skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've just left a workshop at our CS department, where we discussed new and old issues with teaching programming. Tutorials and assignment, based on completely made up cases and requirements, are still very much at the core of introductory programming courses. This is in sharp contrast to what DHH says in the post, as well as comments here and elsewhere.

May I be slightly selfish, and ask a question to all of you who have a CS degree? Did you learn programming as part of your CS education? Regardless, what's you opinion about the way programming was taught?
How does this compare? How many does Google/Amazon/Facebook/Dropbox add a week?
If I don't sign them, people address me as "he" consistently.
1000 new servers a week is a ridiculous number for this sort of company. Their code must be really, really bad. Anyone who works there care to chime in? Is it all written in ColdFusion or something?
I don't think it's quite as easy as you make it out to be.
I'm interested to know more about this.

I do have a Masters degree but it's in an unrelated field (economics--don't ask). Does that qualify as an "advanced degree"? I assume not since it's not related to my field. Or?

The description I found of the EB2 said an advanced degree or "significant" benefit to the national economy. Heh. That applies?
How Can We Solve Public Education's Problems?
Forget user groups. Forget craigslist. Forget the internet.

1. Do stuff: Pick up projects. Do open source work. Volunteer.

2. Network: Meet people in person.

"Finding a mentor" is a misnomer. You don't "find" a mentor any more than you find a girlfriend or spouse. A relationship with someone who can mentor you is the byproduct of everything else you do. Get out there and get busy. You may be surprised at the people who take an interest in you and your work.
The best CS classes I had drove a single project through a semester, with the lessons applying to the next development tasks you needed to undertake. By the end of the course, you had a reference project that you could carry forward, and even continue to work on if you wanted to.
4 World-Famous Websites Who Ripped off Their Ideas from Someone Else
The ASF Hits its Millionth Commit
"as many as 1,000 servers every week"

Really this probably means that one week they added 1,000 but the actual average number is much lower.

Makes for a good talking point worded that way!
Obama Tricks Voters as Enron Hoodwinked Public: Amity Shlaes
BlackBerry Tablet: Timely or Folly?
Wait a minute... there's a website advertising stolen credit cards for $1.50, and the author is complaining that they tacked on an extra 0.60 fee?

I'm pretty sure this article was written with tongue firmly in cheek, but it's just so... out there.

I dare the author to make this $2.10 purchase using one of his own valid credit cards.
It seems many simply wish they had gotten a different degree in general. It may just be a "grass is greener" scenario. Or like somebody who learns a lot of math knows: when you finally understand something and look back it seems trivial. Following that, worth less than some not understood problem.
What's new for iOS?
The Demiurge's Elder Brother
Wow. Dropbox is full steam ahead on it's way to ubiquity. Keep it up, guys!
If I were you I'd try to use my cross domain knowledge (a pilot!) to position myself in a niche where there are few competitors, I have a hard time imagining there would be a lot of people that can call themselves programmer/pilot (though on HN for sure we have a few). That seems to be your unique selling point, so try to get as much traction there by recycling your old skills for as much as they're worth.

As for mentors, that's easy: Ask! (the specific person). If you're turned down find another one until you have what you're looking for.

A bit of an introduction wouldn't hurt, and those people here that have their email addresses listed do so because they don't mind being contacted, otherwise why else would they do that?
Saftey was improved after the disaster.

Failure rate went from 4% to 1.8% according to the interview.

Probably due at least in part to treating the explosion as something other than a "blameworthy act."
Out of 6 reviews... Which could indicate a great movie, or dumb chance, or preferential treatment of reviewers willing to commit to being positive.
Wow, uh; ok...

I don't disagree with pg or you. You said it best with these two points:

1.) "When the deal is hot they'll all crap themselves to get into it."

2.) "Paul has a unique view of raising capital, one that comes from the perspective of dozens of undifferentiated two-person startups..."

This really is a case of the exception that proves the rule. The presence of a few exceptions establishes that pg's general rule does exist. (Hence your qualifier in your first point that I listed.)

And as to being a fanboy -- I am one of yours as well ;)
That's disingenuous --that's called reported speech. (in reported speech, tenses go back one).
4chan's Moot to be among keynote speakers at 2011 SXSW Interactive Festival
As I mentioned to you on Twitter, I'd love to see a demonstration of some common sites as they're being read by a screen reader. If you can include examples of good ones AND bad ones, that'd be great.

I think that a lot of web devs will feel much differently about accessibility once they hear the painful experience of a screen reader going through a poorly marked-up site.
You'd think after five years in php I would have picked up on that nifty method to chain methods together.

