skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heh, I was wondering why I was getting a bunch of traffic on that article all of a sudden. (My article's the top result on that query.)

That said, though, he pays minimum wage for work that for all effective purposes requires a college degree. And he stands behind that as if it's sound policy. (See here, though I'm sure it's posted elsewhere in this thread: http://www.benhuh.com/2010/02/02/are-you-what-you-earn-compe... )

Let's be clear: It's nowhere near as bad as what sites like Examiner.com and Demand Media do. If anything, it's part of a bad, disturbing trend.

EDIT to be a bit more evenhanded
The kernel license has an explicit exception to the GPL for user programs: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING
(I've been censored by the majority, or at least some people. My first comment fine, it was hyperbole but I like flair and more importantly I stand by my opinion on the issue and I think a quick perusal through business headlines will bear me out. But my approach was strong, I felt my reaction matched the outrageousness of the OP's comment, but I may have been wrong about that, I am certainly looking at that possibility.

(But for the subsequent comments which I made I ask you to consider whether this system is working when it blocks actual dissenting opinion rather than trolling which this most certainly is not. Certainly people may not like the opinions and my dissent from what may be more widespread views, but as I understand that's not the purpose of this rating system.)
Twitter is great to share links and short messages/news. It is not intended to be used as a conversation tool or long comments. Use it you feel the need for it, or don't.
I am glad Avi helped you figure out a good name.

About editing: I think you can get away with deleting the tweet and reposting it. Not sure you can remove it entirely, as people can retweet you or favorite your tweet if you are not fast enough.
I was more thinking along the lines of, "Oh yeah, I've read them all. Wait, MIX? What's that?"

I've seen several equally dense, informative CS books (such as Dick Grune's _Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide_), but Knuth has a specific sort of cachet among xkcd-quoting geek hipsters, so people namedropping him, make a pretense of having read them all the way through, etc.
There seem to be implementations, such as http://www.gnu.org/software/mdk/manual/mdk.html . One person's "unimplemented instruction set architecture" is another's "virtual machine".
You really did work at CN, given that accent/logic.

restating the hypothesis == proof. I love it.
The iPad is a tool like a torx screwdriver -- when you need to do something specific then it's awesome. (Perhaps even a multi-screw set -- when you load up different apps)

A computer is a tool that can make other tools.
IE still has 60% market share, and it's holding steady. IE9 is going to be one of the most important products Microsoft ever ships. It will be compatible enough with web standards, and offer enough performance, that it should allow developers to build more sophisticated apps based on open standards. Html5, css3 and fast Javascript will soon be a given.
It's also interesting how one of your first tweets was that you made a mistake and you wanted to edit your tweet. I get that all the time, and I wish Twitter included an 'edit within the first 60 secs' feature.
It might not be hard for him to relocate to Uruguay; he lives here in Buenos Aires. But he might have other problems that are at the root of being a COBOL programmer (e.g. lack of interest in new things, lack of aptitude for programming, I have no idea) and he was about a month away from retiring anyway.
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How did the experience working in a tech startup help you?
I am asking this from the perspective of working as a Software Engineer in a startup, and not as a founder. Did it help opening doors to opportunities in other companies? How did it help you professionally?Did you jump startups? Joined a bigger company later on?
Somalia. Greetings from the other side :-)

[Edit: oh, this is about where you are? I am representin' Packerland.]
I think the author chose a poor title for the article. The continuing shrinkage of Blockbuster is just a continuing reinforcement of the fact that DVD sales and rentals will decrease as digital downloads and streaming continue their growth. If anything this is confirmation that the end is a lot closer than the begining.
Once again we see Steve's intensity and vision and single-mindedness.

Bill: Who cares?

Steve: Round rectangles.

Bill: Not important.

Steve: Round rectangles.

Bill: They're impossible.

Steve: Round rectangles.

Bill: Okay I'll try to figure out how to do them.

Steve: Okay now send in that Andy guy about that Switcher thing. And bring my checkbook.
"The first rule about [WePay] is you don't talk about [WePay]." <sucker punch> Take that.

In Rich's blog, he has the fight part right. You have to fight for what you want and what you believe in. True entrepreneurs know this, because if you don't fight for it, what you get in return is near nothing, or zilch. You get railroaded and sidetracked.
I am at Cornell, actually I just started, There is a good grad level entrepreneurship course at the Management school, also you can enroll for software engineering course, where you work on delivering a product for a startup/other clients. Also you own the product or some share in resulting enterprise if it is a startup.

This guy http://www.stephenpurpura.com/site/Welcome.html
is T.A for the software Engg. course is also an ex-Microsoft guy who was Product Manager for Windows XP.

http://www.seamlessreceipts.com/about was founded as result of the Software Engg. course and it has known to have received 225K in funding.

