skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

The other cutoff, 38, has a lot more play in it. One
reason I put it there is that I don't think many people
have the physical stamina much past that age. I used to
work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week.
I don't know if I could do that now.

Also, startups are a big risk financially. If you try
something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big
deal; a lot of 26 year olds are broke. By 38 you can't
take so many risks-- especially if you have kids.
I concede that Facebook fan pages are a whole other animal altogether. In that case (in terms of having an account to manage a fan page as a professional face, so to speak), then performing user authentication based on knowledge of "friends" (account connections) makes no sense whatsoever.

All joking and discourse regarding "friends" aside, I think it's fair to have multi-factor authentication when it appears that an account has been breached. But yes, they could have implemented this differently. (See Gmail's "last account activity" alerts, which notify you regarding a breach once you log in from a recognized IP address but do not prevent access to your account: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&... )

I suppose I'm one of those odd, longtime users that wishes Facebook wouldn't try to be everything, hence the jabs at "I have too many friends" issue.
Benefits of having string-type immutable (non-technical)
What's age got to do with it? American corporate software development is just as broken. Even the corporate ladder isn't that different. Programmers either move up as they age or are considered losers.

The difference is that the US has that dysfunctional system, but it also has a highly innovative system: startups and companies run something like startups (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc).

Japan simply doesn't have a startup ecosystem. Essentially no other country does.
You guys talk about ageism in a (mostly) ageist way and missed the point of the piece. It's about your attitudes, your negativeness. You're proving the authors point, but are too shallow and naive and inexperienced to see it.
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When I read the title, I first thought about a webrobot based on the Gecko engine and thought about an own project where I want to implement something similar (but based on WebKit). :)

Well, still very interesting. :)
Adding on to your comment, a friend let me read through a beta copy of The Rspec Book last year. At the time, only the first couple chapters were written and it was lacking a lot of content. It was a great resource though, and I would highly recommend it. The final release is due "Soon", and ordering it now gives you access to the current revision of the Beta, which I hear is complete sans-editing. I'm holding out until I can buy a paper copy.

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/achbd/the-rspec-book

Your links to the RailsCasts screencasts are great also. PeepCode also has their Cucumber Screencast that is a little more detailed than RailsCasts.

http://peepcode.com/products/cucumber

These are all Ruby or Rails specific. Cucumber itself is a DSL to be used along with another language, and there are projects underway to implement Cucumber or Cucumber-like frameworks for other languages like Python, Java and .NET
I want time away from the computer altogether.
I think I'll take my iPhone 3G though, for GPS waypoints tracking, and occasional email and Wordpress blog updates.
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Proper Way to Start a Hardware Tech Company?
Hi, I have an idea for a computer hardware company and I need some help on the hardware part. So I assume I need to get a prototype and then I use the prototype to get more money to launch full production? I am planning on charging about $300 for the item so I figure I need $10,000 to get a few prototypes made. Would that be correct? Where can I find more in-depth information on this aspect? Do I just incorporate and then contact Flextronics with my requirements sheet? Do I need to find an engineer here in the states first and then contact Flextronics? I kinda think I have a good idea of all this if I was doing software but I am unsure over hardware.
Hire people who are smarter than you. It is the essential.

It could be stated as Hire a young passionate geek and make him feel special and comfortable. It is actually very cheap, compared to hiring an impotent 'certified professional'.
Nope, the main reason for the death of the product was the price tag. When announced, they said it would cost $199, when launched it actually cost $499. That's a pretty huge difference. I fail to see what difference the name on the box makes.
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It's also becoming an issue in the Python world, in job descriptions and among newbies, that Django == Python, as in questions like "how do I implement a sort in Django ?". Not helped by the fanbois who answer "just use Django" without qualification whenever somebody asks which web framework to use with Python.

While I'm happy that Django has helped promote Python, any monoculture is not only bad, but boring.
The more the others entrench themselves, the more foolish they will look when I crush them with MY media distribution system.
There was a very eye opening post on metafilter recently when Blizzard suggested all World of Warcraft players should be forced to use their real name.

A woman pointed out this was bad for the women (and girls) who play and listed off a shocking litany of the BS that any obviously female player needed to deal with.

Maybe the gender ratio in your game would have been better if this thing was more widely acknowledged and therefore dealt with.

edit for link: http://www.metafilter.com/93492/But-my-name-really-is-Deathb...

