skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.”

Probably the best thing to happen as the decision makers managed to decide Sun to the selling block.
"Under the current system, the worst students cost far more to educate than the best students."

This is an excellent argument against the current system. The reason why the worst students cost more to educate using the Gary Plan is largely because of expensive pull-outs, which isn't a problem under, say, Open Systems Instruction.[1] Under the current system they actually talk about Total Adjusted Pupil Units rather than students, which shows just how pervasive the problem is.

[1] C.f. Public Schools Should Learn to Ski
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> They'd have to double their revenue stream every single year to make it worth buying at that price within some reasonable payoff-time like 5 years.

That's not so ridiculous for an internet company dominant in a developing space. Minecraft seems to have doubled its revenue stream every single month for the last few months.
Additionally, they are cutting edge now. The textures are so small for budget and performance reasons. When generating new terrain, my i7 920 system with a HD 4850 drops to 40 fps. You can download higher-resolution third-party textures, and they turn the game into a slideshow.
I'm sure they use a CDN for delivery of the flash assets. The flash is still most likely updated several times a day.

We used to batch commands in the client and submit every 6 seconds. It was still a crazy number of writes, because basically every click is a database update. MySQL is really bad at that sort of work load, but I migrated almost everything to Redis. Really fun problems to solve!
I'm working on a Vancouver based startup. I think it's awesome and my mom says it's cool! :)

On a more serious note, I think the event is an awesome idea and would like to see event more startups in Vancouver. I think we've got the right culture and city to do it in. Also, VHS (Vancouver Hackspace)does a hack night on Tuesdays if anyone is interested. http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/wp/
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I see the difference between creativity and insanity as a function of society. If a given society sees the connections as useful, it's creative. If instead, society cannot make sense of the connections, it's insanity.

As an analogy, mentally challenged children were seen as cursed in ancient Sparta and were routinely put to death. On the other hand, Mayan culture viewed mentally challenged children as "divine gifts," and the children could easily rise to positions of religious prominence and status in adulthood.

It's less a matter of the individual than how that individual can fit into society.
I agree with the sentiment, but it's important to note that excellent programming requires some pretty high level theoretical understanding of Computer Science (i.e. Algorithms). There's a slow way to do everything and a fast way to do some things; programmers need to understand the theory behind this. In addition, if you're trying to teach someone how to write secure code, they're going to need at least some understanding of crypto. Crypto has theoretical aspects to it as well. Basically when you keep all the parts of theory that are useful to programming, there isn't much extra stuff left. It turns out the things you could remove only amount to about one theory course in your standard competitive Computer Science curriculum.

The real reason why we have an issue producing quality programmers is more fundamental; we just don't have enough people who are good at teaching it. It's not because we "waste" time on one or two courses on some theoretical aspects.

Another thing to consider is allowing Computer Science majors to opt out of general education requirements in favor of more programming classes. Allowing this would free up a semester or more for most undergraduates (as opposed to the one course saved from cutting theory). Even with just average teaching, a semester can make a big difference.
Can you catch the Intel WiMAX Wanderer in Austin, TX?
I don't really like the design of that site. Also, I will like to keep it closely tied with stylebot so it is easy to share/install styles.
Do super angels have super powers? Or could it just be that a bunch of guys in the same industry wanted to meet together. That people in a given industry meet to further the goals of that industry is hardly surprising.

Who doesn't want to buy into a company at a lower valuation?
Along similar lines, make sure you have clear and reasonable terms for parting ways with your co-founder in the unlikely event that that happens. It will save you from major headaches later on.

I recently went through that process, and even for an amicable split, it was a lot more work to resolve than I would have liked.
All the real money vs hyped money thing apart, I read somewhere that a 2003 decision by Steve Jobs to swap his options for a low return but safer alternative has costed him a lot. As per the article his worth would have been at least $13 billion now.

Couldn't locate the original article; found the following with a google search.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-steve-jobs-blunders-...

Anyone care to confirm or deny this?
For example, my hometown of Montville, NJ has a wonderful public school system which has very good outcomes. As does Bergen County, NJ. And many of my friends and family have attended Rutgers University and received outstanding educations. These are public schools, functioning just fine. Rutgers is arguably better than most private universities, and our high school arguably better than most private schools.

I thought even the best public school is highly inefficient, especially with the high school I go to. They have pep rally and sport team. It cost money to train coaches, build stadium, and other items. Heck, my educational field trip got canceled even though sport teams get to go.