Also Prof. Claire Cardie has her own startup in area of sentiment detection in texts.

If you are a senior then you can still enroll in the Software Engg. course, its a 5K level course though.

Here is the link to the course: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs5150/2010fa/
You will get far less interesting answers that way, given how we all tend to gravitate towards a few countries, and Imperial San Francisco ;-)
Nice. Talk about a Yogi Bera-ism!
This article was definitely informative and I say keep these coming.

But I agree... Data, data, data! Or keep your political bias out of here!
It makes sense from the perspective of a mutually-beneficial open source deal: you link against my open software, so you open yours too.

also, from: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

> The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License. But first, please read <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html>.
We're luck that Steve didn't see dead people otherwise to this day our Macs would be full of ghosts.
If Larry can, why Paul cannot? ^_^
But did Bill get 6 men's worth of pay? If the answer is no let that be a lesson to all super-talented/productive hackers out there whether you should strike it out on your man or work for The Man.
Since the technique relies in part on the solubility of N2O in water, I'd be surprised to find out that cavitation worked well in oil.
Luxury! (Scottish accent)

I remember 48KB of memory and 4 MHz, no lowercase, no multi-tasking, only 40 columns text width, the keys were almost painfully hard to press down and you had to pay for all documentation, what little of it anywhere you could find.
I've had that happen a lot. Something I thought would be very hard turned out to be fairly easy. And vice versa. Happened more when I was younger though. I think with time and experience one's prediction ability evens out a bit.
Why is this getting upvoted? You're wrong. Spec-compliant jvms get a patent grant. Dalvik isn't spec-compliant, so it doesn't get the grant.
He also offered to buy my reasonably successful blog for $200. True story.
This reminds me of the demise of the brick and mortar chain Egghead Software, which was coincidentally adjacent to the Blockbuster in the town where I grew up. I realize it's not exactly the same because it's not like broadband/streaming/Netflix killed Egghead; however, Egghead and its contemporaries were the only way, at one point, to really see (and salivate over) the latest and greatest software titles. How many standalone software stores do you see these days?

Definitely, the days of the blue-chip brick and mortar movie rental operations are over. Blockbuster has attempted to enter the RedBox kiosk market.. but IMHO, it's too little, too late. Even that market has a very limited life expectancy.
I think you might be too wise and experienced for that </sarcasm>
Maybe it's a national pride thing as well, since OCaml was developed at INRIA.
I prefer the horse's mouth.
Sure I've seen it too, but I'm referring to trends here.
Yes - everything will act as if that stack frame was heap-allocated and still exists* . You can modify the value(s), define multiple functions sharing the same variable bindings, etc. A lot of common language features (such as conventional objects) can be implemented as syntactic sugar on top of closures. (Same with continuations.)

* Compilers/interpreters are free to do optimizations that won't affect results, like only heap-allocating the closures that escape their scope.
1. A certain amount of group think -- CS at Cornell seems to focus a lot more on theory/research. I know this is the case at any reputable CS school but the top CS students either aim to go get their PhDs and pursue the most abstract research or go work for an IBM/Accenture (in my experience, a lot more people opt for MS over Google and I know of a handful at FB)

Thats is purely beacuse MS hires more people every year. You can obtain good stats from this page:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/ugrad/cscareers/PlacementReport/in... [for undergrad]

For Masters students as well as undergrads:
http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/student-services/engineer...

People go in all sort of companies from Zynga to Google to Microsoft to NetApp and to exotic trading companies such as Black Rock and D. E. Shaw .
Actually, this is one interesting spot that netbooks fill in the PC ecosystem as well. I use Kindle for PC all the time on mine, but then can still write blog posts, touchup images, etc. I'm not saying it's better or worse than an iPad, but it is filling a unique need, and I'm amazed how much different a computer feels when you can carry it around so easily (10 in. screen and <1kg) and still use it for a whole day. It's the promise of laptops, portable computing, fulfilled. And yes, it's way more a content consumption device, even though it's a PC. So there :)
Defined benefits should be outlawed.

If mutual funds and hedge funds are not permitted to guarantee returns, then neither should pension funds.
I wasn't talking about extracting in oil, but extracting oil-soluble flavors: clove, mint, vanilla, rosemary, cardamom, garlic, bacon, coffee, capsaicin, etc. Cream and vodka both have plenty of water.

I haven't tried cavitation (yet!), but I've done extraction by slower processes.
I agree that a demo website is the most helpful. If your product requires data to illustrate its usefulness/features, do preload some data as well as provide a stage-by-stage walkthrough (e.g. try doing A, click B to do C, etc.). The only drawback is that a demo might be more time-consuming, resulting in sign-up friction. As an alternative to the demo, I have a 30-second video with screencasts baked in it. Also, never require sign-up information just to try a demo. If they're really interested, they would go for the trial, during which you can start capturing your leads.

