skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whoever came up with the term 'NoSQL' should be drawn and quartered for providing such fodder to the frothing blogosphere.
In my opinion, this book is practically a must-read for anyone living in our increasingly computing intensive world, not just for aspiring computer scientists. It has both depth and accessibility, starting with something familiar in concept to many people (Morse code), and slowly building more and more ideas toward the final realization of a workable computing machine. Great book.
Micheal E. Gerber's books (the E-Myth, E-Myth Revisited, E-Myth Mastery, and especially Awakening the Entrepreneur Within (2008) ISBN 978-0061568145) are amazing to read just as you're starting out.
It's most likely just handles metadata, aggregated data or serves as a proxy to their main DB.

I just can't believe they converted 10 PB of binary data into JSON ;)
Dear HN, I have 5d off and I want to write a small project, any suggestions?
I've got 5 days off from different things and a thought gazed up my mind "Hey, why not writing a small and interesting project ?"
However, I don't have many ideas, I'm intrested in lowlevel, networking, .net (garbage collectors methods and the like), security, compilers, compression, web (django,red5) etc
I was wondering if anyone could hint me about something small `n easy to write in the spare time I have ?
What is the best way to know if it has already been submitted? Just googling it?
Oh well, hopefully a few people who didn't catch it the first time got a chance to read it.
If you look in more detail, it's not as big a problem as it appears.

14 million are de-facto insured - they are eligible for medicaid but have not bothered to sign up. If they ever require insurance, they can sign up and medicaid will pay for their treatment (medicaid doesn't care about preexisting conditions). Another 23 million are uninsured for 4 months or less, presumably because they declined COBRA.

Fun fact, from the wikipedia page: the states with the biggest percentage of uninsured people border Mexico. I wonder how much of the problem could be solved by enforcing immigration law.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/25/who-are-the-...
It seems that this 'article' is lots of copy-pasting of most of the reviews from this Amazon user:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3CC0TO2YD3P5A/
Veterans Affairs: Implement Data Breach Lessons Learned
LightCMS Review
Google Trends: Microsoft, apple
I'm not sure I understand the question. Some javascript files depend on functions provided in others, but what are CSS and image dependencies? Are you referring to stylesheets that specify image backgrounds?
This kind of coaching/mentorship is probably found a lot more in a grad program than undergrad, where it's pretty much nonexistent.
Free Whitepaper: Tips to SuperCharge Your Call-to-Action Buttons
Suggested new title: "Ask HN: Why are the startup events/conferences that I've looked at recently in the Bay Area held on weekdays?"

Most of the ones for startups in my area (Dallas) are Saturday, weekend, or weekday evening. No clue about anywhere else as I haven't really looked elsewhere.
This is nonsense.

A CS degree includes math, science, a range of CS electives (e.g. database theory, networking, algorithms) and non-CS electives (e.g. writing, philosophy).

Plus, you have graded assignments, lab exercises, supplemental papers, and interaction with teachers and fellow students.
I'm going to make up hypothetical problem. then have the developer use the most retarded solution, and then use the resulting make believe coding chaos to prove my point.

Yay Programming Blogging

:/
Well, I have a couple of reasons for not having my contact details here:

- Due to the nature of this post, I don't want to disclosure the name of the company I work for because even though I am not happy with my job and with their attitude towards me, I don't have the right to expose them to this situation. I respect them and I simply want to move on. If someone wants to talk with me, it is easy for them to leave a message here (as richardmarr did).

- I didn't post this in order to get a job through HN. I have concerns regarding my career and that was the only reason why I posted this.
MPEG LA says its H.264 video codec will be free for HTML5 streaming forever
I'm actually endeared by the story being a dump of everything the author witnessed, rather than being carefully engineered (with some stuff expanded on, some stuff dropped) to provoke a particular reaction in the reader.
> sadly, if a company has a degree requirement for hiring, then no amount of self-learning can substitute for a lack of an accredited diploma.

Sure, but do you really want to work at a place like that?
This is one of those articles you mentioned in the "back when" category.

By Tony Bain / February 12, 2009 3:00 PM
Agreed. Improve your mind and not your tools. Don't spend a couple of hours learning to use a tiled WM instead spend that time reading up on documentation. I believe that will give you the biggest speed gain.
Ask PG: Why is my domain blocked?
We launched the http://appsumo.com optimization bundle which organically made front page of Hacker news. Then the deal article went dead;(

Bummer but as is life.

