skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, but more of them are doing it now than in Shakespeare's time. (Okay, they were watching it on stage rather than on TV; the period's equivalent of soap operas and sitcoms...)

As a percentage and in absolute numbers there are more educated people, by nearly anyone's definition of education, than at any time in history up to now. And television, mass communication in general, plays a large part in that.

As hard as it is for many to imagine, a lot of what passes for junk culture and time wasting trivia these days will be considered high art in the future. Future pundits will decry how the youth of the country are wasting their time with the latest feelie dramas and grab-o-vision media instead of partaking of more uplifting fare like downloading _Maru, the box cat_ and staying up all night playing _Tomb Raider_...
The money requested ($10,000) was intended as a summer sipend. I doubt that a single programmer can write the code in 3 months, while paying the bills.

In other words, $10,000 means they can work on this all summer without needing a job to support them.
Because I said so works, but you aren't actually thinking this in your own head, so why not just take the time once everyone is back in listening mode to give them the long version?

Dad: Go to bed, please.

Kid: Why?

Dad: Because I said so.

post hysterics...

Dad: Why do you think Dad was telling you to go to sleep?

Kid: I don't know.

Dad: Well, what are you doing today?

Kid: Going to school.

Dad: And if you don't sleep before you go to school, what happens... etc etc.

Of course this is variable on the child, the issue and the level of understanding. I've done this though and while it doesn't solve the immediate concern, it sure as hell helps with any possible recurrence.
To a degree perhaps. However, Node.js has a programming style that's highly reminiscent of code you would see in a browser. For instance, responding to a conenct event on a socket

socket.addListener("connect", function () {
socket.write("hello\r\n");
});

is really not that different from responding to a click event on an element in jQuery.

$("#my-element").click(function() {
alert('Element Clicked!');
});

I'm not saying that it will instantly make everyone a server side programmer, but it definitely makes the barrier to entry quite a bit lower.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/c3l8f/microsoft...
Full-disclosure: I am both a woman and a Grooveshark employee. Not just employee - Developer.

I read your blog post, and you make some very good points. I feel much the same about the industry as a whole, and became especially sensitive to it after attending FOWA Miami last year, and seeing the vast, vast difference in the number of women in attendance versus the number of men. At the after parties, I walked up to every woman I saw and asked them if they were programmers. I didn't find a a single one. They were all in marketing or design.

But here at Grooveshark? Yeah, so the "that's what she said" joke on our 404 page is inappropriate. But it's still pretty damn funny. Maybe I'm biased. I've heard "that's what he said" jokes thrown about the office as well. As a woman, I'm certainly in the minority of employees here at Grooveshark. But I am absolutely not dumped into any sort of Illustrator ghetto. In fact, I'm the lead ActionScript developer here. The actual Grooveshark application you use every day? Until the redesign, that was all me. It's gotten too large to be maintained by a single dev anymore, but I'm still the one who designs and writes all the application's architecture. I am not sexualized (at least no more than any of the men are) or vilified here. I am a valuable part of our team.

So yes, our industry has a serious problem. But don't think Grooveshark (or our 404 page) seriously contributes to it.
I knew multiple people in my CS program that didn't even own a computer and never did anything computer-related outside of class. It was just a job to them. We could never understand it.

Almost everything I learned about writing code came outside of class, mostly messing around with open-source tools and games.
This argument just doesn't make sense. Its trivial to make this search, the OP just put a nice wrapper around it. There are two possible choices he could have made:

Something shocking, like "playing hooky", that could get people in trouble. In this case, people will get in trouble, because someone will find out they were playing hooky and report them. However, because people are directly being effected, a shit-storm will be caused, and people will accept that this is a problem faster.

On the other hand, the examples could have been something trivial, such as "Weight". It may get people annoyed about it, but no one is going to lose their job. And since they won't lose their job, they won't be pissed, and Facebook can drag their feet.

The best part is, anyone with malicious intent could make these searches on their own. Exposing it to the public just forces someone to take action.
Excerpts From the Diary of an App Store Reviewer
You might be interested to know that this method has been employed by Cloudmark for many years in their collaborative spam filtering network: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1105677

However, it works so well for them because the consensus on what is "ham" and what is "spam" is nearly universal enough that it can be relied upon to be agreed with by the majority of agents (people) the vast majority of the time. For news links, this will unlikely be the case unless you are actively attempting to create a news site where only a very few have power over what is shown and what is not.

