skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you know who they are, specifically, just call them or e-mail them. Say something along the lines of:

"Hi [their name], you don't know me but I came across your name on [LinkedIn / their site / industry site], and was impressed by [whatever made you want to call them]. I was hoping to get your advice on a service I'm creating for online ad agencies, would you be interested in meeting up and chatting about the industry? I'd be happy to take you out to lunch sometime this week."

Be prepared to answer follow-up questions about the kind of service you're building. At the meeting, I wouldn't ask if they'd buy it, and if they say no, ask what their reasons are (it comes off as defensive, and potentially overbearing). I'd discuss the service, then ask first: "Are there any problems you see with my sales strategy? Any reasons an agency like yours wouldn't purchase it?"

I'd also ask what the biggest selling points they see are, and what they think you could do to make it even more marketable (note that the answers to this question are often not actually in your best interest).
XSS isn't only about SCRIPT tags. What about javascript URIs, IMG and IFRAME tags, flash elements that you can add in a page by XSS? Filtering what is shown to the user is still the best solution IMHO.
Yeah, the problem about the "pornography is drugs because it stimulates chemicals in your brain" argument is that everything is drugs for that reason, including vigorous exercise!
The first personal computer was not created by Steve Wozniak at Apple. What computer was the first depends upon how you define personal computer. The first microprocessor based computer targeted to a non-commercial market was the Altair.
I never compared the state of PHP today with the first released version. I merely used the origins of PHP to argue that PHP was, indeed, more designed for simple web applications than most other general purpose programming languages.

And yes, you can make such statements about every other mainstream language. For instance Perl was more designed for text manipulation than most other general purpose programming languages. Java was more designed for multi-threading than most other general purpose languages. C was more designed for close to the machine programming than most other general purpose languages.

All of these things are true. All of these things still show in various ways. Yet every one of those is a general purpose language that can be used for anything you want.
We work with the polish office of a development shop. They get more done faster, and with more agility and creativity than anyone else we've worked with--and all this having seamlessly stepped into a code base that someone else built.

It's not about where the office is, it's about the quality of the people.
Do you need to understand what a metric tensor is in order to be a mechanic?
It's been 10 years, but I do distinctly remember an SICP exercise which stated that a proper solution was worthy of a phd thesis. So I'm going to agree. :-)
I actually found this quite accessible, I was expecting something very complicated or theoretical but it's a good visualization and explanation about the internals of Git.
Will is an exhaustible resource, most people don't have enough to overcome the desires of the body. It's not as simple as calories in calories out; it never has been.
Great article. As the irrelevant and otherwise ad hominem responses in this thread demonstrate, it will be a while before internet pornography is widely understood as the highly addictive substance it is and should be regulated more strongly in the same way "traditional", non-electronic porn is (i.e. through zoning, much stronger penalties for allowing access to minors, etc.)
It takes superhuman willpower to go to bed hungry every day when you have the option not to. That's why people on low-calorie diets so frequently (read: almost always) put non-trivial weight back on within a few years.

Your brain tells you to eat n calories. Your brain will make damn sure that you eat every bit of n. Telling a person who can't eat less than n that they're lazy is like telling a schizophrenic that they should just snap out of it.
This is pious nonsense. Do you know what sex is for? What process created our sex drive? Are you a woman?
It is clearly an area ripe for research.
You're being obtuse. It is the nature and types of chemical events that pornography induces that is relevant.
I probably code half of my time, with data analysis, testing , thinking about approaches, etc. taking the rest.

My startup is not really a startup anymore, it is 10 years old :) and as such we are more in maintenance mode for most of the product lines.
But only for those at "subscribing institutions". I don't qualify, so I guess I have to see if the library has it.
Well again part of the point is to spec out your project very specifically. As in "These are the functions we need, these are the variables we will be passing and these are the results we expect to be returned". So code reuse isn't a problem nor is knowing how to use it (quality of code can be a problem but a big part of successful outsourcing is finding people you trust to write decent code)

As for the "Front End" being fun I'd point out that the developers I'm working with are Information Systems people more than Computer Science people. They enjoy working with the actual users, planning features and then implementing those features. What the outsourcing does is allow them to say "I need this string parsed in this way so I can make the rest of this feature work" and just have it done for them rather than having to do the grunt work of writing the relatively easy but time consuming code that parses the string.
I'm not really a programmer, but I'm a front end web developer. When I'm working on a project I usually spend the full day split between; design, research, and coding. The amount of time I spend between these things is about 7hrs/4days a week. In my spare time I work on freelance projects.
Apple does sell the full episode on iTunes.
Your code serves as a much better explanation than the linked paper in the article. And that Perl code o_O
Putting Marriage First
Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?
eyePhone Zombies...Dumb Bastards!
If you live in the US then you can go to college at any time. With a highschool diploma or GED, you can walk into any community college, fill out the application form, and you're immediately accepted for the next quarter. Take 2 years of the right classes and you can transfer to your state university.

