skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have iTunes, you know. Works in a similar way.

Liking the convenience, but want to know that a popular hub accepting inbound connections and open to third-party publishers has some sort of security built in, OS or otherwise. They seem to be going around the OS, and I don't think it's necessary.
It's way more complicated than that. It also depends on how much control a contractor has over his task, hours, and tools. Even if you have a work for hire agreement, micromanagement can turn the contractor into a Statutory Employee. If you treat them as employees they may well turn out to be employees if anything goes to court. Microsoft learned that the hard way.

EDIT: Clarification: The IRS and Labor department dont really like independent contractors; it allows you all sorts of tax write-offs. They have a list of tests to see if you qualify: available to work for anyone, advertising, the list above, and a few other things. If you work at their site, using their equipment, and are micromanaged, you may be declared a statuary employee. A business license should be a simple remedy.
I guess the problem with Great Britain is that there are no recent historical accounts of it working combined with the fact that the economic crisis requires immediate, resolute action.

Having the Lib-Dems be the king-makers at every election might be a weird case---assuming that no other popular parties begin emerging.
Ah, I get you now, sorry.

I don't know if it is not 'right', the signal function would have been just as strong if they would have set their original goal at $100K and people would have sent them that much $.

In some ways the $amount is a value that collapses a number of underlying elements to a single number, the amount of frustration around facebook privacy, the people that simply wish these kids luck and there are a number of people that hate facebook enough to put up a substantial amount of $.

Which portion of that $100K ($109K already, $4500 per hour right now) comes from the 'signal' portion is hard to tell.
Recovery.gov finds new home in the cloud
Diaspora, the anti-Facebook
I went to TEDxCam and it was a good experience. I think one problem with the TEDx conferences is finding out about them, I only found out about it by word-of-mouth. It would be nice if I could go to some website and subscribe for notifications of say TEDx events occurring in the UK.
IWatch
Well, what did you except out of a CS (== computer science) degree?

If you want to be a great software developer, then you should (1) major in CS and (2) learn how to program. These are usually two separate but mutually beneficial things.
What's your sample size? Are you a teacher, or just referring to friends and acquaintances of yours?

I've received numerous compliments on how well my children speak. All I ever did was speak to them like people (in the way that I would like to be spoken to), and explain any concepts or words they didn't understand using concepts and words they already did understand.

It just seemed...obvious. If you're going to treat your children like they're idiots, why would you expect them to turn out any different?
* automate backing it up

* fix display issues - if they think data is lost, then it is

there are some good insights here obviously gained through experience. have you written about some of the stories behind these insights?

Could use a little more explanation on how to make coding faster though, as that's more about process than following a set list of rules.
> I guess I had been spending quite a bit more time with books rather than people.

I've sometimes had the same problem. my native language is French, and I mostly learned English by myself with books, computers, and music. Sometimes when I spoke, it sounded more like something a character in a book would say than what a typical person would.

Exposure to more flesh-and-blook Anglophones has mostly fixed that, though.
This is kind of a pissy, spiteful post. Why would anyone ever take this kind of conflict public ? What does Arrington have to gain by going around jamming his thumb in "old media" eyes ?
At the current rate they're pulling in money they are less than 8 days away from $400K, if they get more mainstream press it might happen quicker than that.

If the media hype dies down it will probably freeze fairly quickly, but the media is loving this story so far.
It seems to me that people that really are meant to be programmers already started before college. At least that's been the case with guys I've worked with that actually knew what the hell they were doing.

No offense to this guy but the reality is, if you are not into this stuff before you started college (aka writing your own programs because a) it's cool, and b) you got tired of not having a program that did what you need, etc), then it's a pretty brutal career path.

Think about it this way, most good/great programmers are just coders because it's how they've always been. If you are just getting into this industry because it's a good career path then you have to realize you are going against guys like me who started programming the Atari 800 when I was a kid because, well it was fun and just seemed right.

I wish him luck, but this isn't 1998 any more and companies aren't going to just hire you off the street just because you have a CS degree. The competition level for jobs right now is higher than it's been for a long time. With that said, he can certainly make this work, he just needs to start coding on his own to learn and grow.
That's why it would be great to have a 'preview' button the initial form is pretty small to work in and it is very easy to miss something before clicking 'reply'.

It sure encourages brevity though.
OK, at the risk of getting called out for spamming I can't help but interject here.

I am the founder of a company who's goal is to create an environment where remote contributors are the company. I have one other co-founder and a few more interested in it. None of us live in the same city. I really want to get at least one more really talented person as a co-founder.

Please have a look:
http://www.fireworksproject.com/pages/extraordinary_people.h...
I thought pg and jl were the only "editors"? no?
> What does Arrington have to gain by going around jamming his thumb in "old media" eyes ?

