skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
:)

Was it Dijkstra that advocated writing everything in assembly, or am I thinking of someone else? I know he was big on formally verifying the correctness of programs, but I thought I remember him saying that for implementation purposes, he advocated assembly. Or was that more of a "if you can't write it in assembly, you don't understand all the parts" deal? It seems he hated FORTRAN, APL, BASIC, and PL/1, and only later did he like LISP.

I wonder what he would have thought of Haskell. Standardization started in the 80's, so he would have been alive when it was being ironed out. A search in the EWD archives didn't reveal anything though.

EDIT:

http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12x...

It appears that he liked functional languages...

>The clarity and economy of expression that the language of functional programming permits is often very impressive, and, but for human inertia, functional programming can be expected to have a brilliant future, the more so because today's computers admit quite efficient implementations of functional programming languages.

but...

>In particular, evaluating a functional program with pen and paper is a pain in the neck!

So he spends the rest of the paper talking about the predicate calculus and relation calculus.
Sorry we aren't in Berlin - but LShift are looking for developers in London.

http://www.lshift.net/recruitment.html

Interesting work done by interesting people.
It will always be an unending battle between hackers and the 'filterers'.

Actually, I wonder if there's another motive behind the filtering. I reckon by blocking access to certain foreign sites, it is actually giving opportunities to the locals to come up with their own home-brewed version of the service. The government is helping you kill off foreign competition.

Maybe it should be a case of "when there's a big problem, there's a big opportunity."
Those are all "go fast, turn left" racing, with relatively little navigation load on the driver, and almost no way to get off track. Memorize the course, plan your strategy and tactics, and run the course over and over. (Not to trivialize the skills required.)

Rally and programming have lots of chances to go off into the weeds or get off course.
> What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work

Non-attachment -- Exactly how? If so why delete your work ? That shows his attachment to it. iirc, there was some discontent over one of his libraries being overtaken by another (nokogiri ?). There were benchmarks that showed his lib to be slower. then he improved his lib. this went on. he did seem a bit annoyed, if i recall.
I was thinking more in the line of Chemistry/Biology/ labs. Are't labs absolutely essential to be a major in those subjects?
I don't know if it will be possible to do where you are, but I mowed lawns for years on the side. Even after I had a "successful" startup. I enjoyed having something completely non-technical to do and it actually let my mind reboot. And before anyone scoffs, the pay is actually pretty decent relative to the time invested. Don't believe me? Call up a landscaping service and get a quote for your yard. There is some initial costs for equipment, but it's definitely something that is scalable. You can get a used lawnmower for less than $50. It doesn't have to be great, little push mowers are work horses and damn near indestructible. Especially anything with a Briggs and Straton Motor. But like I said, this will only be relevant if you live in a part of the country you can mow lawns in.

And on your comment about working in a cafe. I have often thought about how great it would be if someone started a "Startup Cafe" with a rag tag group employees that were all working on their own projects. Somewhere you could pick up a few hours in your odd spare time and still be in a stimulating environment. Maybe have a laptop setup next to the server stand for a few snippets in your downtime. Someone start working on that! I'll buy my coffee there.
Paper Sculptures
Awesome sculptures
What makes a bank a bank nowadays is money lending rather than deposits and transfers. Some say money lending itself creates value, but I don't agree. Oversimplified, it can be said that because money is nothing, then money lending is even more so.

But in any case I was talking about the "rotten" banking system with corrupt lending practices rather than about banking in general.
Not that Eric Ries et al need validation from me, but I nearly went to that conference. (The timing just did not work for me.) You think $700 is a lot of money? I was getting ready to buy a plane ticket across the Pacific. I thought it was likely to be cheap at the price, given the quality of the novel insights Eric Ries et al have been writing about.

Take Minimum Viable Product, for example. It is similar to 37Signals "do less", but it doesn't end there: you're eliminating parts of the product which don't provide value, but you're also strategically deferring parts which do provide value until you've got a handle on the big business risks. I think that is a pretty powerful idea. Hugely powerful.

I've talked on the Business of Software forums for literally years now on how important polishing the first five minutes of interaction with your product is, but it never occurred to me to get that five minutes out before building the rest of the product. The story about spending 6 months to make the IMVU IM client being wasted because no one downloaded it, and how you could have gotten the same information without actually coding the IM client simply by putting up a download button and having nobody click it, was a lightbulb moment for me. Hey, wait a second: instead of building the whole product and then optimizing the living daylights out of the first five minutes, I can build the first five minutes and see if that knocks socks off. If so, then invest in building the rest of the product. (If not, figure out why it isn't knocking socks off and recalibrate. I'm not sure I like "pivot.")