Once you're 25 years old, the government no longer expects your parents to contribute to your education, so you will become eligible for a lot more financial aid. I got $12k of free money in my last year because of this.

I think you should go to college and get some work experience before trying to make a startup. I tried developing my own fax server product when I was 20. The product worked, but I made some poor business decisions and gave up. Then I went to community college, transferred to university, studied abroad, graduated, got a software engineering job in Amazon Web Services, learned and saved money for a few years, and then left to start my business. Now I am in a much better position to build a product and company. You can be in my position in 6-7 years.
I'm a programmer but I think I have a different take on this debate than most other programmers. I know quite a few people who aren't programmers but have started, and continue to run, successful businesses. The thing all of them have in common is that they don't necessarily choose tech-heavy niches. There are tons of problems that can be solved with a shitty web application written in broken PHP. These people all know basic PHP and outsource for parts of the apps they can't get right. If something sort of works they ship it anyway and refine it over time.

I think there's something very valuable in that mentality for hackers to learn from. There are a lot of businesses that start with a shitty product in a good market and refine it over time. We hear about it all the time: release early and often.
People have been focusing on the noscript tag, but I rather like the idea of something in the head that disables all javascript in body. One good idea is perhaps better than one good idea followed by one bad idea, especially when the history is already full of so many horrible ideas that got into the spec. ;)

But there's also already something in html5; the iframe sandbox attribute. Among other things it can be used to disallow scripts to run in an iframe. You can read about it here. Amusingly, they suggest it may be available for widespread use in 10 years. http://blog.whatwg.org/whats-next-in-html-episode-2-sandbox
Numerus clausus
I only sit down and write code for maybe 5-10 hours a week. Programming is always on my mind, so I am mentally preparing my work at all times. I am working on a startup full time. I spend the rest of my time on diversions which are not too mentally taxing, like exercise and watching movies.
Frankly I don't think either of them have taken CS, and have no idea what the word subset means.

Though I think pwim may have been pointing that out. There are elements of each discipline that overlap, but you don't need to know any of the physics/mechanics pieces that overlap to get a degree in one, and the same is true of CS/programming.

In fact, you can be an excellent programmer and know no CS, be an excellent mechanic and know no physics, and even be an excellent computer scientist and know nothing that would serve you in a modern programming job. (Obviously you could probably figure it out, but a code monkey would do just as well as some computer scientists.)

But fundamentally they serve different purposes. It's almost conceivable someone could prove P=NP without writing a line of code. Though decreasingly so as computers become so ubiquitous.
Learning swimming is like learning Lisp. The ultimate objective is grokking the 'glide', which is similar to that 'profound enlightenment experience' you get when finally grokking Lisp.

Prior to that, you struggle to push yourself through the water, fighting with every stroke and kick. After, you're just sliding through the water, letting the water do almost all the work, and you hardly even have to kick anymore (more to stabilize your body and provide torque to your stroke than to propel).

The key is to understand that the longer a vessel in the water is relative to its width, the faster it can go in a straight line with the same propulsive input. This works with people too. So when you swim you want to make yourself as long as possible for as long as possible.

You do this by keeping one arm extended straight in front of you, perfectly inline with the side of your body, until you bring the next arm forward to replace. Pull with the first, keep the second extended until you can bring the first back up to replace it again, repeat.

Also, rotate your body into the water. Submerge the shoulder and side of your body of whichever arm is extended. Rotate back each time you switch arms. This keeps the longest part of your body constantly in the water.

It feels weird and unnatural, until you start feeling yourself gliding (by 'glide', I mean keeping your momentum between strokes), and that's the point of enlightenment.

Of course, you have to do other things as well, like keep your entire body in as straight a line as possible. Many fail at this by keeping their head and shoulders too high, which pushes their waist and abdomen down into the water, creating too much hydrodynamic drag to glide.

Total Immersion fixes this with their 'Pressing the T' idea. Eg, your shoulders form the horizintal bar of the T and your spine forms the vertical bar. Your center of buoyancy is somewhere in the middle of verticle bar, perhaps a little toward the top. If you force yourself to press the horizontal part down into the water, it rotates your lower part upwards (like a fulcrum around your center of buoyancy).

That keeps your upper and lower body more equally submerged, reducing your hydrodynamic drag and better enabling you to glide.

If you have trouble mastering this on your own, then a coach would be good. Other alternatives are to join the local US Masters Swim Team (where I first heard of Total Immersion), or a local, well-organized triathlon team. Alot of Tri teams will have swimming workshops where they video your stroke, have a pro swimmer/coach critique and fix it, then make you practice it.

