skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if your affiliate program is the source of the problem. Perhaps affiliates are submitting articles with their affiliate link and the mods got tired of deleting them?

BTW congrats on putting together a good bundle of conversion rate tools. I'll be picking up a copy myself.
No list of books is going to substitute for years of interactive study, but if there is going to be a list, CLRS should be (high) on it. You might not need it to write a Rails app in 21 days, but you'll be a more enlightened programmer if you do.
Geoengineering schemes are entirely novel new forcings, while the impact of atmospheric CO2 can be studied historically.

This weakens your contention, but I still think you're pointing out an interesting bit of hypocrisy in the public debate (often these hypocrisies cease to exist in debates among experts).
Used to apply that to PC builds as well.

Fast, Quiet, Cheap
I've had part 2 vary a lot, from being interrogated by a suspicious customs officer, to being asked one or two half-assed questions by a very bored one.
I'm not a lawyer, but I did look at this issue about a year ago for a feature I was considering for our own startup. You can most certainly be sued, defending will be pricey, and you may lose the lawsuit - although case law in America isn't completely settled. The key case against is probably eBay vs. Bidder's Edge.

Having a single point of failure like this certainly won't help your fundraising efforts. If you're going to take the legal risk, why not bootstrap? That way you can put the money in your pocket as you go along and if the site does get shut down, at least you've extracted the profits along the way.
That's the joke, dude...

Re OP: Ah, the joys of being a Sybase user, nobody even makes fun of us.
".. are you suggesting that Americans are inherently more stupid than Europeans?"

No. I'm suggesting that there will always be stupid and lazy people wherever you go. Many countries in Europe attempt to legislate it away by taking away by making choices for you (More social programs and restrictions on private alternatives). For some, this is fine, because they will be better off. For others, it just means less freedom and less choices.

In the US, we are free to make our own choices (and for some people, this means failing).
Thanks!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) [...] involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. [...]

Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time because productivity gains come essentially from a better capital technology. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more dependent on taxation level than growth in the GDP.
Does anyone know if the native client is based on an abstract specification, or purely Chrome-dependent?

In other words, is there a chance that other browsers might implement it in the future as well, allowing web developers to write client-side applications in any language that can compile to native code, not just Javascript?

If so... the day when one can actually write and deliver any type of application through the browser, with no penalty, might actually be on the horizon.

People have talked about how webapps are going to kill traditional software for the next decade. If the relevant browsers implemented this, could it finally actually happen?
Not coffee, but, I had a similar experience with Coca Cola a few years back. I went from drinking 1.5-2L a day[1] to none[2]. Of course, I dropped caffeine and picked up sugar instead (turns out, its really cheap to grab a Brita filter and a large jug of sugar flavored like Iced Tea to mix into water..).

Now, its slightly more balanced. I try to only have sugar or caffeine when I'm not at home.

1. A glass when I came home from school (around 1:30-2pm), a glass when having a snack (around 4:30pm), and a glass at dinner (around 7pm)

2. My college has a deal with Pepsi -- none of the dining halls have Coca Cola and there is only one or two vending machines that have it on campus.
Most of these books are from the ACM Classic Book Series:
http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=SERIES11430&type=series...
It probably is why, and it indicates that they failed to copy Apple properly: Apple chose the rate to correspond to a restful breathing rate. As I can attest from a quick test, 40/min is more like someone exercising, hardly a soothing assurance that the Dell is happily sleeping. Furthermore, blinking is not very smooth, either. Dell apparently saw the idea "visually indicate sleep mode". So what Dell has is a blinking indicator light that happen to mean "in sleep mode". What Apple has is a light that intuitively means "I'm happily resting and saving power. When you want me again, open me up and I'll be right where you left me." The first time I saw Apple's light, I immediately knew what the computer was doing. If I saw a Dell blinking a lot, I would have no idea if it meant "sleep mode", "charging", "charging in sleep mode". The blink rate might even be how quickly it's charging or how much it needs to be charged. So yes, Dell did a bad copy.
> The trouble is that I don't remember anything. ... [If I came into enough money] I'd probably repeat my undergraduate schooling.

I agree with other posters that you'd relearn the material faster, and this is a kind of remembering. I'd also add that you've probably internalized concepts and skills from your undergrad that you don't consciously realize or connect to your education.

