skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not denying that class plays a role --- in fact, I think I made that pretty explicit. I'm arguing that "hacking since you were 8 isn't so much a badge of geek cred as it is an artifact of your social class" is a really bad way of making that argument, since hacking since you were 8 actually is a badge of geek cred.

If you look, you'll probably find that people who've trained for pro-tennis since early grade school also tend to be well-off. Guess what? They really are fanatical tennis players; they aren't just "people that had the opportunity to be shuttled to expensive tennis lessons in their childhood".

You seem to be trying to engage me in an argument where we're both on the same side. That sounds boring. Let's instead engage with the article article that was posted.
http://hockeybias.com/ is looking...
Good luck on your hunt, Clay; you've a excellent bit of copy text on the front page. Hint Hint
It depends how old you are now.
This makes complete sense — people who are capable of searching on their mobile device own a smartphone, people who own smartphones are either tech savvy or of a younger demographic (excuse my assumptions) but both of which are more likely to use Google.
It took me sometime to figure out you just start single clicking to set markers. (Had to read the about page to know this) A little note to the effect of: "just start clicking to add markers" would have been helpful.
I use emacs for most of my text editing. I hate using vim because I find all the mode switching to be really annoying. I like how keys always mean one thing in emacs, even if it results in the occasional bit of emacs pinky.
San Francisco, CA

Fluther.com is looking for an new designer and a server engineer.

We're in the mission, and we love darts.

jobs@fluther.com
I don't buy it. I grew up on a subsistence farm and we were, I think, living well below the poverty line. I started programming when I was 8, on a Timex Sinclair 1000, which my brother and I saved up to buy. We learned by trial and error and a ZX81 assembly book that came from the library. I picked raspberries one summer (among other things) to buy a C64.

> Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that.

That's an unfortunate attitude and just not true. This reminds me of a thread (on mathoverflow I think, but I can't find it) where the general consensus was working hard throughout grad school (in math) was the great equalizer, and mattered more than how much background you came in with. The same is true for undergrad and CS.

Moreover, it isn't a competition. Someone else being an amazing hacker doesn't detract from what you know. In fact, having such people around can teach and inspire. I'd much rather be a small fish in a big pond (as I am.)
You can wriggle all you like, but here's a published, third-party Oracle benchmark showing it well ahead of the competition. Why are they "afraid"?
Please don't miss the point: you had the opportunity, as did many of your middle class peers, to discover your aptitude for computers at an early age. This is not an opportunity afforded to children in low income homes. You are not required to apologize for this. Please don't. Just recognize it for what it is, and be grateful you had an early chance to discover something you love.

My 8 year-old and I are starting a side project to build Ubuntu machines out of discarded parts for low income families in our city. One of the reasons we're doing this is that kid out there who might be a genius programmer, but would otherwise never get the chance to hack a kernel or troll a newb on IRC.
Uh, it's not 37 Signals' responsibility to determine whether their advice is relevant to your business, your startup or whatever you are trying to do.

Their advice is what you make of it. It will work well for some; probably not so well for others. It is your job to determine whether that advice will work for you and is relevant or not to how you want to run your business or startup.

All these "pundits" fresh out of business school with zero years of experience under their belt need to take a long hard look in the mirror and decide whether they want to continue talking out of their ass or actually take a closer look at how Jason and his team actually run their business.

Just because Jason and 37S figured out a non-traditional way to make money through providing web services does not mean their approach is wrong. Just because it's not taught in business school does not mean it's wrong.
I think most avoid Microsoft because of two main factors: cost and source.

You might think Microsoft is stable and that things tend to just work; but, if they stop supporting something you need -- you're SOL. If there is a bug that affects your software and it's low on their priority list -- you're SOL.

With FOSS, you can branch the project and not update and everything should continue to work as you'd expect. You can fix a bug yourself if the community doesn't think it's a priority.

What's more, with the new anti-IP laws in NZ and having the PirateBay being hosted by the Pirate Party, I imagine there will be a lot of very interesting changes in the FOSS community.
They just did recently.
Bull. Shit. When I was 8 years old, I started computing, but not at all because I was privileged. Just because someone has a computer at a young age doesn't mean they're parents went out and bought a state of the art computer. As an immigrant family we couldn't afford much in the way of leisure, but they at least knew a good deal when they saw one. So, when they saw a "computer" at the local flea market for a $100, they went for it. That means that I was hacking BASIC in DOS on a Tandy 1000 while all my friends played flight simulators in Windows 3.11 on their immensely more expensive/powerful 486's.
The reason why slashdot.org shows no traffic driven is because most visitors there know to block their referer.
I've not followed what's happening in France (there is, shall we say, less transparency in that country), but the Finnish reactor is having problems due to lax supervision of (sub)contractors: foundational concrete was not done correctly, forgings have to be recast, etc.