Then we just spent a few hours writing up this post on how we've doubled our conversion rate in two days: http://www.appsumo.com/blog/how-we-doubled-our-conversion-rate-in-two-days/

My friend Gabe Weinberg of DDG fame submitted it and it got auto-dead: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636833

That's weird, maybe it's a fluke, resubmit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636832

Auto-dead again. Noah is tearing:(

I am not sure if it was cause our original front-page story was "commercial" even though we are a startup. There are a ton of startups that are "commercial" that don't get banned or dead, see Awesomeness Reminders: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618019

Any one have any ideas?
Smells like a soon-to-be acquisition scnerio to me.
Maybe the US is the most powerful country in the world _because_ its people work hard in a high productivity system.

America is an exception. But perhaps it is "out of sync" with the world in the same way Google is out of sync with your average software corp.
As long as I get my vector files, I could care less. It works pretty well. They've been at this for a while, before there were any good alternatives online to flash for this application.
In modern web stacks you're already separated your view from your controller from your models, and you've abstracted most or all of your database code into an ORM. That's a lot of framework to punch through when your abstractions start to leak already. At some level your controller has to know something about what objects exist in your database and what fields they contain.

I've also found it's extremely hard to predict ahead of time what projects will turn out to be long lived and large scale so I try to build the simplest thing possible first and then take advantage of the flexibility of modern stacks to iterate and refactor from there. Things like named scopes in rails should be more than enough to keep your controllers from getting too tightly intertwined with your models.
Most of the startup events/conferences here in the midwest (that I've seen) are on the weekends or in the evenings. The few I've attended that were during the mornings on weekdays have always been targeted at business owners, though I never realized that distinction until just now.
This is actually a good point. Something that is fun and engages my mind when it's dulled and flat is actually quite a useful tool. When I get back to work I am much more switched on.

I think you just need to remember to define your breaks properly.
Continuing in the evolutionary psychology vein, though, the two viewpoints can be reconciled - humans evolved in an environment where it would likely be more acceptable for women to reproduce without a steady partner, so it would be advantageous for groups to protect women more than men for the reasons cited in the original article. However, in modern society, those tendencies could well be unjustified, since contraception and the increased payoffs of committed parent pairs in a society where it's expensive to raise children have made it less likely that a single woman would have children by a man that hasn't committed to her. So we may well be in a situation where we're wired by evolution to protect women more than men despite the practice not being demographically justified in a modern society.
CDMA inventor Qualcomm seeks 'iPhone developer guru'
It's not even a cop-out, it's just ridiculous. TAOCP is basically a reference book -- no one actually reads through the entire thing like a textbook. TAOCP can be a good companion to other things but I wouldn't attempt to read it 1) in exclusion and 2) as a substitute for a CS degree.

Also, no K&R?? How will you make it through OS design without K&R?
well..there are several events scheduled during weekday evenings in bay area as well. however, considering how spread out bay area is, commuting isnt quite trivial and fast.
My experience echoes this. I really believe there is a fixed limit to the amount of work one can do and once you cross that line, you just end up goofing off or procrastinating. And it's nowhere near 40 hours per week. I would say it's more like 20-30.

The 40 hour work week is standard because Henry Ford's productivity studies found that for repetitive, manual labour, that was the maximum amount of hours one could work before a drastic reduction in productivity. That bar was set nearly 100 years ago and yet we still follow it even though work has drastically changed.

I never understand people who work insane hours. They may be at work for X hours per day but I really doubt they are working all that time.
Except, of course, that it isn't "a dump of everything the author witnessed" without things expanded or or dropped. A big chunk of it is exposition about an algorithm - and not even the one in question.

When you relate events, you inevitably "engineer" them, even if only unconsciously or by your judgement of what's relevant or not. Storytelling is about how to engineer usefully and usually entertainingly, particularly to the people you're telling the story to.
Thanks for the support!
Well, I understand the business from a recruiters point of view. However, the majority of the job posts comes from recruitment companies and it is hard to avoid that. Occasionally I find a job announcement from a company but it is not easy. Once I apply for the jobs through the recruitment companies, I have the feeling that my application enters in a black hole where someone will decide if I should really apply for the job based on some checklists. I don't have any control or saying on that matter, which is frustrating...
The latter. In my experience, the fundamentals that this list covers are 'the hard parts' in terms of a certain kind of understanding and sort of intellectual challenge: most things more 'applied' beyond this point are taught poorly if at all in CS, and learned more readily in the 'real world.'
There have been a lot of re-submissions of appsumo.com, with all kinds of tricks to get it to pass the dupe filter.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1457353

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535925

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529957

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535928

Maybe that's what triggered a ban?
Ask the receiver of rhetorical questions: does pg have an e-mail address?
Just because work you do benefits another does not entitle you to that value. Yes pirates cannot pirate what does not exist. That just means the market needs to find a way to pay content creation, instead of content copying.
And when something's glitching? Say an avoid-ground routine and a go-down routine, plus some sort of importance measurement (very near ground? go up fast). All reasonable in a self-piloting machine.