The whole thread is eye-opening, regarding female experiences in such arenas.
against or with?
After a few games (1 to 5), new formations stop showing up and other players stop moving.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100724 Firefox/3.6.8
Awesome! All those playing are not a waste of time as everyone has berated me.
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Rails 3 Beautiful Code
That is not true. Underemployment does not benefit anyone: it does not provide the employee with a living wage and results in an unproductive workforce. You can't change the fact that there is a minimum amount of money necessary for a reasonable existence, and going below it is just a means for temporary exploitation of workers, in some (although possibly farfetched) fashion similar to slavery.

Subsistence work with no possibility of improvement does not provide society with a net benefit, but only creates a class of permanent poverty marred by undernutrition and an inability escape the tactical issues of living paycheck to paycheck, and it's an especially important issue in a country such as the US where health benefits are few and time off is minimal.

If minimum wage is taken away, market force WILL drive down the wages, but there will be no social benefit, as it will only result in denying opportunities to a very large sector of society.
You say it's not 'as good as it sounds', it all depends on your perspective.

If you are earning $40k - $60k/year - which many young founders were likely earning before joining YC - even if after multiple dilutive rounds of financing you end up with 10% of the company, in a $20M exit....that's still $2M.

Sure, you can't buy Fiji....but you are literally going from a bank account with a few hundred/thousand/tens of thousands, to literally hundreds of thousands/millions.

That is VERY major the first time it happens.

I guess the point I am making is, the jump from having $10K in the bank to $1M in the bank, is SOOOO much bigger than from $1M to $100M - because it impacts your life much more.
It's back up. From the site: "If you've arrived here from yardoc.org/docs or rdoc.info, don't be alarmed. We've finally merged the two sites just like we said we'd do, And we made sure none of your project URLs were harmed."

Excellent! I think one of the biggest wins of rails 3 is the partial undoing of fragmentation that the community was going through. Wins all over the place.
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That would be quite ballsy on the part of the client. There's too many variables that aren't mentioned in your hypothetical situation to make a case. If a client came out with an idea and proposed hiring me for it and seemed too clueless to give me much else for input then I would probably decline the project. I just wouldn't trust this person to not flake out on me at some point and cause a bunch of headaches for me. I'm busy enough as a contractor that I wouldn't need to take on something like this and an important part of contract development is knowing when to say no.
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This has the potential to reach many more computers than *@home.

Great idea, great execution!
Thanking you kindly sir.
I really dread the prospect of annoying low quality ads in the form of lower thirds or pop-up video style overlays that these platforms will enable. If the ads were relevant to my interests I might be more tolerant but I have one AdMob based app that constantly displays a horrible ad for what appears to be a welfare scam targeted at black women. I have no clue why they'd be serving me this ad. I can't even imagine how horrible it would be as a video ad with public access quality production and jacked up audio volume levels blaring at me unexpectedly. I hope Google ups their quality control and sets some sane limits or we might end up with something even worse than current TV advertising.
I thought it was in exceedingly poor taste and was going to make the same comment.
I would suggest making the "Most recent 20 edits" section grow down instead of growing up (i.e. insert the new edits at the top of the list).
I'm sorry. Why do we care about such article?
Thanks a lot for the inputs. I will find out tutorials about C#. I hope I can master it easily.
An example: Enlive for Clojure. This is a really awesome technique.
Hmm... seems like (although this guy seems pretty technical) he's also been jaded by a few specific edge cases and made generalized decisions based on those edge cases that prevented him from finding a proper solution to the problem. (This sentence is full of fail, but that's how it streamed out of my head, sorry in advance)

I'd call him a "noob" in my circle of friends. A lot of people will tell you "you can't do this and that and the other with X, Y, or Z platform" when the truth is, you can.

I was immediately turned off when he said that Leopard was a step backwards in the OS X world. I've never heard something so absurd in my entire life. Every OS that Apple has released has become exceptionally better each and every time. I'd hate my life if I was stuck on an old PPC Tiger machine.
Facebook misusing user names + photographs to promote their services.
Well, maybe. Part of the fun for me was the discovery that it was other people with whom I was playing.
I was about to give up and call it "boring" until I read this comment!
There is this running gag where I use an ipad on a train and messages get garbled. Sorry, but its too funny and too late to correct. Try typing "templating" on an iPad, it will complain.

