skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So this guy sounds like some office granny scolding the interns over trifles of etiquette. He summed up his 12 years of working at Microsoft with a bunch of smarmy anecdotes typical of office gossip & politics. Not a single mention about software or technology in general. No penetrating insights about the industry, products, the future.

I wonder about Microsoft's financial future if this is what their corporate culture has been reduced to. Everyone is so high on themselves and on playing Soap Opera over in Redmond that nothing truly new gets shipped.
I read my ebooks in all those places.
+1 for the concrete thing. Spolsky was using real numbers from real experience with real applicants, but this article seems to be pure speculation and anecdote. The author is saying, "Well, my personal experience doesn't match up with this so it must be inaccurate."
Hey chopsueyar, since it's meant for situations with a large audience and a projector, we haven't made it public. If we do however, we'll definitely let people know.
I wasn't getting any video/audio through the web, so I've gone with the iphone app (over wifi) and it is definitely choppy, some rewinding of the stream, etc...

At least it looks like the talks will be made available after the event (based on seeing rebroadcasts of previous ones)...
Django app to run a HN like social news site with subtopics.
If you can get your book published and marketed by a 'top publisher', there's still money to be made the old way:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/08/23/seth-godin-a...
http://www.tlb.org/eunicycle.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/segway.html

50% as dorky. 0% as smug.
No. That's stupid. IE6 was IE6 because for more than 5 years it was the last browser of its line.

The "IE8 is the new IE6" claims at least have some meat to them: IE8 is the last (edit: MS) browser running on Windows XP which means as long as Windows XP exists in significant numbers so does IE8, but this is nonsense: Firefox, Safari and Chrome are not going back into their hole, which means IE9 will not be an undisputed champion of anything which means IE9 will not be the last IE ever to run on Windows Vista and Windows 7 (unless microsoft decides to get out of the browser market entirely, but I don't see that happening).

Thus IE9 can not be the new IE6. It might not be the best browser ever, but IE10 will come next and improve it, and IE11 after it.

If you're grasping for parallels, IE9 is the IE5 of CSS3, not the IE6.
Toddlers’ Favorite Toy: The iPhone
Seems fixed now, give it a shot
but there is a benefit to fewer releases, of course: less diversity

In theory. yes. In practice, it doesn't seem to work like that. Firefox and Chrome get automatically updated quite rapidly, so the current version is the only very important one.
I was in the same position as you a few months ago. I had an idea for YComb!, and I didn't know any technical guys well enough to be a technical co-founder, so I decided I was going to be the technical co-founder.

I would recommend picking up SAMS Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours: http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Hours-Coverage/dp/... and O'Reilly's Learning PHP, MySQL, and Javascript: http://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-JavaScript-Step---Step/...

Do the SAMS guide first, then O'Reilly. Do the examples, do the examples, do the examples. That's the most important part. Even if you only have a few spare hours per day, you can get through 3-4 chapters of HTML/CSS, but I would recommend only doing one chapter of the O'Reilly book a day, since it's a bit more to learn than the SAMS book. So, it should take you about 3 weeks to work through both of those, and have at least a competent grasp on web dev. From there you can probably make your own decisions about where you want to go from there.
This is a really good intro on tuning a high bandwidth site; thx!
Lets not forget that the main problem with IE6 was that it was the primary vector that infected millions of computers with viruses and created the gigantic botnets we have today.

Sure IE6's CSS compatibility and other rendering quirks are issues, but it was far overshadowed by the huge security hole it created.
I am thinking of using LeanPub, which takes 25%. You keep your rights.
Looks great on my desktop browser (Google Chrome).

However, I tried on my Android 2.2 phone (HTC Hero) and the graphics are sometimes a bit jagged or pixelated looking, and the scrolling is also quite slow and not smooth at all. That probably has to do with the phone, seeing that HTC Hero is a slow phone, despite its 500-something MHz clock rate. I also think it's got to due with the browser being un-optimized.
The probability that a person with type I diabetes would have had type I diabetes (and so died a painful death before 35) if born a hundred years ago is close to one, as type I is inherited.
And most food was considerably less healthy and safe then, too, only more scarce and expensive. The problem with GM and processed food is not that it is less healthy than what came before it, but considerably less healthy than what can be produced today, which is the relevant reference point.
If this really enables web programmers to make functional phone apps as it seems to do, I predict two things:

1) More useful apps will be out on the market with an influx of new developers. "The best will get better"

2) The amount of money earned by your average app (already pretty low) will continue to decrease as developer supply grows.
The education you're talking about doesn't exist in first world countries either. The education, from elementary school to college, is focused on "teaching" people to be good: citizens (that is, compliant with government demands), consumers, and employees. The highest virtue in schools in first world countries are athletics and popularity. The lowest virtues are learning.

