skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel that there is the danger here of a blind leading the blind effect. I tried it out for giggles. Not to pick on my reviewer, but here:

There are alot of words on the landing page [of BCC]. Look at some of the ycombinator pages and you will notice the average site has about 45 words and 4-9 links. Don't give them so many options and so much to read. Otherewise, looks good!

The quality of your users' interactions with FeedbackRoulette is directly related to the quality of the advice they receive. To recruit and retain the best users who give the best advice, you have to be giving out advice which is worth their time. The above quoted advice is well-intentioned but does not convince me that I am likely to realize business value by continuing to be engaged with the service.

To see another take at resolving this problem, take a look at StackOverflow: by breaking the 1:1 nature of the communication, you can use people's desire to peacock to get hypercontributing members of the community to be responsible for most of the good advice on the site, and let the 90% who do no writing merely vote the good stuff to the top. Hopefully they pick the right good stuff. If, on the other hand, StackOverflow picked two random programmers with a question and connected them, the average experience of using it would be getting your query on Rails ActiveRecord validation answered by a junior Java programmer from India. That would be a much less effective StackOverflow. It would likely not maintain the interest of somebody like John Skeet (who, if you are not familiar with the SO community, is something of a local legend).

(Sidenote: if this reviewer was right and there are in fact YC companies with 45 words on the front page... how do I put this gently... there must be someone in your alumni network who you trust on SEO, right? Talk to him about whether that is a good idea. It will be a very brief conversation.)
Oh well. But WHY was the bubble bigger in Ireland? Do Irishmen need some kind of bigger houses and more of them than the rest of the world?

Anyway, we keep going and going in circles. Let's stop. The whole story (including why more debt) is very well described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger

More on that later I guess.

Let me just add that it would be very simplistic to attribute "current problems" just to the property bubble, or high debts to just low tax rate for multinationals. So to make it clear, that's not how I think.
Uh. Was Engadget under the impression that it would be hard for someone physical access to your logged-in unlocked machine to get your password anyways?

I see the bug here and all, but it's not like any other non-Keychain-integrated app is better. Don't let people you don't trust use your computer.
Nokia ends talk of Symbian^4, adopts HTML5 in Qt framework
I'm a heavy lastFM user and yet used none of these functions that they are removing. For me my iPod/netbook fills the role of loved tracks and playlists. I'd rather not waste bandwidth streaming tracks which I already have on various devices.
The Media Library :(

EDIT: Okay, I just tried Audacious again, and I have to admit, it's 95% of Winamp, I'm very happy with it. The only two things I don't like is that it's in the alt+tab list and that it doesn't have a media library, but, other than that, it's amazing, thank you!
How to pick a co-founder
Multiple simultaneous high-def video download in every room. More ads to sell.
Why we don't schedule deployments during off-hours
I don't have a lot to say about it personally but it came up fairly often on LtU
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/search/node/bitc
Okay, now I have to get the HTC Desire HD. Between this, Grooveshark and Swype, I don't think any other OS can compete.
If you're going to read Designing w/Web Standards, you'll get a very very good head start with CSS. You may be able to get by for a while just using what that book teaches.

But, I actually really recommend at least skimming through parts the CSS2 spec. There are more human-readable passages than you might expect. Specifically:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html

Most beginner CSS devs don't really understand how inheritance and the cascade work (it isn't necessarily last-rule-wins, it's based on selector specificity). This part of the spec spells it all out.

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/box.html

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html

These are easily the two most important pages of the spec. If you understand these, you'll be able to take away 90% of the mystery and guesswork that can go into laying out a page. Nearly every time I've seen a developer struggling with CSS issues, it's turned out that they've had an imperfect understanding of the basic concepts that are spelled out here.

And for a technical spec, these pages are amazingly readable and understandable.
I have always seen 2 on 1 or 3 on 1, that way noone is bias.
But WHY did Irish banks invest more in property than everyone else?
the one I just wrote you about
Private equity giant KKR acquires proprietary trading desk of Goldman Sachs
Any language that has some measure of 'good' is like a well loved comic book character. There may be reports of death, but if the character is well loved, there will be some means of bringing the thing back.
I took a quick look at it, however the Get Bids screen claims "We are sorry but your account has been flagged as fraudulent."

The voting angle is interesting, and rewarding people with logging in to give them more voting power makes sense too.

Good luck
Agreed. Fresh out of college and broke, having a beer with dinner, or having that second or third drink at a bar was just not in the budget.
I think there is a correlation between intelligence, existential angst, and a need to 'get fucked up' to let it all go for the night. It's not EVERY intelligent person, just a subset that doesn't feel any stigma about drugs/alcohol. The big problem is when people start to believe alcohol/drugs are an escape from reality, they really just alter consciousness up or down a few levels. Over the years, alcohol will also make you dumber and more likely to do something you'll regret for many years.