Pageviews?
I'm going to side on Arrington on this one, even though sometimes, he likes to make a big deal out of something small like removing a few words from his post.
It's funny that you mention this because desktop syncing is where Android really got it wrong. Try buying a droid/htc/etc and try using the manufacturer's software for upgrading the firmware -- basically impossible for the average user. Jobs is trying to make devices easy for the average joe, not the power user who runs linux. Macs have always been in a niche market and quite happy with where it is.
Reminds me of the kinds of posts we saw after the whole CrunchPad/JooJoo thing fell apart.
Do Capitalists Produce Nothing?
But even more likely was single-ancestor with some gene mingling. So a bit of both.

Seems like a bit of a false dichotomy going on here as this is a "degree of" question and not an either-or question (If I understood the article correctly)
What they are proposing is significantly more difficult than what Facebook initially wrote. Facebook, at one point, was just another web app with a nice story for bootstrapping new users via the college networks. These guys are trying to build a distributed, secure, encrypted network on which to build social networking functionality. If they do it correctly it could be the basis for a whole lot more. And even if they don't work it out entirely as long as they release the source code it is a step in the right direction and others can continue to work on it or something similar.
Agreed. I've tried trading one punishment for another, and the only thing it seems to teach is that punishment is malleable, and that they can start "gaming" the punishments for less harsh ones, even if the situation calls.

I promised myself when I was a child that I would never tell my children, "because I said so." You know, sometimes it really is "you just have to put up with it and do what I say...because I'm Daddy, and I said so."
I think that's disingenuous of Adobe, because that choice still rests in the hands of the consumer at the moment they made an informed purchase.

If they chose to make an uninformed purchase, well, that's still a choice.

Abobe is actually seeking to take away Apple's ability to make a design choice. If choice is sacred, why isn't that one?
If you don't like the post, just flag it and move on.
Thanks, I will try it.
Application-level solution would still be preferable, I think,
and is an interesting problem, aside from the immediate usability benefits.
This sounds like someone at Fortune trying to do something industrious and then getting smacked by the higher-ups.

I wonder how many good ideas are quashed simply because of policy.
> What does Arrington have to gain

A troll, like Arrington, craves and hopes to gain attention. Like all trolls the solution is to ignore him. And quit reading clicking through to techcrunch.
You have no idea how common the reality of CS graduates who just don't know how to program is...
probably still angry about the iphone controversy that he wishes involved him
+1 for Clever bastard.
Then I think less of them. The lack of accountability in banning procedure is really shameful, and I've been banned for saying things like that I thought Clojure was better than Arc (although I think Arc is cool).

(I am notifier; I changed accounts in event of ban.)
It's always nice to hear someone talk about the entrepreneurial process.

Great interview and great reminder of things to not forget as you go forth with your business.
Why won't you give us spell checking?
I see a lot of people worry about if they fail. I think in the community there are a lot of people here to make it a success, and I think at this point that showing a little opportunism would be good right now.
Identify ways you can help that can create a win-win for both you and diaspora. Don't say you miss the party for this one.
Micromanaging someone, dictating their tools, etc, are telling them how to spend their time. Which I would take to mean that they clearly must have sold you that time (regardless of what's on paper) rather than whatever they're producing with it.
as to 1) Yes, agreed fully, a trust is the way to go. Grellas would be awesome.

2) Kickstarter will likely learn as much from this particular event as anybody (including the diaspora team), they have seen their model validated in a way that you can only dream of when you run a service like that with a ton of free publicity to boot. If diaspora is only marginally successful that would be enough, but they should be careful to show their independence from the project.

I'm going to watch this very closely in the next couple of months, it is imo the biggest story in the year to date with respect to start-up financing.

I sincerely wish those kids the best of luck, they'll need it. Their biggest problems will be that they will be sitting on a significant sum of money and that alone will attract all kinds of sharks, which is not good when you're a goldfish.

I've suggested they apply to YC, that's one of the ways in which they could get the expertise they need in order to at least make it to a launch of sorts. They'll be in dire need of people they can trust.
He's using the potential bad press over this whole childish incident (on both sides) to head off a letter from lawyers. I suspect it will work.
Why? All he had to do was select a few sentences from the excerpts and edit his post.

There's greater reward in the long run from acting like an adult, working well with others, and not being a complete douche.
(Speaking as a PM) --- because it's the PM's job to pivot.
It's a douche-douche situation.
cheap way to solve that problem is just to wear one of those gloves with holes cut out for the fingers... I use my bicycling gloves and they work great. I don't think we need to use fancy technology to solve this simple problem :-)
This.

