skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with the Newcomb solution is that it is aimed at the high-end of tech companies, which are ultimately willing to pay very high portion of the company worth for the top talent.

Most companies employing programmers today are not such companies -- they cannot possibly hope to hire A+ employees, but they are trying to build a solid team of B- or C-level programmers, just hoping to keep the F-level out. As far as I know, this is a total crapshoot and the ones succeeding in it do so mostly by luck.
What Happens In Facebook Stays In Facebook
As I've said elsewhere, the person who titled this is a silly person, they misrepresented what we said.

Yes, you've said that several times. Intention was two-part. One, to show how previous post by spolsky was false dichotomy, and second to point out to your success - which almost everyone here understood as such.

However, your original post on reddit (well your sysadmin) was titled: "Minecraftwiki.net and minecraftforum.net now serve more traffic than Slashdot and Stackoverflow" - so you can't blame that part on me, just the server count and php part.
"Monopoly is a side effect of the massive corruption plaguing Mexico"
Hold it. Please don`t make broad accusations. If you have any specific information about Telmex say so, but do not generalize. That badly hurts our reputation and it has been said many times that people just take it as true.
Mexico has corruption levels that are consistent with outher countries with similar development levels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
I tried that too on some PC's around. It's a nice feature given the need to reinstall the OS more often... There are some compatibility issues with USB booting on different BIOS, but other than that it is really helpful.

Now the next question is how do you run Win7 from a USB stick...
On the first day of my first job out of college, the sales engineer of the company took me out to lunch to give me some career advice. He said the best thing he ever did for his career was not learning how to code. Apparently he had graduated as a CS major and went straight for a software company, but really just could not program. Of course, as he put it he chose not to program, but I ultimately saw some of his work and it was beyond terrible.

Instead, he made sure never to actually be useful to the programming or hardware teams, but talk to them just enough to know the basics and keep updated. Since he wasn't actually ever working on anything, he used his free time to mingle with management and used his inside knowledge from the programming teams to announce potential problems to management before the actual programming teams could communicate this info.

Sure enough, he slowly moved into management and higher salary brackets by never actually learning how to program. Of course, the programmers and hardware teams caught on to his game and cut him off from any useful information, and without any actually knowledge he hit a ceiling within the company pretty quickly. Still, it was an important business lesson for me, and ever since watching this all take place I've made sure to carve out some time from my heads-down work to maintain visibility and directly communicate with management.
Learning Data Visualization From a Data Scientist
"College only teaches you theory...You have to learn...on your own."

Agreed. My experience was that I got into programming as a kid. By the time I enrolled in college, I had written hundreds of thousands of lines of BASIC code and had written a ton of Pascal programs. College enhanced my programming abilities with concepts like big O notation but for the most part did not give me any hard technical skills that were hirable. My first job out of college was programming in Java which I picked up on my own and via an internship.
You aren't something unless you do it. First, define programming. I think I program, but I might not be programming if someone's sense of the word is 100% test complete.
I would remind everyone that the Internet was slow in 1900.

And by 'slow' I mean 'non-existent'

I'll be middle class now, thanks.
We cannot neglect the masses who like the feel of a paperback, who will read it on the airplane, on the bus, or on the pot.

On the technical book side, I have continued to see a market for people who want their own hardcopy of SICP, TAOCP, Feynman's physics books, and other greats.
People who need someone to wipe their ass for them can hire a home health aide. That's surprisingly cheap, and will run you between ten and twenty bucks an hour:

http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/home-health-ai...

If you don't need it, and want your ass wiped for some perverse thrill, I suppose they'd probably refuse to work for you. On the other hand, if you want it for a perverse thrill you can probably find someone on craigslist who'll do it for free.
Overhauling Balsamiq.com
Understood and agreed. I thought about editing my comment to add a disclaimer about "if you can implement it" because many companies cannot.