This was hugely influential in my choice of Appointment Reminder over a notebook full of other ideas for my next product. There are probably a few decent ideas in there (amidst a lot of drek and random scribblings), but Appointment Reminder was the one that had an obvious opportunity for a very compelling demo implementable in a few weeks. And I think it will work fairly decently for me.

Heck, I think I stole three ideas just from watching the videos.
nice.... hope to make it to the next meet.
This is the fringe of my knowledge on China so please factcheck.

When Mao Zedong died in '76 he left behind a mixed bag of good and bad, he managed to keep China together in spite of serious internal pressures between ethnic groups, but in the process killed millions (some estimates run as high as 80 million people) and left behind a country that was on the brink of economic collapse.

After Deng Xiaoping took over the focus became the economy, less the ideology, which I think was more seen as a way to remain in power, rather than as a real guide to how to run the country. The 'party' became a device rather than a place for true believers.

Over the last 30 years then, slowly but surely Chinese officials have tried to both hold on to their power while staving off a revolution of a dissatisfied populace by giving them access to elements of the 'free market' in a piece-meal fashion.

The real benefit of this gradual release has been that a Soviet style implosion was avoided, the downside is that many of the old power structures remain, and that corruption is, in spite of a serious effort to combat it still a huge problem.

The ruling class in China is limited to a relatively small group of people (as compared to the size of the Chinese population), not unlike the Bush and Kennedy families in the United States, only without the nicety of a public election.

One of the reasons why I think Chinese people in power are so scared of all this communications power their underlings have is that it would allow them to effectively organize a protest that could not be struck down so easily.

Every so many years the 'old guard' dies off and has to be replaced by new people, and - surprise, surprise - these tend to be family members of the previous old guard, who apparently are the only Chinese people that are able to govern this country. It's a dynasty in anything but name.

The nepotism you allude to is alive and well at the highest levels, but below there is slowly a real change of the guard happening, and these people are not satisfied with being relegated to just being 'implementors', they want real power.

And they'll sooner or later get it, but I don't know if that's on a timescale of 20 years or 100's of years.

All that's needed for that to happen is a connection between the potential mob and the higher cadre of the government below they dynasty figures, and the thing that holds it off is gradual economic reform. If they manage to turn China around to the point where the economy is strong enough that a large majority of the Chinese populace is satisfied with their lot it will remain a peaceful transition and those that brokered it will probably remain in power for a long time.

If they mess up, if China gets hit by a severe economic crisis or if they overplay their hand then all bets are off.
Music/recording has been an unusually competitive software market for some time now. Unlike, say, the situation with Photoshop, one can name dozens of products that have been releasing updates regularly for decades on end, because of exactly this kind of lock-in and a seemingly unending need for more features, more sounds and effects (and higher quality ones) and more hardware support.

Trying to get into the commercial software packages as an amateur, one gets this sinking feeling of, "oh my god, there's too much stuff to maintain." Installers for every little plugin you come across, some of them using dongles, others using serials, some a tiny sub-megabyte download, others being dozens of gigabytes in samples or loops. And then you have to think about the handy presets and effects chains, hardware setups for different situations...and then a learning curve for everything, even in mostly-similar situations. It essentially becomes impossible to restore a project from an earlier setup, other than to salvage raw audio and MIDI.

I can see why a lot of people still put their stock in hardware even today; the product cycles are longer and the hardware isn't going to "disappear into the ether" so easily.

However, I also think that open source is going to gradually gain an advantage here because, once developed, it can remain stable, well-integrated, and easy to install in ways that the commercial packages can't. It hasn't hit the point where you can adequately point to equivalents for all studio functions, and it probably won't do so for some years to come, because of the extremely slow development of UI polish, new features in existing software, and API standardization. The Linux audio distributions today are still embarrassingly cumbersome to work with. But it's possible to envision a day where it all works together and has some form of healthy relationship with the commercial market.
"You think $700 is a lot of money?"

Sure it is, for the differential in the information you can get by paying it and attending the "New Age Of Entrepreneurship Dawning" seminar vs reading, talking to people who actually run startups today, reading HN and so on.
Obviously there are people who think otherwise.

Doesn't change my views on the essential marginal value of Ries's offerings and "insights" vs Steve Blanks' originals. As to extracting lessons for startup experience, one can do that from any startup story without buying into the whole "lean startup" filter.

"Take Minimum Viable Product, for example. It is similar to 37Signals "do less", but it doesn't end there: you're eliminating parts of the product which don't provide value, but you're also strategically deferring parts which do provide value until you've got a handle on the big business risks. I think that is a pretty powerful idea. Hugely powerful."

