skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, actually I do this all the time. While I think the total effort of a web server is about the same in most languages, an initial prototype is way easier in a language like Python or Ruby. That's mostly because there's much less ceremony involved and all the bits you need are right there.

As I work on the prototype though, I start to figure out if the language I decided at first will work well for it or not. Since I usually throw my first prototype out, with a fixed time to get it working, I'll end up picking a different language or not depending on my experience so far.
At 27, there is one thing I've learned that would have been quite helpful at 22:

"I'm not ready for that yet" is the magic word for a lifestyle of stagnation and missed opportunities. You're right! You're not ready, but the thing is, you never will be unless you just do it.
The soy templates are a timesaver for anything that is going to be generated in JS and styled by a designer. We use it at work and I haven't regretted it at all. The only thing I want is a better handling of namespaces.

I am debating using the rest of closure for my next project but the verbosity is a little bit scary.
Last time I check, Google got started in America.

It also doesn't matter if other countries made A to the fourth power, Google is still started in America.

What we need is kids that can think outside of the box, not get 3000 points on science tests.

Beside, markets doesn't exists when government basically provide education for "free". Kinda hard to have a market when the government basically take money from you. If you don't take your kids to public schools, you get less benefit if any. In basically every first world countries, education is provided for you. There's no markets in other countries too.
'We lost all the progress', Hurricane Alex sends oil onto Gulf roads, beaches
It sucked, and I should have just started using bstring right away, but I was going with the inspiration at the time and wanted to get something working to see if the idea of HTTP->0mq was viable. As you can see, it didn't take very long to switch at that stage, just a couple days. Now if I'd waited it would have been a total nightmare and probably impossible.

First up, I had some unit tests, which are essential if you want to be able to pivot like this suddenly. Second, I knew a lot about the tools I could use so I had a clear idea of how to attack the problem. Finally, it's just a matter of picking the smallest little piece, converting it, and then stepping through all the parts that piece touches. Kind of like spreading a virus.
I don't even talk about startups. I talk about making products and charging for them.
FUN FACT: (and you probably already know this but many do not): "fsync = off" is postgresql-ese for "please destroy all my data". Don't do it. Ever. The 9.0 docs are finally improving the language here to indicate that you must not set fsync off if you value your job.

Setting "synchronous_commit = off" nets you 99.9% of the performance improvement without the possibility of corrupting your entire database.
Yes, that's what happens when you just expose the existing C API rather than write your own.
Solar system animation, rendered in CSS
Prospects of more Internet control
Yes, but the "safe" aspect is only a side benefit. Artistically, they're perfect. Really, the more you think about it, the more it seems like a video game or comic book writer made them up and they escaped into reality and stole a time machine.

They were into the occult and old Nordic/Germanic mythology. They were developing and had bonafide super-science weapons: jets, ICBMs, and stealth aircraft while some of their opponents early in the war were still using cavalry charges. There was real-life superscience intrigue involving highly gifted super-geniuses. This intrigue involved nuclear weapons. They were urgently bent on world domination -- not as an eventual goal or as a someday-daydream wish, but as an urgent we-need-to-do-this-ASAP real-world project.

They also seem to be securely in the top 5% of everyone fictional or real as far of level of atrocities goes.

They just flat-out make really cool villains.
As they say, scratching your own itch is the key to creating great products.
This is an example of a good general principle for communication: don't express your ideas in a way that a reader cannot understand without referencing an external source of knowledge if it is a reasonably trivial task to embed that knowledge into your content in the first place.
You can look at it that way, but not so much true. The great thing about being a self employed is that it doesn't matter where you work.

I take my computer with me everywhere I go, even on vacation. I've had conference calls in the morning and hit Disney World in the afternoon. Usually my customers don't even realize I'm out and about.

So while you could say that your not really on vacation just remote, you could look at it the other way and realize you could spend a month in Florida on vacation and still make a few bucks in the process. I've been on vacations that have paid for themselves simply by putting a little work in for half a day here and there.
Let me follow people. I just learned about Bret Taylor's account.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154

I'd love to click "follow" next to that comment. Then I want my view on hacker news to be heavily weighted by the mods from the people I follow (you could make it a mod on the normal ranking, like a reordering of the top stories). A friend comment view would be even more useful - like the thread view for any user, but collected among friends. A synopsis view of the comments without the full thread and only the first 200 chars of the comment would be easy to digest.