I prefer cannabis and acid instead of alcohol. They seem to elevate consciousness instead of depress it. But who could say no to a beer with your friends after a hard day's work?
DMCA compliance, or at least DMCA-as-interpreted-by-various-labels compliance.

Shame about loved tracks, but the "my library" station is the best, and that will still work.
Dragonfly, MongoMapper and Rails3
Don't forget that Ive languished for a long time at Apple until Steve talent scouted him and promoted him up after he returned.
Text rendering speed? I type a letter Terminal, it appears. What are you doing that text rendering speed matters?
I usually gave an indirect answer when interviewees asked. For example, when hiring part-time employees, most of whom were current college students, all I really cared about was their ability to show up on time, follow directions, and be familiar with standard business practices. So anyone who showed up late to the interview, wore inappropriate clothing for a business setting, answered cell phones during the interview, etc. was cut. If someone asked why I would usually frame it as "I can't discuss the decision to hire or not hire you specifically, but generally companies look for candidates who show up on time to an interview, dress appropriately, and don't answer phones, etc."
OS X Lion: Lessons Learned From iOS
Anecdotally, I saw well over 50% (out of a few dozen) at a Stanford student union last weekend.
I'd argue the author didn't really sneak in.

I think graduating high school seniors are held to a different standard than working adults - which the author technically was.

But, the strategy is good. I did almost the same thing. I took graduate CS classes and was later accepted into SEAS at Columbia. I ended up going to another school that worked with my commute better but, if you are set on going to a specific school, establishing a relationship there will help you - but only if you get good grades :-) You still have to prove you are serious about the education.
Excellent idea for an experiment (especially for the first day). I didn't mean to demean your work.

Personally I would prefer visual cues to auditory.
I think it'd be illegal for Google NOT to use tax shelters. They have to maximize shareholder value. They can't just give money away to whoever they feel like for no reason, including to the US Govt.
Yeah from the article it really looks like one of those "screw you our long-time customer" actions disguised as a bland update. Are other people irritated too?

"last.fm removing all the reasons I signed up" would have been a great headline.
Nice for Stanford. Not so nice for all the communities that applied only to watch Google pick Stanford some ~7 miles away.
I'm one of those people that still uses Winamp 2.9x... this is pretty awesome news for me.

I've never liked any of the other media players available on Android, I'm definitely going to try this out when I get home. I think I'm most excited about the wifi sync.
Who stole anything in this case? That's not a valid analogy as one act is legal and the other is not.
This correlate fine with what we observe and with the Fermi paradox. That is, there are no indications of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. When Frank Drake first turned his radio telescope to the sky and started to listen, he expected the ether to be full of radio signals from other civilizations. To his astonishment it was silent. Obviously there is a "great filter" in place which prevent intelligent life to evolve in abundance. And this article seems to point to such a filter. Nick Bostrom has an interesting philosophical take on this http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/fermi.pdf
What problem did that specific bit of GC pressure cause you? (I'm doing "5 whys" in reverse. Otherwise known as "The Socratic Method.")
agreed. Often times folks will "hear" an answer differently, so it's good to have multiple sets of ears, imho.
launching at off-hours or friday night is a way to the boss to abuse young kids
Good question: Yes I was in a UK startup. I feel that the risk adverse nature/attitude we came across significantly impedes innovation in the UK (remember this is in my experience and this was around 2001-2005). I believe we had to work harder to overcome this and this took focus away from our core activities at times. We often found no one was willing to invest unless you had 5 years of track record and £1mill/yr turnover and if you where doing something disruptive (like we were) and innovative in a new market, then it was even harder. So I guess I feel there is more chance that good startup WITH cash will fail due to being crushed by this problem. Plus I think the US is known for its better startup fostering nature and work ethic as suggested in this article. http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/20/european-startups-need-t...

Wooly reasons but having said all that, times have changed and I'm not against UK startups at all, I would just like to look at US ones first... I suppose if a UK startup was doing something disruptive in healthcare I might be more interested!
Can you FizzBuzz?

While I cannot remember the syntax off the top of my head, I am pretty sure I could write out how to do this in BASIC. I have not had a programming course in 22 years. Maybe there is hope for me.
I would choose a very small niche. The chicken-and-egg problem disappears almost complete if you choose the niche small enough. This can be a movie category or a region, maybe the movie category is better in your case.

Because, if the niche is small enough, you will always be able to handle the short coming of the other (supply/demand) side in a realistic way, be it by cold calling or adwords or whatever.

