skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The courses you lined up are pretty good. You should stick with one scripting language for now. Once you are comfortable with one, you can pick up the other one later. You will always find people who will say php is better than ROR, ROR better than python. Don't listen to them. I will say pick one stick with one. Once you mastered its not a big deal to go on to other languages.

Before you start, understand the basic architecture of web based technology. Try to understand how http works in basic.

Just because you watched some videos and went through tutorials you won't be able to program. What you need to do is practice practice and practice. If you can't get in 100th time you should try 101st time.
Another thing you need is passion. You should like what you are doing. If you are coding for the heck of it, you will not be able to code.
Here's some preliminary data that shows that Google Instant may have changed the distribution of clicks by rank, with more emphasis being put on results above the fold.

http://bit.ly/dAzvX3

It's not about the query behavior, but about assessment behavior. As such, your mileage may vary based on your particular rank for terms.

Outside of this analysis, the keyword length could remain the same, but a site may receive less traffic if the auto complete algorithm has changed for critical terms. Again, this will vary site by site - and where one loses, another will gain.
Have you actually tried it and been discouraged? Honestly, 100% of the core gameplay is identical to what it was in 2008. The bonuses are just new maps, slightly different alternate weapons, a new game mode or two (payload, king of the hill), and hats. It's not as if they added a dozen new classes or something; they release exactly enough content to keep it fresh for people who are playing all the time.

I'm surprised that anyone would find it intimidating -- frankly, if you took 2008 me, put me in a hole for two years, and brought me out to play TF2 CTF or CP, I would probably barely even notice that there were new things.
I moved to SanFran with my girlfriend without knowing anyone about 8 months ago. I live in between the Mission and Noe, on Guerrero St. I still don't really know anyone outside of my job but it's a great area full of friendly people. You can easily strike up casual conversation with most people in Doloros park. I joined a couple meetups and met some good people but then got to busy at work and haven't attended any in a while. There's noisebridge on Mission St where you could go hang out and meet some people.
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge
Well, that's already the case, but I agree in that this would make it considerably worse. If you look at the government as legal force, then this scheme would amount to paying for influence over a group with legal force.
> Some PC and laptop makers are already using UEFI

Who? I'd be a lot less skeptical about widespread use, if I knew a Dell or an HP were on board with this.
When you say 60% is not categorized, are you referring to the green slice in his chart? That's the amount he thinks the U.S. should be spending given its wealth and what other countries spend. He is intentionally only categorizing the parts that he thinks exceed other countries' expenditures.

(See the last paragraph of the conclusion.)
For point # 3, it's actually even worse than that. These days, the best doctors also do a fellowship after residency. It's slightly less ridiculous than a residency, but it's another 2-4 years of being underpaid tacked on to the previous 10.

My buddy, who is nearly finished with his cardiology fellowship, is nearly 300k in debt at this point. On the other hand, that dude has already saved some lives and I'd trust him w/ mine in a <dorky pun>heartbeat</dorky pun>.
The only thing I've found to be "almost instant" is waking up my mac from sleep mode.
I'm in the process of moving from Austin->San Francisco and I've been using PadMapper to see apartments per neighborhood. Once I find a place I think is cool, I click over to google maps and "explore" a bit with street view. Incredibly useful...

I also use google maps to check transit times on Caltrain to various SV locations. Include times from apartment -> transit stops -> final location, etc etc to get a good feel for total travel time to events/meetings.

Good luck!
To me, the larger story is about risk. A lot of people here, if directed to build a personal finance startup, would go about it in much the same way that Wesabe did. Launch early, attempt to build a community of enthusiasts, and grow the site organically (through word of mouth) as opposed to advertising. This is the time-honored way, and a lot of startups have succeeded by it.

What did Patser do? He went and dropped $2 million on the domain name before he even had a single user, and then inked a sweetheart deal with Yodlee to gain an overnight technical advantage on the competition. He spent money on advertising, artwork, and design. (Interestingly, the claim that Mint spent $1/user conflicts with something I read earlier: http://www.slate.com/id/2228846/. Not sure where the truth lay.)