Also, the Cloudmark technique chooses very few people to reward and this is on purpose. They are sparing with the reputation points and quick to downgrade on controversy in order to prevent a high-reputation individual gaming the system. Your news reputation system would likely have to incorporate a similar technique in order to be similarly robust. However, in doing so, I would imagine that most people would not see their reputation ever rise and would likely stop using the system. (due to lack of the "incentives" of which you speak) Cloudmark gets around this because people are already marking emails as spam or not in their email clients already, so there's no marginal cost associated with training Cloudmark's network or building their own reputation.

Its an interesting direction you propose, but I believe you'd be exposing your user base to scale-free network effects in which only a small few would gain sufficient reputation to "move the needle" and the rest would wallow in relative obscurity. This would then essentially replicate the Slashdot of 2000 AD but with the marketing message saying that it was "fairer" because of all the "incentives" people have.

You might want to think of how to structure a social news site as a kind of online auction, choosing a structure in which truth-telling is a dominant strategy, instead, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%93...
Run Haiku!
It start to make sense when he talks about the people in China.
Hah - I didn't intend to end 3/4 of my post with question marks. Or did I? ..ahem.

My comment was really a rhetorical question about the moral (not necessarily commercial - I'm not arguing that) appropriateness of taking (as you described) an alienating path.

I've read quite a few descriptions of marketing as being successful by causing unknown wants and needs. None of those descriptions really talk about 'us and them' as a concept.

[edit-minor typo]
Short notes on McCarthy's "Recursive Functions"
That would be a "joint work", which is not in the list. What is in the list is "a contribution to a collective work", which has to be distinct from the whole.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101 : <<A “collective work” is a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole.>> <<A “joint work” is a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole.>>
We could do those things, but we could also just let people in if they want to come to the US to improve their lives.

I totally agree that the guy is insane.
Agreed. Whatever server-side language you're using, you're likely using javascript too.

I think CommonJS is the more important project to consider here.
Alan Kay quotes
What's to stop anyone on the list from posting the info on the internet?

Wait until August. If you're not ready yet then you're not ready. Don't take unnecessary risks.
It's very rational for the politicians ladling out the money ... until they "run out of other people's money", to paraphrase Margret Thatcher.
That seems rather over the top.
I can't really see this ruining anybody's life.
It isn't letting me search for specific peoples comments. I don't know any of these people, nor am I likely to meet them.

This website reminds me of being outside, with people, and hearing little snippets of conversations from strangers. Nobody goes to a park and then complains the council that strangers where able to hear their conversations.

Hmmm, I hope this doesn't sound facetious. I feel like I'm missing the point with the facebook privacy hype. There are so many reactions that seem totally strange from my perspective that I feel like I've got something wrong.

The way it sits in my mind is:
Facebook is a service provided for free.
I've given facebook some information about myself so that it can be displayed to people who are interested.
My friends do the same and so we can communicate and share things such as photos.
Some people start to get angry at the fact facebook doesn't do what they want, namely provide this service in a private manner.

I have yet to see anyone personally upset by this. Mostly people seem to disagree with the principle, and go and get angry on behalf of others.
School-bus sized squid actually quite friendly, study finds
Just thought I'd mention that when I hit "sign up", Firefox prompts me with the "open with/save file" dialog. I am using Firefox 3.5.9 on Ubuntu 9.10
Why'd you choose to use vzaar.com? How much bandwidth does a showcase site like this take up on average?
A duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345734
I have all the books currently out now on Scala and I think "Programming Scala" by Wampler and Payne is the best one for learning the language: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Scalability-Function...

Steer clear of the Artima book: its huge, out of date and not written particularly well.
It would be great as a browser plugin for creating new accounts and not needing to give them my real email address.
When people talk about "genericness", or "generic programming" in front of me, the first example they give to me is the parametric polymorphism of the STL. It seems I underestimated you (again). But even if you know what you write, many people don't know what they read. Hence my up-mod.

The fact that template are Turing complete doesn't hide the restrictions they come with (like how they interact with inheritance). I know they have others goals than mere parametric polymorphism. I even admit that I don't understand these goals. I just say that one goal wasn't met: simple parametric polymorphism.

About lambda lifting being a (simple) syntactical transformation, please stop. You're right, but in a trivial sense: every compilation process is a (less simple) syntactical transformation. That includes lambda lifting, ghc's crazy optimizer, and every static compiler on this planet.

Now, by "syntactic sugar", I meant something that could be dealt with with local macros. You know, I have done the transformation you speak of manually in C++. More than once. I know this is fairly simple. But it is not local. I still have to write something outside the definition of the function I am writing the closure in. So, to do lambda lifting, I need a more global preprocessor.