Sure. Why do you need to pay 700$ to understand that idea? Sure you could pay. It is your money. I am just saying I wouldn't. And I don't believe in "I will tell you how to get rich" type seminars. If you have the money to spare Mr Ries has (had?) a $180,000 for 3 days of wisdom sharing deal too. (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/introducing-lea...). On that thread I defended his right to price his wares any way he wanted to. I still do. I am just saying I don't think it is worth that kind of money, which is a different thing.

As I said, Caveat Emptor. Listen to opinions. Then do what you will with your money and time.
I hate Django
Yeah, there are a few areas where free software gets killed by the proprietary alternatives. I've been waiting for free mechanical CAD and PCB layout software to appear for years. The best free alternatives (Blender, sort of? Kicad? gEDA?) are still relatively weak compared to, say, Solidworks and Altium Designer.

I guess I'd say that I'll unhappily sacrifice some freedom to gain quality.
Everybody's comments are pretty much on point. If you're contracting, you should be asking for $75-150 / hour. Shops like Pivotal Labs bill out their developers at $175 / hour (the firm obviously keeps a chunk of that).

I think your options are to try and take on some small contract work so you can keep working on your own projects -or- go work for a well known Rails environment (Pivotal, Gilt Groupe, etc) and work with a team to beef up your skills.

Even if you get a very junior development position at a slightly larger company, you'll probably still be looking at a > $75k annual salary.
Attract repeat visitors to your companies website,

Change companies to company's
"go fast, turn left"?

Are you confusing Nascar with F1? Seriously?
I was wondering if I should post it here. The posts over there are sometimes hilarious, some humorous ones are obviously made by people who use and like Django and there are even a couple humorous movie references thrown in.

I say it has some entertainment value, appropriate for a Sunday afternoon (I am on GMT-3).
Nitrogen, as a contractor your taxes should end up being much lower. Anyone doing freelance work should absolutely hire an accountant to figure out what's deductable (meals, office space, tech gear). All of those expenses come off the top and in my experience, you end up with ~30% more dollars at the end of the day relative to what you'd end up with if you were taking a standard salary.
Yes would really appreciate that - seems like we may be complimentary in some ways.
Chicago's Web Site Opens Window on Media, Not Daley
Or by actual people. Your web broswer connecting to a linux powered website isn't you "using" linux, it's you using a web browser.
I'm a liberal Democrat. Public schools. Universal health care. Organized labor. All that jazz.
Tax breaks here can be meaningless. One city gave a tax break on profits for the first (I think) three years in new businesses set up by foreigners. Hey, any business that can make money within 3 years is already being done by locals.
Close-by observers see one castle and far-away observers see an other castle.

There's also an old version with faces, which I found even more impressive: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/435058989_9d83960682_o.jp...

Take a few steps back and the faces swap!

I have seen optical effects used on billboards but not this exact one, yet. Perhaps it's hard to achieve a good effect at billboard size.
Ask HN: Who's hiring in Asia?
Is it too soon for another one of these?

I'm especially curious about Seoul Korea, cause that's where I am!
if you've found out quickly, consider yourself lucky. better than finding out a bit later.

whenever you get into a partnership/co-founding, you need to have the 'divorce' plan figured out and agreed upon ahead of time. good to have a vesting plan at the start to deal with this kind of thing...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics website says the mean hourly wage of computer programmers is $35.91

http://stats.bls.gov/oes/2009/may/oes151021.htm
Yes. I think that brick and mortar institutes could follow the lead if open courseware but then have places for labs. Accessible videos gives students more time to prep outside of class, at their leisure, and more one on one time with instructors during time than normally would be filled with banal lecture.
I once left a technology company to start my own business. Mostly, i got (almost whispered) "are you hiring?"
How to sue an oil company
TRS80 comics (at least the ones I find online) aren't tutorials, more like a Radio Shack/DC comics marketing collaboration.

Certainly a lot of people donate their time to open source projects. Many of them do it while being paid by a company or a university to work on that code. Many others later us it as a base to start companies or consulting careers.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but _why did stand out, especially among the Ruby community in the mid '00s, as someone who could easily make $200/hr consulting, and chose not to do so. I don't know many (of course there are some) who willingly choose that path.

Otherwise we pretty much agree :)
While that is certainly the strategy used to place people on the court, it usually backfires on the party in power. Republicans appointed Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter, and (for god's sake) Stevens. Additionally, even when dominated by Republican appointees, the court has whacked Republican administrations (most recent example: detainee trials).
You mean: "Jingapore"
There was a psychiatrist that was hired by the US govt in WW2 to analyse Hitler.

Despite never having met him, and not being a military man, the psychiatrist (I forget his name) predicted Hitler's strategy for the rest of the war - and the eventual suicide, having brought Germany to ruin.

