skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Calculus is designed as a gateway for all of our quantitative students, our future engineers and physicists in addition to our computer scientists, and so it's already forced to wear many hats. Changing it isn't something we can do lightly, as it's integral in everything from standardized testing to college admissions (in the case of high school students); and nearly every quantitative track (in the case of college students).

What good does splicing Big-Oh into the process do, when computer science enrollment is in steady decline, and understanding Big-Oh is pointless without first understanding the costs of polynomial algorithms? It would be nice if our calculus students knew Lebesgue integration too, but I would offer that the calculus sequence is not the right time. If the kids are in college, they can take Intro. to Comp. Sci., and if the kids are in high school, they probably shouldn't worry about Big-Oh at all.

The biggest revision high school math needs is 1. A course which instills students with a basic statistical fluency, so they can read the newspaper and endure advertisements with a critical mind, and 2. A course for advanced students which teaches discrete math and basic non-geometrical proofs, for our increasingly discrete world.
Makes sense; I try to work on my documentation during times when I can't devote enough hours to get into the zone to code.
having Prolog-like syntax without Prolog-like semantics is silly.

Yes. Yes! I'm not the only one thinking it then!

I think the Erlang process model is brilliant but it really took on the ugliness of the Prolog syntax without attaining the full benefits of the Prolog logical semantics.
You still need to get the same weight (or possibly more) of raw materials to people, offsetting the cost of transporting finished goods.

There would be some savings, and these same forces are bringing some manufacturing work back onshore, but not a great deal of it yet.
that's like saying "if OSX is so great, why doesn't apple give it away for free?" in other words, "does not compute."

part of the reason the apple experience is better than windows is because the hardware involved is much less diverse. windows users and programmers get killed trying to keep up with drivers for every hardware device under the sun. much of that hardware is complete crap, produced by fly-by-night companies that couldn't care less whether it works or not. an environment like that is not amenable to a good user experience.

also, apple is primarily a hardware company, not a software company. they are very possibly losing money on every sale of OSX. they are willing to do that because they know every copy will be run on a piece of hardware they sold.

apple's margins on their own hardware is ncredible, usually cited as around 40 percent. meanwhile, pc manufacturers have been competing on nothing but price for years, so they've driven their own margins into the ground. one main reason dell is in so much trouble right now.
I turned a laptop into a dual-boot machine with Fedora and it still doesn't support the wifi card, the new printer (not a fancy one, either), built-in web cam, etc.

This has been since January! Yes, I know it's not Linux' fault, it's proprietary drivers for the hw that only work for MS systems. But the result is the same. I love using the Linux; wish I could use it more.
Well, you have to troubleshoot the wireless adapter, go through 3 or 4 sixteen step tutorials on how to install it, discover it's impossible with version 4 of the chipset (Linux drivers are only available for version 3 and below with the same serial number), sell the old wireless adapter on eBay, spend some time figuring out which adapters will work, check forums to find out which ones REALLY work, buy the new hardware, ship it, and follow a few more sixteen step tutorials keeping your fingers crossed that it will eventually actually work.

Meanwhile, every time you ask for help you have geeks helpfully telling you that you shouldn't be using wireless anyway because it's not secure, as if I were about to drill holes through the floor of the place I am renting for a month to accommodate their sense of what I need.

But I did mispeak. I managed to get Linux INSTALLED in a few minutes. It's actually getting the system to the point of usability that is the hard part.
I'm still printing my own.
Vistaprint.com for me. I got some free basic ones with my contact info, plus some fancy glossy ones to hand out to potential users. Very inexpensive, amazing quality.
He explains the source of the term in the article: an observation of a specific, real-life experience -- the "young man" way to repair a motorcycle versus the "old man" way to repair a motorcycle. It's not exactly his fault that no old or young women showed up to help him and his friends fix their bikes.
First Joel on Software conference
FTA: We simply do not believe our employees have an interest in coming in late, leaving early, and doing as little as possible for as much money as their union can wheedle out of us.

This one (and delegating in general) is really, really hard. It has taken me a lot of practice to learn to trust people to turn up with what they should have. Constantly checking up on people is a good way to stop them feeling like their work is their own.

You do, along the way, get burned a few times - but when stuff is late or wrong I have had good results from doing the 5 why thing. If you don't get what you need, keep asking why until you get to the root cause. Quite often it's me (adding extra work, or being unclear about priority).

Much better to take a few minutes to get all the way to the real problem, rather than just saying nothing or going off the deep end. You find out what you need to fix (which might be the individual but probably isn't), the guys on your team get constructive feedback with clear understanding of what they need to do next time, and no one gets resentful.
So, this is exactly what we've done. Briefly:

(1) The comments saying that it's hard-to-impossible to transition from consulting to product are correct. Two problems: (a) it takes more than just discipline to walk away from money --- it takes reckless speculation, and that's painful; (b) consulting hours don't bucket neatly, and don't schedule neatly, and so you're constantly being disrupted.