Arrington plays the game every bit as much as the rest of them. But he's willing to expose how it works, from time to time, in order to make money for himself. I find it entertaining, which is the point.
How do you think the Bzr UI design compares with that of Hg?
Good comment here.

I came from the opposite end of the spectrum: started building "websites" with PHP and have grown to be a full fledged programmer in PHP, Python, Erlang, Scheme, and Objective-C. I quickly learned that my creations were sub-par and poorly engineered because of gaps in my knowledge of abstract concepts.

Learning about the Theory of Computation sky rocketed my skills, shoring up my mathematics education has also greatly augmented my understanding of why certain things work and why certain things are a bad idea to do (even though you have the rope to do it!).

Knowledge truly is power, the rest of it you will gain through experience. The OP will quickly learn that he will be above those that did not get through a CS degree because he does understand the minutia of the system and he will be able to understand the engineering process with precision. Rather than "stabbing in the dark" as I see a lot of my peers doing - who did not even bother to at least teach themselves the basics of computational theory, mathematics, &c...

You're on the right track my friend, as many have already said - just start getting some experience. The best route there, IMHO, is by contributing to Open Source Software; nothing taught me more about software engineering than slowly becoming a core developer for an OSS project!
A 78 KB Mac OS X game that's actually pretty addictive (direct download link)
In 1999 I was dismayed by the sheer number of otherwise incapable people who staffed the various startups I slaved away for. They had titles like "Director Of Marketing", "VP of Communications", etc. They were opportunists looking for a job that would make them wealthy, but without the skills or the real drive to become competent enough at that job to achieve their goals.

I do my best to keep track of the people I've developed some nominal relationship with professionally. LinkedIN has been awesome for this. After the bubble burst, the most useless people I knew left the tech industry. They became Mortgage Brokers, Real Estate Agents, and Recruiters.

After the real estate bubble burst, a lot of these same people rebranded themselves as Social Media Experts. For every dollar your startup earns or raises, there are hundreds of looters trying to convince you to give it to them.
Posts meant to generate discussion/heat are the bread & butter of Techcrunch. I don't find that their articles tend break news, or have anything remarkably insightful to say. They are an entertainment news source, I suppose.
A Chat Application in Lift Framework [pdf]
Yes, but if they hire say cperciva or someone with credentials and experience like that I can see that part as 'solvable'.

The technology is doable, after all, skype was built by two guys on top of a library created to distribute mp3s.

If you look at the top of the pledge page they write "Decentralize the web", they do not specifically mention facebook, so they seem to be aware of the fact that this could be the basis for a whole lot more.
At least this guy is cognizant of his condition...
Why bother anymore? The browser is a legacy of trash. It's been broken for so long and to point where developers have come to rely on its brokenness. Fixing it will inflict so much more pain on developers that we are in a situation where a legitimate debate could be had over whether it's even the right thing to do. They have some of the best programming minds in the world over there, but when they're at such a severe disadvantage with that minefield of an application how can they be expected to deliver anything more than the embarrassment that IE has been over the past several years? Has there been any substantial discussion about starting over?
That is just plain poetic.

Did you come up with that yourself ?
Yeah, I agree, they're trying to jerk Arrington around here.

Now fortune may have not had rights to let Arrington post it, but that's their issue most likely, as they misrepresented it, not Arrington

The first emails from them clearly are talking about excerpts in their entirety.
CS isn't a degree that teaches you how to program. For me it was much more like a discrete mathematics degree. I learned probably hundreds of algorithms (compression, cryptography, 3D rendering, AI), how to analyze and create new algorithms, but not how to program (except in the typical CS101 courses).

It was always assumed that any student could learn the language of their choice from an off-the-shelf book. I myself knew about half a dozen languages and mastered a couple before I graduated, but that was all extra-curricular work. In many ways I'd probably be a better developer if I obtained a Software Engineering degree instead, but CS gave me the foundation to tackle the interesting computational problems.

The professors knew they would be much more valuable explaining how RSA worked than how to debug a syntax error or learn the language of the month.
I see people coming in with 2 year degrees from community colleges, who can outgun 4-year CS graduates. The ones who can pull this off tend to be genuine hackers, who have a passion for what they are doing.
J.F.D.I.
Leaning to program for the first time in college is sort of like learning to read and write for the first time in college.
I once had a friend who never forgot a birthday or holiday. I always got a card from him. The problem was that it was always a card that someone else had sent him. He scribbled over their message and wrote his own, then added a lame message, "I'm doing my part by recycling."

This went on for years and I hated it. It wasn't funny anymore and I didn't want to read what others had written to him.

Then it hit me... Who was reading all the cards I had sent him?