So it's not always necessary for an analyst - a good one that is, not an armchair amateur - to have met their subject in order to perform a successful analysis.
Not achieving what I set out to achieve is certainly a part of it. My dream is to make money with my own products/startup.

Not giving up yet, but at the moment I need money...

Your comment reminds me that there should always be ways to make the programming job more interesting. If it is boring, I should think about creating abstractions/frameworks/IDEs and what not to make it less boring.

So your comment cheered me up at least a little bit :-)
IPad Says No to Violence and Adult Situations in Manga
You're most welcome. The very best of luck to you!

I'll be in your shoes in a couple of months, just finishing up college now so I can't really work on my numerous ideas. Can't wait to get into it!

You might also consider keeping a blog of your progress, like this guy with Bingo Cards, of all things:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/

Even though his product isn't pitched at a HN-type demographic, the process of how he develops his ideas makes for an interesting read. It's a great way of generating free buzz - writing passionately about your startup with no BS. Something you may wish to consider also.
Interesting idea - I haven't thought about summer camps for quite a while. There was a brief time in the 80ies when they actually had programming courses at holiday summer camps (not anymore, I think?).

I suppose you are talking about summer camps by universities about some technical subject? Sounds good, but wouldn't they mostly hire students?
Why do you say that JackM?
Web Laureate Classic: "Microsoft: HorizonS (P1)"
Personal Social Gardens that Live in the Browser
7-Keep your day job

31-Remain frugal

37-When your dreams become reality, they are no longer your dreams
Because nobody here would care if I would write 'zerogravitas' or 'ZeroGravitas' to indicate you.

It's just a moniker, a handle. As soon as you start to assign great weight to the spelling and the special look ("It has to have an _") of a nickname then you're definitely in branding territory.

Just like "The artist formerly called Prince" is a brand, so is "_why, they lucky stiff".
The material is free, but if you want the paper...
You sound like an "idea person" like myself. Realize that the supply of ideas far exceeds the skills needed to implement those ideas.
Spend a few years learning to implement solutions at employer expense (a programming job is good). When you have sufficient skills and experience, you can start your own business. A programming job is not so depressing if you think of it as a means to acquire skills needed to fulfill your dream. Maybe you are depressed because it takes so long to learn those skills. If you already have the skills, quit your job and start working on your own ideas.
A Fast Wait-Free Hash Table that Scales Linearly to Hundreds of Threads
I'm referring to a very wide (at least 45 cm wide by 25 high) volume of about 200 pages that came with those first machines to teach you basic. The whole thing was a running cartoon and by the end you could write simple programs.

The Radio Shack/DC comics stuff is definitely not what I refer to.

And we don't know if why didn't choose to do $200/hr consulting jobs, he may have done the _why thing on the side.
The cost of hosting exams in a rented place has to come from someplace. I was thinking more in the line of having a "structured" course, with syllabus, study materials, quiz/test and even free e-books. Not bits and pieces of video and texts randomly sprinkled all over the web.

The idea is to be an actual replacement of a brick and mortar college where anyone can give an exam anytime they want when they feel ready, instead of being forced to go through months of "learning". If you fail a course exam, you can give the exam again next week (albiet different questionnaires).

Other ideas:

- FAQ sections where students can send in questions on each course which can be answered in the form of video/text. Have enough of those over time and it replaces the need to have one-on-one interactions with instructors with questions.

- Add social aspect to the "online school" where students can see if there are others in his area studying or have passed the same course that he/she can meet up for a study group.

- Online forums, Chat (moderated) on each courses with instant feedback.

- Let companies/individuals/employer "sponsor" each course/major. Lets say each exam costs $100-$200, Google/MS can give away 100 free exams to encourage people to study computer science.

- All materials is open for everyone to see, read, study, participate. Students only pay for exams.

Just brainstorming.... We can dream, right? :)
The outstanding question though is that in this type of case, high-end domain specific software, the pure open source model tends not to produce the ultra-high end software. The reason, though it seems to mystify many open source advocates, is that it takes lots of money to make a unique or novel thing on time spans of less than a decade...and the only way to recoup those costs is by selling that thing at some price and keeping the IP closed. Multi-thousand dollar plugins are one example.

In other words, going open source in this type of sense means that you won't have the latest and greatest anyway. So your particular case example doesn't change things.
German is a plus but our team speaks English. Just hadn't had time and resources to make our website multi-language.
I believe github allows you to comment on commits. I don't know how well that is integrated with their bug tracker, though.
This is not an answer per se, given that I haven't done it myself, but I would love to drive a taxi one day.
ATM Hacker Thor Used "Barack Obama" Alias
There are programming jobs with a lot of autonomy and control over the product you build. Maybe you should go for one of those, or become a product manager?
It seems to be English slang word too: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shirm