If you create jobs in an area, then people have the economic power to come together and hire teachers and create a school. If an external party, such as government, creates the school, the school will be focused on the agenda of that third party.

Education isn't a commodity like cotton. Pretty much all cotton is the useful as cotton. Much of the education in first world countries is focused on keeping people down, dependent, and unquestioning.

Every decade the schools teach less, and in less detail. It is pretty scary. (I expect to be downvoted because I believe most participants on HN are college students or recent graduates who haven't had enough time out of college to get the perspective that results in these conclusions.)
There is a simple solution to this. Start with a working program that doesn't do what you want, and incrementally make it into the one you want.

It doesn't matter what the original program does. I cannot count how many times I started with a program that printed Hello, world and wound up with with something useful and unrelated.
IRobot's experimental robots include ones filled with sand.
You're welcome.

No, I'm Dutch. Just my name :)

It'll be up in another 4 hours when this thread goes dead. Otherwise I have to go through the whole thing twice.
This would be awesome to ride on, but I am a little afraid that it will tip as soon as it hits a rough spot.
It is, among many, many other things, the primary way we get people to our monthly ChiSec meetups. It's also been a hiring vector for us. There's two uses for you.
Ask HN: How can I make Vim into a useful code editor?
I'm new to Mac and Rails and am going through the tutorials in Agile Web Development w/ Rails. I'm finding that using TextEdit along with switching between files is a bit cumbersome. I'd much rather just stay in terminal the whole time.

I went here (http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/) to download a color scheme, placed it in /usr/share/vim/vim72/colors, and ran :colo ansi_blows. I didn't get an error, but nothing changes. Any advice? Thanks!
I haven't read Titan, but I can recommend "The Myth of the Robber Barrons". Excellent book.

The short story is this: All those robber barrons did far more good for society than the government that broke them up. The propaganda about how they were doing so much harm and needed to be broken up for the good of society is the basic propaganda of socialism. But of course, since it is taught as history, people believe it.
"I wish there were something like JQuery for cross-browser CSS."

Take a look at Compass http://compass-style.org/ - a framework for SASS (a CSS preprocessor).

It has a few major benefits over plain CSS, one of which is that it implements a lot of common things across browsers where possible (round borders, inline-block, etc).
That is how most programs are written, but it really helps to have some existing structure, such as an app framework. Also I suspect there has only ever been one Makefile, that has been copied and tweaked millions of times by millions of people over the years...
I'm teaching a dozen people or so how to build "websites" with HTML/CSS/Javascript/python. There's four intro lessons that take about an hour-ish, and then we review code once a week or so.

The idea is to give you the absolute minimum exposure you need to build what you want to build, show you how to look up the rest, and introduce you to some of the more abstract principles by correcting your code as you go.

Definitely still in Beta / Guinea Pig mode, but send me an email if you'd like to try it out: japherwocky [at] pearachute.com
Yes I agree. My point is that just being a intrest graph service limits the service to the early adopter tech crowd. Facebook are in a much stronger position as (normal) people are there already with their friends, and they can grab the interest graph as well.
consider how many businesses are reliant on twitter.

facebook may have their hand all throughout the social graph, but twitter has given rise to an entire ecosystem that is not going anywhere.

just think about all the social media (AKA twitter) jobs that have been created!
Full working code on a whiteboard, is very uncommon. However a lot of the time useful code snippets go on a whiteboard. Particularly in informal meetings. More than that, design diagrams go up there as well. There are some interview questions that I like which force people to put up the sort of pictures we actually draw in meetings - for instance come up with the tables backing a particular application. At the place where we asked that, you'd find yourself doing that after you got hired as well.

If you don't use whiteboards in these ways, then I'm going to suggest putting whiteboards near developers and consciously try it. You'll be amazed how well it works.
Jon Postel, more than almost anyone else, is one of the main reasons we have the Internet we have today. He created the DNA that set in stone the character of what the Internet really 'is'. This allowed the Internet to transition from a many educational to a commercial entity but still retain its 'open soul'.
But do you know one that offers free dynamic dns for top level domains?
I don't really need priority inbox, because I can make unwanted e-mail go away with filters and reporting them spam.
/*
>If, before a test, you imply that the women should expect to do a little worse than the men, that hurts performance. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This sounds like a specific form of a general psychological result that would hold true for men too. If so then this article is beyond disingenuous it is a flat lie. That aside in order for the result to have a bearing on real world test scores it would require someone to be telling women just before their maths test that they're going to fail. Who's doing that, it would be pretty easy to spot in a school and certainly in my country a teacher doing that would lose their jobs.
*/

It does hold true for men -- specifically, men of African-American and Hispanic descent, when reminded that minorities generally do worse on math exams before the exam is given.