What makes you think it would be any different the second time around? (Except that you might retain more having seen it once already.) I don't mean this as a challenge. I've had similar feelings in the past (How can I hold onto this? Why am I forgetting so much?) and I've gone back to school recently and I've struggled with learning how to learn in a better way. It isn't an automatic slam dunk.
Better option is chef-solo + vagrant. That way, you can version all parts of the system, not just Ruby/Rails.
Three Rules to Actionable Metrics
Though I'm far from an expert, I would think they could even out performance in software to some extent.
Apparently I'm not of the set "people".
Amusingly, I'm looking around the room, and the most obvious examples of rounded rectangles are my MacBook, my iPad, and my iPhone.
Depends on how concentrated the weight is and how hard it hits. Most roofs can handle a bunch of 200 pound roofers working on them, or tons of snow, without any difficulty.
It means that you still fight with the tool - which is a waste of energy. Accept the tools are not perfect, get your benefits out of them (either financial or intellectual - for example by making something better) and use the remaining energy in something more constructing for your self.

Quote from Tao of Programming: 'There once was a master programmer who wrote unstructured programs. A novice programmer, seeking to imitate him, also began to write unstructured programs. When the novice asked the master to evaluate his progress, the master criticized him for writing unstructured programs, saying, ``What is appropriate for the master is not appropriate for the novice. You must understand the Tao before transcending structure.'
So the argument is that, because one group of people invent the name "DevOps", then all recent sys admins must be like that?
I might be biased because I've spent most of my professional life working for a large-ish business where products in general end up being reused a lot by other internal products and all have an active life of at least 3 to 5 years

The interesting and frustrating thing about building software is that the answer to most questions is "it depends". What you're describing may be appropriate in your case. In the case of most of the projects I've been involved with adding any significant extra abstraction on top of reasonable use of an ORM would be overkill in most places.
The strange case of virtual machines on telephones
How a business increased their sales 18 fold by using online promotions
Granted that selling meat to people who post on the internet is like shooting fish in a barrel, this is still an impressive use of discounts and online presence to attract new business.
No caffeine huh.. I guess I'll be moving on to alcohol[1].

[1] http://xkcd.com/323
it's not only the countries you travel visa-free to, it's also how they treat you once you're there... i once traveled through italy with an american friend and was surprised at the hassle they made of the border crossing of a nighttrain simply due to his passport... i was able to sleep on and he had to answer questions this was back in 2000. at the same time consider countries like syria where an american passport might not be as nice as an EU one.
I concur. Make something cool and figure out if there's a market especially when you are 'disrupting' an existing model and possible existing in someone else's ecosystem (ex Ebay). That way you don't lose much but have lots to gain if you create something people want. Corporations can be bought and lawyers leashed if there's money in it for both sides.
I am glad to hear that it is a good time to move to London.

I have no problems whatsoever to join a company as a graduate. I have an excellent salary right now but I don't care if I even have to earn half of it. Money isn't the top priority for me right now, otherwise I would stay where I am. I was just afraid I would not be considered for such a position, but I will definitely try.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Some investors clearly have made returns over the last fifty years at substantially above the market rate.
We have historical data on SO2 - basically every volcanic eruption ever.

That's actually not a lot of data, but it's considerably more than we know about exogenous inputs of CO2 - we have only one data point on CO2, but a handful on SO2 (Pinatubo, Krakatoa, a few more).
The circle version is here on Wikipedia (it includes the 1+3+5... trick):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm

Generalized to ellipses:
http://homepage.smc.edu/kennedy_john/belipse.pdf
This compelled me to take my copy of "Programming Pearls" (by Jon Bentley, 2000, 2nd ed.) from the bookshelf.

Another one that has spent time on my night table is "The Turing Omnibus: 61 excursions in computer science" by A.K. Dewdney. Varied, clever problems in dazzlingly plain language.
Agile Game Development with Scrum: Teams
I'm confused about Bundler and rvm's per-project ruby and gemsets, what's the difference?
This is essentially what Merkel, RapLeaf and Palantir do.

I used to make money by doing this and selling the results to financial research firms. But, I didn't make any of the details of what I was doing public.
That article, for being so wordy, is remarkably slim on details. If the issue is that he refused to use a condom, then that doesn't constitute rape if they decided to have sex with him anyway. If he actually did force himself on someone without their consent, that's a whole different (and much more serious) issue and he should face the repercussions.
http://appsumo.com will not be linkified then?
> but lots of down votes.

Because you are making a lot of assumptions. For example:

"the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it."

Is different from "The earth is getting warmer because of human activity."

In fact, you go on to say: "Humans may have something to do with it, and they may not. There is still debate on what the causes might be and much research still needs to be done."

A debate on this implies that their are those who think human activity is partly to blame.

Finally, you go on to say this:

>I find it ironic that scientists can act so religious-like on this topic and have faith in the belief that humans are the sole reason behind global warming without solid scientific proof.

Religious-like? Faith? Humans are the sole reason?