(referring to :

function Obj($methods=array())
)

Awesome hack dude.
His punctuation and capitalization could be called eccentric. His writing style is a cliché, a bad one, that reinforces Arrington's point and undermines his own. For a blog post that purports to say, "Nothing is wrong here, just fair play and good capitalism," he shouldn't have adopted a style that, in fiction at least, always means, "This is a morally blinkered guy who needs to be reined in by the law, because he will never admit to seeing anything wrong with anything that gets him ahead."

I admit I don't know anything about him and very little about the issue at hand; I'm just talking about style. I find it fascinating that he would model his blog persona after (in approximately equal parts) Gordon Gekko, Colonel Jessup, and Jay of Jay and Silent Bob. I mean, really, why would you adopt a personal style that is universally understood as shorthand for "arrogant and morally compromised asshole?" And if you did, why would you deny wrongdoing in a tone that signals to readers that you're incapable of caring or acknowledging if what you're doing is wrong? I'm not presuming guilt; you don't have to be evil to find classic movie villains like Gordon Gekko charismatic or even inspiring. It's just odd that he is apparently cultivating Arrington's story instead of defusing it. Could he be doing it on purpose? Does he relish the assumption that he's an evil mastermind? Or could there be a more boring financial motivation for it?
You could disagree with anything if you tried to. But can you see any merit to the 'need a goal to guide your learning' point of view?
From... six critics. That's like saying you got a 100% increase in conversions... from two trials.
In related space matters: the ISS has a webcam!

Last week I saw a hurricane from space. Yesterday, they were struggling to get Win2000 to connect to a LAN.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/isslivestream.asx
It's not from the glory point of view, not even from the interesting work angle but simply from a money making perspective.
Note that it's not 1000 servers every week, it's up to 1000 servers in a given week. This was likely done to support the launch of a new game, and may factor in server turnover (they're on EC2).

That being said, launching 1000 nodes for non-batch jobs is still pretty remarkable.
It is not required that the participants have monopoly power for them to transgress the law on this point. I agree with you that the "nearly 100% of the early stage deals in Silicon Valley" statement is wildly overstated but this should not affect the fundamental legal analysis here.
What about the constant changes in font style and color? Pretty sure that took more effort than hitting the shift key would have.
Don't shout, please.
I'm sure the speed is awful. But that's not the point.

Also, type hinting isn't all it's cracked up to be in PHP. In my opinion, type hints don't fit well in a dynamic language like PHP. The main problem I have is that you can't pass a decorator object to type hinted methods. Also, it makes it harder to pass mock objects for test cases.

Static method calls are possible, you can just add and call methods on the class object.

Autoloading probably isn't too hard to figure out.

You make a good point about serialisation. Closures can't be serialised. To be fair though, you can't do it in Javascript either.
7 Ways to Exercise at the Office
Wait, what is that a webcam of? I see a computer monitor, nothing spacey at all, and hearing Russian radio chatter.
Cheap Bakeware Sets
To tell someone new to programming to open the emacs source and start reading it is not really friendly.

I'd start with something considerably lighter than that, but I do agree that reading code is a really important part of really learning how to program (well).

As for 'code monkeying' not being programming, I disagree with that, programming is the creation of specific instructions in order for a computer to reach a certain goal and I couldn't care less what the goal was or the way in which you arrived at your program. I'd definitely not go so far as to demean anybody that got in to coding that way, just like not everybody can be Michaelangelo we can't all be Peter Norvig.

From Excel to LISP and everything in between, it's all programming.
Running through that in my head, that's basically equivalent to subclassing. At least, I can't find a difference. (In fact if you do it the naive way you'll end up with something less functional than subclassing for no good reason, so you might as well just treat it as a subclass.) It also blocks monkey patching the original class, which I observe neutrally.
Great App article...stay on the App train before the burst
@TableandBoard.com
About Inky
Thanks. :-)

Although, usually I go for a static create() method instead of a function.

Oh man, I really wish they'd make constructors chainable. :-(
I've had problems with my moderncv based CV. Some companies want the CV to be in DOC.

On the one hand I could just say that I don't want to work in such a company, but when it's the recruiter and not the company demanding it, I don't really know what to do.

(At the moment I'll just send them a link to one of the PDF to DOC sites that are all over internet.)
Well, Comic Sans is a poor excuse for a hand-lettered font, and there are a zillion better out there, even if most lay people are unaware of them. Papyrus, though, is a gorgeous font (a modified Carolingian with caps and a distressed effect) that is the righteous choice when used correctly. Like anything that looks simple on the surface, though, people are going to copy the wrong thing when they try to duplicate someone else's success. Papyrus can figure strongly in a successful design, but it's rarely the font alone that makes a design work.
I bet the developers have thought of rewriting it using OOP and an MVC pattern, but all current plugins and themes would have to be rewritten as well. It's not so bad, since you'd only need the top few dozen plugins and themes rewritten to get traction.

I'd be willing to help out if anyone here is brave enough to try a rewrite!
>And if you did, why would you deny wrongdoing in a tone that signals to readers that you're incapable of caring or acknowledging if what you're doing is wrong?

