skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Programming will be easy when problem solving is easy.

An especially hard part is identifying where the problems actually lie. The average person "solves" a problem by addressing only the best case scenario and lacks the pessimism and pervading sense of doom that enables programmers to figure out in advance, and account for, all the ways in which every little thing will go wrong.
Apart from the semantic goofiness, how is this worse than the landlords simply raising the rent every year (which is clearly not unethical)?
Except when you're a buck novice it can be very intimidating and difficult to make a contribution among people who know WAY more than you. It's unfortunately very common for expert programmers to treat novices with disdain, and this can be extremely discouraging.

I think there's a lot to be said for practicing your skills on your own so that you have a reasonable level of practice before trying to contribute to other projects.
Alexandre Tharaud's recording is good too:
http://www.amazon.com/Chopin-Pr%C3%A9ludes-Op-28/dp/B0012X2C...

The preludes seem to me to prefigure jazz in some passages.
Don't rule out the embedded world either. Lots of gray hair there.
one of the best tutorials on logs i've ever come accross.thanks a million!!!!
please look into my partial fraction problems when you get the time.so far i've been able to solve a couple of them but the above mentioned one is bothering me a lot.
Why after - vote out everyone who voted for this crap.
"a) Apple's kernel is open source: having used GPL would not have made any difference here"

Except for a necessary parts to make it useful. From someone close to the source (the last paragraph pretty much wraps it up):

http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/writing/oshistory.html

"b) The other BSDs have openly stated that Apple contributed back and thanked them for it."

Yes, see the 
huge amount of code
 that Apple contributed to the NetBSD kernel:

http://nxr.netbsd.org/source/search?q=apple&project=/src...

"Finally and I think the most important thing, is to ask: had those technologies been GPLed, [...], or simply have refused to use that code?"

Yes, who would use (L)GPL code in their systems?

$ gcc -v
gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)
$ make -v
GNU Make 3.81
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
[...]
This program built for i386-apple-darwin10.0
$ troff -v
GNU troff (groff) version 1.19.2

It's true that LLVM and Webkit (based on KHTML, which was LGPL) are exceptions. However, it remains to be seen what they contribute back to LLVM in the future. Probably just those bits that will give them the tools edge.
I wonder how this will affect next rounds applicants. I would expect them to get skewed significantly to the facebook add-on category.
Government regulation is what creates most barriers to entry. In general, the most unethical industries and professions are those that are most tied in to government in the first place. Especially where government provides the barriers to entry - professional and occupational licensing being just the tip of the iceberg.
You're right. I feel bad now. Adding LOL-TL;DR.
I figured that because between June and July, IE marketcshare increased by .4%

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...
Google Reader now showing all-time read counts
Mercurial and Django both have some decent documentation. You may email a maintainer and ask for a simple bug or feature to get started on.
I think it is also important to remember something else here. Guy Steele certainly had significant influence on Java, but he was far from the final decision maker. I'm sure there are tons of things he would have wished Java to have (or not have) but they weren't his call to make. If anything people should be grateful that he was involved at all, since Java would probably have been a lot worse off it he hadn't been.

And to top it off, Guy seems to have that rare combination of being simultaneously super smart and reasonably humble. I have never read anything he's written or listened to any talk he's given where I was not greatly impressed by him and what he had to say.

I don't think I've ever seen him comment on Hacker News. I wish we could get him to comment regularly here, as his knowledge and insight would be of great value.
'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009 [video]
10 Must-have Products for Designers
Well since it’s Friday and everybody’s happy I thought we should get even more reasons to be cheerful so we invited Neil of Dennis and McGregor (one of our newest advertisers) to recommend us some insanely cool items to offer as a gift to a designhead.
> It's not uncommon to have reasonably long conversations where you think you're communicating, only to find out that your conversations were entirely parallel.

I suspect this is not unique to japanese. I bet this happens a lot in all languages. Especially during arguments.
Further, 21 items that cost $55.1 total $1157.1000000000001
In college, my music history teacher always told us that "every instrumentalist harbors a secret desire to be a singer". (It was always startling when he said this-- he was the school's orchestra conductor and a semi-famous Cellist, and was often dismissive of singers as "lazy musicians").

More than any other composer (at least for piano), Chopin seems most gifted in his ability to write music that, for all intents and purposes, is singing with the piano.
Learning to write a compiler
http://billmebob.com/ has been around for a while and seems to work fine for me. You need to find and implement a reason for me to switch, but I like what you have so far!
You can sorta get what he's asking for with a bash feature.
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/devref1.html#DEVTCP
Some software companies I know are quite unable to measure results, let alone effort.
Joining the club, in Python:

[e for e in employees if e.isPartTime()]

You can even push it further:

[e for e in employees if e.isPartTime() or e.lazy() or e.havePassiveIncomeAlready()]

and further:

[e for e in employees if e.isPartTime() or e.lazy() or e.havePassiveIncomeAlready() or e in [exec for exec in BoardofDirector.all() if exec.haveTooManyPortfolio()]]

Above is your friendly neighborhood List Comprehension available since Jython 2.0
No, it doesn't. I've given you the rules, and I've pointed you at two web pages that explain the rules and work through some examples. You seem to keep wanting me to just give you the answers without showing me any working for yourself.