On the other hand, the same companies that are decrying "99 out of 100 cannot program" also claim to be in the same high-end tech company space as Newcomb.
I usually prefer to hang out with friends for an hour or go out for a walk when tired.

May be because I'm not usually bored of working but tired of looking at the screen.

But it helps. You might wanna give it a shot.
I think the problem he's referring to is giving out the Google and Facebook subdomains, so the redirect is probably fine.
Did you know that "I" is the most used English word?
It has been down for about seven hours so far
My dad has worked at malden mills for over 30. Aaron has always wanted malden mills to compete on new innovation. He believed that no one could keep up with him and imitators would always be a few steps behind. Couple that with the extreme high quality of the production process and patents seem opposed to the companies secret sauce.

Unfortunately, in he is no longer there. Was it a successful experiment? It's hard to say. He really took a beating on the 95 fire. He kept all employees on the payroll through the entire episode, even after getting totally screwed by insurance. He saved Lawrence from an even worse fate then its had. That was probably more import to him then his own success.
Kind of tough to run OS X on a ThinkPad :\
Our field is such a weird place to be. I live in a city where most people are looking for .NET, WCF, WWF, WPF, WebServices, SQL-Server (T-SQL), and some Windows Administration, either that set or this one: JSF, Struts2, Spring, Hibernate, Maven/Ant, XML, XSLT, XSL, XQuery, XPath with Oracle/DB2.

Most programmers in my area are no longer care about Algorithm, Data Structure, Operating System principles, Database principles, or basic Math.

Most companies, that I work for or heard from employees, don't have good codebase, don't have good automation tests, don't have good culture.

Sometime I do wonder what does it mean to "be able to program".

Can deciding to use MVC (Spring, ASP.NET, Rails) to spit out XML/JSON so that it can be consumed by AIR, pure JS/jQuery, or even your iPhone app be counted as "be able to program"?

Can writing good code that can be easily testable be counted as "be able to program"?

Can producing code that consumed WebServices from other payment provider be considered as "be able to program"?

Or, can solving tricky algorithm problems is the de-facto "can program" filter?

Some of the "can..." produce business values. Some others, might not necessarily produce business values, but instead, just to show that "yeah, I can sling code the way you want me to".

Tricky field...
I agree, but I think that at times there is some more talent about in peers, just need to give them the benefit of the doubt and see how they go.

I was thinking about it recently, if I had spent my 4 years of uni (just finish up now) focusing solely on the course content and not spending time reading things like books and hacker news and hacking my own projects/ freelancing/ startup, where would I be as a programmer? I think I would be so far behind where I am now, especially on the business side of things but also the programming. I know for a fact the thesis I'm finishing up would be nowhere near the level I have go it to.

It's interesting that in uni in terms of ability I would be close to the top, but when I've seen some of the amazing talent in Melbourne through coworking I'm just average.
A cool, new way for communicating and sharing information
I've seen people say this alot these days, "Degree is not that important". But I kinda disagree with it.

I would rather say, "Grades" are not that important. You don't go to Engineering school just to learn programming.

Programming is something you learn to apply what you are learning at school.
Living like a king is more about power and prestige (both among other people) and less about physical comfort. Human beings are social creatures, not robots, and we are predisposed to care more about what the people around us think than whether we are maximizing our lifetime and minimizing discomfort. In fact, we trade discomfort for social status all the time - have you ever been in a nightclub? It's hot, sweaty, and loud as hell in there...and people pay 20 bucks to get in.

On a more extreme scale, many people trade entire lifetimes of discomfort for the chance to "be a king". Think of an astronaut in space, without the benefit of even gravity but knowing that what they are doing is special and unique, and an inspiration to millions... or other examples like Jackass 3D, football, marathons, etc.
Do you really think having to work 40 hours per week to pay a mortgage is better than the life Louis XIV had, only because you have a SUV, a large TV and access to 4chan and reddit?

