skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why bother? You could go a long way and make things clearer by giving the functions better, new names and deprecating the old ones. "Rewrite with OOP and MVC" is an easy, whiny, pointless suggestion. Wordpress is warty, but it doesn't need a rewrite.
Patricks 'greatest hits' collection is a good start:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
Zynga has acquired a bunch of different game studios. While I'm sure they've tried to retrofit the acquired games to better architectures, they probably weren't designed with scalability or efficiency in mind from the beginning.
> I'm sure the speed is awful. But that's not the point.

Fair enough. I can appreciate that you have done an interesting bit of hackery here. Along that vein, you might consider adding support for uniform access. With this, methods without arguments can be called as properties, and properties could be exposed as read/write or read-only.

> Also, type hinting isn't all it's cracked up to be in PHP.

This is a matter of taste, but I completely disagree. In my opinion, type hinting is one of the redeeming qualities of the language. It means that PHP is taking care of the sanity checks for you. Of course, I'm partial to strongly typed languages.

> The main problem I have is that you can't pass a decorator object to type hinted methods.

Polymorphism allows you to do this. In the context of decorators, that usually means defining an interface.
Sounds like a challenge to come up with a new field of business. Interesting...
Yep. Same here. I waited tables and coded on my break for fun. Didn't even think it could be a career, since I was self-taught.
Yeah. I mean, look at the JooJoo/CrunchPad Debacle. According the Mike A., that's exactly what happened.
sigh

THR and Variety are notoriously tough reviewers. Besides, if you think Sorkin's going to fuck up the dialogue in a movie about communication, you're on crack. Sure, a 100% is just a leading indicator of quality, but it's a supremely high quality leading indicator.
Peter Travers (Rolling Stone)' only 4 star rating of the year, 100 on metacritic, which takes a mean-average of critic ratings implying perfect reviews, although sample size is 4 on metacritic, 2 of which are also on rottentomatoes. To note: Inception had 100 on several reviews on big names prior to wide-release, but settled at 74.

It is pretty safe to say that the reviews are going to be strong as the big critics have their reviews out and they lead the way. Being released in September also puts it favourable for Oscar nominations.
It's not a big deal.

I have Firefox purge everything except saved passwords every time I quit. I also use better privacy to purge LSOs and DOM storage. It really doesn't effect my quality of life when browsing the web. That being said I don't use a lot of sophisticated web applications that require complex preferences to be set and kept in local storage.
If the flash is not changed very often why not a CDN for the flash delivery and then have the flash poll their servers with the farming actions, ect....
Is 'commit count' the new 'lines of code' metric?
I started a business in my early twenties to address everything she mentioned in this speech.

It failed.

If artists are slaves to the system, then it's a very good system. In my experience there's still a strong Stockholm Syndrome between artists and "the industry." Many young musicians still think they will sign a deal, get fronted a million dollars, and go right on tour across the country. It's a real shame, but I couldn't convince them to sign with a small company focused on leveraging the Internet and file sharing.

I came close, but they all ended up wanting that "shot."

I still have ideas after some years about how to do it now... but it's a matter of hearts and minds. The idea of the mythical "record label," is still deeply ingrained in our culture. If you can convince the artists to go grass-roots rather than over-night success then you might have something. If there are any artists (or interested parties) reading, get in touch.
Interesting thoughts. I think if done right the daycare aspect could be really fun and socially/academically valuable time for the kids.

I actually do think it's a business opportunity but haven't pursued it yet (though I'd like to in the next year or two).

As for merit pay, the pay plan I came up with for my hypothetical school would simply be a partnership model. You "make partner" when your colleagues decide they trust you, value your contribution, and would like to keep you on board by sharing profits with you. Then, everyone is paid a base salary but partners get profit sharing.

This solves the main problem of tenure while keeping the spirit and benefits of it.

Another idea I had for pay plans is to incentivize teachers to create curriculum materials (this would save huge money on textbooks). Ideally there would be a network of schools so that if a teacher crated an amazing lesson or book chapter he/she would be paid a bit extra every time it was chosen/used. Enough that a moderately prolific teacher could earn a 20-40% bonus simply via curriculum creation. Maybe one decides to teach acoustical physics by analyzing a lady gaga song, and the lesson is a huge hit across a thousand schools.

In my opinion the ideal teachers are the sort of people capable of creating top quality curriculum... curriculum creation is a natural biproduct of energetic, creative teaching, and a large chunk of the way schools currently allocate money goes into paying textbook firms rather than cultivating a valuable skill in their employees.
Ask HN:  Have you used Amazon Turk or other site for content generation?
I have toyed with the idea of using Turk to generate some content for a project..just to get the ball rolling. I feel that this project is suffering from the empty parking lot syndrome. Is seeding your site cheating/wrong?
Here it's the opposite, we're not in proximity but we are definitely working together.