The proposition that nobody is telling women they're going to do worse on math tests, however, is simplistic. It isn't that some mean old guy is telling them they suck (although one of my female physics professors mentioned, out of the classroom, that she had been thrown out of a physics class at Georgia Tech in the early 1970's for "taking a man's spot" -- you're right that this sort of thing is much less common these days, at least in the West). It's that the whole culture is suffused with the attitude that women's mathematical abilities are suspect -- witness threads like these, which appear over and over on the interwebs, discussing whether or not women are as capable as men at math.

Measuring maths ability scientifically and publishing the results, rather than relying on folk-science and anecdote, could help encourage women to trust their own desires and abilities mathematically -- even when faced with a predominantly male culture and continual doubt being cast on their abilities to function at the highest levels.

I know this to be true because I am now a lone female coder in a group of (really great, smart, delightful) guys, loving my work on a complex, challenging system. And I remember that I dropped out of the very first coding class I took after a few weeks because I was completely intimidated by the swaggering guy classmates who threw around terms I wasn't yet familiar with -- I felt out of place and was full of self-doubt. It was only after maturing and understanding the social dynamics that I retook the class and ended up with one of the top 5 grades, out of several hundred students. Yet, at first, I had been certain I was incapable -- not because any guys were mean to me (not one was anything but helpful), but because I doubted myself, and felt alone and weird.

And surely this isn't gender-specific, and surely many geeky coders can relate, and have probably had similar experiences in different areas of life. This isn't a woman-man thing only -- it's a specific expression of a general human tendency to reflect cultural attitudes about their lives in the images they create of themselves.
The least we could do is get his name right.

Please.
We discussed this before... but... what if Microsoft developer tools are better than Apple (xcode) and Android (eclipse) ? what if any guy can develop some software in a few days while doing the same for Android and the Apple takes 2x o 3x? what if Silverlight experience is better than html5 or native UIs? And... what if connecting games between desktop, xbox and mobile works?

Many "What IFs", but for me the developing tools and silverlight are key. Also on the RIM side QNX is a very promising bet against Linux/iOS/Windows, the demo doesn't feel real, but QNX is a strong OS.
I've done it with XP back in the day, but never tried it with Win7. That might make an interesting project...
A monopoly is someone who owns an entire market. In the history of america, the only monopolies that have existed were government granted ones, like the US Postal Service. The government passed a law prohibiting the offering of first class mail. At the time they did this, there was a thriving and growing and diverse mail delivery system made up of thousands of small businesses and private contractors.

Standard Oil was never a monopoly, and never had monopoly pricing power. Standard oil was only ever able to get large because they quickly and constantly drove down the price of gasoline.

There is this tendency for americans to call businesses that are not monopolies under the definition to be monopolies to justify using violence against them (it is violence when a company is forcibly broken up or forced to not engage in "anti-competitive" (by which they really mean "competitive") activities.)

The reality is, none of these businesses were monopolies, and as much as I hate microsoft, they weren't a monopoly. Existing laws would have been sufficient for enforcement against microsoft for their crimes, which included fraud and misrepresentation. But the "anti-trust" laws are all about preserving government power and are used only against businesses that become big enough to wield influence and thus attract opponents in government... usually opponents in government in the pocket of competing businesses.

The US would be a better country and have a more robust economy, if Standard Oil had never been broken up. This and the "anti-trust" movement is a triumph of socialism over capitalism.
Ugh!

Please don't enumerate buzzwords like that. Or at least ROT13 it to be kind to some people's refined slacker sensibilities.

Right now I am digging my nails into the desk and biting my teeth: please, don't give the scumbags any of your attention. Hack outside what you see on corporate job descriptions, even if you have to wait tables to support your console habit.

Everyday you spend learning something to meet a job requirement, you're being someone's #&@! And someone who doesn't know you or give a crap about you. Do this shit for yourself. Do what you* want.

Forty years from now, at the end of your career, what do you want to remember? What do you want to be remembered by? Surely, not that pile of inventory reporting macros you wrote in Vector SQL-PowerG# 2020.

I see these ghosts at bookstores, discussing how they're certified in Java, Oracle, CISCO, and A+, and now need to add Ruby and Scala because they saw it on an ad. I am sure a great many of them can code and code "well", as much as their tools allow them. But at what cost to themselves, their ego, karma, mental health, personal growth, and fucking COJONES .. tienes algo?