Personally, I find screenshots rather unhelpful and, to some extent, fake. Sometimes it feels like vaporware. The best remedy to that sort of impression is to give a live demo.
Singapore and Malaysia, anyone?
Knuth still seems hopeful, so we might as well join him.
My father, who worked in real estate, predicted the demise of Blockbuster when I was a little kid. In his opinion, they habitually overpaid for property which did not advance their interests. "You have to understand, large chains are real estate investment firms which run a side business in movies, burgers, banking, etc."

The opposite is Walgreens and Starbucks, incidentally.
Please don't use CN as shorthand in these comments as it's short for both Conde Nast and Cheezburger Network.

- on behalf of the Society for the Elimination of Ambiguity.
Though I hope/suspect @paulg was merely inactive/unused rather than yanked away from an active user. It would be alarming if Twitter got into the latter (except for considered trademark issues, of course).
I was an early user of Angstro, excellent product and team. I discovered tons of interesting & relevant content via Angstro, and Rohit and his team were quick to implement interesting features.

Great acquisition for Google.
Considering that Bebo just got bought for ~10M, it wouldn't surprise me to see CN do something similar. If someone could buy Reddit for 5-8M then it would be a pretty good deal at that price. There are plenty of ways to monetize the site, there are just a few pieces that are missing before that can really happen.
In St. Louis, I've seen Walgreens shut down one store and open another one literally across the street, at a slightly better location (easier to get into, easier to see coming from both directions on the street).
Already done that a while ago, but still find them narrow and sometimes boring. There are tons of repost and common media hype I really want to get rid of.
The Daily What is just as much the horse's mouth as Ben's blog. The Daily What is a Cheezburger Network property.
I just saw a line of 7-8 in front of a redbox at the grocery store by my house, and _right next to it_ the blockbuster bluebox was sitting idle. The people have spoken.
It really shows that you didn't prepare for the interview. If its casual or business casual and you should up in a suit, you look like an ass. Besides, who codes in a suit and tie all day?
They have very, very sharp operators who can tell you the difference in expected value of three different ways to cut the egress from a particular road, which is something you have to debate with government traffic planners.
Also Flash 11 is about to support 3D and it looks serious

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20009940-264.html

Unity3D is at a turning point.
"But that list of links is the reason why ultimately I have decided to spend my time in a different editor."

Actually most of the functionalities I mentioned are available out-of-the-box. Ediff just works. Version control just works. I sent a long list of links so people could have a better idea how these features work. It's true, though, that emacs doesn't have everything out-of-the-box and you need to download and install and configure things, but the same is true for every single editor and IDE out there.
Yes -- just like they would diluted in the next round of investment. (And really, employees working for sub-market salaries in exchange for stock options are just another type of investor.)

But the founders get diluted too. In the no-pool case, the founders have 70% of the company post-investment, whereas in the 20%-pool case, the founders have 62.5% and get diluted down to 50% as the pool is handed out.
Startups in 137 chars
Because a marketing/business driven product has never failed before...

Also wasn't this part of the newer Google that looked better and was primarily more product/marketing/suits driven like Buzz?

If it was engineering culture that killed Wave, engineers are ok with failing to make something better or to analyze it. Later perfecting it for a solid product/system.

I believe the product failed in the way they released it and that Google may have found the limit for how connected people want to be. Cool as it was, Wave seemed exhausting and we don't need to see people type each letter.

Waves happen naturally on the web, twitter, facebook etc. Google hurried the response to that. I do believe many components will be reused on Google.me. Also I wonder if they have any issue with GWT now that they are being sued for Java licensing on Android.
Ooshirts t-shirt printing
You probably don't want to partner with someone who's unlikely to stick around when your startup hits a low point. If you've found someone competent and reliable (even for a couple of hours a day), that's already better for you than someone who works long hours but will ditch you at the first sign of a better opportunity. If your cofounder doesn't seem to care, then you're in trouble.
I know at some point links to twitter updates were killed right away on hackernews.

Posted this one to see what'll happen when it's a tweet from the bigwigs :)
I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.
http://venturehacks.com/articles/option-pool-shuffle

...and everything else they write!
Princeton's the same way. Tremendous amount of engineering talent and we even benefit from relative proximity to New York, and yet the prevailing campus culture pushes students towards finance and consulting.

How can that culture change? I can't say for sure, but my hypothesis is that a hacker culture already exists at Princeton; it's just hidden and untapped. At the very least these two things could help a university with an untapped hacker culture:

1. a hacker house, or at least some defined space to code along like-minded kids, even if that is nothing more than a dorm room.