Now say the go-down routine gets abnormally high importance, or fires off a million times per second.

Unlikely? Yes, but so is what happened. And I specifically included "consider if", because it's not what happened, but could conceivably, and was probably one of the panicked fears going through their heads.
You should be cautious with dashes -- but not too cautious -- for a very simple reason -- they can confuse your reader, especially if -- well, let me put put this in a form of a joke -- used as many times as I smoke cigarettes per day.

There is another useful punctuation mark; most people have seemed to forgot that it exists; you can guess what it is, I suppose.
Exercises in understanding your target market. (My first attempt.)
I'm working on my first proper entrepreneurial venture. ("Proper" meaning check the market, see what the demand is, being building MVP based on positive results, etc as opposed to build first and cross fingers.) The planned product is a hybrid between personal CRM and contact/profile/ID management service. Currently, I have a very good idea about my value proposition, my potential channels, how to monetize my idea... however I still have a big question mark for my targeted market.

To remedy this, I've put together a very basic and simple survey with the objective of identifying which features I should focus on in my MVP, understanding the frustrations of my potential users and trying to understand various workflows as it relates to how they might use my product.

So I humbly approach your collective expertise and ask if you wouldn't mind critiquing my survey (and maybe filling it out, too?) or helping me identify oversights in my approach. As a small token of appreciation, I will gladly share the results if anyone is interested.

Thanks so much! I'm learning a lot from this community and happy to have this resource available.

Survey link: http://www.survs.com/survey/CT3A9Q3XGX
Are rounded rectangles actually hard? Isn't it just a matter of placing 4 quarter circles in the right places? If you can draw straight lines and you can draw ovals (and hence, the special case of circles), then you can draw rounded rects, right?
Two planet transit
Not going to happen unless they decide to make it into a social network.
I believe you already can, using F3:: for everything is just a fallback if you've forgotten what class the method belongs to. I had a thought to plug in an ACL check inside the __callStatic() and autoLoad() methods, since it's already searching for the class and method, would be a simple thing to run that through an ACL table to see if the user has access to the class/method. Just a thought.
I emailed pg already...
Objectively, the efficient market hypothesis was handed it's head in the last crash.

Interesting. Could you please explain the trading strategy based on market crashes like the last one which you believe is a counterexample to EMH (assuming you are not still getting rich with it)?

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/how-to-complain-re-emh...

[edit: clarified what I mean by trading strategy, in response to tome.]
I have no idea about other submissions besides the one Gabe told me he did.
"taking care of young kids is boring as hell."

There were articles about how couples with children are unhappier over here recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494011

Yet I believe I'd be unhappy in my old age if I don't have children (not to mention several good points in that discussion).

I keep going back to the "experiencing self vs remembering self" talk many people here directed me to:

http://sheshtawy.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/experience-self-vs...

The experiencing self is unhappier, but the remembering self is definitely happier :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism

Higher education is over-rated. If you can read and write, there is no reason why you can't pick up a book and learn something new yourself. Yes, your mileage may vary in performance, but how is it any different from IRL education?
What I learned: If I want to lead people into something, I need two stooges. Plant them in the audience, and start the show.
Luhn 10 valid tokens to replace credit card numbers and simplify PCI Compliance
CSS files that need images are an example of this, yes, but the browser handles that anyway (you might want to preload it, for efficiency, though).

For example, imagine a user profile page on a social network.

The page might come preloaded with a Javascript widgets that you use all over your site, like a common interface element to hide and expand content. These widgets might demand some base Javascript libraries, as well as their own CSS classes and images.

Then, if the user wants to edit their hometown, we might want to load a map widget. Since this is a rare thing, we didn't include it in the page, but we decided to load it on demand. Once again we might load a lot of base JS, CSS or images.

Now, obviously this is all possible by inserting each dependency manually. But when your site gets really big and dependencies get very complicated, one wants to be able to say to a framework "hey, framework, go make sure this page has everything it needs for hide/expand widgets". Or, "hey framework, the user just clicked 'edit hometown', so now we need everything required for map widgets".
Prediction: this thread goes dead to keep the recursion balance in the universe in check.
I'm not sure why you're getting flagged, but I really like your site, I'll be buying this bundle this weekend :)
Augmented Reality by Siamak Ashrafi & Mobile Energy Consumption by Frank Maker
Of note, the NY Times' title was originally "Kepler Telescope Detects an Earth-Size Planet". It's now been changed to "Kepler Telescope Detects Possible Earth-Size Planet."
10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books
Investors Push Six Apart And VideoEgg Toward Merger
So then why not wait for an answer?
Science Only Has Two Legs
Growing, Indie Style
Don't despair cause there's still a strong search for software developers on the market. Java is still a good technology to know, since a lot of people are interested in that. Otherwise, you can just spend a couple of weekends in your room, learning a new technology and making a fun project out of it.