He did everything that the 37 Signals / MVP crowd says you shouldn't. I'm not criticizing, but in their pursuit of instant profitability / dislike of VC money, they sometimes seem to lose sight of the value of gambling big. Patser took risks, and the market rewarded him for it.
>programming is a relatively low status and low paid occupation

Median comp-sci undergrad salary is like second or third from the highest out of all majors. Non-degreed programmers likewise do better than just about any other non-degreed professionals.
I particularly like the floppy disk clip art.
Doesn't apple use this already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface
Macs use EFI, don't they? My MBP cold boots fairly quickly, but nothing to write home about.
Pointing to Google is such a non-argument, in my opinion. What does it prove? That you can succeed with a mediocre name, not that picking a good brand doesn't matter. I don't like it when people say "Google does X, so it must be fine". Google is a much better name than Wesabe, anyway. Of course picking a good brand helps. Will it make or break your company? No.
I agree with most you said except a small detail: how is C good at expressing algorithms? There are far more expressive languages in the C family. The point of learning C I would argue is to have at least one low level language in your toolbox.
Good day for the good guys.
Wordpress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. – alleged email from anonymous microsoft executive.
My view is that people in the bay area are very friendly and it's reasonably easy to make friends (accounting the geek factor ;-). A good start is to check meetup.com for groups with similar interest (startups, programming languages, food, etc). If you're into hiking, the Stanford Outing Group is pretty good:

https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/outing

They are not affiliated with Stanford anymore and they have user-organized group hikes regularly (sometimes every week) around the bay area.
The Price of German Reunification: The Euro
Common words don't do well as names when they are words that describe exactly what the company does. Common words can be better used when they have nothing to do with what the company does.

For example, Apple is a much better name for a computer company than "Computer", would be. Same Amazon is much better for an online bookstore, than "Bookstore.com" would be.

The reason they are better is because they can be uniquely associated with that company. How many Apple companies are there that sell computers? How many Amazon's that sell books?

They use a common word to actually turn it into an unique one.

Sex.com like names are usually highly valued as domains because of the perception people have on them, thinking that a name so descriptive MUST be valueable as a brand.

It's actually absolutely worthless as a brand name, and if you follow the track records of the companies that have used domain names like that you'll see that most of them have failed. Sure it might help a little bit with SEO, but that benefit is not nearly enough to compensate for how bad a brand like that is and how easily people will forget it.

As for what Marc said, I agree with the fact that their approach was not about the automation is probably the biggest factor in their eventual failure. However, the Wesabe name did create some friction as opposed to Mint.

When you have a bad name is like trying to drive a car with your foot slightly pressing on the break pedal. No matter how fast your car (product) is, your speed will still be dramatically reduced.
That 60% is the "expected" costs. The categorization is just for the "extra" costs.
It is the popular imagination conflates them...

1. High-Frequency trading, by definition, done by algorithms.

2. We hear rumors or storyies of Algorithms gone wild.

3. This report blames and 'Algorithmic Trade' as the cause.

People are tempted to 'connect-the-dots' and would likely end up with an erroneous conclusion.
> As far as the finances, as I understand things, simply raising the cap on income would extend things out a bit, FICA doesn't get collected past 105k or something.

Since benefits are roughly related to FICA, extending the cap doesn't help much. It helps some, because the benefits system is progressive, in that folks who contribute a lot get less return on their contributions than folks who contribute just a little, but ....

The folks who designed SS thought that the cap was essential. Their argument was that SS wouldn't survive if it paid folks like Ross Perot $500k/year in benefits or if it was a tax with no benefits to folks like Ross Perot. The cap means that Perot doesn't get $500k/year but don't care because he didn't put much in.

Are they wrong?
Sometimes companies embed the passcode in the build script to automate the build process. Having to type in the passcode every time to build a release can become a chore.
It's smaller than the resolution high-quality DSLRs can reliably produce, but I think it probably does cover the vast majority of Facebook users' uploads. A 2048x1536 photo is still 3 megapixels, which isn't bad. Sure, 10-megapixel point and shoots are common, but most don't really reliably capture 10 megapixels worth of information, and might even benefit from being downsampled to 3 megapixels (if the downsampling algorithm is high quality, anyway).
BlackBerry's Encryption Hacked; Backups Now a Risk
How much money should a social media consultant make?
As a doctor in England that has seen the American system, there are a lot of interesting points.

I agree with number 3 on specialisation; a doctor should first "learn how to learn" then specialise. If they change their mind, they can easily relearn. Most stay with one thing, with many becoming ultra specialists ie. knee surgeons.
Very nice article - many lessons learned and I think you're on the mark there, TC40 gave Mint social proof - if they can win within their own community then it must be ok.

I wonder if personal financial software is a tougher market for adoption than business financial software is.

It seems to me that many of Wesabe's features are also relevant to small businesses who are already used to making more input decisions and "wrestling" with their financial software and who might be more willing to adopt if benefits exceed costs.