"human activity probably has something to do with it."

That's why you are getting down voted. Stop overreacting. =)
Wholesale cost on domains has got to be less than $5 or so for them so they make a little. Not much though.
Somewhat of the inverse of more luxury: there is approximately 50% more poverty in the US than in Western European countries: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf (page 38).
The Mafia Wars wars: dissecting Digital Chocolate's case against Zynga
so true and that's the USC/Permanent resident line, how about that visitors line...
> I find it hard to imagine another way to get code that is as easy to test and to mock. Any suggestion?

If you need a special data store for testing, just point the ORM at a test database. You don't need a half-assed database simulator when you can have as many real databases as you need.
MPEG LA Counters Google WebM with permanent royalty moratorium
Oh the format wars...
And Facebook. And Buzz. And probably all other status feeds they can get their hands on.

(But sure, from playing a bit with the feature, it sure looks like Twitter is drowning out everyone else.)
What a great video. He comes across as a really likable guy who knows what he's doing and loves it. I've seen a few other marketing videos around that could learn a lot from his honest, personal approach.
I know, I work for one of them. I certainly would not claim markets are 100% efficient.

It's joe_the_user's argument that I'm disputing, not his conclusion. In general, when you make an argument that the EMH is false and certain securities are priced incorrectly (I'm guessing he is referring to houses or MBS), you should have a track record of getting rich based on trading those securities.
Happy 4th Birthday Amazon EC2
I agree entirely with the OP, but I have also seen people treating computation as a "third leg", to the detriment of progress I think.

Let me concoct a trivial example. Suppose you wanted to know whether a bowling ball would drop from the top of a building faster than a tennis ball. You can do this without reference to theory - just go out and experiment. Doing the experiment would not give you the complete physical picture perhaps, but it would certainly

(a) answer your narrow question and

(b) give you a constraint that any theory must explain.

The problem is that there is a class of research where people who are faced with this question, would set up a computer model. Now let's say they didn't realise they had to model air resistance. They will discover something all right, but it will neither answer the narrow question, nor provide a robust constraint for theory.

In other words, playing around with computational models is not, by itself, theory or experimentation unless you are very careful on how you tie it back to the physical world.
I don't know, at Northwestern you can't pass the Intro to Networking class without writing TCP, software implementations of link state and vector routing, and sockets implementation.

Those are just the project sections, there are of course formal exams for the other fundamentals of networking.
Ask HN: Can you do start-ups over 40?
I am just over 40, have tons of experience in the industry, but will probably be out of a job in 30 days. Should I go start-up or look for a safe, big-company position?
Can't wait until the US starts blanketing various countries with drones. Excellent precedent.

But when the drones invade the US, the gun nuts will finally have something to do!
I would also wager that 99% of web applications have their data normalized between multiple tables requiring many joins to reconstruct the data for use by the application. Document databases can provide a more representative structure for storing data than splitting the data across multiple tables and records. Scalability is not usually my primary concern for choosing a data store. It all comes down to choosing the right tool for the job and not always defaulting to use a hammer for all tasks.
Absolutely! I once hired a MSc CS grad on a project and he produced some of the worst code I've ever seen, not even just a code perspective, which to some degree is understandable, but from a conceptual point of view as well. Some seriously bad stuff.

That said I still greatly value a CS degree (even a self-study one) simply because of the fundamentals it teaches. It's not an automatic indicator of ability, but having that level of understanding makes the difference between someone that can think conceptually about and around a problem and someone that has a set number of tools to solve problems with.

I don't think that getting a CS degree is the only way to get that kind of understanding, but I do think it's one of the easier ways. If you're a hacker on your own and you've got to trawl through the glut of bad coding books out there, it's tough to get a good education.

Though I firmly believe that if you're the kind of guy that has gotten that education without any help then you're probably better than the guy that got it with help.

I'm firmly in the camp that holds that an education is to educate you and provide you with skills and tools to operate effectively, not to obtain a certificate. Holding the certificate is not an indication that you have actually received an education, the only indication is your ability, ambition and results.

For what it's worth, I think the majority of the books on the list are must-reads for anyone in programming, there may be a few better ones (I'm a Tannenbaum fan when it comes to OS's as an example) and there may be areas that aren't covered, e.g. usability and CHI (Design of everyday things would be my suggestion there) and there is suspicious lack of anything web, mobile or distributed, but if someone internalises these, they'll definitely be better for it.
That doesn't let you test ORM queries alone or controller code alone, though. They get bundled together and the testing is necessarily done on a higher level. I guess this can be acceptable in most situations.
But a teacher doesn't have to be a teacher in a school setting. It could be a peer or mentor in a completely different environment (be it work or just a good friend).

