waste'.

Bloom has the further advantage of not needing a distribution system, as the energy can go right from the box (source) to the user.

Maybe I'm not getting what gregor is talking about? But this doesn't seem to be the 'myth' of energy breakthroughs.

What are the past 'breakthroughs' which have failed?

Also, pointing to Hydro as more popular than Nuclear doesn't prove energy breakthroughs are a myth. That is like saying that if wind power is 20% of energy production, that that would not be a breakthrough.
OCaml has type inference too, though it doesn't have Haskell's typeclasses, which are very nice. (You can get much of the same functionality with functors (parametric modules), but it's not as straightforward.)

OCaml isn't lazy-by-default, so reasoning about time/space performance is generally easier. It's worth considering as an alternative to Haskell.
My problem with the coding questions (other than the fact that everyone has seen them) is that they're too shallow. So the questions are binary. If you can't do them, interview over, sure. But if you can do them they don't say that much. They're almost short enough to count as trivia.

I prefer asking for a program that will take about an hour, but will also get a range of correct answers and mistakes. The ideal question has maximum dispersion, like a good hash function. You can observe a variety of strengths and weaknesses, and the horrible candidates will cry, the mediocre candidates will cringe, the good candidates will nod, and the strong candidates will laugh.
How To Create iBooks In ePub format  for The iPad
I agree with you mostly, but sometimes it does matter.

One could argue that even free software gets boosts from companies. If Linux weren't so popular on servers, we wouldn't have IBM, Novell, and tons of other companies contributing to free software there. If it got to a critical mass on the desktop, I'd guess Dell, HP, and others might see it in their interest to contribute to free desktop software.

More users brings a more vibrant space sometimes. I switch off between Mac and Linux and Linux is fine for most things I want to do (Hulu being a notable exception). But I can also see how much companies have contributed to free software in the Linux world and that it's mostly server-useful software because Linux has a critical mass of users on the server end. And the more users you have, the more people who might want to scratch their own itch.
How'd it go down then?
Isn't it better to focus on oneself -- trying to be a better parent or teacher -- than to focus on testing the child in your care and trying to predict his future? It's not possible to predict people's futures anyway and all this tyrannical nonsense is simply contributing to depression and to the bureaucratisation of childhood.
Hmm, what is the order of magnitude of your action volume? Worst case, you might write them sequentially to log files via a trivial web service and deal with them later, a la "tin" [ https://nosqleast.com/2009/#speaker/anglade ]
Is there a lizard/Spock add-on yet?
Here are some articles from Mozilla explaining their Javascript tracing:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/07/tracemonkey-overview/

http://ejohn.org/blog/tracemonkey/

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/trac...

These are tangentially related to the article topic, but gives you some sense of what tracing does.
I bet a sufficiently motivated essayist could draw comparisons between, say, hacking and painting.
when you say 'student', you mean low-paid, right? Last I looked, it was illegal to have unpaid interns working on anything your company might actually use to generate income.
Honestly, ask him to make you an offer. If he says 15% and you think "yes, that feels right" then go for it. If not at least you will know what ball park he is thinking of.

If I was your CEO I would probably calculate it like this... If you are doing 15 hours of a 40 hour a week job, that would be about 6%. If you were to consider a CEO is the "top" position at 10 and a CTO is next a 7 then (as a friendly gesture based on work so far) I would weigh that 6% by the difference and come in at about 18% relative to the importance of what you are doing against how much time you do it for.

But that is just me.
More a Fanpack. Still, very cool.

video http://www.martinjetpack.com/video-gallery.aspx