Swimming is generally the most difficult part of tri's for most people to learn, so the teams that are halfway serious devote alot of attention to improving their members' swimming.

Good luck! It's very rewarding once you get it.
"A sex therapist or psychologist only see individuals that are troubled. Worse yet, they have every incentives to create more potential patients to treat."

What is the relevance of these two sentences?
The author of this article is a bit too addicted (pun intended) to appeals to authority. Sentences like these, in a scientific article or expository essay, throw me off:

"Dr. Eric Nestler, head of neuroscience research at Mount Cedar Sinai in New York and one of the most respected addiction scientists in the world, published a paper."

Alarm bells started ringing. Surely, we don't need to know that he's "the most respected". We need to know if his ideas are provably respectable....

And then, "In this paper he said that..."

That is almost certainly elliptical, with the real meaning being, "his paper couldn't conclusively prove or demonstrate this, but he said it, and he is "most respected", so he must be right."

But in spite of all those potential biases, the author treads mostly carefully, with good intentions and some apparent academic integrity so that the article is a compelling read. That said, the author is a bit high handed and sensationalist at times, drawing on Shakespeare and Lincoln for powerful poetic effect, which should surely be unnecessary if he hopes to sway us by power of reason and not emotion (or the lobe and not the limbic, to put it in his own words). But we can forgive him, I think, for climbing high on his soap box. He, after all, believes that we're at war.
Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 13 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)
There are several ways, this is what I would do:

1) Give the app to industry bloggers, writers and anyone willing to listen to your pitch
2) Submit your app to as many directories as possible
3) Find where your target demo congregates online and become active there
4) Consider an affiliate program to induce sales (banner ads)
5) Rinse and repeat...
I've always loved water and I've always been swimming and diving for fun but I've never been taught to swim for real. Never went to swimming school or had anyone teach me swimming.

So I'm a self-learner, as in programming.

I knew could get better by hiring an instructor or taking a class but I've decided I like to hack myself. Especially, I wanted to experiment with self-analysis and trying to engage into self-correcting style of swimming, optimizing problems out of my way as I become aware of them. For the setting, I wanted to learn about the art of breast stroke. I wanted to learn to swim breast stroke well.

I first measured my progress by swimming until I felt exhausted (with occasional small breaks at the ends). When I started, I could do a mere 500m doing breast stroke and all my muscles were dead at that point. Then, my muscles got much better and I could swim slightly more but not much. Eventually, through careful thinking, trial-and-error, and finding a way I could move in a relaxed manner, I apparently learned something and within months I could swim 2000 meters of breast stroke in about one hour. There were still faster swimmers in the pool but I had overdone myself by a few times, and that was good enough.

In the second phase, I began to measure my progress by counting how many strokes I would do per 25 (or 50) meters, i.e. one stretch of a pool. I started at about 15 and again, by experimenting, finding the easiest movement, and dozens of hours of trial-and-error I got that down to about 8-9, given I was really really warm and not exhausted enough physically. So, I knew that again, I could do something more right, even if at the slight expense of excess muscle wear.

Now I'm in my third phase which is measuring my effortlessness. I try to swim without feeling the exertion of force at all. If I notice a slip (like a kick that doesn't propel me forward enough) or if I notice that I have to continuously [over]use certain muscles (which then start running out of juice), I try to self-correct myself into not doing that, into not having to use muscle power per se. I can surely walk 12 hours a day if I have to, why couldn't I theoretically swim 12 hours a day? The results so far are that I can occasionally "fly on the water"; that is, engage into some kind of a suitable circular moment that allows me to flow forward as if riding on a sine wave perfectly aligned to my movements, giving me a practically endless slope downwards. I can't describe it but it feels great!

The next phase is to try to get more speed while maintaining the effortlessness that I will hopefully achieve. I will need more muscle power but only slightly: my idea is that by using the slight advance in muscle power and by developing the right timing and alignment, I could apply them both together and gain more than I put in.

I don't know about the fifth phase, or that if one exists. Will see about that.
That is awesome. I was thinking something like that might happen.

Unfortunately, I just switched to Android. But maybe I'll just port it :)
Monday thru Friday, 9am to 6pm I work as a programmer.

Monday thru Wednesday code my own projects from about 630 till 1 or 2am.

Thursday I play in a pool league, so I play pool from about 7pm to 10 or 11pm. Then I head home to code for an hour or so.

Friday/Saturday consists of heavy drinking. Sunday is recovery and I plan the rest of my week out and research what I'm going to code.

