skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The giant hole in our workforce isn't entry level developers who can hash out c code and write a compiler from scratch. It is for people with combined skills who can APPLY encapsulated technology (lots thanks to companies has been encapsulated) to specific domains.

Right on.

I know people who can write a compiler from scratch but have no idea how to help a customer solve a business problem.

I also know people who can diagnose business, project, and people problems but have no idea what the underlying technology is or how to apply it.

The critical path for the masses is in the intersection of these 2 sets.

The preparation for that probably requires cursory study of a lot of things and deep study of one or two things.

Does everyone need to learn to program? No. But a little more understanding by everyone can go a long way.
Ask HN: How do I "Go Big on Launch"?
I'm currently working to get my small design studio up and running, and was wondering if any of you could offer me some advice on what to do for launch. We're currently in the 'teaser page' state of things.

From what I've been told: go big on launch, find some people to do a giveaway with, and just generally have a good time. I'm not really sure what 'go big on launch' means, though, and if there's anything lacking in what I've got so far in terms of advice. I'm also curious as to what time of year would work best to launch something like this.
It's easy if you've coded enough to know. I hate the fact that in Python, to reverse a string, I have to do slicing:

string[::-1]

In Ruby, I can do string.reverse() so that makes me hate that about Python, well... that and a few other things, but otherwise I love it.

I think he's looking for knowledge enough to know what you would do differently if you could change the language. Otherwise, you're not interviewing a qualified person.
This is obviously a subject that I care about a lot.

I'm not sure that I'm ready to hand down some sort of moral imperative, but I do think that learning programming brings _advantages_ to one in almost any other profession. But this can be said about almost any cross-disciplinary study.

Really, it's hard to have an outside perspective on this; we all see programming as important (if not necessary) because our lives revolve around tech. Yet many of my friends do not know how to program, and they get along just fine. Almost all of them that have gone on to learn the basics have enjoyed the additional perspective, however.
Apple Loses Mirror Worlds Document Display Trial
i think the important thing to look at here is the change to allow users to own and control their own data.

i see that as inevitable.

now whether that takes 1, 5, 10, or 20 years for consumers to demand, only time will tell.
You could use an account with no real followers.
Not sure if it would help, but our teaser page is at http://wearepico.com - The about text is a pretty good summary of our goals, I think.
Since I have Android 1.6 and live in Japan, this announcement destroyed the little hope I had for using Skype on my phone in the near future.
On the other hand, I finally taught my parents how to call me from GMail (not exactly easy, with me being 10k km away and without remote desktop control), now I can receive their calls via SIP, even in Pidgin.
My caution is not of eavesdropping, but of lock-in.

I'd like to be able to contact friends/family/business partners using a service of my own chooising.
I think the author overestimates how much encapsulation we will see of actual programming. See the recent HN entry on programmerless programming (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1753634) as well as Brooks' "No Silver Bullet."

Beyond that, he misunderstands the reason for teaching programming. Not everything taught in high school is expected to be the basis of a student's profession. We don't teach English classes with the intent or expectation of turning all of the students into professional literary critics, and we don't make everyone take algebra because we think they will or should all become mathematicians. Similarly, the basics of programming can be useful to a lot of people who aren't professional programmers. Everyone I know in technical fields (and many people who aren't) had to write code to solve a problem at some point.

With regard to applying existing encapsulations, it seems there are too many with interfaces too different to gain much from teaching how to use individual components. If we can find something that applies generally to all of them, we'll have something worth spending the time to teach.

Perhaps I'm less inclined to see programming as something exclusively for specialists because I first learned programming from someone whose profession and primary expertise are not programming.
Absolutely agree with you. This seems like an excuse for a blog post rather than something that he was actively seeking to truly learn. I'm sure if he'd even read a decent book on it that he would have benefited much more. For anyone reading these comments who is interested in meditation, check out these two free books:

Happy To Burn - http://www.sankhara.com.au/shop/products/displayFree.html

Mindfulness in Plain English - http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

I found these to be very useful as I started exploring meditation. I also found a yoga teacher that also taught meditation - enough to make a difference in my life, both working and outside of work.
It's only a little "cool", but I just completed version 1 of a live wallpaper that shows National Weather Service radar imagery.

http://www.appidio.com/apps/radar-wallpaper/
You could become a PM @ Zynga.
Hacker News | Top Links
Good answer and I agree with it, but most of the time these ideas are invented and reinvented many times, easily, and they should not be protected by the government. You can describe a problem to a six year old and they can come up with patentable inventions that solve the problem. This says more about our patent system than it does about six year olds.
Because the U.S. has "printed" plenty of money in the past two years and is going to "print" some more:

http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2010/10/04/looking...

