skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first real line of code I wrote (I'm not counting poorly crafted HTML) was when I was 16, as a senior in high school. And that was Visual Basic. We didn't do C until the second half of the year (and by this point, I was 17). Which right now, means that I've been coding "seriously" for about 4-4.5 years. I'd guess that its not nearly as many years as you have. Which is fine. You're probably older. And you probably started before you were a senior in high school.

But, you know what? That doesn't mean that I'm any worse off in terms of ability (to code, design, learn or understand concepts) than you. And I'm not sorry for not spending my teen years implementing Ukkonen's algorithm or whatever else would count for you. I can read the paper on how it works if I ever need to implement it.

I object to claim that in order to code, you have to have some sort of monkish training. That if you're "like this," then programming is the only path or that you have to be "like this," in order to be a programmer. Your point of view seems like a horribly elitist, closed-minded view to have.
Scrolling with the mouse wheel is painfully slow but everything else is awesome.
This is really cool. However, in the future, I think a better alternative will be running native code from the browser like Google NativeClient or CLI in the browser. Users are always in the browser and really don't like opening other application, aside from the iPhone / iPad apps.

That said, this tool is a great alternative to Air and Silverlight and it is here now.
I already do have the chance. They have a blog and everything: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/
the upshot to all this publicity is they'll get some competent advisors since they're now over their head for college frosh.

also they should probably take a year off and move somewhere other than NYC (unless proximity to help is worth the rent).
Looks excellent to me ! I am sure there will be many happy clients using this one.
slanted attack on Michael Arrington

cute character attack

Not an attack, just an observation. And not of his character (which I am hardly qualified to judge), just of his behavior in this particular post.

I dunno, posting word for word emails from someone else in a blog just seems a little over the top to me, regardless of the reason. I don't know the merits of this case, nor do I care.

The antecdote was to make a point (as antecdotes are usually meant to do). It's the same as the office gossip. If he's saying/doing that to someone else, what's he saying/doing about me?
Just about everything I've learned since graduating college is summed up in this web page (which I did not write -- but found recently). Enjoy!

http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html
Nitpick: You say "correct" where the more precise phrasing would be something like "far more probable".
They did say "post on" the excerpts instead of "post" the excerpts. That's a syntactic nicety which must have gone unnoticed by Arrington, but which was presumably clear in the mind of the Fortune rep.
Just what this project needs, more publicity.
Alternatively, perhaps exit applied Occam's Razor and concluded that maxklein is either a fiction or a fraud, and calling him out in public seems like an apt way to expose the lie?
Well get them to hop on Kickstart, see what happens
From my view, the only real closed thing in Flash is that they do not allow SWF renderers others than the Flash Player itself. (If any mobile company can create their own renderer, then, why license players from Adobe)

Then another problem appears, if anyone can create their own players, then they might introduce differences(Java vs J++ long ago)

GNASH being mentioned on an official page, i can not believe my eyes!!!
Maybe I misread the article, but it looks like the Fortune PR person never, ever states that TechCrunch is only supposed to post portions of the excerpts. This is the closest I could find:

> And if you don’t mind, once you’ve read the excerpts, please let me know if you choose not to post on one and not the other or both, which of course we would love.

Now, IANAL but nowhere in there does it say to not post the excerpts.
The problem with trying to run native code in the browser is that you're likely to be stuck on Chrome for the forseeable future, whereas NativeHost (and technology like it) needs only to be written once for each platform and can then bootstrap any cappuccino app on top of it (and those apps will also run unmodified on the web).
Why don't you just email me if you are so curious? My business model is easy to duplicate and posting something like this is not good for me, I would prefer it if you would just do this privately.
I've been a geek most of my life, but I hadn't done any programming until college. I love it, and am fully confident that I'm good at it.

But yes, there really should be some drive towards interest in your career path. If not, you'll struggle to improve, and would likely be significantly happier doing a different job.
a better technique would probably have been to apologize to techcrunch for telling them the wrong thing, and then asking to take it down. as opposed to telling arrington that he misunderstood.
Ask HN: How to get traction?
I'm wondering how you go from 0 users to your first 1,000 users, especially if it is for a service that is not really similar anything else. I've read the blog by the duck duck go guy, but I didn't feel like I had a satisfactory answer.
In case you have any confusion about this, please note that the term "Innovative" is used here to mean "likely to cause Hacker News readers to spew soda out their noses".
i've asked him twice in the comment threads

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171696

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1344398

his blog posts are great. more over, particularly after a very xkcd-ish comic he made about starting out, i associated him with success stories like patio11 (whose recent mixergy interview really inspires me).

but i just can't seem to figure out what exactly he does (whereas patio11 is incredibly transparent).