I mean, a true autodidact, not a shallow self-educated learner like me who happens to learn little bit there and there, would probably own the students at my highschool with terrifying efficiency.
Wow. Great essay. Thanks.

Too late about the C++ Java thing though...
I attended MinecraftCon 2010 in Bellevue back in August.

http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/08/31/wherein_bbot_gets_r...

It was scheduled maybe a month ahead of time, and located days ahead of time, and held in the middle of a field, in the rain; and still a about hundred people showed up. Just to see Markus.

Minecraft fans are dedicated, I'll give them that.
That's why professional programmers should get a B.S. in CS and then an M.S. in software engineering (or a few years of internship experience such as that required for licensed architects). Unfortunately, this is one of those things you can't say because it increases the opportunity cost of a programming career.
I used to work with the most amazing guy when it comes to commiseration. I actually felt bad for him--he was so good at it, it seemed he had to do it more often because people would (unconsciously?) seek him out.

Once I realized it, I tried to observe everything I could. He used a lot of those techniques. Another useful one is, "That must have felt X ". Again, validating feelings.

Please note: telling someone that they shouldn't worry about something is pretty much the polar opposite of this, and should be avoided by anyone hoping to maintain a friendship with someone with feelings.
From my point of view as a business owner, if they haven't replaced you already, your old employer would likely welcome you back with open arms. Good people are hard to find - and ones that know all your systems and eccentricities are even harder to find. The biggest headache in hiring someone is getting them up to speed and integrated into your company culture. This is way more time and energy consuming than you might think. So if I was you old employer I would bring you back - the only headache would be if I had replaced you already or promoted one of your old co-workers. At a Fortune 500 company they should be able to find some parallel position at least for you.
I'm keeping this in my back pocket the next time I have a conversation about why I prefer Ruby's monkey patching paradigm to Python's strictness. This is better than all my current examples. :)
> What I think is interesting about the free-to-play
> period (due to website collapse) is that it may
> actually be a massive boost,

I think the paypal withholding his funds may have also been a boost - I know I thought "An indie game that did $600,000 sales in one week? I need to check that out."

It may not have been intentional but I think some of the adversity that Minecraft has faced has been turned around nicely.
I work for a non-profit as an IT manager (35 paid employees, ~50 unpaid employees) for an organization that tries to reduce poverty in the world. I've worked as an IT manager at "for-profits" for a while now, and this job is by far the most challenging.

This isn't true for all non-profits, but here there is nearly no budget. Our pay-scale is fixed, and we use interns in a big way. We rely heavily on 'sponsorship' from organizations who support our cause for nearly everything we do.

Of course I take advantage of blanket donation programs (from Microsoft and Cisco, for example) and "non-profit discounts", but that's not what I really want. I don't want to pick SharePoint because it's free for us, I want to pick it because it is a good solution and fits our needs. Sadly (and by-design, surely) that price point affects my proposals to management, and I have to say "Microsoft gives it to us for free, 37signals offers no discounts". :(

But these blanket discounts aren't what I push for with vendors. I want to build a special relationship with our sponsors. I want you to donate your software or services to us because you believe in our cause, just as I believe in our cause and have taken a serious pay cut to support it. I want that relationship to be sustainable: I don't want you to feel that the burden of supporting us is greater than the reward.

And there can be a lot of rewards. We have an extensive for-profit network, and we work very close with them. We have a ton of young, highly-educated staff who come through our organization. We have a very large base of supporters who engage us, and who we engage, online (twitter, facebook, etc). The list goes on and on, it only requires a bit of creative thinking to replace dollar signs.

So I'd re-phrase the question: What are you doing to leverage a group of people who need and are passionate about using your product for an important cause which you support, but don't have the resources to pay full price?
Preparing For a Successful Job Interview
I would use redis ordered sets and shard between servers in your application.

1. Get the server ID based on what the timestamp is. You would store a starting time and a server ID. You then lookup what server your data is on based on the start of your range.

2. Use sorted sets to store your data, using the timestamp as the score. These are really fast in redis: http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/ZaddCommand

Other option is to checkout Raik, which will do the distributed part for you (a distributed hash-table with no master eg.) but it doesn't have the data structures that redis has (it is just key=>valu)
7 Typical questions employers ask candidates
> I used to be a mechanical engineer for several space shuttle missions.