The correction is, of ourselves, "this kind of templating is being eschewed by other, newer techniques." Enlive by cgrand is the example I like to mention.
(some of the stars got stripped by HN so the above won't work)

Try putting a couple of spaces in front of your code line, like this:

cat file | perl -p -e "s/.*from ([0-9\.]+).*/\1/g"

See http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Edit: for simple regexes, sed works well, too, and probably loads slightly faster than perl.
He's not being "picky" though, he's complaining legitimately about things which are supposed to work, or work reliably (or predictably), and don't, despite being built by huge companies with the resources to make them work right.

I can't say much more about this, because the whole subject gets my blood boiling too quickly for me to make much sense. I'll just say that I really wish I could tie some of you guys to a chair, in a room with me, while I try to coach one of my clients through using their new computer. (Like the older couple that made the switch from WebTV to a Mac last week ... that was an adventure.) For example, if my clients are anything to go by, there are huge numbers of people who are afraid of updating their software, ever. That is a problem!

Unrelated: hey cool, saundby is right around the corner from me. I'm in Grass Valley. I run up to Colfax Max for burgers and shakes all the time. Neat!
> It seems like Nvidia would have less of an image problem if the Teslas were the same performance and have more RAM and have ECC.

That might be hard when going for reliability. It's a bit like overclocking your CPU, you can do it, but it's outside of the warranty. In this case the overclockers are the third party board manufacturers that are trying to get an advantage over their competitors that they can paste on the box so that in the store when comparing two boxes the customer will pick theirs.

> (Also, the value of ECC is diminished if a Tesla is over 3x the price of a GeForce, because then you can run three times and vote.)

That's not really true. The majority of the situations where the Tesla boards are used you'll find multiple boards in one box already. The limiting factor here is how many boards you can pack in to a system, more = better. So if you'd use the 'voting' principle you'd be wasting tons of power, rackspace and host computers in order to offset the price of the ECC, not just the two extra cards.
Besides whatever else you choose to do: get in the best shape of your life.
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>What is unique about programming as a practice that make it unsuitable for professional beyond a certain age?

I'm not sure. I've worked with several /really good/ old guys. Even with this virtualization and 'cloud' stuff, a lot of *NIX knowledge that was relevant in the 70s is still relevant now. It's just the hairball of bash scripts you used to need to manage many servers at once has become more standardized. You still need guys who actually understand what is going on.

For all positions, and /especially/ technical positions, I think government workers tend do be older than private sector workers... it makes sense, as the way pension pays out means that you get better pension contributions from your later years of work, and the same goes for healthcare.

Really, for old folks, the private sector can't (or won't) touch those kinds of benefits. I think the thing of it is, the private sector will pay more for youngsters (that is, if you don't care about risk) while the public sector will pay more for old folks, so it doesn't surprise me that you don't see many old programmers in the private sector.

All of my parents work for the government; my stepfather as a .net programmer(retired.) There were years where I was making more than them, but their ending salaries were pretty comfortable, and upon retirement, they get free health insurance /and/ a very significant percentage of that salary for the rest of their lives.

I don't have the temperament for government work, but really, as you get older, if your choice is individual contributor work in the private sector vs. individual contributor work in the public sector, staying in the private sector past the age of 45 or so is just plain irrational.

I've thought long and hard about this, and the idea is vaguely terrifying. I told myself that if my business wasn't supporting me by the time I was 30, I'd start preparing for public sector employment. I'll be 30 this October, and so far, it looks like I've made it, but only just.

Because the public sector has such silly low starting wages for technical people, they don't have that much home-grown programming experience. An experienced private sector programmer is going to have a relatively easy time scoring a public sector job when it's time to settle down for his last 15-20 years before retirement; so I think what we see here is the natural inclination people have to seek out the highest paying jobs they can get.
I want a Home button because I lost my words!
Why the tail is helpful (not explained in the video): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080317171030.ht...
I'm not sure yet. I was thinking of maintaining it at as free service to provide advertising for my pay for products and any other products that I launch in the future.
> This axiomatically means, of course, that one cannot appropriate for one's own use and profit the subject matter of the venture and at the very least cannot do so without compensating the other partners for the value of what is being taken.

Is there a requirement for consent in such cases?
It's dead in the water as far as I can see. For one they didn't sell enough to make it interesting, second the lawsuit will likely cost more than it's worth to FG to continue. If they allow it to go to court it will cost them dearly and they still don't have a product.

The smart move would be to call it a day and cut the losses, Arrington may have a legal case but it seems like he's throwing good money after bad as well. The joojoo isn't going anywhere, the 'profits' are non-existent and there won't be any in the future.