Adding more currency without backing is a sure way to cause inflation, I hear. How they've been avoiding this is by China and then the U.S. sinking money into U.S. Treasury bonds, I hear also. When the U.S. makes claims that the economy is not good (which they've done quite a bit), I wonder if they are trying to influence investors to invest in these bonds rather than stocks, or if they were really trying to warn us that something bad is coming. Either way, as a consumer, I'm worried.
True. If you are in any way human, you'll have more fun hanging around San Francisco than you will standing around in the Google parking lot.
Nokia’s VP of MeeGo resigns
Oops. I submitted this to look for a 'comments' page - weird that this hasn't been submitted. Do people know about this? Why isn't it on the top menu bar?

I found it via The Unofficial HN FAQ (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755533).
Researchers Gain Free Access to Microsoft Cloud Resources
Touchqode - mobile code editor for Android
SmartyPig announces PhilanthroPig, a custom fundraising site
And this is indeed a good thing.

Capital that was malinvested during the boom period has to be accumulated again to return to previous productivity levels. The method to accumulate capital is saving.
This is something I'm currently looking into. I have actually spotted a market for something that will make a small aspect of analysis easier. In discussions with analysts at other big companies I notice that they also struggle with the same issues.

There is a lot of competition in the area, but the products are all from bulky enterprise applications that are not quite suitable to the task.

Your comment has made me think that I should flesh this idea out a bit more and hire a decent programmer in the early days to lay some decent foundations to this idea.
Stuxnet: Fact vs. theory
Big Omaha Video Series: David Hauser of Grasshopper
Amazon RDS now supports Read Replicas
Skype is available on Blackberry on Verizon. I'm not sure about availability outside of that.

The client is pretty packed. Apparently you can't use it on wifi though, but otherwise it's a full-blown Skype client.
Why not simply use Hudson: http://hudson-ci.org/. It has a bunch of plugins http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Plugins
Great.

Now we'll have a whole bunch of 10-character titled 400 words essays full of links to wikipedia hitting the new page every day at 8:30.

Then we'll have a whole bunch of utilities that write 10-character titled 400 word essays full of links to wikipedia, posting them to the new page every day at 8:30.

</sarcasm>

jacquesm, your contributions here are second to none, but lately I'm beginning to wonder if you might have a little too much time on your hands. As many teachers have told me, "If only we could channel that energy."

:-)
my sense is the best time is more west-coast US focused at around 11:30 am EST which gets the hackers on the west coast and the soon to be lunch-breaking east coasters (and it's not too late to catch europe)
From Diversity to Sustainability: How Campus Ideology Is Born
I agree with the premise of the article. The software development world would be perfectly happy if there were more technicians around. Technology is becoming an inherent skill, there's no reason to believe that we're a niche anymore.

At least where I am from there seems to be a glut of specialized and educated people. Industry jobs that would be easily serviced by a technician for the pay-grade they offer and skill set they require are instead demanding CS degrees and years of experience. It's like asking a master carpenter to install your Ikea furniture.

Many of the tools that we've spent the last two decades building have allowed anyone with some spare time and a copy of a few technical manuals to build a decent web application in no time. What's even more amazing is that a lot of these skills are simply taught socially. My nieces never learned how to build websites, integrate it with their social networks, customize it, and all that in school. They learned it from friends and online.

I don't think "everyone" needs to learn how to program, but that most of them will to some degree as computer technology becomes more ingrained in our daily lives.
If Facebook Looked Like MySpace
And Clojure :-)
IBM Lotus Notes Takes a New Turn in its Long Historical Run
Downloading now! I didn't see this before, glad you re-posted. Not sure if I would ever actually use my phone like this, but there's only one way to find out...
There are roles at companies for these skill but they are not a newly founded startup. Once the company has reached about 30 people there will be a need for more generalized skills typically in the business/sales side of the company as sales engineers/consultants.
There is no distinction once you start taking money, really. Or once you have a critical mass of mainstream users (I'm thinking of Firefox, etc.).
The law of large numbers says that larger samplings should be MORE uniform rather than LESS; you've got it exactly backwards.
Prototype HTML5 Video Chat
Wow, this is great news, thanks!

EDIT: Wait, this just converts your SIP phones to work with Skype, it doesn't allow you to call other SIP phones. E.g. I can't use it to call Truphone/Gizmo users with it. It's a two-tier phone service, same as IM clients. This is why the GP's ideals are a good thing.
Sure it's 33% the size of PNGs. It's 33% the quality. Am I the only person in existence who hates the "quantization" look?

edit: The strength of PNGs is not photography, but images with large blocks of solid colors; screenshots, etc. That's why the example in the article didn't suffer.
So, the Java build systems suck? You should see the .NET ones - those make me cry.