The locality of the transformation may not be important to you, but to me, it is crucial. I don't mind some noise (semicolons, curly brackets, keywords…), because when used to it, I can see the actual code beneath it. However, the code has to be there. If I have to look up elsewhere, it quickly blows up my short term memory. Also, as long as the transformation is strictly local, you could deal with it with simple macros, like this:

-- I assuume "closure" is a Lisp-like macro
let x =
let y = ... in
closure arg1 arg2 (... body ...)

So, a language without lambdas doesn't treat functions as first class citizens. That's what I meant by "doesn't fully implement functions". This is a strong wording, but I don't think it is inaccurate. Put the same restrictions on integers, and see if you can still say that they are "fully implemented".

Did I overlooked something?
>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.

You don't approach the problem backwards, that's how.

A "product" without a need is like an answer without a question. You should always have, at minimum, at least 1 user that finds the product useful before you even develop anything.

Assuming you have a least one person who is having a problem solved by your product, the issue then becomes to find other people with the same problem. Your product should sell itself to them.

What problem does your service solve?

Who has that problem?

Go introduce your problem to them. If this model doesn't fit for whatever "but, but" you can come up with, I would humbly suggest abandoning this product and focusing on another.
Apologies as it's been a long time, but:

1. Sufficient hygiene to pass the 0.5-second first look.
2. Be interesting.
3. They're smart, so... listen. 2 ears, 1 mouth - remember the ratio.
4. Let them play with (and pick) the toys, too.
Work at a Startup
All regression also depends on the unreasonable man.
Flaws of Hierarchical File System
I chose them because they had a nice looking player and I was in a hurry to get the site up. But they're pretty awful. They charge way too much for bandwidth and the <video> alternative they put in the page doesn't play on an iPhone/iPad. Support is kinda lame too.

Once I find a decent generic flv player I'm moving the videos to my normal CDN.
Ah, thank you, content-type was set to json. Fixed now.
That's not a good approach to risk management because we don't know all of the specific risks. Even if we knew that, we don't know the likelihood of it occurring. Even if we knew that, we don't know the harm that it would cause. Even if we knew that, we don't know how much it would cost to make that risk go away.

I think a better approach to risk management is to flip it and think of the key parts of the system, and figure out ways to make the system more robust, have redundancy, and some strategic slack built in.
More exclusive info & pics of Froyo's tether and WiFi AP/mobile hotspot features
Well, except the part where they email him saying, thank you great post.
So, in short, be a phony geek?
I'm guessing this author must not be their science editor.
I thought of that too, there are a couple of services that do this, although not as a browser plugin. I thought it might be more compelling for people to be able to use this service to add this functionality to their application, if they were using a provider like heroku where you don't get a mail server with your hosting.

Thanks for the feedback.
Our opinions on this specific issue: http://www.alertdebugging.com/2009/11/04/mockingbird-cappucc...
ColdFusion Snippets - Array to List
I'm really interested in attending something like this but am on the East Coast. Will there be any audio/video available from this event?
This should have just been a link to Kickstarter without mention of Diaspora... I like Kickstarter though.
Yes, we'll broadcast the event on Justin.tv.
Don't know why but this struck a cord with me. I realize on home pages of systems I just list features.

I updated my flash card site, http://cueflash.com with similar copy. (Check out http://dev.cueflash.com/ to see the old copy).

Feel free to comment if you think it could be improved (I am not much of a marketer).
Facebook calls all-hands meeting on privacy for Thursday
I say full attention. When will they get an opportunity like this again?
Two weeks' living expenses in 200-euro notes is still a pretty small pile.

Besides, if the shit hits the fan who's going to have change for a 500 anyway? Unless you're just expecting a glitch with your bank, in which case it's best to just have a couple of different accounts.
I think it is about how one succeeds where another fails, not about about kickstarter.
First, they will have to increase the federal prison capacity 10x, so they can hold all the American citizens who rebel against this tyranny, and would gladly spend the rest of their lives in a federal prison in protest. I would be among them.
The huge problem here is that they provided him all of this content and neglected to say, "Slim this down and use no more than 115 words." They neglected to give him a guideline to follow - and better yet, they should have just given him what he needed to create the post and nothing more.

If someone comes to me and says, "Create a post based on all of this content," I am not going to take the time to pick and choose selectively what the reader sees. Why should he take the time to inconvenience his readers?
May I suggest Video for Everybody?

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
Does it support right-click menus?
...also known in some circles as "seagull management."
Things to Stop Doing on Facebook
Very timely ... Amen on business lawyers! I just signed the papers on a seed round and what drove me nuts was all the expensive back and forth on possible IPO provisions (caps on legal fees etc.) let's see if we can get user one without using up a significant chunk of capital on legal fees first!!
Some guy hires a company through oDesk, possibly asks for undeliverable specs and pays very little, doesn't get the stuff delivered and the goes on and sues the marketplace because of the outcome? That's as absurd as suing ebay or craigslist if you don't like some stuff you buy there!
Sounds interesting.