Generally I think the solution to making HN not suck is to let me ignore completely the parts that suck.
http://scott.wolchok.org/listrev.c is what I was satisfied with yesterday. I seem to have exaggerated slightly about the non-driver code being the same length as the reverse, but it's close.
12 Hacked Nintendo Controllers
IPhone 4 Gets Shot, Microwaved - Y'know, Phone Stuff
We avoid exponential search space problems by using sampling, and curtailing of exploration.

Basically, you use the same general strategies that are used to write Go playing programs.
You don't even submit the source code. So it would be hard for them to have people reading it.
No, this is chunked from the client, not to the client. To the client is quite alright and works great. From the client is absolutely retarded and total abuse of the protocol.

Which brings up another point: HTTP is like the old testament. Wanna kill your brother? Probably find something to support it. Wanna sacrifice a goat? Yep, you could do that. Don't want people to sacrifice goats? Sure, rock on. Want adultery? You could probably find that too. It's got everything depending on what you read, where you read, and what context you take it in.

The HTTP RFC is like that. Want to send chunked encoding mixed inside a keep-alive with request pipelining when you don't really need to? Rock on. Want google web accelerator to hit links without you asking it to (in clear violation of every other part of the browser standard)? Go for it. Don't want people to do that? Cool there's another part.

After a while, you have to go with what's most probable, and just be explicit in your own design about the rest.
You're forgetting the fact that he is crawling job pages and extracting the data himself. His plans for using the startup's location as the location for the job, if done somehow automatically, is certainly non-trivial. I highly doubt this took 30 minutes to make. I think you're just being insulting and ignorant.
I can't reply as a funded person since I'm also a bootstrapper, but having done work for some startups they typically have directors which work for the funding group that sit around and make sure their money is working hard. So I imagine they have less flexibility.
Don't forget, very stylish uniforms designed by Hugo Boss.
> fun/socializing/humanities over hard science/hard work

Insulting other scholars isn’t really necessary here, yah?
You work in a .NET environment, or have Windows lock-in? Otherwise, why not use Haskell on the job, like others do: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry
Trying to compete with the existing school system is idiotic because it is paid for by taxpayers.

Everything in the education supply chain needs to be interchangeable or else it is hard to optimize anything.

Imagine trying to start up a hacker school for kids. You have to provide educations for areas outside of your "teach people how to hack robots and computers" expertise like history, language art, etc.

Why not let delegate the job to a School of Grammars or a walt-mart style basic mathematic school? Oh right, you can't! You have to go through the legislative process to get it approved. Then you have to battle the local teacher union with all the pink-collar teachers who don't understand the value of hacking and thinks that all kids should become "creative" people not mechanical engineers. Imagine politicians dumbing down the hacking education plan just so they can have easy and inexpensive way to test students.

Sure you can get crappier school in a free market system, but it also mean you can get really good schools and educational systems.
I'd subtract two points for every startup you've already worked in, especially the failed ones. Every time you do a startup it does get easier. I've met a few people in Silicon Valley who were shoulder deep in their thirties, with kids, and working at their fourth or fifth startup.
fair enough, I'll take humanities out :)
Your runtime checks and proper type system and at dynamic linking. That means you don't have them, and they aren't a complete total truth of any kind at all. They're just a highly probable enhancement.
Microsoft Exec: Foursquare Sucks, And It's Going To Lose
Here in Europe vacation does not necessarily imply that you're flying somewhere else. For example, I currently have 3 weeks of, but I'm only spending one of these weeks hiking. During the other weeks I'll do just whatever makes fun (maybe going on a multi-day bike ride).

Of course, you can also take less vacation in one year, and therefore take more in the next year. For example, I only took 3 weeks of vacation last year, and I've planned 7 weeks of vacation this year. All of them paid. :)
I've been considering negotiating part-time with my employer for awhile as a prudent middle ground between recklessly jumping ship (a la http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1451175) and continuing to let my UI project crawl along at a near-standstill.

Your listed caveats help me form a good picture of what I should be ready to concede. Any more tips on negotiating? I know there are always a lot of variables from company to company, but was it hard to keep full benefits?
I always find it a bit confusing why a job would require a MS or PHD. Shouldn't the applicant be judged by what he knows, not what his paper slip says.

The smartest antenna guy I know is an engineer with 30+ years of experience, a ham radio warrior on the weekends, yet he has no degree.

Therefore when he reads this job application he's going to have to pass because of the degree requirements.
Yeah, and then after the Berlin wall fell, action movies couldn't even go to communists for villains. So now it's just various vaguely European / Middle Eastern bad guys.