I mean that the glass is half full. I wouldn't call a full dependency resolution system like maven's "a sad state of affairs."
Not just in the South Bay. They are perennial winners at the annual bay area barista competition, where judging is done by other baristas, so they have a lot of cred as one of the best coffee places in California.

That being said, their new layout is a step down. Their slogan is "serious coffee, happy people" but now with the new assembly-line-style counter setup the people seem less happy.
I find it hard to believe that Gelernter's work played any role in the creation of Apple's products. I've read some of his stuff (admittedly unrelated) and the thing that leapt out at me was how hard it would be to do anything with it. (Edit: frankly, I don't think it's all that hard to sit around "inventing" things if all you have to do is write about them and never back them up with real products. Research prototypes don't count, either.)

These judgments are really hard to stomach. Perhaps, though, if enough powerful companies get hit with them, they'll lobby to stop the insanity. That's how the legislative process works, isn't it?
The "could care less" phrasing makes sense if interpreted sarcastically. Imagine "I suppose I could care even less <eyeroll>". This article is rather illuminating: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm
I understand your point; but myth_drannon was saying that research on graphene is more engineering than physics. I know that engineering and physics overlap; but not sure if this research is engineering or physics; or who decides which is which.
The most important aspect of the plan was that all the triggers that were put in place to automatically raise prices, tariffs, and salaries were turned off.

These were the biggest producers of inflation and were what made Brazilian inflation unique. It was a sort of administrative inflation.
I'd seriously regret writing this if that was the outcome.

As for me having too much time on my hands, my days are pretty long and I still get all the work done that I should so as far as I can see the damage is limited. In the last three weeks I've changed out the gearbox on a car (which is something I'd never done before on a car that new), had about 30K lines of changes committed, made a couple of online friends, helped some fellow HN'ers to improve and/or launch their startup, met some interesting people and I found enough time to write an article or two and be active here.

If you have any productivity tips other than 48 hour workdays I'm game :)

And I enjoy this.
Cool, I'll use it for today and come back with feedback. I suggest adding DuckDuckGo, though.
I see two directions emerge from this, if I want to move more toward the startup world:

- Found: Expand on one of the ideas I have. Right now.

- Early-stage help: Continue on my current path, although look toward a short-term goal of project management or the like. This is a more marketable skill in early-stage startups than analysis.
Ask HN: Are Press release services useful?
I'm planning to create a press release (about my site) and use some online press release distribution service, but I wonder if it really will have some effect.

Do you have some experience with these services?
Did your press release had some coverage?
Because there's not enough spam already.
That's been my experience. I haven't really seen a good freelance job board with high-quality postings and lack of sketchy characters since 37signals Gig Board.
@messel: Interesting find :) But I get a bit suspicious when the title says "Brilliant". Do you agree that removing it would be in the spirit of the submission guidelines for HN? (Though, of course, the guidelines do not say to remove such words)
Online CRM applications popular amongst small businesses in September
Great! I appreciate it. DDG is available... type "duck" in the filter box.

You can add it to your list of providers by clicking "add" in the tools menu.
Passion has a funny way of trumping logic
You are in the very good company of David Mitchell

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/la...
FreeBSD Quickstart Guide for Linux Users
Revenue from selling software aka Finacle = $200 million
http://goo.gl/WBl7

Revenue from selling consulting = $4.67 billion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosys

Indians (not just Infosys) among most corrupt while doing business abroad
http://goo.gl/QaDI

Infosys is a chop shop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosys#Controversy
"Event Streams are the Future of the Internet" (2000)
OK, so I get that a patent allows an inventor to protect their invention from exploitation, but I don't understand why a patent is transferrable - surely the idea is to allow an inventor to license the patent so that even if they couldn't realise a commercial product with their idea, they could allow others to do so, and still get something in return.

I could sympathise if Mirror Worlds were the originators of the patent, but as they bought it, then I get the impression that the whole thing stinks.
It looks nice but I think I'll stick with slickrun, which saves me the 2s initial page load and can launch far more things than just searches.
Y Combinator’s WePay Partners With GroupSpaces To Let Groups Collect Cash
None of them are 'large' enterprise companies - think Oracle, MSFT, IBM, etc.
Also, include Hacker News in the title. This site is getting entirely too self-referential.
Linux Magazine AG Launches English Language LPI Training Portal
News.ycombinator.com rss on safari
Could someone point me at a direction through which I can read rss feeds in safari, for ycombinator, like reddit using safari's feed:// protocol thing?
"Just because they are the strong, doesn't mean they can't get their a55es kicked" :)
I claim no authority on this, but: when the money suddenly started pouring in, they really needed to take a step back and figure out what these people who were throwing money at them actually wanted. Then, build a bare-bones but polished minimum viable product that is actually useful and usable for the majority of users. Don't make any specific, bold announcements, but rather "it'll be done when it's done". The "developer preview" would have been fine for slow, bottom-up growth, but it isn't in this reality. The product was already consumer facing before it even existed, so the audience is wrong.
Intelligence, Big Picture Thinking and Success
Play-Doh? Calculus? At the Manhattan Free School, Anything Goes
already submit code to the Android Project itself in fact..
Woobius traffic specs (quite representative of the enterprise space, so more realistic if you're doing an SaaS that also targets enterprise users/customers), are not too far off, but not 50% yet.

