skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you enter into a contract, knowing the details, that's your responsibility. They are not 'scum' for making the offer.

Your second statement doesn't follow logically from your first. They can be "scum" even if I'm responsible for my actions. Perhaps we just have different perspectives, but I believe that if you spend your time trying to rip off people who don't know any better, you're destroying value. The fact that they agree to it doesn't absolve you of any responsibility. If I sell a car with a critical defect that I fail to disclose to the buyer under the assumption that it's their responsibility to get the car checked before they buy, I've done something wrong. I wouldn't want someone to do that to me, and it's not right for me to do it to them.

Further, it's not at all obvious that some of their clients are very happy, but the collection of blog posts, magazine exposés, BBB complaints, and lawsuits is sufficient evidence for me that they definitely have unhappy clients.

EDIT: I don't have any proof of this, but from the conversation I had and the research I did, I highly doubt that the people forking over $32k have "all the details". This sounds to me exactly like any other high-pressure exploitative sales seminar.
Has K2 opened the door to more opportunities for Joomla? We think so.
I started a PC tutoring business in high school that was 100% profitable and then a web design/development firm in college that was also profitable from day one. The only reason why they "failed" was because I wanted someone else to pay me a good salary and benefits when I graduated college. I'm working on a side project at the moment and that may be my first foray into running a business with people I hire.

Regardless, I would never consider these failures, and here's why:

Any venture you do on your own shows initiative and is practice for your programming and business skills - that already places you in the top 1% of software devs. What's the worst that could happen? You build your skills and work for a great company, because any company that fosters entrepreneurial innovation (e.g. Google, Facebook) would LOVE to have you if you built something significant.

So...build a successful business or boost your resume to work for Google/Facebook? Sounds like a win to me.
Does a clear definition of "OOP" even exist?
My problem is that I never saw a clear definition of OOP

I often see quick judgements ("OOP rules/sucks"), or deep superior wisdom ("good OOP is hard"), which don't actually tell anything. I often read about bundling functions and data together, and encapsulation, but plain modules (or C compilation units) already do that. I hear about inheritance, but not all OO code use that, and we even tend to avoid it in favour of composition, these days.

The closest to a clear definition of OO I know of is http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigms.html According to this, OOP would be records + functions + named state + closures. But so is stateful functional programming…

From what I see, OOP is nothing more than syntactic sugar wrapped up in an aura of mystery. However, my priors that the majority of the programming community can fall in such an obvious trap are quite low.

I notice that I am confused.

So, are my observations flawed? Or are programmers less rational than I thought?
I can't remember if someone sent it to me or if I saw it on another aggregate suite. Probably the latter.
FTC shoots down cyber-vultures at Google Money Tree
I really wonder how much time the author has spent with a modern IDE like Eclipse. For Java development, it really does have all of the features on his wish list, or something equivalent.
Why are you all confusing market for market place?

No one is talking about only one market.
But a generalist in what area. My first thought was he was looking for a job in the advertising industry, based on the page itself. He gives no indication what he wants to do. Even saying "I design things" eliminates, say, accounting.
MIT Media Lab: The place where crazy inventors create your future
I was a competitive runner for many years and trained with some of the best. The difference between great runners and cyclists and everybody else is that they learn to tolerate pain - a lot of it - on a regular basis. They crave pain and can push their pain threshold far beyond what normal people would be able to tolerate.

If you've ever seen a great runner working out - it's almost painful to even watch - but always very impressive.
clickable: http://entogo.com
Microsoft makes a lot of money. Sure, its not "sexy", but it has a solid hold on the enterprise. Nothing seems to be taking any significant market share away from Office. People just seem to expect one company to own 90% of the market and that really isn't going to happen with cellphones. Heck, the iPod, probably one of the more dominant devices in a consumer market, didn't get above 75%.