2. student-driven cs curriculum. Princeton's CS program like Cornell's (i'm taking your word for it) is heavily theory based. There is i believe only one course on web development. In other departments, students not infrequently campaign for new classes. I wonder what effect an iphone development class (for the sake of an example) would have on the campus culture?
From the US, currently in Thailand (heading to Australia)
I tried wrapping my head around Clojure but I just couldn't. I'm currently diving into Scala and finding it much easier to get into coming from an OOP background (I'm a Java developer by day and a Rails/Objective-C developer by night).
If he truly believes that advertising high wages leads to bad candidates, then why advertise wages at all? It seems to me that if you are offering wages that low, you will end up with a bunch of candidates who don't think very highly of their abilities. That isn't the sort of environment I would want to be a part of.

I, for one, wouldn't work for near minimum-wage, but that isn't because I have an inability to control my expenses [1] or I don't believe I could work my way from Jr. Developer to Sr. Developer. I wouldn't work for that because I expect my employer to respect me and my abilities, and an offer that low would be, quite frankly, an insult. I've invested a lot of time and effort to get to where I am, and I expect any potential employer to recognize that. If they didn't recognize that, why hire me at all?

[1]: I could roughly continue living my life at the wages he posted ($8.55-$10/hr).
Reddit responded to the prop 19 issue far more quickly than digg responded to the 09 f9 issue, mind.
Buying an SSD is absolutely excusable, just buy the smallest one you can get away with and keep your machine very clean/small. I'm living comfortably with 40GB right now, as all of my media (music, movies, whatever) is on my iMac.
It gave me a lot of ideas on what not to do.

...most of which I did anyway when I finally did start my own software company. Some lessons have to be learned by doing, not by observing.
No Germany? Or Sweden?
Also, DVDFlix is a terrible, terrible name.
How Not To Raise Money
I am from (and in ) Egypt!
Developers.Mozilla.Org totally revamped
I think of the problem of "learning programming" in terms of basic conceptual difficulty. Programming is difficult mainly because of "how to build algorithm," "how to design data structure" type problems. The syntax and vocab of a programming language are there mainly to illuminate concepts that keep coming up over and over in your domain, and protect you from errors.

But to solve the conceptual problems, you have to "get the picture" about various models of data organization and how they might relate to each other. If, for example, you don't know how a list works or its practical utility, you're going to get stuck at a very low level of understanding of how the infrastructure of the program might be implemented. Similarly, when you are writing software for some class of end-user(e.g. "power users" who write bash scripts daily vs. retired grandmas that are scared of any error message or complex feature) you have to design an interface around _their_ most likely mental model, so that they can get the job done quickly.

And, of course, when one programmer reviews another's code, or a programmer reviews their own code years later, the initial reaction is always that it looks ugly because it inevitably uses a thought process different from their current one.
> I've been censored

No, you haven't. Yes, your comment has been downvoted on HN but that's not censorship.
And his point was basically that any VM implementing any bytecode language might very well violate the patents in question.

Anyway, Dalvik does not even claim to execute Java bytecode, but its own language. Does that not mean that it is in pretty much the same legal footing as, say, the Python bytecode interpreter?

And there exists plenty of prior art on the VM, all the way back to 1966 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine ), so I am not so easily convinced that the patent is going to survive the trial.
I would have loved if you landed him @pgtips.
Startups in 137 chars: Make something someone specific needs, launch fast, let users show you what to change, change it, repeat last two.

More like these please.
you could probably make a cool demo just using camtasia. there's a 30-day free trial. it's a pretty good combination of screencast, voice, effects / production, text and is good for a first version. not sure what the best tool is..
I understand that the University of Alaska has rules against hanging meat out dorm room windows.
Twitter is starting to take back and re-release inactive accounts. You can sign up to be notified when the ones you want are made public via Tweetclaims (not my startup, but I did write about them).
India is on the list
My general point was that one can make a mathematical model that takes into account the historical value of the ambient C-14 to C-12 ratio, plus the historical value of the C-14 decay rate.

C-14 dating isn't used for dating recently-dead things, but not for the reason you suggest. The real reason is that the half-life of C-14 is about 5730 years. Not much decay happens in 200 years, and the little that does happen is difficult to sort out from measurement errors.

Other techniques are used for dating things that died recently. Watch CSI for some clues :D
Ask HN: experience certificate or reference letter samples needed urgently!
Hi guys..

I need a sample of experience certificate.. work experience certificate from an American company.. or a reference letter sample. I need it urgently!

I just need the structure.. I am from Egypt, and there is a great difference between the American style and Egyptian style.. :D

I hope that I asked at the proper place. :)
Thank you so much in advance..
Look, we can sit here and argue semantics or we can get out a dictionary. I did, did you? How about responding to my question rather than something inaccurate.
under pressure, gas penetrates the cells, then forms bubbles to disrupt the cells when the pressure is suddenly released

When diving we call this the bends, and it is usually something to avoid. Nice to see it used with a more pleasant outcome :)