Because if he were to go ahead and write a mild-mannered piece about the collusion at that meeting or the lack thereof, those who know Dave and his variegated rants on his blog would see that as something out of the ordinary. He has pretty strong opinions, and they're converted from intensity to hex values.

That's kind of his style. He knows that people will go to his blog and think "wow, this guy's unprofessional," but that, too, is part of it.
Ask HN: Bussiness visionaries who backstabbed friends to get to the top?
This question spawned from a discussion I was having with some friends about Facebook / The Social Network.

Who are other business visionaries who used ethically questionable tactics similar to those used (allegedly) by Zuckerberg?

Update: I should add, people other than the most obvious, which for us was Bill Gates.
Viewers don't recognize the font that something's in. At most, they might recognize the feeling that the font gives them, but that's probably a subconscious reaction as well. Consider the situation in which someone sends an important and serious email, but uses Comic Sans for the text. The same font would work for a birthday party invitation, but since the font doesn't support the context of the communication it comes across as foolish.
This makes me feel a little better.

We created a multi-player rpg for mobile phones at startup weekend a few year ago. It actually did ok and it was growing pretty quickly. I hosted it on AppEngine to start and the resources just started going sky high. Players were initiating an attack at least once per second (not to mention all of the other server calls like messaging, weapon purchasing, scanning to see who is in your area).

I thought we were going to have to reengineer in order to try and make it as efficient as possible. The thing is, these addictive multi-player games that are all about throwing data back and forth end up taking huge amounts of resources.

We eventually ditched the game, but the site is still up at http://killyourneighbor.com
"and almost impossible to prove that it actually happened if it did"

Wouldn't that be the best type of thing to collude on?
I studied CS at the University of Toronto in the early 90's and in hindsight I'm amazed that we never formally taught how to program. (The one exception I can recall is a "theory of languages" course that gave us a brief exposure to half a dozen languages, but it was an optional course and wasn't part of the core curriculum.) We were basically given assignments by the profs and it was assumed that we would pick up programming in the tutorials with a little help from the TAs!

Personally I had the benefit of having done a fair bit of programming in high school and on my own (Amiga AMOS FTW!) so I survived but I know it was very difficult for students who hadn't had any programming experience prior to university, and the drop-out rate from the CS program was very high (> 50% IIRC).
This post makes so many wrong assumptions I don't have time to mention them all. Here are a few:

1. SuperAwesome makes $0.50 CPM from that one ad unit(probably a small rectangle). I'm sure they have multiple ad units on each page, so their actual CPM is probably closer to $3-$4, maybe more.

2. The post does not take into account traffic quality or market size whatsoever. Maybe there are a million people interested in reading SuperAwesome content but only 40,000 people interested in your SaaS.

3. Most importantly, it's probably a lot easier for SuperAwesome to get their traffic, because they are a large content site and get traffic for free. If you're selling a service, unless you have a very popular blog or excellent PR, you(and your competitors) will probably need to buy most of the traffic you get.

I hate to tear apart someone's blog post, but this one is just plain wrong. I would much prefer post based on real data and not a slew of assumptions.

EDIT: I'm going to guess SuperAwesome is dafont.com, here's their BSA page:
http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/8441

It was easy to find because on many sites on BSA have 7 million impressions and 0.50 CPM. This is a terrible example- font/graphic sites are notorious for having low quality, hard to target traffic from all over the world and many pageviews per unique visitor as they look at different fonts. That's the reason they're selling impressions for a low CPM, it is not representative of most content sites or blogs whatsoever.
This title is misleading...

"I’m not saying that angels don’t wish that valuations are lower (I certainly do). But there simply is no way that such a conspiracy could be effective, given the economics of the market."
No chance - my parents still are. It's cause they love us, really...
That makes perfect sense, thank you!
They used to have SSTV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSTV) as well. I never successfully captured one but I have from other SSTV stations. It's a very cool feeling to receive pictures from someone hundreds of miles away over "nothing" (radio). I can only imagine the feeling receiving photos directly from the ISS.
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How much should you spend on IT security?
If Wikipedia is to be believed, even if a Challenger-like disaster could be made survivable, it would require quite radical and undesirable changes to the orbiter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes#Eject...

NASA playing hide-and-seek with the true fates of the Challenger crew is deplorable, but not taking the steps you describe - before and after the disaster - was a conscious acceptance of risk.
See: 4chan
Gender Plots - how listening preferences vary with the listener’s age and gender
Okay let me elaborate on it's importance(to me). I might have done something... illegalish. At least I'm afraid I did, so I wanted to find out from him whether I did or didn't. :D
If I did I want to apologize because he's someone I look up to, and I don't want any animosity from him.
Joe's point was that your mom's kitchen is neither licensed nor inspected by the state. Yet, she served you baked goods out of that kitchen. The false implication that unlicensed == unsafe is what he was commenting on.