(2) That said, we now have multiple full-time people working on product, which we're launching soon. The classic consulting model is a pyramid scheme, where people claw their way to "partner" and get fat off profit sharing. In the product-consulting model, instead of setting aside money for partners, you pay full-time devs. This appears to work.

If I had to choose between VC and consulting, and my consulting practice was lucrative (ours is: software security billable hours are expensive), I'd do consulting again, even though it cost us a year. Reasons:

* I'll trade a year for control over my own destiny.

* The year is a false economy, since, for most companies, getting funding takes many speculative months.

* There are things about running a consultancy as a business that translate to running a product business, and running a business is a valuable skill.

* The networking and customer face time you get from consulting is hugely valuable.

* Time to market is simply overrated.
In my experience, Calculus in the university is solely used as weeder material, designed to bludgeon students with the notion that mathematics is dull, tedious, and a necessary evil. Nothing did as much to destroy the joy I derived from math as did my college Calculus courses.

The current pedagogy of Calculus is atrocious, and any method which helps impart the beauty of it without battering the souls of the students is worth pursuing. Feynman's great strength was his disregard for orthodoxy in the search for greater truth. Big-O notation is for more than just profiling the costs of computational algorithms. It is for reasoning about inexact quantities and seeing the greater patterns in the relationships between numbers and functions. Is using Big-O as a method of teaching Calculus better than the current process? Honestly, almost anything would be an improvement.

Math and Calculus are both beautiful and practical. But the current way we teach them completely loses those notions in favor of rote memorization and techniques without context.
I've found that Test Driven Development is particularly beneficial when tired. The test suite reduces the size of the program that I need to keep in short term memory, and the quick test-solve-refactor cycle keeps me focused. Later, when more awake, I review what I did by quickly scanning the test suite and looking for any obvious omissions.

The above isn't necessary an argument for TDD, but I think you might find it useful to try to view building a test suite and building your codebase as complementary activities rather than exclusive ones. If you use them together, the entire process becomes less difficult, and code in your test suite is just as valuable as anywhere else.
Ask YC: Accounting suggestions - how do you do it?
If there is one thing that makes my blood boil, it's doing paperwork, especially taxes. I hate it. I hate keeping records, data entry, well, all of it. I've tried the accountant route, but it's expensive and I end up creating a spreadsheet to give to them that's nearly as annoying as doing it myself.

I'm hoping folks can share what they do tax-wise. Do you have any accounting hacks to make this less aggravating? What's your system and incorporation setup?
Urgency is poisonous?
I skimmed it too and think PAWS is a tight dev guide for what author Murty calls AWS' "infrastructure services" (read: no Mturk, DevPay, Fulfillment, Associates or Alexa). The 600 pg book celebrates Ruby and the free download is particularly well commented in Python, Java.
Faster than expected... (Salesforce, Google + EC2 with Disks)
More than just a counter-intuitive thesis to raise discussions?
I highly recommend Moo cards -- they do small runs for relatively cheap, and let you customize the backs with photos or any design you want!

http://www.moo.com/
Manholes have flanges.

Circular and reuleaux triangles aren't the only shapes that won't fall through.
EC2 gets persistent block level storage
Java Will Never Be A Mobile Platform - Thoughts On Nokia, iPhone, and it’s Murderer
Turbo Tax
Some places teach Calculus well. For example, check out the advanced Calculus courses at Waterloo.
Contract work can be a great way to bootstrap the business if you're careful about it. I chose projects that we're high paying and easy to walk away from (corporate training, wrote a second edition of a book, strange enterprise documentation gigs).

Once we had a product we could sell there was a temptation to push it on any person with money. The problem with taking those kinds of customers is that it ties down your product. Keeping an independent stream of income would have given us more flexibility after we'd launched the product.

Also, some people say that having side projects makes it hard to focus on your main project. I found the opposite, having a main project that I loved made it very hard to focus on the side projects.
How well do the introductory courses fare?
But you consult. Do you think you're making a mistake doing that? Or is your web page just out of date?
Confirming bias? Maybe. Link bait? Definitely.

But you say it likes it's a bad thing. Do you think I don't have a valid point? Are you not debugging a memory leak in a production Lisp app?

With Lisp you can put together a site in a few hours. But how many days must later be spent debugging issues like this? Will this time spent debugging be counted against your productivity gains you attribute to Lisp?