This is not the medium for teaching you about the basic, basic, basic rules of elementary algebra. There are loads of tutorials on the web - try using Google to search for tutorials on logarithms.

When you tell me what you've searched for, and what the first rules are that they give you, then I'll start helping again.
The first issue is a programming language problem, not an OS problem. His language of choice exposes the direct low-level API, which is not usually what application-level programmers want.

A few library functions, and the problem is solved without FUSE or a performance impact. And it's still portable to everywhere.
It was the very, very first one I found with a Google search for "logarithm tutorial".

Have you not tried searching for tutorials?
You can do a lot of weird stuff, but it's not the right place for that. Just use Template Haskell.
I'd sue in a minute if someone tried this []. Seriously. They will not be delivering the area you pay for.

[] Well ok, I would measure the area myself to find that the area actually differed from what I was paying for.
How crazy are you feeling today? - Steve Jobs Stylie
What's not worse about it?

If a landlord raises the rent on a 400 square foot space, they're simply asking more money for it the same space. If a tenant wants to pay that price for 400 square feet, that's his choice.

On the other hand, if the landlord claims it's 420 square feet, no matter how much he charges per square foot, the tenant is paying for something that simply doesn't exist.
By the way, this is not just happening in Silicon Valley. It's been very hard for people to find good Ruby on Rails developers over here in Boston.
lolwut? who youre describing is just a really brilliant person, not an "awesome coder"
Some of us did. As a contractor, you certainly can earn a significant multiple of the hourly rate you would make as an employee in most companies. If you set up your own business and build your own stuff, then you have almost astronomical potential: the software development business has low barriers to entry, and the right idea can scale from a small team to serving thousands or millions of customers.

However, it's not as simple as that: you absolutely must have a broader set of skills to work effectively in these ways. There are many management and communication skills that you wouldn't need much working in a technical role as an employee that are quite simply essential to working independently, and more still if it's not just your own work to be organised but a whole team/company. Also, you are operating without the safety net that being an employee provides: you typically bear all of the risk if you're on a high-margin fixed-price contract that overruns by a year, or if you put your own money into starting a company and your idea just doesn't work out.
Further, the validation for the price field lets you type in prices like "1.2.3.4", which is confusingly invalid.

Who needs tests when you have HN!
I find their blogs to be somewhat more filled with these off-the-cuff kinds of articles and stats than their actual magazine is, though ymmv.

Though it does raise a question: is there a better free-market-oriented magazine without going all the way to a libertarian one like Reason? I've found overall the Economist to be a bit better than the WSJ, which seems to cherry-pick its facts and slant its infographics a lot more, especially on the editorial page (to the point where its data and charts sometimes verge on outright dishonesty).
Random anecdote: Back in 2002 I spent a week in a village in rural Haiti trying to get an electric generator set up. We had car trouble between villages and our resident mechanic was fixing it on the side of the road, when a woman from a small hut came out and asked us if we wanted Coca Cola. She sold us bottles of Coke kept cool in a hole with a tarp over it. I've never looked at the Coke brand the same way since.
It is worse because it involves deceit.
reminds me of one of my favorite short stories - The Distinguished Stranger (Robert Louis Stevenson) http://www.authorama.com/fables-12.html
Can any of them reliably find SQL injection, write a fuzzer, or spot an integer overflow? I'll pay you multiple thousands of dollars to refer them to me.

If not, re-read Patrick's comment with that in mind.
What you are describing is a finishing school for the rich, which is what higher education used to be, a long time ago. That is no longer true.

If you want a white collar job in the US, you must go to college. Yes, there are some outliers, but having a degree is damn close to a hard requirement.

Pretending that is no longer true and indulging the liberal arts fantasy just makes the problem worse. There are too many kids who come out of college with debt and a degree in not having people take them seriously.
Think of facebook as a service - using it for identity and also possibly your social network. A lot of startups have a social component and having an easy facebook integration means no longer implementing it from scratch.

However, it does not mean that the startups will be skewed towards facebook (i.e. are glorified facebook apps). Rather, I see them as using facebook the same way as companies use blogs, messaging, message boards, maybe even a billing system (if facebook introduces one).