If they were safe enough for you to eat, they're probably safe enough for me to eat, regardless of whether she has a seal from the state.
This. Also if you know exactly what we should look for when writing mark up? I feel as if a lot of common knowledge on this topic is on the same level as SEO optimization - a bunch of mumbo jumbo and nobody really knowing what they're talking about. This should change.
Everything in the IT field sucks, learn to love it. He gives four reasons why Git sucks and tons of reasons why it doesn't. Cool slideshow but it should've been titled "Intro to Git"
The only thing missing from that post was the blinking text and the spinning email image from circa 1999.
Things move FAST on the Internet! :)
(Go figure!)
I don't understand anyone who doesn't learn because they're curious. Because it's fun. Because they enjoy it. Intellectual curiosity.

It must be very odd programming 'professionally', only as a job and not as something you love first and foremost.

The problem with learning anything IMHO is when you don't enjoy it enough to want to learn it. And maybe that's a good signal that you shouldn't. Things are so much easier when you love what you do.
It's a British usage
A Response to Ineffectual Java-NG Proposals
I'm finally all caught up - 09/22/2010, 9 AM pacific. If there's more feedback, please email me.
Not just the domain knowledge, the access you have to your target market. 15 years is a long time to get to know people. Customer development will be a breeze, you could literally shoot the shit with your peers, and take notes afterward. You'll also have a head start when you start marketing too, because you can start by telling everyone you know in the industry.
I think the better indicator that this sample may be reflective of the final meter is the vocabulary in the reviews - highly positive - one claims "movie of the year".

It's possible to get a tomato and still have some happenstance language in the critique - the fact that the language, here, is immensely positive is a strong indicator that such a strong meter will hang around.

That, and it's directed by David Fincher.
Having met Dave, I can say he's one of those people you immediately trust. The guy is set financially, and is only is the investment game for the fun of it.

And yeah, his style is bizarre, but that's just the way he likes it.

Anyway, if he says this is all much ado about nothing, he's almost certainly telling the truth.
Here is few and some discussion too - http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=840.0;all
I'm the programmer in my startup. I'm also the guy with the day job. We weren't making the necessary progress until we actually analyzed why I wasn't being as productive as we needed in the evening and weekend situations.

Turns out that I basically needed an assistant. Since I was building features for my cofounders, we decided that we should pair program (except they don't know how to program). So they act as the "feature manager" and come up to my apt for 2 hours a nights a week and we work together.

A few key points: the feature managers MUST have their thoughts detailed out. In order for me to crank out code, I need to know exactly what to do. I think there's a cognitive cost when you have to shift from implementation to design mode (and even testing mode). You'll be amazed how much it helps to push those responsibilities out of your brain (and yet still get fast feedback).

Doing this, we've gotten probably 4 months worth of work done in the last month, without me increasing hours. Seeing how efficiently I can implement features made my cofounders realize that it's worthwhile to pay me even 1/4 time, so that I can reduce hours elsewhere. Been a real game changer for our company.
From the article:

With new iOS release of Dropbox, new iPad and iPhone apps include automatic
offline caching for recently accessed files, support for HD video and
high-resolution photo capture. The apps also feature a UI improvement
including a new home screen and progress display, full screen landscape
document viewing on iPad and the support for multitasking to allow files to
upload or download in the background.
I don't know if there was collusion or not, and I wouldn't dare to offer my uninformed opinion, but with all due respect, saying that there are too many angels for collusion to even be possible doesn't seem right to me.

If there are zillions of angels and all of them are equal, then sure it's probably a very hard market to corner. But from my view, there are hot startups and those startups want the very best angels. I would guess it follows a power law distribution. Startups want money, but they also want name brand money and the powerful connections that come with it.

These angels may miss a few deals here and there to the angels who aren't in on it, but I think they can move the terms in their favor.

I also think your analogy works better the other way around: even though there are almost 5000 US colleges to chose from - some of them extremely accessible - I think the top 10-20 schools could easily collude to extract better terms from students. This is because the name recognition is important.
That's very interesting! With that hindsight, can you identify any quick wins that could have lowered the drop-out rate, or helped your personal understanding of programming?
Steve McConnell would like a word concerning non-idiomatic programming.
Is the primary audience of your product scientists? From what I can see the uses you promote seem to be primarily journalists. Are you working on a similar basis for them? ie a tool that lets them get on with writing and finding stories rather than correcting dataset anomalies? Do you see gridworks/Google Refine and tools like freebase and infochimps as competition? Panopticon? Chart.io? Sorry for the barrage of questions, my background is data vis and your business and business model fascinates me. Good to see more startups in london too!
Does google analytics tell you your ranking for a particular key word? If not is there any tool out there which does this?