I would stick with this niche for a while. You will have some first successful transactions, some success stories, some data you can use for statistics and pr, generate modest earnings, build up some ranking positions on google, etc... and you start understanding the numbers of your business, the conversion rate, etc..

And you will provide traction for your current users. Promoters that have signed up for the newsletter will regular receive some opportunities, and this is what counts to make your useres happy in a marketplace.

When your first niche is doing well, you can risk the next step, expand two other segements (categories). And repeat.

From my point of view, the critical thing is that you will loose a lot of ressources everytime you start acquiring new customers/segments. There will always be a mismatch of the demand-side and the supply-side. To be successfull, you needed to cover one segment by segment, otherwise you may run out of time and money before you get significant traction.
>The idea that you need a physical machine close by to get any work done is completely out the window at this point. ... I ssh into the virtual machine to do pretty much everything: edit code, fire off builds, run tests, etc. ...Wide-area network latencies are low enough that this works fine for interactive use, even when I'm at home on my cable modem.

This situation sounds fine if you're a developer and your job requires only low-bandwidth text streams between you and your physical computer. But for anyone who does anything graphical, or for anyone at home who wants to enjoy media, the bandwidth and latency are big problems.

Maybe I should just assume that because this is on HN and written on a developer's blog, context is assumed. But it sure seems like a disconnect between hard programmers and the other 99% of the population.
I used to live in Cambridge, MA. The bars were filled with graduate students, post docs, and PhD burnouts. I'm not sure how much dumb people drink, but the smart ones could drink me under the table.
Indeed. Aussie rules is probably the least tackle-intensive of the non-round-football games.

A better comparison would be to Rugby League, which is tackle-stops-play much like Grid Iron (which is what we call American Football). But there's still less tackling, because you're only allowed to tackle the guy with the ball, whereas Grid Iron seems to be an everybody-tackles-everybody-all-the-time sort of situation.
I've been doing a lot of job hunting lately. There are a ton of crappy jobs out there for php/java code monkeys. If you can solve FizzBuzz you can get the job, though you might not want to. Python and other more fashionable languages tend to be the choice of more sophisticated teams with higher standards. Simply put, a beginner's level understanding of PHP will get you a php code monkey job. A beginner's level understanding of Python along with an understanding of fundamentals can get you a dev job.

edit: definitely broad strokes
How about a twist on the original idea:

Reviewers submit a short review with the basic findings and points of improvement, and hint at a more in-depth review.

For a nominal fee, you could access a more in-depth review and consulting (maybe with coding help, etc..). The site could be a nexus between people needing reviewing help, and consultants, for a small fee.

Top reviewers could make a living out of this, other people can submit good reviews in the hope of being picked for consulting work.

Just my 2 cents of brainstorming (probably millions of buts to this one).
The best music player I've used so far is FooBar2000 on Windows. I wish there was an exact clone for Linux.
"To be clear, this trial is completely separate from our community selection process for Google Fiber, which is still ongoing"
That's true enough. But fact is, if someone's ignorant of modulus, I'd say that's scary. Knowing modulus doesn't necessarily demonstrate you have a great grasp of programming. But I think not knowing modulus demonstrates that there's a higher probability you know very little. And fact is, FizzBuzz also filters out all the people who know modulus, but can't figure it out anyway. You definitely don't want those people.
Is Blaming Warranted -- Ever?
that's precisely what I've done ... I have a (not finished) product, which you can see at http://nift.ie ... that's my product .. I just need to add some more features before I start plugging it ...
I did the same as you. I did not get into programming till I was in my early 30s. I think I was 34 years old when I first started identifying as "a computer programmer" (I mean, when I would meet people and they would ask me what I did for a living).

I've had a great time doing software work, but the first year or 2 I was doing it were frustrating for the number of things I still did not know how to do. It is a little bit amazing how many different things you have to know to be good at it.

Anyway, my own experience is that it can be done. Of course, 2010 is a tough time to be starting in any career at all. You did not mention which country you are in, but from the way you talk about your schooling, I assume you are in the USA. The recession has been intense in the USA, see this chart: http://calculatedriskimages.blogspot.com/2010/07/employment-...

One change I've noticed in the tech industry since 2005 is there is a much bigger interest in knowing frameworks, rather than simply a computer language. Maybe 10 years ago a person could say "I know Java" or "I know PHP" but nowadays its more like "I know Spring, Hibernate, Grails" or "I know Symfony, CodeIgniter, Drupal". So my advice is to pick a specialty.
And depression and its associated pathologies. But as with everything, YMMV. Some people can drink a lot and have it not affect anything at all. Only some people, though.
They don't have the time, they don't want lawsuits, they can't tell you that they ended up hiring Jeff the tax guy's cousin because many of the staff already knew him and he's a good dude as well as a good coder...etc.
Microsoft Research != Microsoft in general. It's not even 1% of Microsoft, and everywhere there is different. Some of the research there has practical use, but a lot of it is just PR for Microsoft.
Well, that sure was an easy way for Mozilla's director to get a press hit.