Microsoft, like DEC with the mini to micro transition, is having a tad bit of trouble jumping from PCs driven by corporate sales to mobile devices driven by consumer sales. This is being mitigated by their experience with the XBox line in the consumer market. They make a lot of cash and probably will be one of the big cellphone / portable device operating systems. They also have a very large chest of patents to help with positioning.
There is no amount of tax revenue that politicians can't spend (and if they can borrow, use as leverage for more borrowing).

There's a thesis expressed in this recent book (look for discussions of it) http://www.amazon.com/Never-Enough-Americas-Limitless-Welfar... that a or the fatal flaw (my term) of liberalism is that it has no limiting principle. I find it very hard to look at California and not agree.
Goldman Sachs Cuts Compensation Pool to $370,706 per Employee as revenue fell
W/ $550K Financing, Intrepid Hires CEO, Rolls out Genomic Data-Management System
Nothing happens to your windows. They keep working as if nothing happened.
Statistically Speaking, My High School Sucked
I like this one better than the OP, because the front page gets straight to the point: “Hi. I'm Susan. My superpower is getting things done. It's an exceedingly rare and critical superpower. I battle the agent of chaos. I overdeliver. I delight. I amaze. And I'm looking for a place in need of a superhero like me.” That’s a 30-second elevator speech in 10 seconds.

By comparison, I have to scroll halfway through the original posting to get to an “About Me” section to find out what the author thinks his qualifications are, and they include stuff like “perfectly capable of obtaining my own snacks and beverages” and “usually wearing clothes”. Har har har. Now tell me, as a potential employer, why I should pay you money.
That's interesting. I agree building network is just as important as learning. I think it depends on the stage you are at. These are more for bootstrapping and getting started, which has a lot of inertia with it.
While most likely in jest, this is likely going to be a problem at many institutes of higher education. College grad unemployment is just 4.4% but how many people get jobs in their field of study or even remotely taking advantage of their degree/experience in college?

As someone who is facing the same problem as this BC student it's scary to think about the decisions I made 4 years ago to get to this place. I never dreamed of being in BigLaw and have always seen myself practicing law in an alternative area but I know people who were counting on law school/college/MBA to be a generic meal ticket.

The direct link has the whole letter but the ATL writeup had interesting commentary: http://eagleionline.com/2010/10/15/open-letter-to-interim-de...
I agree. I would not excited about visiting this domain while at work.
I don't think it's a good comparison. And the author just comes across as "wah! programming is hard! sob".
I'm no elite athlete/champion, but this makes complete sense to me now. The last couple of weekends I have been taking part in hill climb events. Knowing every inch of the course definitely helped me pace myself and achieve a far better time than I expected.

Like the interviewee in the article, I definitely didn't look pretty in the photos: http://flic.kr/p/8KQANq
True, but is that a problem with police salaries, or with military ones? I have a number of acquaintances in the military, many of whom have served multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a taxpayer and (putative) beneficiary of their service, I'm personally embarrassed by how little they get paid.
Site shows a blank page right now. There's another pitfall of dirty code...
"(when did Mac-0S get real multi-tasking?)"

As soon as possible after Jobs' return.
They started at 3, not 1. And giving how incompatible it is with WM6.5, I contend that it's fair to say they're launching a new platform. But it's far from their first try.
Use a thing-o-matic to bootstrap a lego thing-o-matic and a maker-lego bot.
Top 5 Sports Video Games Ever
"Sometimes professionalism goes a long way. "

I didn't see anything I'd call unprofessional in his application.

People with jobs often feel overly entitled to define what constitutes professionalism. (NB, I'm not addressing you personally, just the amorphous "they".)

To me, the larger point of the article is how difficult in can be to break through the arbitrary and diverse standards each HR department and hiring manager has.

Sometimes it just feels better to state what you want and hope they find you.
In any case I'm only going to look at the top 5 or so results returned, so the method used for ranking the results is much more important. Do (b) and show me the closest two matches to my current or given location and the closest two with in-stock info along with local travel times and opening hours for each.