there's nothing sinister about my curiosity. when i get inspired by someone else's success, i want to know as much about the context and details of that success as possible. otherwise it just becomes frustrating.
MacBooks have multitouch already, it's just on a touchpad instead of the screen. Unless Apple goes completely bananas over touchscreen keyboards and releases a Nintendo DS style MacBook, all they'll probably do is embiggen the touchpad.
This really shouldn't have 80+ votes. Someone please tell me why this is interesting.
Flex is marginally faster than light
I'm sorry, but he's just not that into you.
huh? please elaborate on the specific portion of history you're referring to. If you're referring to any of the historical industrial revolutions, worker conditions tended to be terrible.
What Makes A Good Entrepreneur? Nurture vs Nature
Trabalhando com django usando Netbeans
Cocovivo looks pretty neat. Could be a good working vacation for me.

However, there are no indications of cost that I can find -- anyone stayed there before?
Actually this is common old fashioned industry standard:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Injection_Rejection.aspx

We where laughing our asses of. My name and the name of the other in-house guy, both contain an 'and'. Just our boss, could login and had no problem. :)
Get hired by YouNoodle and get a free iPad (or Kindle or smartphone)
That is the most buzzword compliant thing I will hear about today.
It's the Daily Mail, I'm surprised they don't cause cancer.
Exactly. They've said the alternatives are lawsuit or go with their "altered" deal. He picked lawsuit.

Since we're now going to a lawsuit, these emails are going to be exhibits in court => public knowledge.
I'd like to throw in my hat for http://dyndns.com. I've been a paying customer for about 5 years and have never had any significant problems. Their customer service is also quite good, in my experience.
This explanation works, but there's another: On the horizon, you have things to compare it against. It looks the size it is. In the middle of the sky, there's nothing but a large black field with a small circle: it looks smaller than it is, because it's overwhelmed by the larger field. It's a very well known effect in the art world.
sounds like a mixergy interview is in order...
Without knowing what kind of service you're providing, it will be hard for many to offer any advice, or potentially good tactic ideas for you.

Some general advice I'd provide is:

- Figure out the characteristics of your users. What kinds of people have the problem you're solving? Be as specific as possible, and segment into multiple groups. Think about age, gender, interests, activities, group memberships, places.

- What kind of tools and services do those people already use? How do those services get their users?

- Where can your different types of users already be found? What communities are they part of? What types of sites do they frequent? http://quantcast.com is a great tool for this. This list: http://socialmediaanswers.com/niche-social-networking-sites/ and lists like it are another good one.

- What kind of things do your potential users talk about? Can you find them using http://search.twitter.com and http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch ?

Good luck!
Indeed, it appears similar to the fake facebook chat popups on porn and spam sites. I would have difficulty believing there was a real person behind it.
Well, send me an email and we can talk.
I was reading this, thinking, "wow, this guy sure seems to love Apple."

Then I read this: "As a pundit, I'm supposed to explain how the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. But I can't. The iPad really is The Big One: Apple's reconception of personal computing." To which I thought, "translation: 'my fanboyism gets in the way of rational thought.'"

THEN, I hit the bottom of the article, and realized what I was reading. John Gruber of Daring Fireball, Apple's unofficial mouthpiece, writing another fluff piece for Apple.

This is how Apple fanboys roll.
There's so much going on here my head hurts a little. :-)
I disagree - you are right that convenience is the issue, but wrong to assume that will never change.

What's needed is that Alice, who knows nothing of crypto, gets mail from Bob. It's encrypted, but there is a reassuring icon of a padlock or something along with a simple plaintext message from Bob, a la 'Hi Alice - Bob here. I've decided to start encoding my email to keep it secure from prying eyes on the internet. I use a reliable free service called (something cool). You can install it in about a minute by clicking on the icon, and after that everything is automatic. If you're not sure, just give me a call and I'll confirm it's legit. your friend, Bob'.

People are totally willing to install stuff and recommend it to their friends as long as it's simple and transparent in operation. Most encryption systems haven't been, because most crypto nerds are skeptical of anything that doesn't expose its functionality...whereas most ordinary people don't want to know how it works, they just want to know that it does and that it's safe. Frankly that's why I don't bother using crypto right now, my academic interest in it peaked when PGP was new and I was passing the code around and joking it was classified as a munition. but since nobody has broken into my mailbox in the last 20 years, I can't be arsed to stick public key blocks at the end of every message and have people assume I'm paranoid or, to do tech support for my relatives.

If you like crypto and think more people ought to use it (which I agree with), maybe a gmail extension would find an audience.
Yes, if you take a photograph, a dollyzoom like effect comes into place.
There's a lot to dislike about Oracle and Larry Ellison (especially as a person) but there's something to be said of a CEO who used the word "permgen" (in reference to HotSpot's generational garbage collector) at the first speech after an acquisition.