I voted you up for this sentence alone. It makes anything else that follows that you say inherently more valuable to the discussion. thanks for contributing.
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What about combatting trolls?
One more bug in the first code snippet is their use of find_by_id means that @album could be nil, causing an error when they attempt to edit it. Most people would use @album.find and then catch the error/show a 404.

I realize these guys are in college, but they really should have (a) brought people's expectations in line with their abilities and (b) reached out to experienced developers to help them out. Intridea probably would have given them a few developer hours per week to help code, advise them, and so on. Just a little input and guidance would have saved them a lot of grief.
The best I can sum it up: I can barely remember anything that has happened in real life since I started playing Minecraft on Saturday. All I have are Minecraft memories and I can't believe the clock now says it's Thursday.

Very dangerous if you want to stay productive. But I'm happy because I just made my first lava fountains outside my home (after spending an hour scouring the land trying to find where I had left my huge mine/home).

About the only hope I have is that Minecraft doesn't yet have a compelling co-op mode for anything other than massive building. The "survival" aspect seems not to work multiplayer yet, but if it did, my wife, kid, and I would be playing in there all the time. Because it doesn't work, I have to come up for air to spend time with them.
Ask HN: Do you think APIs will be the next gold rush?
We're seeing an explosion of APIs; apart the traction will they ever generate some revenue to the developer/webapp?
Now, bringing athletics into the discussion is a wholly different beast. Having interacted with a lot of fans and alums and faculty, and having attended panels back at RU, there will be quite some opposition against athletic spending and it will be labelled as unnecessary but more often then not, the benefits of athletics to an institution outweigh the cons by a whole lot (if run properly that is) and the arguments against it are often misguided.. that conversation is for a different time, diff place.
You should add an "I don't really care" option.
When you put it that way, suddenly I'm intrigued by the concept.
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Data are hard to come by in the industry (compared to, say, manufacturing where science branches were spawned based on analysis, observations).

From where I stand, the cost of poor quality software goes beyond the production. It's more in maintenance, licensing, lost opportunities, and poor adaptability to changing business needs.
think of it this way, I could be doing something else while I was composing your letter. Also hand written things are always much more personal than email.
He is getting praise about it because most reporters would have preserved the connections they have with these people and not said a word.

Arrington said up front that he was not invited to this dinner, he showed up expecting a quick chat or a rejection and knew that he was stirring trouble by showing up. He was tipped off that something was up because they all remained quiet, and chased up afterwards to find out that something fishy had indeed gone on (he confirmed with two people, one of those being the person who tipped him off to the meeting).

As entrepreneurs, do we not want people like Arrington fishing out stories like this? Can't we appreciate that the reason he went public is to let the public be aware that something might be happening.

I can see how people might be arguing that what the angels are doing is not wrong, but arguing that coming out with the story in the first place is out of line is to argue that journalists should just sit in the office and re-hash press releases, never digging into anything.

Besides, the post from McClure today confirmed everything Arrington wrote yesterday (it was that post that completely tipped my own opinion). Dave essentially said 'yes this is all what happen, but we aren't colluding because it is a free country'. Doesn't what Dave posted counter-argue everything you just wrote? And that is coming straight from somebody who was there, not somebody who read about it online and then formed an opinion.
Aren't we, as intelligent observers of technology, sick of the thoughtless "company x vs company y" throwaway articles yet?

Steve Jobs has been very clear that he believes the TV industry as it exists today is incapable of supporting real innovation. This is why the Apple TV is referred to as a "hobby". They do not see themselves as competing with Google or Microsoft in this space because they are not trying to solve the same problem.

It's all spelled out very clearly by Steve himself right here. It's a great clip.

http://video.allthingsd.com/video/d8-steve-jobs-on-televisio...
I've always felt the problem is that class projects never have to be production ready. You're expected to show that you've learned and can implement the theoretical material, but you never have to turn that proof of knowledge into a complete, well tested project.

That's one of my biggest regrets about my CS degrees (BS/MS). I took so many classes and did so many class projects that I never had to see one project all the way through to complete, tested, usable release.

And I don't think it's a CS department's responsibility to expect class projects to be built to a shippable standard. However, I do think that it's the school's duty to encourage students to work on a real, production project, of their own creation or as a contributor, on their own time - even if it means taking on a reduced academic load.
thanks for sharing your thoughts. :)
Thanks for the amazing feedback! Lots of great ideas! I'll definitely try implementing some of them in future versions.