It'd be nice if closest was in travel time, be that by car or public transport, too.
Brain Mounted Computers are a Dominant Strategy Equilibrium
I think there is a comparison to be made about pushing past the monotonous work required to launch a product.
If the author wants to use his lunch break to work on his side projects, then, more power to him. Personally, I like to segment my free time by month, rather than hour, but I realize a lot of people do not have the freedom to do that. I would rather have an 8 month contract job during which I work 60 hours a week, and then I have 4 months to work on my own projects. It takes me days to get my mind into a new project, and I am my most productive when I spent all of yesterday on the project, and I know I will spend all of today and all of tomorrow on the project.

However, whatever project I'm working on, I prefer to use the meals as meetings. Since everyone has to stop for a meal at some point, they seem like useful points to gather people around and regroup.
Everyone has their own 'most important bits' of what OOP is. For example, many people don't consider message passing to be an important part of OOP, others do. Like any term that corresponds to an idea rather than a thing, each person is going to have their own take on what that idea is based on their experiences.
And the "cool" way is to fail on URL encoding?

http://i.imgur.com/hUtkJ.png
Any thing is worth a shot in my opinion - its not like you have not tried any other options so I think that this is a great way to make yourself known.
Best of luck.
A feel-good story about the UC Berkeley police...

I was playing basketball at the Cal rec center and someone stole my iPhone from my sweatshirt. Later that night I texted the phone from my roommate's hoping that I could convince the thief of some kind of trade. I went to work the following day during which my roommate, who was a grad student at Berkeley (EECS!), received a text a from said thief. The thief tried to compel me or my friend to come to West Oakland (danger!), but my friend negotiated for a meeting at a Berkeley BART station. My friend called the UC police, and they organized a little sting to arrest the culprits and recover the phone. All for my first generation iPhone :) Pretty great. The transcript of the texts is pretty magnificent, too.
Sadly I have often seen the type of people mentioned in the article as the one considered "entrepreneurs" and are often the ones saying we need more entrepreneurs. When I was a teen, its all I saw and developed a strong aversion with all things related "entrepreneurs", it just seemed like a moral license to screw people and not care.

If it creates that perception for other people growing up, they really do a disservice to the world!
Microsoft Open Source BioInformatics - Using Software to Advance Healthcare
* Nice try at anonymity, but I'm going to need a name.

* Oh, you're unemployed too?

* Not sure how you expect me to respond without this.

* Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but that doesn't seem like an actual e-mail address.

* Let's not take any chances here.

* You're either a terrible typist or a poor listener. Make sure your email address matches in both fields.

* Hey, if you don't know what to call the job, I'm not sure I want to be doing it.

* SOUNDS INTERESTING. Wait, you didn't write anything here.
Mental tenacity — and the ability to manage and even
thrive on and push through pain — is a key segregator
between the mortals and immortals
- Mary Wittenberg

I think the quote works much better like that.
I've been using PayPal regularly for over 10 years as well, as in, almost daily, for work. I, too, have never had a single problem. I have had occasion to call them for phone support in one instance where a PayPal debit card was stolen, and in another where there was an error in my account balance, as something was deducted twice. In both instances, they were very helpful and had the matters resolved in minutes.

I'm not discounting the problems other people hav ehad, just sharing my own experience with PayPal.
Python has issues dealing with multiple cores due to the GIL, not I/O. Global Interpreter Locked threading like Python's and Ruby's can deal with I/O concurrency just fine: they context switch upon encountering a blocking I/O operation. In the end Python and Ruby can only handle I/O on a single core but the same is true for Node.js whose evented model makes it inherent single-threaded. This is easily solved by setting up multiple processes, one process per CPU core, with each process possibly handling many I/O operations concurrently.