The success found in coaches for people who are already talented at their craft often centers around motivation and challenging that person to become even better.
Here's the source code; I'm sure other browsers are welcome to use it. http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/wiki/Source
Of course you can!

But it's harder because you likely will have a bigger number to reach before 'ramen profitability'.

Cut your fixed monthly costs as much as you can as soon as you can, that will increase your runway considerably.

A step back is always hard, but this will increase your chances of success by quite a substantial margin.
For the common case of a large rectangle with small radius corners, you can even just draw 3 rectangles and 4 ovals and have a tolerable amount of overlap.
Does that mean everyone who does not have such a track record should believe in EMH? Or should they just not make arguments that do anything to contradict it? Or something else?
Yeah, the reason I was thinking of using mongo is because I have to write a simple posting app (i.e. allow for blog or twitter style posts with tags) so defining a relational schema seems like overkill to me. But I can't be sure.

To the parent: thanks for the edifying comment. I do have some experience with SQL and relational DBs, but was thinking of using noSQL for some projects. Your point to thoroughly learn the relational model is well taken.
Why not?

The question is how much you have in the way of savings, and what sort of lifestyle you want, and how quickly the startup would either 1) fail, so you can get on with your life or 2) start generating money.
Yeah ... sorry guys, NSFW.
Speaking of "leveling up" (and EpicWin, from what I can see, is clearly mankind's greatest invention):

The new AppointmentReminder site is extremely solid.

Can I invest?

By the way: Get the office.

I'm working from home this week too, because it's the first week of middle school for the boy and so the first time he takes the bus.

Since the beginning of the year, on a typical week, I actually full-time on product for Matasano, which always feels less productive than being billable --- nothing is more "productive-feeling" than being billable. But this week is different. I'm doing a web pentest for a friend's company, because, well, I like the company. So I'm actually unusually productive this week.

But because I'm home, it does not feel that way at all. I feel totally unproductive and lost, despite clear daily evidence to the contrary. It's because I'm not going to the office to boot up my work day.
MBAs are for wusses - Military service makes Israeli techies tougher
Certainly. But such people are in short supply.
Totally fair point. We do have four paying customers, so we're seeing some early meaningful traction. And it was definitely tricky to come up with something worthwhile.
Now your boss has decided he wants this example search on 6 different pages (that require 6 different controllers). What do you do?

Copy/paste the query within all 6 controllers
Create a class with a method (or just a function) to handle it

Why is the idea that you shouldn't duplicate code novel enough to make it to the front page of HN?
Hmmm...

if it were me, it would mostly depend on how I want my life to be 5 from now or 10 years from now. (or in which direction i want it to be going)

And then choose whichever option has a higher chance of delivering that. So do you know what you want 5 years from now?

Also, it would partly depend on whats important right now? high excitement, high reward, high risk type of position or a safe comfy type of position?

Good luck.
rvm is sweet for managing rubies but not so sweet in that it hijacks cd(). I like to cd without any apps meddling.

Recommended fix: $ echo rvm_project_rvmrc=0 >> ~/.rvmrc
Definitely, too bad Indeed.com doesn't really cover that territory in force yet. It's now the number one site in the US, and they have tons of start-up company positions in their search engine.

-Justin
www.wyckwyre.com
It's an interesting behavior though, not just Chrome, but everyone. Certain numbers have meanings (1.0 being the most famous), just like extra tags like "alpha" and "beta".

They're a signal to IT folk to measure progress, and at least the perceived value of an upgrade (1.0 to 1.1 is a small change compared to 1.0 to 2.0). There's also expectations of compatibility. Files made with 1.0 should work with 1.1, but 2.0 might have breaking features that need to be looked into deeper.

Of course this varies with every single piece of software. You're right that for Chrome, it doesn't matter nearly as much, because updates are automatic. I just find it very interesting to see some software shoot up quick (maybe a 1.0 after 6 months), and then other software takes a lot longer (vlc taking years and years to hit 1.0).
Good point,
Formal logic I studied in the phil dept far outstripped the AI courses at a similar level in CS.
The same goes for Linear Algebra and data mining/IR.

Those two areas, possibly along with linguistics (data mining again), were much more useful to me than the programming 101 type courses.
I worked for a company that essentially was based on it, and know of another that via "scraping" and related automation makes its living as well. Both have been alive and well for years and have grown quite a bit. The trick is that you work with the companies/sites you are scraping from the beginning as a business relationship of some kind if possible, and not as a parasitic relationship. Basically if you are trying to help them sell their products/services/data and they benefit, even though you will likely have to fix the "scrapers" all the time, it works out.