In reality, the OS X app store is nothing more than a turbocharged version of Apple's own OS X software directory site. If you don't want to bend your app to qualify for it, just set up your own site. It's not reasonable to say Apple has to promote arbitrary applications.
Oracle does not care about Java on the Mac. I think Apple should care. They will loose customers (including me) when there is no decent Java on the Mac. Server side Java won't be a problem. But all the good Java IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans and Intellij) are written in Java and need a decent Windowing System. X11 on the Mac is not that.

The App Store announcement makes it clear that its only a question of time when Apple will close the MacOS-platform the same way they did with iOS.

This makes me really sad. I suspect I will have to switch to Linux then.
Comparing Bounds
Purpose of proof: semi-formal methods
I think a much better strategy would be to just become among the best in the world at something in high school. This is a lot easier than you'd think, as it really only takes 4 hours a day to become better than 99.9% of HS students at virtually anything. Failing that the author's strategy is probably the best backup, assuming you're committed to getting a college degree from an elite college.
If you're "just" installing server-side software, then maybe if the price is right.

If you are also offering to get a working uncustomized copy of popular software installed (e.g. Wordpress) then that's more interesting. Some bits of software need a few manual tweaks/config changes to get working. This is especially true for when you move away from Apache and to nginx. Nothing rocket sciency, but still time consuming and so could be outsourced.
I've found that when you're rejected, it's okay to write back asking for specific guidance as to how you might improve for next time. I've gotten valuable insight > 50% of the time this way.
Currently there is an incentive to rate reviews as follows: if you want to increase the probability for that person to review another of your sites, you would give them a rating similar to your rating (which could be quite low).
HTC Vision (G2) Successfully Overclocked to 1.42 GHz
So we'll see growing class differentiation in sport choices between those who grew up with rich parents (better protect young Tyler's brain so he can grow up to be a lawyer) and those who grew up with poor parents (I'll bet young LeMonjello could be an NFL star someday!)?
Was it John Maynard Smith - The Major Transitions in Evolution? It's a great book, that goes deeper than Dawkins' vulgarizations.
I tried using Open Office on the Mac and it just seemed in a weird place. Not as simple as Textfile for quick edits, but not nearly as refined as Office 2008.
Hi Paul,

you're not nuts :) I studied Civil Engineering at university, and then faffed around for the next 10 years because I didn't know what I wanted to do. I discovered my passion for programming at the age of 32 through the initial Ruby on Rails podcast. Unfortunately I couldn't program at all at the time, had never knowingly used unix and so spent the next 2 years teaching myself most evenings after putting the kids to bed.

The key thing for me actually landing a job was through meeting up with a local programmer. I'd discovered his blog, realised he was local and arranged to meet up with him for a beer. He told me that there was a Ruby User Group in town and so I plucked up the courage and went to the next meeting - it was great! At the third or fourth meeting heard through a fellow attendee that the company he worked at was looking for rails programmers. Two interviews later and I was employed.

I'm not a world class programmer. But I consider myself very fortunate to have discovered my passion at what seemed to me at the time so late in life. Many people never do.

And getting a paycheck as a result of that passion is better than a kick in the teeth ;)

All the best mate.
Poll: Keyboard shortcuts for hacker news?
Is there interest for keyboard shortcuts on the hacker news site?

I really appreciate the clean minimalist interface for hacker news. I can understand why most UI suggestions for the site would not be liked. But, it seems that adding keyboard shortcuts would be a natural UI component for users around here without detracting from the site's simplicity.

Are there shortcuts that I just don't know about? I tried searching for it, but didn't see anything.

I often find myself typing "gi" on hacker news by accident (the shortcut in gmail to take you back to the inbox). When I do that, it always reminds me that it would be nice if there were shortcuts for hacker news. In particular, it'd be great if I could type something like "g23" to go to article number 23. And it'd be cool if I could use "j" and "k" to move a cursor up and down the list with which I could select the article or the comments link.

I know that I could just write a browser plugin or bookmarklet to do it, but do others have interest in this tool?
Running any kind of build process would be an easy first example. :-)
So you've never claimed tax deductions or used a 401(k) or IRA, or ever had health insurance from your employer? Those are all legal ways of "dodging" taxes.

If the government wants to collect more tax, the government can close tax incentives. There's no individual duty not to exploit tax incentives if they're open to you.