These aren't nuclear power issues per se but general competence of construction (supervision) issues. I gather the French site has some of these sorts of problems as well.

Getting onto strictly nuclear power issues, these are the first two attempts to build the new European Pressurized Reactor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor. It's not at all surprising if the first examples of a new design end up being more expensive and slower to build (which of course also means more expensive): there's new learning curves, lots of new regulatory work required, likely redesigns required, etc.

Germany's experience with Soviet design East German plants would not seem to be applicable outside of the former Iron Curtain (although we can thank God none of them were of the RMBK design). Your failed "experimental storage site for nuclear waste" is just that, yours. You are of course welcome to decide that nuclear power is a failure and e.g. depend on natural gas from the former Soviet Union (or just living in the cold and dark), but most of the rest of the world doesn't seem to be following your path.

As for your desire for "clean and renewable energy", none that I'm aware of that can be done on a large scale (I'm excluding geo-thermal) are suitable for either base line or peaking power unless you throw batteries into the mix. Which aren't particularly clean, low maintenance or long lived. (There is one trick you can do which is to pump water uphill into a reservoir but the Greens generally veto that sort of thing, we've moved from NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) to BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything)).
how do you figure?

I presume that they weren't interviewing school children for the survey. You can hardly say that, because 39% adults thought that a computer was unnecessary, deciding (rightly or wrongly) to not get a PC wouldn't disadvantage their potential hacker children, when compared to hacker children who did have parents who jobs required them to have computers.
Despite Angel copying and pasting her job description, I can vouch for her. Weddingful's a neat company, and has a lot of the right ingredients in place.

We share an office, and a great, active investor. If you're at all interested in working in Vancouver, British Columbia, and don't mind a startup with a bit of the leg work done, it's an interesting position.
Vancouver, BC

Looking for a Python/Django developer to come work at Rhino Accounting. Email simon@rhinocloud.com please mention HN.
I asked something like this not to long ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486240

Sorry, not many willing to share ideas here.
Less features != different features. An LCD is not interchangeable with an ePaper display as a feature.
For windows binaries, go to http://www.jnthn.net/perl6/rakudo/Rakudo-Star-2010-07.msi, which is where I got it. It may no t be the standard location, so I am not sure how long it will be available.
This looks cool - I use http://www.everytrail.com/ and its iPhone app for when I go mountain biking.

As for your service - it'd be cool if you could provide some stock routes just as an example to see what's possible. Maybe do some big hiking routes or something.
Hidden Images in the Sistine Chappel
Creating Relationships vs. Selling and Closing: It’s all about Partnerships
I think those guys mydunktank, like Getupandmove, are interesting because it is behavior programming (anbdy a better name?): if you X(give money to charity) I do Y(crazy dare). Action graphs vs chitchat/linksharing social graphs
I was just thinking some more about this on the same line. If you want to call that privileged, you know, I'm open to that. In fact I'd say arguably this is "more privileged" that merely being rich, which is sometimes oversold.

It's just that I don't feel like I can apologize for this or feel bad. It isn't in anybody's best interest for me to try to pretend this was somehow bad.
Because?

Presuming you're referring to Chad Hurley, you think that Google bought YouTube because he married Jim Clark's daughter?

Jim Clark, who as far as I can tell, didn't invest in Google, doesn't work for them, and isn't on their board.
>> more evil

Why/how is theft more evil than piracy?
The tennis players -- they're both, and so are you. The article asks you to accept that you were privileged, and there's nothing evil about that.
I'm really loving these blog posts from Flightcaster about the internal mechanics of the airline industry. Engineering pr0n at its best.

The work of getting paying passengers to the boarding gate makes our modern flying machines look simple in comparison. That's saying something!
As a general comment, you're not likely to regret studying a lot of math whatever you end up doing. It's very useful general purpose stuff, both it and how it trains you to think.
very cool. I've been using gmaps-pedometer for this exact thing.

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/
Clive Thompson is easily the author who most regularly grabs my attention long enough to read an article start to finish and then actually email him to tell him how awesome the article was.
Easy enough, that will go to the top of my list!
When I was eleven my father -- a painter who worked fourteen hour days -- bought me an Atari 400 because it was the one thing I wanted most in the world at the time. We were not privileged...my father just recognized a desire and talent in me that he wanted to help foster. I love you, Dad.
Bull.