If the integration is tight and this happens on a large scale, however, it does mean that the balance is slightly against them being acquired by google!
fp math + money = Superman III
Do not, do not, do not use floating-point arithmetic for money.
I guess I just never met anybody who didn't understand the quote. To me it says: Think very hard about what to add, and think very hard about what to remove. Of course, I realize that those who take the quote literally are not going to think very hard about which features to remove, and I'll agree that you're more likely to succeed with a product that has lots of thoughtlessly added features, than one that has none. :)
Programming is hard because it involves a trade-off. Programming isn't really about solving a problem, it's about limiting options until the only ones left are what people want.

I spent a few months about a year ago re-writing a massive cobbled-together database to track training, testing, and readiness for a large number of people. It had to conform to a number of requirements, like one sub-group of people's grades were averaged, but people could belong to multiple sub-groups and sometimes overlapped.

A monthly report had to be generated from all of this data. The format of the report was set in stone, and was not designed with automation in mind.

I avoided hard-coding many things as much as possible, but eventually I found that the more flexible I made the program, the more difficult it was to use. At one point you almost had to be a programmer to tell my program what kind of output you wanted.

Ah ha! So there are problems, it seems, that are fundamentally complex; there is no right answer, you can either have a flexible, complex program that accounts for every possible scenario, or a hard-coded program that is simple to use but will break the minute something changes.

The same principle applies to computer languages, spreadsheets, databases, anything. They are "easier" because they remove options from you and make assumptions that you won't miss those options. The moment those assumptions are wrong, you need a programmer.
I doubt much will change.

I'm not sure why, but few people seem to remember that YC has (what appears to be) pretty much the exact same partnerships with Twitter[1] and JustinTV[2]. Both of these partnerships were announced, if I remember correctly, around this time last year as a part of the W09 applications. So far, I haven't seen any startups which have launched that take advantage of either partnership.

Given the seeming propensity of startups which leverage Facebook to get acquired, this could be a completely different ballgame though.

1. http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

2. http://ycombinator.com/rfs4.html
> I'm not sure that any company I've worked for, of any size, really got more value from its middle managers than from the senior technical people it keeps trying to turn into middle managers.

Firmly agree and I'll go a step further. I think the traditional org structure and traditional titles aren't well suited for emerging technologies.

Fact is, whoever is held responsible for succeeding/failing is going to get paid more. Being held responsible sucks and is hard.

I think a reasonable alternative would be smaller, largely decentralized teams that don't have traditional management, instead having two people they interface with who take over the traditional management roles - a logistics/supplies guy who checks what each team needs and makes sure they're equipped, and a planning/coordinating guy that makes sure the technical team has something sort of resembling a plan that fits in with the organization's grand strategy.

Team size would be 3 to 10 people or so, with one logistics/supplies guy and one planner/coordinating guy checking in with 5-10 teams at regular times and being on call during certain times if needed.

Something like that. As long as you've got a manager and he's held accountable for results, he'll have higher social status, be more neurotic, and expect to be paid more. I think moving to a supplies/logistics guy (similar to a servant manager type) and a planning/coordinating guy (strategist/diplomat/mediator) you could build an organization where engineers had more respect and authority and seniority, but things would be kept in check. There'd still be some friction between your planning/coordinate guy and technical people, which is natural, but ideally less so and there'd be more of a push for good engineers to lead a new team working on a new project than to become middle managers/planning guys. Largely different skillsets, engineering and planning/coordinating. Google Wave is a pretty good example of why you need a planning/coordinating guy and not just a pure engineering project, but engineers should have the most authority, social status, and prestige in a technology organization.
7 Ways To Ruin A Technological Revolution (Google Talk)
If you're managing your money reasonably well, and you're in your 30s, you probably have $15,000 in the bank in cash. I've never applied to YC because I've always had an order of magnitude more cash than YC typically invests.

People right out of college, or early in their careers who know they want to do a startup, and who haven't had the time to put aside this level of capital are the prime target for YC, and they are also likely to be younger.
I think he answered your question. Burn rate. YC does not give out a lot of money, and older founders probably burn through it too quickly to be successful.

It's kind of like that betting strategy where you double your bet every time you lose. If you have an infinite amount of money, you will always make your money back. If you have a finite amount of money, well... you lose everything very quickly.

Similarly, older founders may do well, but not before the money runs out.

(I had a coworker who was talking about a friends startup. Millions of dollars worth of initial funding for a project that's very similar to something YC invested in. If your $3000 investment fails, it's not a big deal. If your $30,000,000 investment fails, you become very unhappy. Since most startups fail...)
My understanding is that most people do not apply to YC for the money
Some companies or managers keep track of LOC, bugs/loc, commits, or even screen/keyboard activity...