Also, next time you get a job, try to get it in a small company (max. 50-100 people), because those are the companies that really need to be on top of their game in order to make a profit, so you'll be learning a lot of new stuff there.

Here's a couple of websites to get you started on your job hunt:

http://startuply.com/ - startups

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ - I actually did a search on london and quite a few companies popped up

http://jobs.github.com/positions

I follow the London craigslist and that one has some open start-up positions every now and then

And also there is www.monster.com, but the postings there are not usually startups.

I wish you good luck. If you make it big in a start-up, let us know how you did it.
I can see what you mean by the controller needing to know something about the objects it will obtain. It makes sense, although I guess we might disagree on how much info we want to let go through.

I think predicting the length and scale of projects likely depends on who you work for and what products they want. 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, during which different developers will 'own' them. In this case, you can understand how planning ahead might be necessary. I'm currently supporting an application that's 14 years old and small leaks like that end up hurting a whole lot.

Then I guess I'm not as strict for home projects where I'll be the sole owner and developer, but that's the opposite end of the spectrum.
The Bristol Chaotic Pendulum
How innocent the article is written :)
People are expecting to be able to build a cheap just hang in there type of flying thing, which would magically transform itself into a stealth one with minimal tweaking here and there.

Of course not. And it's not about abstractions, middle-ware, etc. Everything is a tool. If you need to abstract, you abstract. If you have experience, you realize that the client is not aware of what he will want in the future. That he will want triple sorts, grouping by, etc.

I recommend to the writer of the article to memorize the Tao of Programming. Only Tao is perfect. Yeah, you can claim your tool is perfect, that is magic, it's not, ask the guy that has to maintain the thing.
If I create software I am entitled to sell it. People are not entitled to get it for free if I want them to pay me for it. Yes, it costs me nothing if they pirate it. But can I steal a car from a factory if I pay them the marginal cost of producing it? Of course not.

Paying for content creation is a fantasy in software. Name any big consumer application that could have been developed that way with developers getting paid about the same as they would by selling it (i.e. about the same as the value they provide).
I've suggested that the autokill program post a comment explaining the reason for the kill. Maybe PG thinks that gives away too much info to spammers and abusers, but I've seen a lot of frustration and confusion here that seems to come from the autokiller. Some insight would relieve that. The vast majority of us are well-meaning users.
Energy conservation: Not such a bright idea
1- Didn't realize this would make homepage.
2- Thought it should be public that startups / articles are getting banned for unknown reasons...
They use it to store aggregated reports for distribution and analysis. It isn't doing any heavy lifting, and it's not a terribly compelling case study of anything.
Asking like this is a way to get more appsumo exposure without incurring the ban on their links.
Here is an old thread about the 'auto dead' domains and some of the reasons why they got killed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910

It also has a list, but presumably that's long out of date.
Why? Twitter had similar deals with Bing to let them use their real time search results http://www.bing.com/social/
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I didn't say I would like to change career. I just said I would like to change area, meaning from old mainframe-like technologies into recent technologies.

I don't agree that technology is technology. Would you hire a developer with experience in PL/1 to code in C? Would you hire a developer with experience in Cobol to program Java? I guess you wouldn't. Yes, I know object-oriented programming, functional, logical, procedural and scripting... But is that what you read in job posts? No, you read specific languages, tools and technologies.

I didn't give up after 6 months. I had a part-time job during my MSc for 6 months in order to pay my studies/expenses. Then I have been working for 2 years for a financial institution. And now, after those 2 years, I realised I cannot find what I want inside the organisation and I want to move.

I am not English nor native in English. I understand my English isn't perfect, but I have never worked with native English speakers nor lived in the UK (or any other native-English country). My experience tells me that you will only become good at a language once you live in the country and hear it from native speakers. Nevertheless, I think my English is good enough to perform my job.

If you read my post, you will see that I already learn "newer" languages in my free time and I am already a contributor to an open source project (for 3 years).

Moreover, I don't rely on people on teach me. I strongly believe that by simply working with senior folk, you will learn day after day. That is what I want to have.
In-cell dropdown and validation in (Google) spreadsheets
Tons of media players pause when you pull out the headphones. I think some portable cd player I had in the late 90's did that.
I'm the guy maintaining the thing, and I'm complaining about ORMs not being perfect. I'm not sure I get your point.