My parents were working class slobs, but they bought me a computer at the age of 10. It was a TRS-80 Color Computer which was the cheapest thing you could get at that time. It was just about the only thing they spent money on for me. I got no piano lessons, no braces, no model rockets, nothing -- except a Dad who wouldn't take a foreman position when he was offered one, a Mom who taught me to "stay in a dead end job you hate no matter what"... Hell, the schoolteacher and carpenter next door wouldn't talk to me family since they thought my parents were just a bunch of scabs...
I assume this is a fake page, because of the URL, and where the navigation links lead. It should be stated here in case anyone misses that. Is there any contextual explanation for why lot49 has this page?
right-clicking to remove a marker would be awesome.

having accounts would be nice, too. and being able to upload data from gps watches. but one step at a time. this is really cool, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the feedback. I totally agree. The copy is vague, and was written before our product crystallized. It needs a serious rewrite.
Why? Why is it a badge of geek cred? Cause you're so old sk00l?

The fact that you have more demonstrable experience may be a badge of honor. That you have had more time to hone your craft perhaps that's worth something.

But the fact that you've been programming for 10 years longer than someone else by itself doesn't mean anything, and it is otherwise irritating to hear people tout that as some sort of credential.

So perhaps your right that the author is not addressing the key point, which is that bragging that you've been using a computer longer than someone else is dumb. The author however is also pointing out that it's also pretentious.

And agreed, starting a fight for the sake of starting a fight is not the best use of either of our hours :)
Mediocrity
You deny my point, then just go on to reinforce it. The lock industry should just create a new magical power source? You just moved around the "mere engineering problem" label but if anything you've made your problem worse by being more clear about what you want to have magicked into existence, not better.
I've generally found the comments on NewEgg (newegg.com) quite useful, when averaged and weighted by the apparent competence of the commentor. I learn details from them that I don't find elsewhere. I'll also look at Amazon and some other places, e.g. anandtech and some of the PC Magazine reviews remain informative.

Off topic, but recently I was trying to learn details of the then new or upcoming Intel mobile Core processors. Googling around, the one place that had specifics was a German site. You never know...
Nice job! Here are some suggestions:

Though it might break the simplicity of the app, it'd be nice if it could plot a road-based route between two points. It'd save a lot of clicks. :)

Also, make the markers smaller and try to detect whether there are any existing plotted routes nearby. My route has a lot of overlaps and it can be hard to differentiate them. Another option is that if you click on an existing marker it will merge the route into it. To diverge from it, you could click the marker you want to diverge from.

Make markers draggable and update distance and height metrics while I drag them. That would be a good way to check for better variations of an existing route.

Show regular distance intervals. So that you'd be able to see the literal milestones of your route.
What a load of bollocks. My parents were dirt-poor (on an first-world scale) growing up. I did all my early learning on an IBM PC-XT (which was given to us). It was nearly decade-old technology by the time I started in on QBasic, and not worth very much at all. I bought my first computer at age 14, with money that I'd made over the summer gutting and renovating houses.

Sure, in a sense, I was privileged, in that my dad did everything he could to give me a competitive advantage by introducing me to logic (I wore out his Martin Gardner books), chess (he never pulled a punch. We played for years before I beat him), classical literature (what extra money he had went to books. He has a library I still envy), music (he has a degree in music, which helps explain the lack of financial resources), and mathematics (he taught me algebra and trig years before I ran into them in school). He inspired a thirst for learning in me, and did everything he could to develop my ability to think critically because he didn't have financial resources. If that's a "disgusting flaunting of privilege", then I don't know what to tell you. I'm not going to apologize for having parents who cared about me enough to push me to develop my ability to think. They did the same with my other siblings - two younger sisters and a brother. None of them are programmers, despite the fact that they grew up with more money and technology than I did.

What this article really reads like is someone with a martyr complex making excuses for why they aren't good at whatever. Sure, there are people who are in CS who were privileged, and given a leg up by parents who could afford expensive technology, but it's flatly offensive to say that everyone who was interested in computers from a young age is a spoiled child of privilege who flaunts that privilege in others' faces.
20 year olds today were 8 in 1998.

In pretty much all of the western world, by the 1990s (and even mid/late 80s) owning a computer was within the reach of all but the retched poor.

My parents bought a PC XT clone in 1987 and they were at best middle-class.
True - when I was ten in 1966 I, following the instructions in a library book, built a Turing machine out of two sheets of paper and, following the program there, added two symbols to three symbols to get five symbols. That was a ll the computer there was for kids in 1966.