One comment: in the application form, it's not really clear how we would be contacted by whoever we decide to (any YC company, any HN user, anyone). Basically, where are the email and resume going and how would "anyone" have access to them?

Thanks!
Taking children seriously is good.

http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/
http://twitter.com/#search?q=hooky

I know it's trendy to hate FB right now but don't underestimate the ignorance factor in all of this.
I cobbled this together last night. It's very ugly but shows what get's leaked: http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/
The thing is, the lack of outrage from nongeeks is not because they don't care, but because they don't know.

I explained Instant Personalization to my dad today and he about shit himself, right before telling me he more or less didn't believe me because Facebook didn't notify him and because he didn't opt into it.

Which is why I'm sitting down with my parents and my brother tonight for a Facebook Privacy tutorial
Come on. Typing "truncate" in a text field doesn't do anything to the database. Neither does "insert" or "update".

What it does is generate stupid alarms and break pageflows when you have an improperly configured web filter.
"today the book’s publisher Simon & Shuster got involved and is threatening legal action."

Thanks. I needed a little more juice for my "death to the publishing industry" mission. grrrr
I've seen "modest proposals" that whose authors didn't know that they're supposed to be parodies. If my reading of Dickey's piece is on target, this is one of those cases where the author didn't know.
It was basically a generic "the more you tighten your grasp, the more worlds that slip through your fingers" mantra. Apple and Facebook don't like change, but if they don't change people will use other products.

Not exactly the content that one would expect from such an attention-grabbing headline that makes such a large claim...
Privacy Checker for Facebook - what are you leaking onto the web?
Its not pretty and needs some work but it gets the point across.
This post alludes to performance faster than nginx. Anybody have any real-world experience comparing the two? I'd love to hear about it if so...
Why is this on HN? Can we vote PS3 vs Wii vs 360 next?
Unless we assume that these people are completely ignorant of the public nature of their status updates, then this isn't a privacy violation. Is the argument that Facebook defaults to public and makes it confusing to change settings?
You don't 'learn what not to do' by going to a place with shoddy practices as your first gig... Unless you're bright enough to look at what they are doing and realize that it's shoddy, you'll end up adopting the practices (and have to spend the time to un-learn them).
How To Not Get Fat At A Web Startup
Working on the web all day long is a recipe for fatness. Not metaphorically, I mean literally. You’re sitting on your butt all day. And especially when you’re working at a startup and putting in 16 hour days, it’s hard to find time to take care of yourself...
It's not about knowing the syntax. It's about expertise and fluency. If you're fluent in Javascript, why should you have to learn another language to program the server in? If anything this should have happened about a decade ago.

(Which it sort of did; I used to use JScript in ASP, but it's not quite the same.)

(Yes, I am the person who frequently compares Node.js to Erlang, unfavorably. But my objection is to the hype that Node.js is a unique and beautiful snowflake, rather than a retread of ideas done endlessly in other languages. I still think that on the whole it's a good idea, even if I don't think it can actually live entirely up to the hype, it can still do good things.)
I know that Strings are just non-encoded sequences of bytes. But how do I know that/how Rails works? Ie does it use some regular expressions somewhere that might fail, or not fail? When I was new to Rails they added an extra method to strings to convert it to a kind of unicode string, but somehow later that was lost.

As I said, it seems to kind of work, but I would like to be sure what is going on.
I built the resume feature as something more general. Those options were in case I eventually do something where anyone can keep a resume on HN, and people can do searches on them, as has sometimes been proposed. For now I'm only using it for workatastartup, so I just took the other options out, in case they alarm people.
Ralph Nader: Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us
I've heard complaints about FB privacy from a lot of non-geeks - more general and somewhat paranoid rather than predicated on specific changes, but all from facebook users who feel confused about where the line between public and private is (as opposed to non-users who post on the internet about how the internet is bad).
I've been known to read law textbooks to my kids. No, really. It works better when they're really really little and don't much care what you're reading. Time will tell what harm or good it's done.

The lesson I take from this is that it's not that people can't read legalese, but that from a young age they quite reasonably would rather do something interesting instead.
I'm guessing the former Bureau Chief for Paris, Cairo, and Central America for Newsweek and (before that) the Washington Post has heard of Swift before.

Dickey's not the first journalist to make this point, which, stated concisely, is that nobody would accept a law like this if it applied universally, because it would mean they could spend a night in a city jail for forgetting their wallet. They're only OK with Arizona's law because they haven't thought it through.
More choice
A Twitter Job Search Experiment