Michael Arrington is like that friend. I will probably never send him an email because I don't want anyone else (much less the whole world) reading it.
A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him, therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
"The best way to know you have a mind is to change it" Judge Pierre Leval
to kill a mockingbird
It's not about personal morality, but legal responsibility. For example, just what are their tax and commercial obligations right now? You can't just hand the IRS a copy of the GPL; a large sum of money like this will require them to spend some time and $ just to document and report it correctly so it doesn't get treated like a scam.
Actually, I think you're wrong on both accounts. Fortune is jerking him around. Calling them on it is not a bad thing, because a working relationship on those terms will likely cost more than it will benefit.

Additionally, bloggers (and others in Attention Media) often make more from douchebaggery than from evenhandedness. (And I honestly don't think Arrington is being a douche here.
I think the problem is they attract various types of insects indiscriminately, which can be disastrous for the ecosystem. IIRC, the laser's tracking mechanism only detects the mosquitoes' wing frequency range.
> Git and mercurial are not the end of the story.

> I'm optimistic that, within another few years (give or take a decade), someone will come up with a VCS that's both powerful and usable. :-)

Do you think Hg shares the same amount of usability as Git?
Actually you're right, UTF-16 it is. Unfortunately it is too late to edit (or delete) my original comment.
Programming requires a lot more than learning the syntax and semantics of a programming language.

Most CS profs don't teach programming because they don't have anything interesting to say and would rather teach something else. They are not programmers.
Ask HN: Fun things to do with old laptops?
I have an old PowerBook G4 (1.66ghz / 1.5gb ram / 70gb drive) and an old small Sony laptop (1.ghz centrino / 512mb ram / 40gb drive / built-in camera). I'd really like to do something neat with them, so I'm open to ideas of what to do.
Electronic Privacy Awareness & Information
Aside from the generall "well, duh" factor (see e.g. Groxx's comment), the usual complaint applies here: there are some really hard-to-control-for factors. For instance, I bet "talking seriously with children" is very strongly correlated with parents' intelligence, which in turn is strongly correlated with children's intelligence, which in turn is strongly correlated with language proficiency. (For any reasonable definition of "intelligence", slippery though that term is.)

The relevant publication here seems to be the one available in pieces at http://dare.uva.nl/record/334829 and, indeed, it doesn't look as if the researcher has tried to control for parents' intelligence, education, etc. For that matter, the sample size is only 25 so it would be difficult to do so and still get any results worth reporting.

I'm underwhelmed by this.
I'm entertaining myself with the notion that a great deal of this money is from Zuck himself, funneled in via small amounts in a fiendish Xanatos Gambit[1] to make the inevitable flameout more spectacular.

1 - http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit
; Perhaps you would prefer monadic clojure?
; We wouldn't want to make it look too alien ;)
(with-monad state-m
(defn m-advice [your-brain spurious-advice?]
(if spurious-advice?
(m-chain (make-highly-subjective-claims
eliminate-good-candidates-for-specious-reasons
arive-at-questionable-conclusion) your-brain)
(m-chain ((m-understanding-broadener :programming)
be-able-to-evaluate-multiple-solutions-for-problem) your-brain))))
Their player is far from rock solid.

If I use the "wrong" DNS servers it claims I'm not from the USA. It's rather low quality/slow on my platform. I don't think the in browser player works at all.
I have to agree. I probably wouldn't say this in the SO question because I wouldn't necessarily want that person to read it, but:

There's a possibility she's just in the wrong field altogether. Most of the computer science people in my classes knew at least one language fairly well coming in as freshmen. I can't say they were all great programmers, but they did know how to program.

Maybe, if she was a straight A student without much practical experience, or a B student with a lot of practical experience, I would think differently. But she isn't.

That said, there are tons and tons of mediocre - bad programmers that make a career out of it. I'm sure she could as well. I just think maybe there's something out there that she would be really, really good at. Why stick with something that you aren't so good at?
For some reason, the text in the original display doesn't show, that's why this comment here should substitute:

This is because you can either post a link or a text. I think this was to avoid people trying to get there comment on a prominent position.
The first step in becoming an excellent programmer is realizing that you aren't one already.

Your question shows that you're probably one step ahead of your classmates.

You will always be learning and always be working hard (hopefully). It doesn't really get that much easier, but it does become a lot more fun and rewarding.

You'll be fine. Thanks for the post.
I don't know if it's the same effect, but I've found that I write as if I were giving a speech or a talk. I suspect this is because, growing up almost all of the arguments I presented were oral ones, in school we didn't really write persuasive essays until upper-middle school, however, I'd been arguing politics, science, history and whatever else over dinner with my family.