skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post. The feeling of creating value for the world rather than for money is something I can both relate with and admire--and I'd like to believe that's the real reason engineers become engineers! Best of luck out there.
What does your site run on? I like webfaction a lot. Super flexible and totally hassle free. They're totally personal and will go the extra mile for you. For more fun with scaling (from their "Why Webfaction" section):

"Our unique multi-machine load balancing solution allows you to manage your account on multiple machines from our control panel. You can easily deploy your apps on multiple machines and our system will automatically provide load-balancing between these machines. Some customers have scaled up their sites to tens of machines for a fraction of the price of dedicated servers."

http://www.webfaction.com/
>always a combination that guarantees failure.

Well, not always. I'm actually reading a book on the subject right now called "Results Without Authority"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814473431?ie=UTF8&tag=...
"Not for long. Mobile Google has turned Trivial Pursuit into a typing competition."

I hope you're right.

"I'd also question the use of the phrase modern culture here."

You make a good point.

It reminds me of the Aborgine's navigation technique referred to as "Songlines" or "Dreaming Tracks" -- they didn't have maps and instruments to navigate with, so instead they told stories. With those stories, they could convey not only a route, but also the locations of water holes and foraging grounds, and by using the story as a mnemonic, it was easy to learn and remember as well as to pass on to another.
The great thing about Savannah is that it's funded by the FSF, so in contrast to SourceForge, so they care more about the Free Software projects and less about monetizing them. In particular, there are no ads, the whole hosting system is based on Free Software and the website is fast (not overloaded).

Other independent hosters are Gna (http://gna.org/) by the FSF France, as well as BerliOS (http://www.berlios.de/) which has been bootstrapped partly by German public funds.

Wikipedia provides a really good overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_softw...
Runner's high[1] is one factor - I would presume that the dopamine from mastery (a new discovery compared to the previously believed dopamine release from completed tasks -don't have a citation on me right now) is another factor; the pain reminds you that you are pushing your boundaries and getting better physically and at your discipline. The pain itself is probably awful, but it symbolizes a lot to the athlete.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/health/nutrition/27best.ht...
35 Breathtaking Night Photography Of World Femous Places
Usually everybody visit on these place in morning time and some time in evening but due to lot of work and shortage of timing we cant look at these places today we are giving you a chance to look these places in front of your screen i hope every body will enjoy it and will love the beauty of these places.
I'm not trying to be difficult, but we literally just had an October 2010 jobs post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748045

Check around here and see what catches your fancy.
Sure, suprise me. I'd really like to see a video of someone typing for an hour or two on an iPad without needing a chiropractor afterwards and in the end producing more text than he'd produce on a laptop or netbook with a stock text editor. If you have trouble focusing, maybe it's because your body is in an awkward posture.

I don't own an iPad, but even thinking about the angle, that I'd have to look at it from while it rests on my lap, hurts my neck.
BigLaw in Boston actually hires quite a few BC grads.
It's ranked 15 by one of the legal journals, I forget which.

It's also very strong in IP and corporate law. It is a feeder school for many "biglaw-esque" IP law firms in Boston and NYC. It's the back up plan of many MIT engineering students who feel like they are underpaid and did not have the foresight to work on wall street during the 2000s.
The JS on the Amazon AWS pages doesn't work very well, either. Can't open up the dialog that has my secret key, for example.
My statement was a conditional one, as you can see from the words "If this is true". You can disagree with the hypothesis this is based on, but that does not invalidate the conditional conclusion.

ZachPruckowski and RyanMcGreal seem to be claiming that variation in teaching methods has little effect on achievement, and demographics/non-school factors seem to be the major cause of variations in achievement. If teaching is not a major cause of achievement, we should not waste time and money on it. Similarly, we should not waste time and money on shark repelling sticks or homeopathy.

But I should point out that the anecdote you repeat seems to imply that teachers don't have a particularly large effect on achievement. As you say, "even there you had problem kids who refused to make any effort" and you had "the ones willing to read the book for its own sake". The teacher won't help either of these categories of student very much. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that these two types of students make up 2/3 of the class, and a good teacher can improve the grades of receptive students by 20% over a crappy one, then teacher quality only accounts for 6% of the achievement of the class.
This argument ignores the question of whether direct instruction is valuable across the entire curriculum, or primarily for basic core reading / spelling / language / arithmatic; it also ignores the fact that many DI results are generated on special ed cohorts. It's also phrased in a way that suggests that anyone who opposes a k-12 direct instruction regime must be opposed because they want to make teachers lives more interesting.
A person who "graduated with the best marks in MIT and has been programming since the womb" is special. The other people doing it "every single graduating year"... they're special too.
I have been doing massive Web Development targeting Chrome (Safari), Firefox and certainly IE.