I'm actually very surprised by how well this works, I can't imagine it working as well in a situation where we'd both have to leave our homes to travel to some building somewhere to work together.

The atmosphere is pretty relaxed, there is a time for hard work and one for status updates (the virtual water cooler), we get an awful lot of stuff done in a day with 0 commute time to boot.
I did a 'build a twitter clone in rails' tutorial rote, but I find I learn much better if I put my own spin on the tutorials as it forces you to look deeper and understand what you're doing rather than just following along and copying code.

I would suggest nobody 'needs' rails, i can get along very well with php, but I thought I'd see what all the hype was about. I suspect I'll go back to my php land. Unfortunately feeling a bit defeated.
Chris makes some really great points about following the money. Its nice to see that he put some actual numbers to it to discredit the 100% claim by Arrington. So unless someone is going to outright call Chris a liar and show different numbers, I'd say that the 100% point can be dismissed.

I like this response better than Dave McClure's. Its sarcastic, but at the same time he does bring some facts to the table.

With all the money that gets invested in tech start ups every year, does it really stand to reason that 10 (even the biggest 10) angel investors could control valuations as being presented? The climate is too diverse. Too many VC firms, big and small, as well as Angels, and incubators.
I was thinking about a similar service paired with a smartphone app. You're in Central Park, and you're thirsty, you press a button in an app, and a guy on a bike finds you from GPS coordinates and gives you a bottle of water.

Something like this could revolutionize Taxi service. No talking to a dispatcher, fumbling with your wallet, or dealing with credit card numbers, just bring up an app and press a button.
If (i)most angel investors are significantly less likely to make investments in early stage tech startups at a given price and/or (ii)due to connections these investors provide a significant non-monetary value-add to the startups they invest in then it's conceivable they might wield a significant amount of market power.
Learning to program is pretty darn fun. Learning brand new paradigms is pretty awesome. Building things in new, better, easier ways as you get knowledge and experience is wonderful.

Learning how to program in a language with a similar amount of power to one that you're already intimately familiar with is pretty darn frustrating. It's hard to be intellectually curious when you're just learning new rules for the same game.

It must be very odd programming in your spare time, not getting paid for something that is inherently laborious and valuable. There are too many other people, places, and things that I love first and foremost to list programming for free as one of them.
Money Thrown at Lunch Problem
There are spacey things going on right now! Someone is floating through the air!!
Why non-profit pricing?
Yes, Knuth has done an incredible number of things and his CV reflects that. For mere mortals, a CV that long looks kind of kooky and you can bet a recruiter is not going to print more than the first few pages.

However, I expect you are right about academia and these are acceptable, although I'd still put a summary of my best work on the first page. BTW, an effective CV for Knuth would surely be:

Donald Knuth

and I'm not sure it needs the Donald.
As owner of a consultancy that makes custom web applications for clients, I'm taking the expected mainstream success of this movie as a very bullish signal about growth in the overall ecosystem of web startups.
WordPress is abandoning support for PHP4 and MySQL 4 in version 3.1. This will allow them to incorporate many of the features in PHP5 they haven't been able to do yet such as stronger OOP.

http://wordpress.org/news/2010/07/eol-for-php4-and-mysql4/

It doesn't need a rewrite. Instead, work with the many brilliant devs who have been improving it for years and know it inside-and-out -- including its flaws and areas for improvement.
ImageMagick for teenage girls
I know I have an immature brain, but my brain translated r3gy to orgy. Perhaps it's the 3 out of 4 letters and almost in the same order. Why is it called r3gy?

I like the initial concept, but instantdomainsearch.com does the same thing but better, with auto searching and shows all the three main TLDs. Perhaps have those features as well?
I'd like to know how many people actually find positions using job sites like this. It'd also be interesting to differentiate by experience, notoriety, and ability. That is, does Zed Shaw really use job sites to find his next employer?
Bipartisan Group of Senators Introduce Renewable Electricity Standard
You must really appreciate form over substance then. The ideas expressed are right on and favorable to the entrepreneur - guys like Dave are forcing all investors to deal with entrepreneurs on more equal terms, if only by providing them more options.
Let me summarize.

"Yes, the meeting described indeed happened. Yes, we talked about what Arrington claimed we talked about. No, Arrington was not welcome. No, it was not the big deal Arrington claimed it was."

If it was not the deal that Arrington claimed it was, then why were they so uncomfortable when Arrington sat down? Why did Sundeep delete his tweet? And why did people tell Arrington that they were uncomfortable with the direction the conversation took?

This leaves me more, not less, likely to believe what Arrington reported. The side evidence leaves me leaning towards the belief that Dave McClure's judgment is more likely lacking than that there is no fire behind the smoke. However I have no really concrete evidence behind that position.