This is exactly the sort of problem Erlang has nailed down. And it requires a whole new thinking about program structure. Is it possible you don't see the problems with Lisp because you can't imagine there is a fundamentally better way?
Couple questions, if you don't mind. Are you incorporated? Is it a specific turbo tax variety? What's the process like, and do you do quarterly estimated tax and all that?
I think that syntax and semantics are largely orthogonal. When you code in Erlang you just don't think about how the syntax resembles Prolog's.

Also, if you prefer to use Lisp syntax in Erlang you can use LFE (http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-questions/browse_threa...).
10 hours billable --- 2 out of 5 work days --- can easily wind up being 20 hours of wall clock time, factoring in ramp-up, off-the-clock support, documentation, non-billable research time, and then the overhead of dropping in and out of your product.

Of our original 3-person founding team, excluding all the hires since then, we've found that none of us can keep up with the FT devs, even when we work out one-week scheduling bubbles. This is obviously a classic "flow" problem.

I'm from dev originally, not consulting, and I was surprised by how expensive (timewise) services work is.
I said, "if you can help it", but unfortunately, I can't help it. I speak from experience when I say that it's distracting, and that periods where I've been able to focus 100% on something are vastly more productive.
I don't know what it's like now, but when I was there, the advanced courses were very intimidating. This is the real deal.
I will agree with you on the point that mathematics is beautiful. I had always appreciated mathematics for its logic. A proof is either right (it proves) or it is wrong (it does not prove), however, it was not until I was introduced to double and triple integration that I realized the raw power and beauty of calculus.

I start working towards my computer science and math degrees this summer, and my registered courses include discrete mathematics and probability. I can be confident in the fact that I will learn some easily learned ideas that are able to do very powerful things.
Hacker News meeting at SF Wednesday April 16th
I just wanted to remind everyone that we are meeting on the Delacy Street Restaurant (600 Embarcadero St.) in San Francisco. Everyone is welcome to come and bring friends with them!

The event starts at 6pm and will run until 11pm. We will probably have diner there also or we can have diner elsewhere depending on how many people attend.

I just created the event in the upcoming site:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/473235/?ps=5

Extra info here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144632

Don't hesitate on contacting me if you need something at: abarrera AT inkzee DOT com

See you guys there!
I'm biased to the security software market, but note that it's a market where companies have constantly tried to play the "productize-the-service" card. What I've observed is, this almost never works.

In fact, taking a consulting approach to product development (working closely with a first customer) also slowed us down drastically, and our product actually has very little to do with our service (what we're launching has nothing to do with reverse engineering software).

There are also some high-profile failures behind our strategy: building a straight-up consultancy to "fund" a full time product group.

But then again, who knows? Building a business is hard. It is not like applying to college, where you clear some "acceptance" hurdle and then you do your homework and everything works out. With the best people, the most credible strategy, and even the right market timing, circumstances can still screw you over.
ANTLR is quite popular and uses StringTemplate to generate source code, for several different target languages. So I would consider that to be pretty good real world use of it.
Do You Have a Hard Time Staying Focused?
I couldn't agree more. I think it's an asinine practice that, if it is in fact being discredited, deserves it. I posted this as an example of the brainteaser interview being discussed elsewhere (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162672), and am a little disappointed that most of the comments here are actually about manholes.

Brainteaser interviews are an artifact of the fundamental problem: there's no easy way to identify good programmers, so people come up with these ersatz, dysfunctional substitutes instead. The brainteaser is a seductive one because it's easy to think "programmers are smart so let's test for smartness instead". This confuses a necessary condition with a sufficient one. It also begs the question, since smartness isn't easy to test for either. The concept of "smartness" underlying the brainteaser interview is a shallow one of the party-trick variety. I see no reason to believe that it's correlated with the kind of programmer I'd want to work with on a project. Brain-teasing opaqueness is not a good thing in production code, and real programming problems are not much like riddles.

I also agree with your other point. Interviewers probing a programmer for "smartness", like a horse might have its teeth examined, or better, like a cow might have its udders palpitated - just feels unseemly to me. It's part of a corporate culture that is the modern version of the feudal system. It's the way you'd treat a peasant. The genius of the Larry-and-Sergey ad is that it speaks truthfully about this issue of respect, which is a very deep one, and of course is ultimately all about self-respect. (Look at some of the reactions to PG's lion metaphor to see just how true that is.)

So large organizations have no reliable process for hiring good programmers. As Paul Graham's writings have articulated so clearly, the fact that they have that problem doesn't mean that you do; they need you more than you need them. There's actually a much better test for which programmers add value in the long run: the market itself. Pass that test and you won't have to ask anyone to approve of your "smartness".
I don't know that it's counter-intuitive at all. I've burnt out before on urgent projects which ended up delayed and of marginal importance. I've seen people culture urgency and watched them value doing something over doing something right. The apparent urgency of a task trumps the mental and physical well-being of the people appointed to it. It's downright unhealthy.