If it is not automated, the managers usually keep a mental note.
Maybe you expect payment in IP addresses.
Turning universities completely into vocational schools seems like it'd have a number of downsides though. The idea that students should be well-rounded and that it's good for society for educated people to have some basic core knowledge isn't only a "liberal arts fantasy", but also a "science fantasy". If you're training people strictly vocationally, not only humanities cores, but also science cores should go, or at least both should be greatly cut down to only those students who specifically need a particular class for their future careers (e.g. maybe CE students will still take intro physics as a prereq for semiconductor physics, but CS students would no longer take Physics 101, or Bio 101, or Chem 101, or any math classes not strictly needed for their CS training, etc.). If you wanted to be really hardcore about it, you could even assess classes based on their predictive earnings power, so if Physics 101 doesn't produce measurable gains in its graduates' earning power within 10 years, axe it.
"Government regulation is what creates most barriers to entry."

Maybe the government regulation as practised by cronyist goverments. Seriously, I don't think that a hypothetical government enforcing standards for square feet measurement would create a huge barrier to entry into the property business.
There are not problem customers, just problems.

I think it's best to avoid beginning working with a client if you don't think you'll have an enjoyable, productive relationship. If you start having problems with an existing client, the best thing is to communicate openly and clearly about the problems and try to solve them together. It's important not to write them off as a "problem customer" but to give them a chance to know what isn't working and to solve it. If you're not able to work things out together, then it's time to part ways.
Landlords can phrase things in terms of $/rsf, but the lease specifies a monthly flat rate. It can't change until the lease expires. What am I missing about the bind this puts tenants in?

I get the semantic dishonesty, but not the practical issue.
1) 3x-1/[(x+2)(1-x+x^2)]
2) 1/(x^3+1)
3) 2x^2-14x+8/[(x^2+3x-2)(x-3)]

In 1 and 3 are there supposed to be extra brackets? It's really hard to tell exactly what these are given that you've used no formatting.

Secondly, why are you trying to solve these? Where did they come from?

Solving the first one, assuming the numerator is supposed to be (3x-1), then we proceed as follows.

When we add fractions like a/b + c/d the result is (ad+bc)/bd. In these questions we assume we have the result of such an addition and try to compute all the terms.

Here we have a denominator of (x+2)(1-x+x^2) so we assume b=x+2 and d=1-x+x^2. that means we have the numerator formula is:

(3x-1) = a(1-x+x^2) + c(x+2)

In this case a and c are potentially polynomials (in fact by looking at the degrees c must be a polynomial of degree 1 larger than a).

Now just try setting a and c to small polynomials, c being 1 degree larger, and compute what you get on the right hand side. Does it look like the left hand side? Probably not. What do you need to change? How can you make it better.

Jiggle it around a bit and see what happens.

Tell me, what if a=(x+1) and c=(x^2-2) : what does the RHS evaluate to? Why is it wrong? How can you change a and c to make it better.

With regards the second question, are you aware that x^3+1 factorizes? Find a value of x that makes x^3+1 equal zero. What does that tell you about factors of x^3+1?

That's enough for now. I've give you a lot of questions. Usually you don't answer them all, just ignoring all but one. I'll see what you do this time. Also, I have to go now - I'll be back tomorrow.
I think you are adressing job postings in the wrong way. See it more as a wishlist and not as something with hard limits.

Sure, you still have to be able to fit the role they want or replace someone else that can fit the role, but don't overestimate the importance of the requirements.

There might be a case to take them really serious if the job posting really differentiate between what the candidate have to know and what they wish for. Other than that, don't take them too hard.
Rather than an ethics problem, this seems like a unit of measure and communication problem.

The comparison to higher education is apt. Prices at community colleges (and many universities) are set in dollars per credit hour. Credit hours, though, aren't the same as clock hours. I taught a three credit hour class that met three times weekly and lasted fifty minutes a session. The school, naturally, advertised this discrepancy well in advance of taking payment. (I do wonder whether there's any case law about that.)

It seems that office managers are setting prices in dollars per real-estate square foot, which is a different unit of measure from the commonly understood measure of area. Maybe they should advertise "real-estate square feet of office space" instead of "square feet of office space" to eliminate the confusion that comes from overloading that phrase?

(Whether this sort of linguistic imprecision and flux is a good idea is a separate argument, to be sure. This sort of shenanigans increases the burden-- and therefore the cost-- for people trying to purchase a good or service.)
Searching for offers, as explained in the article. The nonexistant square feet put the offer undeservingly high in the sqft/$ order which is what many tenants search by.
And 35 year olds don't apply because they don't want to spend 1-3 years making 30-40k/yr. It's not complicated.
Personally I like the Startup School posts much better than the startup company stories. The companies look like a lot of me-too concepts and you don't explain why you picked them or why their strategy or feature set is better. Blogs work when people present new ideas or ideas that were not easy to discover. Ideas not companies.
I'll be using the "lifecycle of an idea" in my entrepreneurship class on Monday. Maybe it will generate some readers for you.