It will be interesting to see this play out.
Right, watching the movie, the cable gets longer and shorter but nothing on the rear hub moving/winding that would explain that. In fact the hub seems to be moving in the opposite direction!
Zencoder (YC W2010) is hiring a design intern
An iPhone App For Asking Questions And Getting Nearby Answers
The link looks like it was planted here for SEO, not your edification.
One unanswered question:

What specifically does this project bring that isn't present in ASP.NET MVC, OpenRasta, FubuMVC or MonoRail?

Or that couldn't have been achieved by porting one of those to Mono (if they aren't there already)?
Much of the complexity seems to be directed at keeping the pedals going around in a circle. Why not levers or some other reciprocating motion? ANything would work with cables.
> When can we get you on board?

When Google buys my startup. Or it goes under. Whichever comes first :)
Which is also a pretty effective business model!
How could you make a list like that and omit HFJ's Gotham in favor of FF Dax or Myriad?

Many of these are roughly equivalent. Terrible list.

A few seconds of searching turns up an infinitely more interesting piece from Smashing Magazine: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/20/60-brilliant-type...
Definitely this. I got a BS in Computer Science and started along the path of Software Engineering while working towards my Masters. Learning some good fundamentals helps, but my code was still a mess. Writing code that you'll actually have to look at again is the best way to become a good programmer.
As a random guy on the internet I'm going to go and replace my bullshit meter because it just exploded while I was reading your post.
Why your site might be crashing Safari on the iPad
Of course its going away; folks have commented on this - allowing church bake sales etc.

Agreed on other points however. There are Mom's Kitchens I would definitely NOT want to eat out of. And licensing means (or used to mean) inspecting.
Google's Eric Schmidt faces off with Stephen Colbert
Apple should have bought Dropbox when they had the chance. Syncing an iOS device's documents via dropbox is WAY better than iTunes.
I seriously didn't know anyone else doing this, so its great to see other people in the same space. Theirs is really nice.

The name came form an idea from an earlier HN article about 4 letter domains. I started using it, and decided I didn't like it. However this was a weekend project, and I spend 2 hours trying to think of another name without anything coming up. I decided to go ahead and finish it. And yes I read it as orgy too (after purchasing it).

Good news is now I have a tool to find a better name.
...so the Information Age is a myth. Most folks are NOT participating in the Internet Revolution, as indicated by the chart's geographic locality of employment.
#1) True. It does not use an MVC paradigm. That's not the way it was designed, and they're not able to make it MVC w/o breaking backward compatibility with the huge ecosystem of plugins and themes that currently exist.

#2) True, and I agree. The function naming could be improved. If you don't know what the function does, look it up in the codex or the source code. The documentation could improve, too, but one of the stated goals for their next development period is improved docs.

#3) Look at the docs. Yes, the_title() writes to the page. If you want to use the title in a variable, there is get_the_title(). There are generally other functions or parameters you can do if you want it to return the value rather than writing it.

#4) False. The comments template file is comments.php.

#5) True.
My day job starts pretty early in the morning (need to leave home by 7:30) so working on weekday mornings is pretty much impossible.
I manage to get in a 2hr session after dinner on 3-4 weeknights, but doing so consistently requires a lot of discipline, giving up on TV etc., and an understanding wife/girlfriend.

I also try to tackle the larger/tougher parts of my side-projects on weekends instead. To make my weekends more productive, I try to finish the interruptive boring work such as laundry etc on a weeknight when I don't feel like coding. That way, I don't have to worry about it over the weekend.
And it’s not just Rotten Tomatoes. It seems like whenever I read something about this movie written by film critics in the last few weeks it was full of praise. Screenplay and editing must be excellent.
When I first started writing web apps in 2004, I tried to make everything nice and accessible. CSS, semantic HTML, etc. However, it was a huge pain in the ass.

So now, for my b2b startup, we ignore that. We move quickly and try to push the product out the door so we can succeed. One of the things that has fallen by the wayside is accessibility. Further, with 15 different balls to juggle, I just can't make myself care about the percentage of users who can't use our site.

For my startup, it seems that we would have a negative ROI for making our site accessible. In fact, I suspect the only way to get people to build better sites is for the money to clearly be worth it.

So my question is this: why should a startup invest effort into something that will only affect a small number of users? Similarly, we don't test our site for IE6, just because it's a pain.
Can't downvote this enough.

Really? All 90% of people who quit their job to found a startup want to do is impress Arrington? They want the same thing that any founder wants-- a combination of happy users, business success, and an exit (though there's more emphasis on the exit for a lot of Valley folks).

Save your venom for people who don't have the guts to start a company. Or better yet, save your venom entirely. The internet doesn't need any more.
Definitely, they probably needed a lot more speakers to get the same level of sound but didn't want the stage to look empty and it also probably gives a placebo effect (ie. more speakers=louder). I just thought this was interesting because I hadn't ever heard about it before this article.
Are you really comparing typing on a PC keyboard to typing on a BlackBerry? My thumbs can only "type" so fast, but sitting at a keyboard I'm somewhere around 100 wpm. It feels like two completely different activities. At a keyboard, capitalization happens automatically without me even thinking about it.