What it really is though is unpolitic. Especially in the USA, suggesting that something can wait, or that the morale boost from working less will end up in more productivity angers a lot of people.
From a philosophical standpoint, I surmise free will does exist over the long-term course of your life - but not the short term.
Hear that. If you could choose to take a typical predatory VC round, putting a few mil in the bank and losing control of your board, would you trade positions from where you are now?
Stumpedia - Search For the People By The People
I'm using GnuCash + an accountant. It works ok, but I share the paperwork frustration. I have an LLC.
http://alphagraphics.com/
"Humility" is a good term, I think :)

I'd rather acknowledge a weakness and account for it moving forward than ignore it and have everything explode when it compounds a problem down the line.
http://www.psprint.com

Not thrilled, but easy enough to do. The bar for bcards is low by the way: you want them not to look laser printed, but that's about it.
Best nugget of truth: The best business model is one that makes your customer money.

From my personal experience eyeballs and race to the bottom savings never work in your favor unless your'e YouTube or WalMart.
Best of luck in your studies! Discrete mathematics was one of my favorite courses in school.
Everyone I talk to loves the first "minicard" someone gives them, and hates every subsequent card. You want your cards to be the standard bcard form factor.
If you know where to look, you can easily find some absurd discounts on VistaPrint. I highly recommend them.
Intuit's Turbo Tax walks you through everything. If you have a personal business, it will step you through the filing. If you have capital gains, it will help you with that as well. I just finished my taxes with Turbo Tax and it only took me about 15 minutes. Yes, I could have done them by hand, but I absolutely hate doing taxes even though I only do them once a year. The government already gets enough of my money, they will not get too much of my time also.
Well, if we're talking about stuff that's not very likely, I'd be pretty happy to go through the YC program, actually. Barring that, finding a niche product that's sustainable, but not 'get rich quick' material would make me happy.

I saw the bad side of what VC's can be like at Linuxcare, and it's pretty ugly.
It's a requirement for the CS portion of my degree. I already hold a finance degree from the University of Florida (2004), but the credit crunch sidelined me. Fortunately, I had the option of pursuing another two majors while still finishing in less than two years.
Micromanaging is not good for anyone...
Sounds promising. I have a C corp. Does TurboTax cover something like that, or only sole proprietorships?
I was going to say the same thing. The point he is making (even if true) has nothing to do with the concept of "Blub", and he makes himself look childish by putting it that way. That's too bad. Some of the other stuff I've read by Damien has been solid and I would have expected better.
Using preflight, online, good customer service, and a Boston company:

http://www.48hourprint.com/
I use Moo Mini Cards, and people seem to love it. It has a good finish and you get to customize it in different colors. I had 4 different colors and people loved it. But not being a standard business card form does tend to be a pain for people who have standard spot for it in their wallets or desk.
http://turbotax.intuit.com/small-business-taxes/

It lists C corp as an option, but I don't own a business, so I can't comment on what it can do for something like a C corp.
Since PuTTY only has 16 colors, I just forward X11 connections and use gvim.
Tell me more about your problem. Perhaps a software solution is in need.
Even more Textmate and Rubygems hotness
"Why current event X means we should all grind my favorite axe."
Other disciplines outside the arts also require creativity: we need to teach them that way
I used illbuzz.com. They are great, fast, and have high quality paper. I opted for the rounded corners, making it 1000 cards for $45. Excellent service.
Will be there rain or shine.
The introductory courses are quite tough.

They teach the material well, but when it comes to assignments and exams they ask questions that tend to force you to apply the things you learned with some sort of twist. I always thought I knew the material inside out and got crushed on exams compared to how I thought I did.

edit: Actually, 137/138 (which you will take first and second term) have recently been nerfed since they eliminated OAC and stopped teaching much calculus in high school.
Very interesting blogpost.

I also recommend to read Feynmans books, especially the one about the challenger (What do you care what other people think). It is a great example what it means to think independently AND work in a large organisation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
lucky win devs?
try Ubuntu
As someone who cares about the quality of the shipped product, I really like to say "my work will be done, when it's done." That line doesn't go over so well with my project managers.

In other areas of my life, having a sense of urgency helps me get things done in a timely manner - like doing grocery shopping or running errands.

I think that urgency artificially introduces stress to the task - which may be beneficial in certain scenarios.
Moo minicards are a great conversation-starter, and give you the chance to express a little individuality. But yes, the smaller size is slightly annoying...
Actually, Olympic pole-vaulters would probably make much better fireman than the average person -- think of the strength and determination required to become an Olympic pole-vaulter. Plus they could just pole-vault in and out of burning buildings :)
If you want to prove something seriously, please find some more examples. (Really!)