Also, this article is total PC crap, following the standard anti-male, anti-white, wahwah bullshit.

She DOES actually touch at the truth for a second when she quotes this

“There is a subset of boys and men who burn with a passion for computers and computing. Through the intensity of their interest, they both mark the field as male and enshrine in its culture their preference for single-minded intensity and focus on technology.”

This is totally true and I was one of them.

Oh, and of course, we're racist too. Here's an exchange-

Because of systemic racism, class differences correlate with racial demographics. In the Racialicious post Gaming Masculinity, Latoya quotes a researcher’s exchange with an African American male computer science (CS) undergraduate:

“Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that. Now, the only thing that I have been doing since I was eight is playing basketball. I would own them on the court. I mean it wouldn’t be fair, they would just stand there and I would dominate. It is sort of like that in CS.”
– Undergraduate CS Major

Magically, when the black BB guy owns you on the court it is somehow NOT unfair at all.
It looks nice and polished but I can do this for free at http://i.seemikecode.com/

At the very least, I'd make a true free plan and let your customers try before they buy. I'm not interested in a tour, I want to actually use the application before I sign up.

I like how you store the test results on your end. I don't think I'd ever use that (because we don't really care about previous tests of rejected candidates) but it's a nice touch.
GazeHawk (YC S10) Does Eyetracking With Web Cams
That is simply not true.

We weren't poor growing up but we were not far from it (at least according to the Western standards). I remember having to eat only once a day and wearing clothes with holes in them because we couldn't afford to go clothes shopping. My father, a good engineer with a university degree lost his job after the Soviet collapse and my mom had to work 2 janitor jobs.

However, if my father knew someone who had a broken radio or TV he would get it for me so I can take it appart and play with the innards. I had a soldering iron and a neighbor had given me his old voltmeter. So I was learning quite a bit without having expensive equipment.

I started to like computers, because I saw them at schools. The Americans had donated us some nice shiny IBM computers and we were fighting to get access to them after school. My mom notice my new infatuation with computers, and she saved enough money for half a year and then bought a Russian ZX Spectrum knock-off and a tape player.

I had asked my neighbor (who was a TV repairman) to hook the console up to our old black and white TV. Then I learned English so I could read all the programming manuals. My friends used to copy and pirate games. But I enjoyed writing basic, assembly, pascal and C. If you segfaulted, you had to reaload the compiler from tape so you waiting for 10 minutes. It was a fun but very arduous process.

Anyway, the fact that we were poor didn't prevent me from hacking since I remember. All it matters is to have good parents who really support and nurture education.

(By the way mom was not allowed to go to school after her 7th grade because she had to support her family. I think she vowed that her children will get all the education they want no matter what).
BioWare Austin is still hiring web/PHP developers to help build the game/web integration for Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. You need to be in Austin, TX, or willing to relocate yourself.

Imagine 1-2 million players feeding game events real-time into your web site from day one. There won't be any "grow slowly, scale gracefully" here. We need to be big out of the gate.

We've had something of a hard time finding people, so we're open to training up junior people, too. Never touched Drupal but are handy with PHP? Please do write.

The openings are here, under "Marketing:" http://www.bioware.com/bioware_info/jobs/austin_jobs/

They're contract jobs, so no relocation expenses are provided for, but they're a year long, so you wouldn't have to look for something new right away. It'd be 40 hours a week with potentially a lot of overtime (paid at time-and-a-half).

If you apply, please also email me (vmiliano at that domain name) with your resume so I can it in the hiring manager's hands.
Wrong, unless "privileged" means "not in abject poverty." We were distinctly lower-middle-class. I bought my first computer myself with my lifetime-accumulated birthday/lawnmowing/snowshoveling money.
For any other Eclipse users in here (I see it mentioned once or twice in the comments), check out viPlugin. Works in vanilla Eclipse as well as Flex Builder, and presumably any other Eclipse-based IDE. Not sure how I would live without it at this point.
What the Data Centers of the Future Might Look Like
> It's best to do one thing really, really well.

Really? True, Google does search really well, and it makes sense that this would have been their philosophy at some point in the past. But now it seems like they would be more for something like "Do one thing really well, and once people appreciate it, do a thousand other little things."
There's also an iPhone app for this called Daily Deed.
How grep got its name
You-Vision Video Glasses - Record everything you see via hidden camera
Don't look for ideas, find problems (that more people than just you have) and solve them.
Action Cures Fear
Yep pretty much.
I posted this and went for a walk with my son.
Half-way to the park I saw that it made it to the front page.

We turned around and I'm thinking to myself "shit, I just launched"