Not as interesting.
Honesty, I wouldn't want to work at such a place but rather quit.
Specialization is useful, but it's also useful to have some minimal level of design competence, just so that you can make a prototype and not have people reject it just because the design is lousy.

(Also, having a basic grasp of design will help you decide whether your designer is doing a good job.)
I'll give you a hint about how it's done: Finite State Machines. They're provable, simple, and are designed to handle state. Removing state isn't the answer. Giving programmers great FSM tools is (like in Erlang).
I use Emacs to do all my editing. But I think it's a failure compared to what it could have been.

There's nothing inherent about Emacs that ties it to being an editor, it could have been rewritten a long time ago in Scheme or acquired a FFI. Then things like GNOME or TextMate might have been rewritten as part of the Emacs ecosystem, while looking exactly like they do today.

Instead Emacs is a very specific thing to a small crowd, and adding things like a FFI to it have been vetoed by Stallman in the past. That's one of the reasons I think that we still don't have Lisp as a first-class systems programming language on GNU as the initial announcement promised: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html

GCC is much the same. There was a proposal many years ago to make a libgcc. Stallman vetoed that on the basis that things like C++ support might be written without contributing the changes back to the FSF.

That's a fair point, but LLVM+Clang are quickly replacing GCC in some areas due to its monolithic architecture. You can't write things like a C source code using GCC as a backend (easily), but you can with the LLVM tools.
I need at least 3 days to START feeling like I'm on vacation. 10 days and I start to forget where I used to work. Something in between is good.
That's really the contrapositive, though. That proverb says that "not understanding the details will lead to failure", but the article is saying "master the details if you want to win".

Different set of connotations. We want to find success, not Satan, in the specifics.
"I've never let my school interfere with my education."
-- Mark Twain

My guess is most students today still agree.
Though this report mentions RIM numbers may be slightly low, looking at Gartner's data (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1372013), their numbers are excessively low.

Where AdMob has RIM below 2%, Gartner has RIM above iOS, and just below Symbian in numbers.

Anecdotal: Our company was using RIM as our corporate provider until last year's "complete outage" fiascos, at which point our CEO decided it was iPhone time. It seems like many other companies who aren't as agile would still be stuck with RIM at the corporate level, so these numbers seem pretty far off-base.
It's just for HR purposes. Apple is pretty good about getting the right people for the job regardless of what the req says.
Not only Sweden. It's the same in Austria and most other European countries.
Work is just another form of capital, even if it's your own. I mean consider one person has an idea for a product, and they sketch out their requirements then employ engineers to build accordingly. Let's say another person has an idea then with their own skills builds a more successful product. Was the second person more successful because they worked harder than the first - no, because they didn't necessarily work any harder than the engineers that were commissioned. The difference, however, could be that along the way the solo worker came up with many additional ideas which he could then add to the project.

I agree with the notion that one great idea ALONE does not guarantee success. But that's different from saying ideas are worthless.
How to deal with Information Overload
Agreed. Its a business arrangement. Money versus time. Nothing else is involved.

But I'm an independent contractor, so my point of view may be different.
Ah, I love the ending! Aren't credit cards great? They actually believe their customers when you tell them you didn't get something.
-You ARE ready. Don't worry that it doesn't feel like it.

-"Long Term" is shorter than you think.

-Follow YOUR interests, not someone else's.

-Make sure you get the paperwork right.

-Money doesn't make people happy. It just makes some problems go away. Don't confuse one for the other.

-Listen to the "grey hairs", but don't just blindly follow them.

-When it seems like everyone else is being stupid, you might be right. But you're probably wrong.

-Never count on being smarter than everyone else. You're not.

-Luck is a handy substitute for knowledge. But you have to purposefully acquire either.
Tell HN: SF Hacker House is back on today
For those of you who live in San Francisco a bunch of us are hanging out in Sugar Lump on 24th and Byrant.

The company is smart, the coffee is good, the wifi is fast and there is some kind of folk violin music playing.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/capital

Capitol is the actual building.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/capitol
The problem is that Bray's reasoning could apply just as well to any aspect of a language that can be worked around, and leads to meaningless bloat in every case. Other examples:

"We shouldn't have to learn the standard library. Always implement functions you want yourself, and comment what each line of code does."

"We shouldn't have to learn about variable scopes. Just put all your variables at the top of the file."

Knowing the basics of operator precedence should be expected. If you don't know it, you don't really know the language. Bray even drops his own thesis when his code sample assumes that the dot operator and function application operator have higher precedence than logical-and.