It's not about stuff, people. It's about leisure time, power, social recognition and, ultimately, freedom to do whatever you want.
Politicians shouldn't be depended on to do anything but further their own interests. That's why we introduced democracy, in order to get their interests as closely aligned to the public interest as possible. Nobles are a different story altogether.

>Utterly unfounded. Counterexamples that come immediately to mind are Steve Jobs and Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

I'm not sure how your personal idols refute my ideas of fairness.
Definitely not, it's the whole core of the idea of a patent that you can't go round patenting things which already exist.

The term "prior art" might be US-specific though, other countries' patent law systems have different words for the same thing (wikipedia suggests "background art" and "state of the art").
I believe Amazon offer up to 70% through Amazon Digital Text Publishing:

https://dtp.amazon.com/

http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?e...

Although that is also "basically a hosted shop with decent SEO that sends e-books upon purchase", I guess ;)
This page does not work on BB OS 5.2 (Bold 9000): http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a1/

It display's, but nothing happens if you click on a item. Also the 'hover' animations lag and flash multiple times.
Stop paying to send your invoices
Aside from the cool plugin, the site design is great.
I've been programming for probably 17 years, since high school, and just recently I appreciated JavaScript. For all its shortcomings, it's beautiful. If you'd just understand it, you would be able to easily understand other languages, dynamic or otherwise.
Does it work? I tried calling my landline and my mobile and it says "Answered, Hangup", though I don't see anything on the landline/mobile.
Voxeo launches Phono for jQuery: 3 lines of JavaScript webify telecom apps
> Use their sign up form as an example in what NOT to do.

Its revenue tells us otherwise.
If there is a better way to submit these, let me know:
http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/issue/194
Why was your posted title on reddit then: "Minecraftwiki.net and minecraftforum.net now serve more traffic than Slashdot and Stackoverflow!" ? I just added a server count and php part which were both in the thread mentioned to signal previous false dichotomy. You guys shouldn't have posted a title like that then, you have compared yourself to SO and Slashdot, not me.
The problem is, you're ignoring false positives. Reports of potential threats happen frequently. The overwhelming majority of them are false positives.

> Did you even read the article? ... An actual identified terrorist showing up at a US flight school.

Did I read the article? "A foreign intelligence service promptly reported that he had connections with a foreign terrorist group" -> Not exactly an actual identified terrorist.

"Had connections with a foreign terrorist group" could be anything. And which foreign intelligence service? Britain? Israel? South Africa? Mexico?

In retrospect, it's obvious, sure. But at the time, not so much. He wasn't a convicted criminal. He was someone who was probably friends with another guy they suspected, or went to the same mosque. If he was someone with a criminal record, of course he'd have gotten a more thorough treatment.

> The agents who had him in custody were begging for permission to investigate what was on his laptop and they were denied.

Probably those damned civil rights and limited search and seizure things.

> The team that was charged with the job of testing airport security were actively prevented from doing their jobs

Again, your read of the article is questionable. They identified weaknesses in the system, and no resources were spent on those weaknesses. But there's other weaknesses too, lots of them. Yes, in retrospect, it seems obvious that there were weaknesses. But there's many potential targets, and there's not an unlimited budget. Yeah, after things go wrong it's very easy to say something should have been done beforehand.

> I don't see how anyone could brush this off as just "20/20 hindsight".

It is 20/20 hindsight. There's thousands of false positives. The article is written with an assured tone because they know how history happened. How many times have there been warnings of an imminent North Korean strike into South Korea? Dozens? I do know the stats on Israeli warnings about their neighbors mobilizing near them - over two dozen times in the last 50 years, full military mobilizations... how many became invasions? 2 out of those 24+?

There'll probably be clues after any bad event happens that it was going to happen... that doesn't necessarily mean anyone was being negligent. Also, a little more friendliness and less snark when you comment? Something like, "I disagree with your interpretation" instead of "Did you even read the article?
Being rich is not about buying larger TVs and better cars. It's about freedom to do whatever you want to do instead of having to work to survive. Rich in 1900 beats middle-class now, for sure.
Yes. Unequivocally so.