Don't choose to remain adequate, and acceptable. Aim to excel, exceed, and if necessary, offend. Today's challenges and good times are tomorrow's fond-memories. Take a shot at something great, even if you fail, do it, and enjoy yourself.
(blush) That didn't occur to me. Good thing I haven't had any "program on a whiteboard" interviews. Thanks for giving up your competitive advantage to all the HNers. :-)

Personally, I hate to program on someone else's computer. I run pretty bog-standard linux with minimal plugins and aliases (in part, so that I'm comfortable in a bog-standard environment typical of servers). The problem is, lots of people have customized the crap out of their system. The result is added discomfort when I try to do something on their computer.
Asking the Big Questions at Singularity University
Are you specifying that you want students with database and networking experience? If not, your expectations may be off. I did both my BS and MS in CS (both at schools you've heard of), but concentrated on theory and AI, and I'm not sure I'd get the last two questions right. TCP guarantees packet delivery and UDP doesn't, though I only happened to learn that in passing - for all I know there are other differences too. And I don't actually know what ACID stands for, though if I had to guess I'd say it describes a set of properties that a database may or may not have. But that guess, even if vaguely right, also comes from happening to have seen it in context somewhere, not from my education. Hmm...a friend of mine from grad school just started at Google and I don't think she'd be able to answer those either.
Yelp Creates Ipad Controlled Beer Keg
I see someone commuting every day on a unicycle (through central Edinburgh in heavy traffic!) - still never seen anyone on a Segway.
Was supposed to go, but zipcar decided to eat my card between last night and this morning. At least I got to me pg and the other awesome yc folks at the party last night.
Americans operate under the delusion that our government is not corrupt. They see corrupt actions as legitimate. For instance, governments here regularly steal property from private citizens without having the citizens be charged with a crime (let alone convicted.)
Steve Jobs friends Mark Zuckerberg to talk about Ping
I've definitely come across candidates that simply couldn't code well. They couldn't handle basic things, and they didn't have a strong grasp of the fundamentals of their preferred languages.

Then again, I've been in interviews that were so brutally hard I stormed off rather than keep dealing with the issue. No exaggeration: I've been plopped down at an unfamiliar machine with only 1 putty window to a unix box (that didn't have emacs!) and told to write an ls clone in 30 minutes, without being allowed to open a web browser (and that was only one of three tasks to do in 1.5 hours)

But I also can't help but wonder if the author is in his own self-selected world. Now that I'm in startup-land, I see fewer incompetent people. Even being in Silicon Valley strongly ups your odds of meeting people who are competent. When I was interviewing outside of the Valley, things sometimes were confusingly bad.
Launching is not a problem. Getting paid is.

As an H1B employee, you will have all kinds of restrictions on doing business in the US.
Website is up with message:
"System Status !
Currently there is DDOS attack on our name servers. We are fixing the problem and everything should be up soon."
I think the leave of logic is to reject economics and just believe in something for ideological reasons.

Slim is making an economic point. Part of the reason there is no end of poverty in this US is due to the "War on Poverty" which destroyed the charity system (via government takeover of welfare programs) and has inhibited job creation (via government regulation, taxation and inflation.)

We were well on our way to ending poverty in this country before the New Deal was done to us.
They do not, and that's one of the primary causes of problems like this. Just because it's the intelligent thing to do does NOT mean that intelligent people actually do it!
Is microtask the future of work?
I've had the opportunity to interview/hire a lot of people over my career. The candidates who completely learned how to program from their college courses and never pushed themselves to learn, try or do more are really easy to spot. They always get a firm "no" from me. I'm looking for the candidate who programs because they truly enjoy it, almost regardless of having a degree or not. If your resume doesn't have at least a few side projects you've done I'm almost guaranteed to not even bother interviewing you.
Misspelling his name, so ironic.
It is "very similar" in the way that buying a meal at mcdonalds is "very similar" to being mugged. In one case you do it voluntarily and the people involved are incentivized to do it efficiently.... and in the other case you do it at gun point and the person involved has no incentive to spend the money efficiently.
I'd be so bored in 1900. I'd have to build my own internet. F* that.
Have you written code for Android? To make it any easier, you would have to advance the state of IDE and language integration by a few decades. Sure, it doesn't let you draw widgets by hand and attach callbacks all in an instant, like Visual Basic, but, for an API, it the simplest, most obvious thing you can imagine.

And FWIW, I do my Android hacking with emacs and a shell buffer.
> It should be a time for celebration, of the incredible way in which Mandelbrot has contributed to the sum of Humanity's Greatness.

What's the point of celebrating now that he's dead?

My great grandmother used to tell all of us -- if you're planning to come to my funeral: don't. Use the money and time you'd spend then and come visit me now.

I think now is a reasonable time to mourn. A great mathematician is no longer around to give talks (I went to one a few years ago and thought it was very neat), and if you know him personally then you won't get to see him and converse with him anymore. That's very sad. Sure, he may have done abstractly great things, but there's no denying there are sad aspects to it.

But as for celebrations and parties, those should be done while the guy is still around to enjoy, I think.
> I think my co-founder registered an LLC ...

Why don't you go out and do a little research, so you will know for a FACT whether he did or not?