Maybe he wants it back as part of a settlement so the project can be sold to a third party?
Hey it's not the companies that push this supposed innovation, it's the new crop of engineers wanting to create a hurdle for others to jump over. Some knowledge that they have exclusivity on. Engineers have been doing this since the dawn of time, but since you guys are so green you don't know that.

Most engineers (like every other profession and occupation) are mediocre. They look for job security in incompatibily. I once had a programming partner who refused to document his work. I asked why after pleading with him repeatedly to leave a trail behind him. "Job security." At another place, the programmers had a slogan "comments are for sissies." Same idea.

So if you take something like C and permute it slightly so that a C programmer doesn't have the skill, you now have something that makes you marketable over that person. You can snow the non-technical manager into believing that your older colleague can't cut it because he knows C and you know Javascript.

In this world of mediocrity there are a very small number of gems, people who work for the user, who strive to make their tech work better for people. That's a skill that develops over the years, you get better at it every decade, because you know more about people. When you're in your 20s you don't even have a clue about yourself.

And most of you commenting here are the mediocre kind of programmer (if you're programmers at all). The ones who are questioning the broad conclusions are the ones I'd want to work with, and I don't care how young or old they are. What I care about is if their minds are at work and if they can relate to other people as equals despite superficial differences like gender, race, age.
Windows should automatically scroll with the content (just like a real irc client would).
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This is great tech, but I'm worried it might set a precedent for rogue sites stealing my computing power/CPU cycles anytime I visit them.
All first world countries (and probably most developing countries) have a minimum wage, yet all the "homeless person found dead from ..." are from the US. In Western Europe most of the the "homeless" I see are actually bussed in from eastern Europe to pan handle.
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Hmm, it's an interesting point. I'm not sure how well it holds up for the historical examples, though. Plenty of people (like Mozart) did lots of things early, but plenty also did lots of things later. Is one the predominant mode? I'm not sure, really. Some examples of people who did their most world-class work in their 40s or later: Descartes' famous works were ages 41-48; Newton's Principia was at age 44; Darwin's magnum opus was at 50; Pasteur discovered pasteurization in his 40s, and did his important work on vaccination in his 50s; Fleming discovered penicillin when he was 47. Of course, there are many examples besides Mozart who did most of their work in their 20s or 30s as well, so a bunch of examples don't really settle it in either direction.
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> I'd hate my life if I was stuck on an old PPC Tiger machine

I have one of those - youtube constantly reminds you to install a modern browser (eg Firefox, Chrome) but there's none working on this machine actually!
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I'm trying to understand. I think youtube beating google was due to network effects: youtube had enough content that it was hard to displace (it was actually more valuable.) Secondarily, it had mindshare (people knew about it.) Possibly, they "understood user behavior and preferences" better (strlen mentioned this intriguing one), and they used this to make it easier to use (slightly more valuable + massively more adoptable.)

Relentless focus on the above factors (content, mindshare, usability) helped them win - have I missed any?
Not a high quality review, more like a few micro rants and tunnel vision comments about various features. Summary: he generally wasn't impressed by either Windows 7 or Snow Leopard, though ranted a bit more about the latter.
Paul, Jason is right, because it happen to a company I was involved with a few years ago. Facebook was in it's early days (I am trying to be as vague here as possible because I do not want to give away who was involved), and they had a problem to solve that was getting worse as they grew quickly. This company had a solution - it had been developed by a small, but smart, team over a relatively short period of time (9-12 months) and was proven to work well with this companies customers.

Facebook called in a meeting with this company, and talked to them a lot about acquiring the company for Facebook stock. They offered the staff roles within Facebook, and the negotiations were well advanced. During due diligence, one of the tech guys sat down with one of the Facebook execs/engineers and described how the system worked, how some features were implemented and ideas they had for future features.

Not long after Facebook cut off all contact, ended up developing their own solution, ended up implementing a lot of these features, and ended up shafting this company. It is a shame that Facebook is so narrow in their thinking, because the execs at this company really could have helped Facebook avoid some of the troubles they had.
The biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make
Heh, neat, looks like something @shazow and I made for Twitter geolocated tweets: http://tweography.com

That said — forming a network on Twitter isn't that hard. Start posting things that are interesting, and follow relevant accounts. Build your account up enough, acquire followers, and that can be step one to getting the word out.

There must also be tons of websites devoted to FB apps: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
- Submit to any directory sites, as comments under relevant articles, etc.

Simply relying on word of mouth isn't going to work — you got to hustle and get the word out yourself. Also, success isn't overnight, nor guaranteed.