I think you aren't properly envisioning what Louis' day-to-day life was actually, physically like.

Edit: Additionally, if you think that maintaining power and social recognition doesn't require constant effort, you obviously have never known someone who was really popular in middle school.
Sorry about the weird formatting, it looks fine when I paste in the comment box. You'll need to add line breaks after the comments to get it working.
Don't think of it as learning a language. You will never be able to learn everything.

Best way is to pick a project. Any simple small project to begin with. And start implementing it.

Dont worry about anything (optimization and all stuff) as far as you are getting results.

If you are not able to find any Simple project, just try to implement a To-do list.
Can't we all just accept that the whole "I am so sad that X is gone" combined with the "Oh well, he was 85 and lived a good life" thing is just a natural part of the human dealing-with-death process? Do we have to take it all so literally and deconstruct every part of it?

I'll be the first to admit that the reason I'm sad about the not-particularly-untimely death of some dude I've never met has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the reminder that I, and everybody I care about, will also die at some point. Mouthing the meaningless platitudes which we associate with death helps to take the sting away.
Live video stream of Startup School today 9:30AM - 5:30 Pacific
Lean Principles #3 - Create Knowledge
The general principle, as I understand it, is that if you can't write a very simple program like FizzBuzz under pressure, you will also do poorly when you're doing harder tasks with less pressure. This aligns pretty well with my experiences, both in school and industry.

Really, if you can't write a few lines "on the spot", what use are you going to be to an employer? In the real world there is always some deadline. I don't always expect perfection in a whiteboard scenario, but there's a world of difference between a blank stare and a 90% correct solution with an off-by-one.
As a professional I can believe it too. Most of my colleagues are fine if they have some existing code and need to modify it, or add a feature following the pattern of the existing code, and that is 90% of what a developer does in the real world. A completely blank screen tho' and even I hesitate. Almost every new project I start actually starts as a skeleton from another, here's my Makefile, here's my usual basic imports, command-line parsing block, etc etc. Once I get some momentum going it's fine...

The fact is that computer science is not software development, any more than you could take an astronomer, drop him on a ship and say "navigate!".
Starts at 9:30AM Pacific.
As most of us probably can't watch the whole day, scroll down that page for listing of full schedule.

Previous Startup Schools have had their videos archived + titled according to speaker at this URL. This one probably will too.
That might get into a distinction between programming (let's make the computer do what we tell it) and developing (let's follow these processes while we program).

But it's a good point. That said, if I were interviewing someone who was clearly a good coder but who said they didn't test their code, I would still hire them as long as they would be willing to start writing some tests.
You are attacking the person. Not his arguments.

Most people assume that just because he became so rich in a developing country he must have done it thru corruption. Carlos Slim is an engineer, he teached algebra and linear programming at the national university. Before buying telmex he was already very successfull in many areas( real state, industrial, financial, comercial and mining). Many people say that he was so rich because president Salinas helped him, but Salinas left 16 years ago and his businesses have flourshed in many areas and in many countries. Why can`t Mexico have somebody as talented as Warren Buffet?
I understand the common HN view for just jumping in and trying to build stuff. Nevertheless, I wonder when would you consider a good time to attack some more complex stuff (e.g. SICP, PAIP, K&R, etc)?

I guess it is the kind of thing you don't miss, until you go through them and really see what you're missing.
And I think you aren't properly envisioning what living like a real king was.
Should you sell your private company shares on SecondMarket?
interview with SecondMarket CEO starts @ 15/16 minutes in.... really honest discussion on how the secondary market for private company works, the problems, the drama, etc.