It's not a matter of bad habit, it's a conscious choice. When I'm IM'ing with friends, I typically type all lowercase (but with good spelling and punctuation) because it's what they do and it seems less formal. When I'm typing an email or an HN comment, the capitalization just happens.
No, they did not, actually.
I think the key is to lower the barriers to creating minimal, working, useful, hopefully interesting programs as much as possible.

E.g., start with a minimal implementation of the Unix 'wc' command in Python, walk through it explaining how it works, and then assign as homework adding the '-l' line counting option. As a professional it's trivial, but if you know nothing about a programming it can be very difficult to get started doing anything. It's too easy for us professionals to forget how much we know now.

Focus more on the performance characteristics and design trade-offs of core algorithms and data structures (e.g., binary search, quicksort, dictionaries, vectors, lists) and less on the nitty gritty of implementing them.

Starting with interactive languages like Python that handle garbage collection and have high-level containers built in is also useful. Noisy stack traces when something goes wrong are also much more accessible than a C or C++ core dump.

Another thing that irked me was the expectation that we were already emacs or vi experts! For beginning programmers, Notepad or Gedit is perfectly adequate.
Company aims to replace CAPTCHAs with advertising
The job boards on 37signals and stackoverflow are not in the list! I am not sure how these kind of boards can be left out? I agree with mahmud's comment. This could be for SEO.
I posed the same question to the author on his blog. As far as I know at least ASP.NET MVC will run on Mono, and I would bet the other frameworks would as well.

I'm all for any new tool that would make my life easier, but it would be great to hear what this framework is going to offer that isn't already offered in the other existing frameworks.
There have been other HN discussions about seeding your site, and the consensus seems to be that it's OK if done ethically. I'd say paying users to generate stuff is fine. Just don't steal copyrighted material, don't pay people to reword someone else's content. Keep them generating original material and I don't see any problems.
I admit I haven't done any research on it, but I've always assumed that it's a pretty easy problem if you're talking about relatively static content-driven pages, but I've always assumed that when it comes to highly interactive web apps it becomes very difficult or even borderline intractable. Is that true? Are you able to use a site like, say, pivotaltracker? And if not, how would you get it to work?
No, it's the new karma points.
James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle
The poster is a spam account. Zero comments and horrid submissions: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=michaelmayer
HtmlCoffee: HTML generation in CoffeeScript
1000 servers is not at all unrealistic if you've automated the process.
> Polymorphism allows you to do this. In the context of decorators, that usually means defining an interface.

This doesn't work if you have a generic decorator class. You can't really make it implement all the interfaces you potentially want to use.

It's the same problem with mock objects in test cases. You can't pass them because the type check prevents it, even though in practice everything would work just fine.
If you read the original post, $110k is the base salary, which means total comp is probably closer $170k.
don't pay people to reword someone else's content.

I had that experience with mturk...several people must have used the same content spinning software, because they all returned basically the same reworded wikipedia article.
Playing Software Developer Hot Potato
If you read Steve Wozniak's book "iWoz", he talks about how Steve Jobs got him to do some hardware work (chip minimization) for Atari and lied about how much money Atari actually paid him.

http://www.woz.org/letters/general/91.html
Brilliant. When I opened Rotten Tomatoes I saw a picture of myself, because the site is using the Facebook personalization API... Very eerie actually- not that I'm against the technology- but just noticing it for the first time on this particular movie entry...
Hmm... this wasn't really what I was expecting.

It's a good list of job boards for IT jobs. And if you're looking for a job (and moreso, if you're currently unemployed) you should probably be taking the time to go through each one (and more).

However ... I wouldn't say that any of them "help" you find a job anymore than a billboards "helps" you find a new skirt to wear to work. When I saw the title, I expected to see a list more like this:

http://standoutjobs.com/

http://www.visualcv.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/

http://stackoverflow.com/

and of course, my very own:
http://codeanthem.com/
You're at a disadvantage compared to the nerds who have been sitting behind a computer since they're 8 years old.

Instead of competing with them, try to use your background in aviation to wedge yourself into the software business. I suggest researching lots of smaller companies that make aviation-related software. Everything from aircraft systems to websites for pilots, iPhone applications related to aviation, tools for GA pilots, etc. There may be people out there who would love to have a software enthusiast pilot on staff, or consulting.

I work in flight simulation, and one very interesting job I've seen people do is test pilot / test engineer. Your combined background could make you a great candidate for that sort of role too. There are a dozen simulator manufacturers around the world, mostly in US, to look up.
GOG (Good Old Games) Relaunches; Takedown was marketing hoax