You will need balance when you code because you will burn yourself out if you do it 24/7. That's why the weekend is reserved for fun and planning what I'm gonna do. I try not to do any coding on those 3 days. It works for me, it might not work for you.
Thanks a lot for the comment.

The problem is that I live in India, and down here there is a time frame to go to college. I can only give the entrance exam in order to prove to those lofty institutions that I am "worthy enough" to walk through those doors.

I hate this system, because everything falls down to a 6 hour exam which supposedly determines my entire "career". If possible I will apply to MIT et al, but I don't have any hopes for them. I know that college doesn't matter. At the same time I also know that it is a stamp that guarantees some basic standard of living, especially when people are free to discriminate against you. So, in all probability I won't go to college right now, but I will secure admission to some big name college so that I have something to fall back to.

I actually don't want to go to college in India as it won't exactly be a happy experience for me. Lets just say that I am unacceptable to their "Indian sensibilities".

At the same time you're right I have a lot to be thankful for. At least I am not on the street right now.

You're absolutely right about everything else, but I have a question. How do you control those thoughts when you are not meditating? They overwhelm me and I just sink into them. What makes it worse is that it reminds me how little control I have over myself. So how do you do it?

One of the biggest problems is that I live in an extremely negative environment, and I realize the need to break free. At the same time I exist within that paradigm and I seek security within it, which just increases the problems.

On the other end you have given me the gem I need to survive. Moving on. That is perhaps the only way it can ever work out.

Once again thank you.
I wonder why that is.
These results are always impressive.

The main problem in my opinion is that most genetic algorithms perform a kind of local search in the genotype space. A large part of the problem is therefor to find a way of encoding which makes the target function smooth with respect to the target function being optimized.

That in itself is a significant intelectual feat in many cases. So one should not be fooled into thinking we can now just plug any given problem into a GA and get brilliant results. Human input is still very much required.
>>>Don't kill yourself, especially not over college admission!<<<

I won't I have a beautiful sister and crazy ideas to live for.

Thank you for commenting.
Deadlines are Everything, and How To Be Amazing
Does anybody know what he is using for the coloring of the mails in Thunderbird?

Also the new Version of Thunderbird has vastly improved search, I think.
Seven days a week, from say 4 - 16 hours in a day, depending on other work that I have to do. When I don't have something that I need to program, I usually find something that I want to program and work on it. I played around with node.js for a while and recently was laying the groundwork to learn Obj-C. (By writing command line programs in Obj-C and compiling them with gcc. Xcode gives me the willies.)

I'm currently involved in a startup.

I also run a startup group (monthly). I run several times a week and try to cook a nice meal several times a week as well. I occasionally go to a movie or out to a bar/club with my gf.

If you're unsatisfied I would recommend learning as many new things as possible. I really find learning a new framework or language helps me keep moving forward.
"Why I typosquatted and why it should be legal"
Andy Grove's rational exuberance (2001)
Machine learning revolutionizes software development
Submitted a day ago and killed:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1484135
Neither is a proper subset of each other. Computer Science is a huge field, and programmers are rarely competent with more than one or two of those fields:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
Open Source Design: Can Non-Devs Contribute to Open Source Software Projects?
Not sure about <noscript_within> going all the way to the browser -- but it might be useful as a directive to a front-end reverse-proxy, working a little like an edge-side-include but telling it to strip stray SCRIPTs, that would provide a last line of defense against.

Not elegant, but perhaps by providing a separate independent layer of enforcement could prove worthwhile.

Still, there's the problem of having app developers rigorously declare the SCRIPT-suppressed regions. So perhaps instead the sense should be reversed: require app-designers to rigorously declare only those narrow areas where SCRIPTs are allowed -- with everything else stripped out (and logged as anomalous) by the bastion-proxy.
I am in your situation. I think it is a tough road but doable. Remember, most of these answers will be biased :)

Here is what I would suggest:

Learn as much about coding as you can - take tutorials, learn the process of scoping out a project, go to meetups, conferences and learn as much as possible. In order to make a decent hiring decision, you must know A LOT about coding even if you cannot do it yourself.

Ideally, you should find a partner who shares your passion and who is willing to work as hard as you are.

Feel free to shoot me an email, if you are looking for more advice..
I'm not interested in selling right now. I am running and growing it over the next 6 months, at which point I will look for a buyer.
Not that I disagree with you. But HN is not sufficiently female dominated for such a thing to conceivably happen :)
I'm at a subscribing institution: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33887169/w13882
> One good idea is perhaps better than one good idea followed by one bad idea

Haha. I'm sure both ideas have been proposed by many people over the years. I have definitely heard of (b) from many others. I haven't heard of anyone else mentioning (a) yet. I'm kinda surprised that everyone keeps arguing against (b) while saying nothing about why (a) won't work.