Barry was UBERhonest
But "Really?" is actually a very good question; it's an appeal to common sense. Do we all work at places where only 1% of the programmers can actually program? I know I haven't... even when I just started and was clearly the least experienced person on the team, I could still get things done...
A few weeks ago I visited the Acropolis in Athens for the first time. To know that, about 25 centuries ago, Euripides and Sophocles presented their premiers in there, at the theater of Dionysos, suddenly gave a pile of rubble an extraordinary sense of purpose and meaning.

I admire the wit of Taleb to call Mandelbrot a Greek--in this modern world of very Roman panem et circenses.
Flash4website.com - Marketplace for promoting and selling Flash/Flex/AIR
You need it all. A degree can get you over the "you don't know what you don't know" hump that many self-taught programmers never get past. My lightbulb moment was linear programming. Up 'til then I was a competent programmer, mind, but suddenly a whole new world opened up, I had no idea you could do this stuff by any means other than brute force...
One thing to consider is that living in the 1900 means that you'll see at least one world war, and probably the great depression too. Not especially happy times.
The fact that it's displaying is a huge step up from where we were just recently. (BlackBerry 5, and especially 4 can be really rough. We'll definitely look in to this, it's one of tr platforms we want to get working for 1.0 final.
Thanks for all those great replies. I will now spend some time reviewing!!
Thanks Jacques! Are you French BTW? any idea when it's going to be up?
Annotation Overlay Effect with jQuery | Codrops
I'd start much simpler than any of the full-on backend languages mentioned like Ruby, Python, Java, etc.

Get the very basics down - it will be fast and easy and you'll feel good you are making progress. HTML and CSS - don't get bogged down in HTML5 or any latest cutting edge thing or another. Just the core for now.

Once you've got this down, which really is pretty simple stuff, I'd go into jQuery and Javascript. Both are fairly easy to approach though deceptively so maybe, with a ton of upside; and with the push that NodeJS is making, that may be all the programming you need even for the backend.

I don't have any good rec's on learning HTML but google it, there's a ton out there.

CSS I'd do the same, though I also really like CSS - The Missing Manual by McFarland.

For Javascript you'll be hearing a lot of Javascript - The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, a must read if you are serious.

And jQuery, honestly is so fun/powerful/addictive, if you get a big of Javascript down you will be off and running. There are countless tutorial websites on jQuery and more books coming everyday. Bookwise it's hard to rec right now as the new version of jQuery just dropped today and everything is a bit out of date as it stands.

Bottom line, don't get caught up in trying to learn too much to begin with. Also, good UI Coders are hard to come by and you can always find a Rails/Python/back-end guy to help out until you get that stuff down too.
Sure, jQuery creates a replica of the underlying system (the browser DOM), but it's a better replica in every way. Even if you ignore cross-browser compatibility, compare the following:

$('div').css('color', 'red') v.s. document.getElementsByTagName('div').style.color = 'red'

$(el).replaceWith(otherEl) v.s. el.parentNode.replaceChild(el, otherEl)

$(el).wrapInner(otherEl) v.s. something-too-horrible-to-contemplate

$.ajax('/foo/bar/', function(data) { $(el).html(data); }) v.s (from memory, may be incorrect):

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('GET', '/foo/bar/');
xhr.onreadystatechange = function(ev) {
if (ev.readyState == 4) {
el.innerHTML = xhr.responseText;
}
}
xhr.send(null); // !?

( the jQuery example can be shortened even
further to $(el).load('/foo/bar'); )

jQuery makes the DOM better.
I've got to wonder if people who would choose the rich in 1900 option don't think they're capable of building big things? Take the modern $70k and start building and investing.
Doesn't work on my HTC Wildfire running 2.1.

Demo page loads okay, and I can switch theme, although it's a bit flaky. However, none of the buttons go to their linked page, it just sits there on the original form. the buttons glow green to acknowledge they've been touched.

Looks great, though, and I'm off to try and run it with phonegap.

Edit: I raised a bug against this http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/issue/195
Not surprised.
Btw, how does other browsers like Opera and Safari perform in the same test?
The truth is that people see only the failures. We never know what apocalypses have been avoided.