I am working on a financial system that is directed more toward business than individuals (however still relevant to individuals) and I am looking for a co-founder. If you're interested Marc, I'm @blusie on twitter.
First interesting read. However, overly simplified. Name, product and UX are all good reasons but they can all be fixed. Companies succeed or fail for two reasons - CEO and cash flow. The importance of a CEO is usually understated but the CEO is critical. Being a visionary, cracking the whip when necessary and instilling values (excellence is the first) cant be replaced. He is driving the company forward. He can be a coder but he should not write single line of code. His role is to manage not to develop. As per Cash flow. Given enough cash flow, anything can be fixed. Company can relaunched, product improved and marketing invested. As per Wesabe vs. Mint. In this day and age people who give control of their accounts to ANY third party are plain crazy. However, the buzz instilled confidence in people and they think Mint is safe. Wesabe could have had a place in the market with people who don’t trust Mint's approach. The issue was, it was not "sexy" and the people who might have been interested didn’t hear about it. Good Marketing could have addressed that (positioning, PR etc). Which goes back to the CEO being a CEO and not focus on coding.
If you want to see what Javascript could have become without premature standardization, check out Lua (http://www.lua.org/). It doesn't get that much hype because it isn't married to the web, but it's popular in other niches, particularly the gaming industry. It's designed for scripting C / C++ applications, but also works well as a standalone language.

It's like a tasteful mix of Python and Javascript, but without any of the fat. It's very dynamic, has a small, extremely portable, and high-performance implementation (in a ~200k C library), has prototype-based objects, a JSON-like native datatype, and a better JIT (http://luajit.org/) than any JS implementation thus far.

Recommended introduction: Ierusalimschy's _Programming in Lua, 2nd ed._ (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/).
thank you for the advice!

They have some tutorials on setting up servers, domains, etc. that are helping me understand basic web tech.

I'm using the tutorials to give myself a basic understanding of where to begin -- I often feel like books / tutorial websites don't really explain the big macro picture before diving deep into the minute details.

Thanks again
One thing that hasn't been mentioned much yet is marketing. Read the big popular marketing books such as "Positioning" by Reis and Trout, because marketing is tough. There is little technical risk involved with most web companies. The biggest risk is not finding enough people to give you money.
The real problem with being put in a unique position to do important work is that you're under the gun to do important work.

But so are you as a professor, at least up to tenure. I agree it is a double edged sword. It is intuitive that a research community prefers to evaluate someone before offering him a tenure-track job.

PS The ratio postdocs/asst.prof can vary a lot. For example it was much lower than 10 in all of the departments I worked at, though not far from it in Europe.
I pay my copywriter $200 per hour. What you're calling "copywriting" is actually "article writing," and what you're calling "good" is actually "not horrendously terrible". They are demonstratively not the same thing. My copywriter can prove that she increases conversion rate, and thus money, not just search engine uptake.
There's a lot of naive love here for a deeply flawed idea.

First, what is suggested in this article is not a receipt, but a breakdown. A sales receipt for a car, for example, doesn't start out, "5 tires (4 on vehicle, 1 spare), 2 axles..." It just doesn't work that way. You buy "government" with your taxes.

Even if you did get an itemized receipt for a car, that would be far easier than what's proposed here. You can always just point to the car and account for the parts. The part is either there or not, and meets specifications or not. The reason that government and spending are these intractable issues is that the parts can be arguably there or not, and arguably working or not.

As long as you can't opt out of all or a portion of your taxes, in other words, as long as tax policy is sane, the only "receipt" you should get should specify that you paid the amount you calculated. Any other discussion or education about costs and allotment should happen in a forum that at least has a chance of shedding some real light.

Finally, if the receipt ever became the focus of public attention, politicians will just monkey with the categories until you're happy again. It will cease to be an information tool and become an influence tool. It will merely add another layer of intractability to an already byzantine bureaucratic system.
I wonder if he'll consider my comment history to be a "buy" or "don't buy" for the apress book then ...
Yeah, Apple has used EFI for quite a while. My laptop still doesn't boot that fast.
Yes, and in fact it would be bad for the drug companies bottom line, so I doubt they'd go for it in the first place.

It would essentially create two groups of drugs. The pre-legislation guaranteed effective drugs and the post-legislation unguaranteed drugs.

As you point out, the unguaranteed drugs would kill people, through inaction. No doctor wants to risk killing their patient, so if at all possible they'll go for the safe pre-legislation alternative.

This would greatly hurt sales of new drugs, which is the last thing drug companies want to do.
Another quick comment about doctors and pay (because I had this conversation the other day w/ a young doctor). Doctors are incentivized to prescribe costly tests. They get paid more w/ every test/procedure, and tests also serve to cover their asses. Patients also, often, demand the testing.

Those who are against tort reform often use some statistics showing that tort fees only account for a tiny percentage of health costs, but they miss a deeper relationship between the fear of being sued (most doctors get sued at some point in their career) and the defensive, expensive, care doctors give.
Nothing about this article explains how it happened, only that it happened.
clickable: http://www.haswifi.com

Would be nice if it supported other countries too.