Having been at Yahoo at the times of Terry Semel, it's incredibly refreshing to see a CEO of company take a hands-on approach to technology (even if Oracle is primarily a sales rather than engineering company).
SEO SOFTWARE STUDIO
Michael Arrington is not like that friend, because he not your friend. Michael Arrington is a reporter, only tell him stuff you want made public.
[Link removed, didn't realize was same as mentioned.]

If your service is truly unique you might find some good rates on keywords.
I think it is also about the fact people already feel their email is secure enough. To get to your email a hacker would already have to break into gmail or your network (or one of the servers your email passes through).

Also email has been around a long time, but the main way of getting someones email is still break into someone account by phishing for their passwords. If the attacker logs in to gmail using your own password, encryption is not going to help (assuming you're envisioning a gmail that does automatic encryption of email and must decrypt it when you view your emails in your browser).
-create something free to give away and reach out to popular bloggers to ask for reviews

-join niche forums and participate
Interview With A Global Warming Skeptic: Dr. Roy Spencer
"git pull" -> git fetch + git merge

"git pull --rebase" -> git fetch + git rebase

git fetch is what syncs the remote changes to your local repo. . If you want to see these changes, they are referenced by so-called remote-tracking branches. To view them use:

git branch -r

Now, if your local branch (let's say its master) has not diverged from the remote branch to which it corresponds (typically origin/master), then it doesn't matter whether you use rebase or merge. In the case where your local master is a superset of the remote master, there are no new remote changes to incorporate. In the case where where your local master is a strict subset of the remote master, then either rebase or merge will perform a so-called "fast-forward" operation which basically just updates your local master to the same commit as the remote master.

However, if your local master has diverged from the remote master, then there is work to do:

Rebase will take all your new local commits, set them aside, reset your local master to the same commit as the remote master, then replay your commits one at a time. If there are conflicts, you will of course have to resolve them as you go.

Merge, on the other hand, will attempt to create a merge commit. A merge commit is one that has two parents. In this case, the parents are the tip of the remote master and the tip of the local master. Of course, here too there may be conflicts for you to resolve.

Regardless of whether you performed rebase or merge, when done, your local master is now a superset of the remote master and you can push out the change. (Unless of course, while you were rebasing/merging, someone else pushed their changes. In this case, wash, rinse, repeat…).

Now, as to whether to use merge or rebase… there is no right answer. It very much depends on the workflow.

Rebase will give you a "cleaner" history in the sense that the history remains linear which some folks prefer. A linear history is easier to understand and if you ever need to use "git bisect" to find where something broke, a linear history is much easier to deal with.

However, some folks prefer to see the true history of development in the sense of "when so-and-so started this work, on which commit was it originally based?". In that case, merge preserves that information (as long as it wasn't a fast-forward -- but you can always force a merge commit with "git merge --no-ff").

In some cases, it makes sense to use both rebase and merge -- rebase for simpler changes and merge to incorporate long-lived topic-branches.

It pains me that the git man pages are so awful. Patches welcome (it is unfortunate that newbies provide the best perspective on how awful the docs are, while simultaneously are the least likely to be able to contribute improvements to them). Ultimately, git is actually based on some fairly simple concepts and I happen to think that once you have a conceptual understanding of it, all the commands (more or less…) start to make sense. So I strongly advocate trying to understand what the heck is going on under the hood.

That said, the Pro Git book is a much better place to start learning git than the git man pages.

Hope this helps.
It's funny, because the situation we're in right now (at least in the US) does neither really well.

On the one hand, hardcore theoretical courses at the average CS school don't exist as weed-out at all. If you're lucky, you've got a good faculty member teaching a compilers or operating systems course that'll make it challenging, but only sometimes. Teaching things like Haskell, The Lambda Calculus, Prolog, Complexity Theory and C are "impractical" for someone doing a CS degree, because, you know, everyone uses "OO" (whatever that means) nowadays so that's the theory we should teach. Plus, if we teach a hard course about the theory of computation, lots of kids will flunk, and we can't have that, now can we?

On the other hand, any attempt to make the curriculum practical (since most schools border on vocational training anyway) is met with the response of "Well, a CS degree shouldn't prepare you to be an industry programmer!"

So really, most universities are left in a luke-warm middle-ground, where theory is being neglected but no one is willing to be the administrator who "flips the switch" and turns CS students into non-stop code monkeys.