IE: 56%
Chrome: 20%
Firefox: 16%
Safari: 5%

IE versions are broken up as:
IE6: 10% (= 5.6% absolute)
IE7: 25% (= 14% absolute)
IE8: 65% (= 36% absolute)

In other words, dropping IE6 support is not yet plausible. But we've already opted to provide only functional support for IE6 - i.e., things need to work in IE6, and not look totally broken, but they don't have to look great.
I guess you're eating it for the humor here, but I pretty much agree with you at this point in my life.

I've tried meditating several times, once every day for a month or so, and I feel like it's hype. Probably because I never fully "got it" but at the same time I wonder why successful figures in history aren't known for meditating.

I feel like like such a beneficial and simple practice would have developed in parallel throughout many cultures and we'd have our own analog- if it was actually beneficial.
nice one.. very cool
We launched a feature like this last year; we called it Tweet to Download (demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIngL60r3_M).

At first it did seem like spamming, but I am at peace with it now. It is analogous to the FB Like button. You should only tweet out stuff that you like, and want to share and download.

The key is to give a sample of the product (in our case song clip) before broadcasting to your social network. I think we could even allow full song stream, and still see similar download/tweet numbers.

In a world where musicians don't get real currency, they are asking for your social currency.
Video showing the product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4GWheE4Gkw Very cool.
Is it actually the case that filtered replication can be used cleanly for access control now? My understanding from the various docs was that currently you can write a filter but not require that users replicate through it -- that is, if you have permission to replicate, you have permission to replicate and that's it. For real access control using this I think you'd need something like a permission to replicate distinct from permission to read and a permission to replicate only through a specified filter. I suppose I'm off to have a look through Max's source, but if I'm wrong about these things I'd appreciate the correction...

...ok, back. Right now there appears to be no access control at all. Granting that this is a relatively early-stage project so it doesn't necessarily matter too much, but my question still stands.
The Placebo Start-ups
Google Instant: how blacklisting could damage your SEO
It might be a good idea to pre-emptively load the results from all the search engines so you don't have to wait for each one. Additionally, it should be obvious which ones get results and the ones that get poor results should be pared away.

Cool idea tho. You should hire a designer -- the current UI while functional definitely has that "engineer touch" :) (Not insulting, I have the same problem!)
IE in North America it is still at 52.3%, so close.
CentOS, Fedora and RHEL use Python for most of the system tools and as such integrating or contribute to those projects will be easier if you know Python.

That said the recent/popular systems automation and conifguration tools (Puppet, Chef, etc..) are predominantly in Ruby, so that is a good choice as well.

I prefer Python, but as spooneybarger said, if you end up using the systems version of the interpreter with CentOS/RHEL you're going to need to learn the differences between versions. Luckly EL 6 is coming out soon and you'll get a fairly up-to-date version.
MBT Barabara Shoes
My father lost some money because of Collor Plan too. I'm 25 and is hard to imagine how my parents went through those rough times.
GroupSpaces integrates Y Combinator’s WePay to let groups collect cash
Thanks for the different method of confirmation.

I've found a PEO, itself, tends to cost $100-$500[1] monthly per empployee. How much (presumably in time, not dollars) does the collective bargaining cost you?

[1] At 4 employees
Good to see you have a diverse range of activities. I firmly believe that overspecialisation (even though it is sometimes economically advantageous) can be crippling for the mind.
I admit I'm entertained by your use of the word "since." Maven 3 is still beta. When it gets released and adopted I fully believe it will be great. I won't be depending on it until it is ready for prime time.

I do wonder if Maven 3's flexibility will hurt it or help it in the long run. Yes pom.xml is XML, but at least there is only one dialect. If team A likes XML and team B likes Groovy, development manager C will have a fun time getting them to work together on project D.
>If your sole source of revenue is licensing the patents that you've created, you're a patent troll.

Isn't that essentially ARM's business model?
That's a good one, but I bet Wilde didn't say it. It sounds too post-Lenny-Bruce.

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

(Dorothy Parker)
Why Michael Stonebraker is wrong about NoSQL in the Enterprise
Refactoring to clean code.
It's a bad sign for them that the result here is overwhelming ambivalence. The sample here is strongly biased toward people who care about the issues Diaspora was invented to address. The greater public would almost undoubtedly be far more ambivalent.