Mind you, I have yet to see an international flight around here (Europe) which actually has Wifi.
Demoknight is practically a new class

Huntsman + Jarate sniper is practically a new class

Gunslinger + Fontier Justice (or wrangler) Engineer is practically a new class

Dead Ringer Spy is almost a new class

Many changes in balance and game play have been made. It's not the same game as it was in 2008.
The Meat Eaters (on eliminating carnivorism)
This dude is late to the party. This seems to me like something that could have been written two or three years ago. Lots of developers have for a long time appreciated the powerful features and expressiveness of JavaScript.
Realistically, most people do not have choice in insurance providers. You get what your employer offers. If you're lucky you might get to choose either an HMO or PPO type plan from either of two different companies. If you're unlucky, you just get whatever your employer chose for you.
Ask HN: Learning About Business
Hello HN.

I'm a young designer and a front end developer. I went to school for design and "experimental media" and now I work as a designer/developer for a museum in NYC. I've been working for a startup as well and I'm becoming exposed more and more to the business side of things. My question for you is this: what are good resources for someone with a background like mine to learn more about business? I'd like to be exposed to some things that you might learn if pursued business as an undergraduate. I'm really looking for a few good books or any solid advice you're willing to give.

Much appreciated.
The problem is already known and it's in resolution phase: http://community.licorize.com/questions/184/valid-email-addr...
This is what I was alluding to. For the most part, unless it is an OpenGL game then a mobile web app can do most if not all of the same work - and its immediately cross platform. Dropping a browser view into an app and selling it that way even allows you to give 30% of your money to apple if thats what you want.
> If Social Security were a private company it would be considered a pyramid scheme and shut down.

No it wouldn't, your concept of pyramid scheme is flawed. By your definition, all insurance is a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes promise everyone they'll get out more than they put in and this eventually collapses. Social Security makes no such promise, it's insurance, they fully expect many people to die before getting out what they put in or even starting to get anything out at all. That's how any insurance works. Social Security is not a pyramid scheme.
Apple's SDK comes with iPhone Simulator.app that — despite the name — is also a full iPad simulator with Mobile Safari.

Besides, "You can make CSS images with rounded corners!" is getting old. Author even failed to put standard properties that would make it work in Opera and IE9.
Then they shouldn't have starved their baby to begin with, by not coming up with a business model that made them actual money.
Oh it can't? Right. Like hey, let me salt a clue here. Oops, better make sure it's ISO compliant. I want to get hired later, after all...

Subtlety, obfuscation, and misdirection; welcome to the Middle East.
Mythbusting “HTML 5 Did Not Kill Flash” - Flash Player version 258.1 plausible?
Consider the true implications of the idea that an algorithm "set off" the market crash:

- Traders were happily trading along at a market price they all had tremendous confidence in.

- An algorithm decides to liquidate some shares, causing the market price to dip a bit b/c of extra supply.

- Said traders immediately lose all confidence in the market price they'd been happily trading along at all day and start dumping their own shares.

Conclusions:

If the traders were confident in the initial market price (i.e, if they were "right" then they should have started buying when the price started dipping. This would have held the price up. That they didn't reveals a lot about their own strategies.

If the fact that the order placed by the algoritm is "to blame" implies that a human wouldn't have placed that order.

It sounds to me that the algorithm simply wanted to liquidate and wouldn't have placed such a large market order if it were overly concerned about getting top dollar for every share. This happens with human traders all the time. The bigger the order the more it will move the market. There are large trade desks that help minimize this but they take a big spread for the service.

So ironically it was the algorithm that had a principled, deep view of the market and the human traders who were fickle and skittish... exactly the opposite of the typical impression of each. It's like if Kasparov were playing against Deep Blue and Deep Blue sacrificed a pawn and Kasparov knocked over the board.
Likely a doctor would prescribe the standard treatment first (assuming it has a decent track record), and only resort to the new, unproven alternative if the standard didn't work. Or, the standard might have undesirable side effects and the patient themself would opt for the unproven alternative.
I think the idea is that he is wasting the opportunity to make some tax free income. Any work that he could have done for X amount of dollars would have been compensated at full rate instead of market rate minus tax liability, given X does not exceed his deductible expenses.

AFAIK, the alternative minimum tax applies to high incomes. Maybe you were referring to wages below the standard deduction?
I would ask yourself this question about expensive. If you don't have much experience with this, is the money that Heroku/EY would cost you really that expensive when you consider the time you will spend learning how to scale your application on your own and the possible service problems you might experience while you learn. Cliches exist for a reason and 'you only get one chance to make a first impression' is completely true. If I go to check out your site and it is slow or down, I won't be coming back. Most people I know are the same way.
As a Portuguese citizen I consider that acronym as offensive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIGS_(economics)#Controversy

I think that we all agree that generalizations are the sign of narrow-minded individuals...
I work in the same office park as Inventionland. Every time I drive by it I wonder what they do in there. Now I kinda want to go take a tour.