I'm still baffled by the amount of misinformation about I/O concurrency.
And why don't they just make Office for Linux. It's about time for it ...
We're all going to drink pee, eventually
asdw would be better for qwerty anyways.
U.S. Pushes to Ease Technical Obstacles to Wiretapping
"I would rather have an 8 month contract job during which I work 60 hours a week, and then I have 4 months to work on my own projects." That sounds interesting, is this kind of schedule widely prevalent among contractors ? Maybe I've been working at a job for too long to know this...
If he was really clever he'd have a Google Analytics link in there so he can track who's visiting :-/
I never meta lego I didn't like. :-P
I'd be curious who actually gets taken by scams like this.

I know 2 kinds of people who own businesses, those who worked their butts off for years building them themselves and those who inherited them from their parents. I've noticed a disproportionate number of the inheritors who have taken family money that took 40 years to amass and have lost it in a year or two. Founders and builders that I know seem to be much more wary of "get rich" scams. They know what it takes to be successful; they've already done it themselves.

Ryan, I'm guessing that you questioned this because you built your own. But would you have been more receptive if you had inherited Daddy's business and wanted out to "live the good life"? Just wondering.
Also add a lego recycler that rips apart a legos object and grinds the bricks to form the molder's input plastic pellets.
Sure the specific example of visualizing an arbitrary algorithm over all inputs might be a little unrealistic, but the point of the post wasn't that we need that specific thing.

On the contrary, this is exactly what we need. Easy visualization is the reason why word processors, photo editors, video editors, music notation and audio software, DTP packages, and 3D programs are so much more powerful than IDEs. WYSIWYG gives the user a view of the entire state of the document they're working on. Users can see what's wrong or what needs doing, then fix it.

It's certainly possible to create this in an IDE in a small number of specific cases, but it's totally impossible in general (and I mean this in the truest sense of the word "impossible").

I agree with you and the author of the post that we should definitely work on getting IDEs smarter, and there's a lot of scope for improving them. It's just that computer science places a hard limit on how far we can go.
Check out Edward Tufte's books , from his webpage

"Edward Tufte has written seven books, including Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. He writes, designs, and self-publishes his books on analytical design, which have received more than 40 awards for content and design. He is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design. His current work includes landscape sculpture, printmaking, video and a new book."
if the topics are constrained to the examples the author presented, then it might be better to save the 30min.
At the same time, a big part of innovation relates on communicating ideas and comes from day-to-day interactions especially with people from different background/experiences.
That is a block the author is imposing on himself by isolating - if there are others great minds at his/her workplace.
perhaps finding a different group of people to have lunch with would increase the learning process and also giving space for cross-pollination of ideas.
Where is this published?
Lego is low-barrier-to-entry hardware programming for children - i.e. people who haven't yet learned that normal people don't make things.
Deffo write an article about it. I'm sure HN would like to hear more about your culture. I know I would.
Some nice Mandelbrot jokes & TED talk. RIP.
Ryan, I'm guessing that you questioned this because you built your own. But would you have been more receptive if you had inherited Daddy's business and wanted out to "live the good life"? Just wondering.

If only I had the chance to find out :)
They crave pain and can push their pain threshold...

These two things seems contradictory. If they crave pain, why would they need to push their pain threshold?

(Disclosure: I'm a wimpy athlete. I always thought pain was the body's signal that something was wrong, so I backed off. Your remark confuses me even more. Just trying to understand.)
I took a 140 mile bike trip and noticed that if I started thinking about anything other than biking, I started going slower. But if I was focused and one-pointed in mind, and allowed myself to feel the pain fully, I was able to push myself harder.
It seems like the author forgets that the medium of code IS text.

In fact, it isn't. Code is better defined as a tree. The "impedance mismatch" of writting a tree using sequential text strings is what makes fragile the tools that IDEs feature.

That code is seen as text is just a historical accident. I believe most serious programmers have been beaten by some incomplete implementation of graphical interfaces and accepted to fall back to good old plain text.