Really, grounding yourself in a lot of CS theory, while occasionally forcing yourself to break out and hack up a project, is probably the best route to becoming a well-rounded programmer. Whether most people are capable of realizing how bad current CS education is and doing so, however, is another matter.
Arrington has a law degree, millions of dollars, and a massively popular platform. He don't scare easy.
This isn't unique to teachers, it's a problem with unions.
Is Dropbox-like "virality system" a good replacement for traditional marketing? 
We have a prototype of the service, that is almost ready for the public testing.
It will help small and medium service companies like interactive agencies, consulting companies etc. replace their traditional marketing with the consumer-affiliate program.

Here is a sample usage scenario:

1. Send your customer thank you letter with a simple “You know someone who might be interested in doing business with us? Let them know!” link.

2. Give 5% discount on future engagements to your customer for each new one you get thanks to his endorsement (you'll give max 25% discount).

3. Give 10% discount to the new customer that came thru the referral link.

4. Our system makes sure that you keep track of all the users, references and rewards.

Our system keeps track of all the deals, offers, customer contacts and referrals so basically it can help you control most of the sales/marketing part of your business.

Sounds interesting? Please sign up for the beta testing here: http://virality.smartupz.com
It really does appear that no good deed goes unpunished.
I think that programming languages are tools which aid the development of programs, but the program itself is really independent of the programming lanauge. I know that I write the same program no matter what the compiler (or assembler).
I don't even think it's going out on a limb. Except, of course, it seems to be.

I wonder how many people even realize that the running "that's what she said" gag from The Office is almost exclusively a meta-joke about Michael's constant inappropriateness...
This is something I've considered before as well; in fact, I wonder why we aren't forced to learn it in school, considering we spend years in school, going to lectures and taking down notes of people talking as quickly as we can write.

In terms of computing, though, I think it would suffer many of the problems of handwriting recognition - wobbly lines, different sizes of people's writings, pens lifting off the page at different times - and some more of it's own.

For instance, Pitman shorthand comes in different versions - every few years they change the standard to try to make it more concise. Many of the shapes are in relative positions so the same thing above/on/below the line have different meanings, and the extra informational signals such as dots and dashes can be left off by more advanced people without changing the meaning.

Worse than that is that it's short because it's phonetic - so not only does the computer trying to recognise it have to do everything it does for handwriting recognition, but it also has another layer to do first - what sounds are you using and what words are you trying to write from them?
Instead of (pen strokes -> words), you get (pen strokes -> phonetic sounds -> words). Also, Pitman shorthand is pressure sensitive - light strokes for unvoiced sounds and heavy strokes for voiced sounds, IIRC.

Worse even than that, it's short because it allows you to leave information out where you know what it will be and to develop your own shortcuts where useful to you. You might abbreviate your name to "Sh" with {name indicating symbol}, or use "em eff ing" for manufacturing, or have a symbol for "Our newest product" or write "would like know b prices" for "we would like to know your best prices".

So now you have pen strokes -> sounds -> filling in missing sounds -> words -> filling in missing words -> text.

Seems useful for taking notes in a hurry and then writing them up in full yourself the same day or week, less useful for writing for other people or future reference, and even less useful for computer recognition.
Deus Ex Bacteria. Shirley, this ancestor could be referred to as "God".
55 Captivating Examples of Illustration Art
> how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!!

Not a fan of oracle, but http://oss.oracle.com/ isn't entirely empty. Btrfs and OCFS2 certainly come to mind as interesting oracle projects.
Inserting in sorted order is not a typical case, and I strongly doubt your "at most 1 disk seek" claim but my memory is fuzzy so you may be correct.

You're definitely right that the cache should be hot though, so I am now also a skeptical hue.
I would really like to see something like Grooveshark in HTML5.
Large video game worlds
Clickable link: http://virality.smartupz.com
I'm not a fraud, a fair number of people have seen the numbers directly and know the business, I've just tried to keep the number low for now.
From the contact page:

If you don't have time to contribute, you're welcome to offer a donation instead.
(Our cost is roughly $20 per person per day, plus your own food consumption)

It really does sound like a cool idea.
I suspect angry demagoguery had more to do with your ban than your choice of platform. Most of the bans I see happen to people who either freak out or post mainly to promote their own blog and make little other contribution. I may bear some responsibility as I visit the new page frequently and don't mind using the flag option.
I personally disagree. None of those why's are all that important except for the buffering because the end user is in fact the only term in the equation that matters.

Advertiser reporting tools are not crucial. They will advertise if they know the eyeballs are there.

Neither is DRM. If given a choice to monetize without DRM or not have a site at all and maintaining rights, the choice is obvious (if the business is interested in profits).

These are things that advertisers and studios "want", not necessarily need.

The only valid complaints are technical things like video quality and buffering. Everything else is secondary and only crucial to Hulu because their business thrives on giving a perceived illusion of ownership to distributors. But when push comes to shove, as it's been stated already in regards to DRM, your content is getting onto DVRs and can easily be redistributed illegally by other means, so what's the point?