As far as sharing is concerned, you're right, it'll definitely add a lot of value to Stylebot. But, as you pointed out, it is important to be careful while building such a site. I want there to be some form of curation so that I can keep it minimalist and it doesn't degenerate into userstyles.org (which is a nice place to share styles, but it is so hard to search for good ones there!) Maybe a user up/down voting system.

For the same reason, it'll take some thought and time to build this. I also want it tightly coupled with Stylebot, so that it is easy to install/share styles without too much effort. I'll definitely take a shot at this whenever I've some free time. It'll be great to have other developers jumping in! :)
Thanks, exactly right. That wasn't meant at all as an insult against Tom (or anyone else). It's just that on HN it's easy to develop a tendency to try to amass karma and lose sight of doing what's really relevant to perfecting our craft.
Farewell to the phone
Windows already swapped my CPU...
That's not just hard to see, it's like a false color from an optical illusion afterimage or something.
Who cares! Collusion should be legal. It's based on freedom of association, freedom of speech and private property. The only cartels/monopolies we should be are the ones governments create--since they're really the only ones immune from competition. Let's talk about phasing out the FCC, not a bunch of angel investors meeting.
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of their own creation or as a contributor, on their own time - even if it means taking on a reduced academic load.

But that's why the apprenticeship model would work so well. I've always thought the way union electricians are trained (a four year apprenticeship, which includes a lot of practical and theoretical schooling, until becoming a journeyman) would be a great fit for software development.
Unlike most companies, you don't get to know that beforehand. This prevents managers from hiring people who are just good enough for a specific role.
Consider using duplicity to backup to gmail IMAPS. 7GB in a luxury, sea-side GOOG datacenter, free of charge forever. Need >7GB? Create another gmail acct.

The problem with paid services is that if you have even a temporary credit card/billing problem, they may nuke your data. Also, they're probably less reliable than gmail.
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I also use the "what will I think about this when I'm 80 and looking back on it" approach. As a rule of thumb, it helps resolve a lot of choices easily, for the better.
Very good points..

As far as the hundreds of annoying investors, I never really thought of it.. But I guess that happens anyway whenever you take any customer's money.. Except in the Diaspora case, they took the money in advance of development with an expectation that what they were building would satisfy each user which is an impossible scenario from the outset.. Plus the project was open source which I don't think is exactly the norm for a YC investment..

But I think in the end, Diaspora is a fluke.. Statistically and Culturally.. Statistically, it's outcome was not representative of a typical Kickstarter Funding process.. Culturally it was the result of some backlash against Facebook.. That means some of the backers were already pissed off and the open source focus means the some were likely quite vocal to begin with.. I think the combination of these factors and the fact that the funders came in before anything was built leads to the scenario you mention..

Our product was already quite built out before we came to kickstarter and users were pledging for Alpha access and other near future products.. Interestingly enough, we got a front page post on Sparkfun.com today and there were a few non-backers who had something to say about how we should build our project.. The fact that it IS already a project means that they can criticize without making the mistake of backing us and feeling swindled that we don't share their vision.. A few times, the complaint was that we should turn our web based product open source even when they criticized our design.. I think complainers will complain no matter what, and the question of ownership and control is very important as in the case of your investor..
Do you have strong opinions about abortion? Whatever they are, there's a non-profit actively working to the contrary.

Do you have strong opinions about what is a bad way to help poor people, perhaps even harming them? There's a non-profit doing that.

Do you have strong political opinions? There's a non-profit, probably a very well-funded non-profit, promoting the opposite with things you consider lies.

That's before we even get into corruption or just plain administrative competence. Specific examples would just set the thread aflame; it's pretty obvious "hideously ineffective" and "[what] I find full-stop evil" non-profits exist. Your list may be different than my list, but we could both come up with one. Unless you have no strong opinions, in which case we could probably still find something in the political category to get you worked up if we tried.
agree, hard to choose where to go to :(
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To be fair, I think this is also a reflection on the state of the multiplayer, which is obviously still in relatively early days in terms of both design and balance (compared to the SP game).
As an ex-student, I would rather take a CS degree though, even though I was in it for the software development. You end up learning about software development anyway, in the beginning of your career, so it's not a good use of your time to devote yourself to this in college.
Or a professional programmer could just get a job and learn software engineering that way.
The good part about Ruby: you can monkeypatch around framework defaults which do not maximize for your project's circumstances. The bad part about Ruby: your least talented coder can monkeypatch around security features which make his life more difficult ("attr_accessible? Stupid Rails coders, don't they know they have private for that shit? Well, I'll redefine it to just NOP. I am the awesome!")