But we are in 2010. This acceptance of this state of matters is very unfortunate. Specially sad is when the author says that IDEs are no more than text editors with some extended capabilities. They shouldn't! They should load the code in all its glorious shape... that by no means is a chunk of text.
Sony Vaio VGN-FZ18S battery 
Sony Vaio VGN-FZ18S battery
Type:	Li-ion
Capacity:	5200 mAh
Volt:	11.1 V
Size:	209.90 x 47.50 x 20.40 mm
Color:	Silver
$ 99.33
http://www.daily-battery.com/sony-vgn-fz18s-battery.htm
I actually quite like this - the keywords and the ability to add your own is pretty cool.
Looks great, but wouldn't it make sense to support Kindle's WebKit-based experimental browser too?
Visualization of Steve Jobs' words
> and trained with some of the best.

If you don't mind me asking, what were your PRs? I got lapped on a mile in high school (the guy ran a sub-5!)

Have you read Once a Runner? Was that what your training life was like?

Interesting offshoot - The whole point of training 20 hours a week for the Ironman triathlon (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile marathon) is so that the body never goes anaerobic during the actual Ironman race. When the body goes anaerobic (lactic acid buildup), everything goes downhill rapidly - it goes from racing a PR (personal record) to whether you will finish the race.

And then there are the Marathon Monks of Tendai:

> The ultimate achievement is the completion of the 1,000-day challenge, which must surely be the most demanding physical and mental challenge in the world. Forget ultra-marathons and so-called iron-man events, this endurance challenge surpasses all others.

Only 46 men have completed the 1,000-day challenge since 1885. It takes seven years to complete, as the monks must undergo other Buddhist training in meditation and calligraphy, and perform general duties within the temple.

http://www.howtobefit.com/tendai-marathon-monks.htm
It all depends on the conversation, some of the best ideas and discussions/learning come from random lunch topics.

But yeah if it's random fluff stuff it's not something I'd want to do every day, when I was interning I spent quiet a few of the sunny days going for walks alone in the surrounding parklands, was relaxing and put me in a better fram of mind than sitting around the office like most of the people I was working with did.
Violent agreement. Focusing on one thing dramatically increases your chance of success, and makes it easier for folks looking for that specific thing to identify you.

Mr. Horner's site seems even more reverse than a reverse application - does that make sense? He seems to be saying, "First, decide if you like ME. Then, decide if you have a job for me."

EDIT: I should have said "industry" instead of "thing" in my second sentence. He's stated he wants to be a generalist, not a specialist. He would fare better by targeting a specific industry.
"It never gets easier, you just go faster." -Greg LeMond
We attempted to solve a lot of these problems in our online HTML/CSS/JS editor/prototyping tool, http://quplo.com. We also wrote about our frustrations with IDEs earlier this year: http://blog.quplo.com/2010/04/the-modern-ide-sucks/

Some things we tried to fix:

- The file system; you don't need one when you're building an HTML prototype. Instead you have sheets, where you can organise multiple "files" (URIs, basically) based around how you want to organise, not how some arbitrary hierarchy of nested folders wants you to.

- Code completion; intellisense and other completion usually pops up an alphabetic list of everything available in the namespace. In the case of CSS, typing "a" presents you with autocomplete starting with "azimuth". When do you ever need azimuth? So instead, we built "common sense code completion", where the likely most-used properties are surfaced at the top of the list. Now, writing HTML and CSS is mostly a case of pressing tab a lot, and up or down when you don't want the auto-suggested default.

- Browser-based; why even write code in a desktop IDE, especially HTML/CSS? Doing in the browser has so many advantages, such as web browsers' awesome tab features or, since it's a web app, everything you write being instantly available online.

- Collaboration; as a web app, no more checking in and updating. We handle version management and you just work on your code with your team (long term: Google-style realtime collaboration?)

There's a lot to improve about today's IDEs. We got started on one specific for simple HTML development. Someone else should solve this problem for programming languages.