There is definitely such a thing as expecting too much familiarity with operator precedence, but it's illogical to say that you shouldn't need to know anything. These are the syntax rules of the language, people!
Given the retinal indifference threshold of 287ppi@12inches, which was given in a recent HN-linked and praised article, 282ppi only needs to be a 1/4 inch further out for the pixels to fall into retinal indifference. Pretty nice for a 2008 phone.
i'm just getting into robotics lately via home projects. done C++ in the past but prefer C or Python. Unwilling to move to Minnesota but if a remote team member in Colorado could work feel free to ping me and we can talk more.
At a previous job, after an arduous interviewing process including programming tests, several interviews, background and credit checks, and finally my references being grilled over the phone, I made it to salary negotiation and I was too tired by then and didn't care if I got the job or not. So I asked for $X (in annual salary) the CEO misunderstood me and thought I wanted $X/hour. I signed the papers and was pulled into the balcony where hands were shaken and well deserved cigarettes were lit by all involved.

I didn't realize what happened until my girlfriend went over the papers (she was worried about the IP papers I might have signed, given my startup ambitions) but when we saw the figures ..

It was $55k in excess of what I thought I was worth. Pants. Shat.

That gave me some serious professional backbone; once you start to make serious money, you tend to respect your career a whole lot more. I was so proud of myself I took up management responsibilities, studied software engineering really well, took on more tasks. Sure, it made me a workaholic, but it drove the point home that what I do is serious business.
> But you get the point: technologists care about education.

Everyone cares about education. Everyone has a strong opinion about the way things should be, because everyone went through school and approaches the topic through their personal experiences. Unfortunately, most of that everyone is clueless (including most techies), and lots of their ideas are contradictory. That is why education policy (like all controversial/important policy) is fundamentally hard. There are no obvious solutions that everyone can agree about – if there were, we’d use them. Instead, it’s a constant hard fight to organize, educate, reach out, debate, and for teachers, just get on doing their jobs the best they can in their own classrooms.

Talk on this discussion board and elsewhere “the industry” being complacent and motivated to keep things “bad” is absurd. “The industry” is millions of individual teachers, parents, students, and administrators, all striving to do their best in their own little local niches. Unfortunately the big structural challenges are often difficult or even insurmountable, and kids end up suffering for it. This isn’t the fault of teacher’s unions (as Obama recently has been saying, parroting a longtime right-wing anti-tax talking point), and it isn’t the fault of “government”, and it isn’t the fault of any singly identifiable actor or institution. It’s just hard.

The post has the right overall idea though: put up or shut up. Do the work, whether that’s becoming a teacher or just helping out in a local classroom from time to time, or whether it’s developing new curricula, organizing people on the ground, etc. Just complaining without action is just nearly useless.
Everyone's free to do whatever. Personally, I spent a week in Bali this Easter, it was very nice to get away from the snow and ice for a while, and I'm gonna take three weeks now in July and do pretty much nothing, just enjoying the summer weather.
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Too bad it doesn't actually describe how. I don't know the readership of the Christian Science Monitor, but the extent of technical discussion is that they "hide the 1's and 0's of computer language in the picture's pixel numbers..."
There's lots wrong here: no labels, incorrect input types for things, no required attributes even though they should be required, no vendor prefixes for newer CSS properties.

If you are writing a tutorial, remember many people will just copy and paste your code without getting it to production level.
The clearest statement of this I have seen is from the O'Reilly book Practical C Programming : "* and / come before + and -. Use parentheses for everything else."

My general rule, on the rare occasions that I actually write code, is the same as for other writing - write to be easily understood by potential readers. You should take a little time and thought to make it easier for someone to follow your work.
Eigensolve- approximating the roots of a univariate polynomial
I think it's actually four weeks in June-August, three of which consecutive. Still good though. Not to mention that many parents of small children begin and end the vacation with some parental leave (to which the employer can't say, if two months advance notice is given) so 7-8 weeks is not uncommon.
I find it troubling that even a company like Zappos doesn't consider alternatives to laying people off. Maybe everyone could have taken an 8% pay cut instead.
The US Govt is going to be more likely to loan to a business..."

This seems like a poor way of making investment decisions. The fact that a VC invests in a company might be a good reason to look at the company, but it shouldn't be the most significant data point. Government loans are even less relevant. You yourself say:

When you are making a loan, you are mostly betting on the survival of the business.

Yeah, so what does that say about the growth potential of the company? Less than nothing. In fact, you could make the argument that the board is so bullish on the future of the company that they preferred loans to VC because they give up less upside.