I also give Opera a shot from time to time. My review is: Their rendering engine is fine, though not perfect. They have some minor problems. However, the JavaScript engine is awful. It doesn't behave like FF or Chrome engines. It's stupidly slow and sometimes freeze the browser.
Font rendering isn't optimal, still better than IE.
Data IS part of the design process.

As for Mechanical Turk, take a look at some of the papers Greg Little has published from MIT to get some creative ideas as to how to use Mechanical Turk.

If you're a Rails developer, take a look at my gem Turkee to easily integrate with Mechanical Turk ( http://github.com/aantix/turkee ).
The fact is, it's often not the skills that get you noticed, but a unique stunt, like Atomic Tom on the train the other day, or what you did.

Congrats.

However, there is a way to get a lot of job offers. Just post your resume to the job boards and the employers WILL find you. Ether market yourself, or find someone who will. And definitely don't grovel!

Til then, start your own business :)
Read Emphyrio by Jack Vance. It's just one book, but it's a fantasy book set in space. The main character is a woodcarver, but there are spaceships that travel to many inhabited worlds. Vance is one of the best authors I know to make a world feel worn, unlike the sci-fi of many other authors.
I think things like this are what Steve was talking about when he spoke of strategic opportunities coming up in the near future.

Entire categories of business are about to be disrupted by the mobile revolution.

Heck, just a few years ago a Visa IPO was floated in the ~20 billion range.

Not saying that Apple will buy Visa, but they have enough cash and a very powerful position. There could be some very interesting ways for them to take advantage of a "PC in every hand."
Finnish EV Team Learns a $400,000 Lesson in Humility at Automotive X-Prize Race
Different strokes for different folks, but this is precisely what turns me off about Opera. I don't want a kitchen sink. I want an uncomplicated web browser.

That web browser used to be Firefox, but it got too heavyweight for me and Chrome's more minimalist approach became my preferred experience.

The Opera vs. The Rest argument feels a lot like the endless emacs vs. vi war :)
Qwerly Alpha Launched
I second this. While Banks may not be the most poetic of authors, his "Culture" series is excellent space opera. I'd enjoy living in this civilization myself.

Currently reading his 9th Culture novel, "Surface Detail," and liking it immensely.
Social/Tech Entrepreneurs' Identity Crisis
No, popular wisdom in California is that we have the most inept legislature in the country and the unions are actually running the place. California doesn't appear to have any problem raising taxes.
Nowhere does it say what industry you're looking for work in or what your major was. The only hint of it is your mention of "programming languages".
6. Dirty code incentivizes the business to invest in tangential revenue work rather than attacking core business problems.

This is very true, and it's also true that clean code can turn into a core competency in itself. The company I work for got a big competitive advantage by being the best at something that at first seemed tangential to our core competency. We added some features, kept them clean, found it easy to add more, and eventually we had another "core competency" that we never even planned. We had no strategic plan or strategic commitment of resources to develop our capabilities in that area; it only happened because it was so easy to add the features our customers asked for, because the code was clean. (We were also lucky that our early customers asked for the right things, which resulted in us having an attractive suite of features.)
It is determined by the balance of supply and demand

That's not actually true - here in the UK they are turning away applicants for the Met, even cancelling start dates. The supply of police officers far outstrips the demand. The same is true of the fire brigade.

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2010/06/10/55913/met-...
While I don't have the time to confirm it. I will say that I've seen similar (if not the same) statistics in several academic papers on the subject.

In essence it seems that charter schools either perform at the median or only slightly better than similar public schools.

These issues are cultural, and until we recognize that for large swaths of America the culture is fundamentally broken, nothing will change.
Yes many skills transfer. Like how one ane write C++ from readin the docs without ever learning C++ or how one can write C++ having only ever learned C. The part you're missing is that it doesn't make you any good in C++, in fact I'd argue that it makes you terrible if you're going to try to write X code in Y language. The fact that it's entry-level doesn't mean anything. A lot of times these entry-level jobs aren't something you can just go and start pasting code together.
The billion-dollar policy question is whether it makes more sense to spend that money through the school system per se or through a broader social policy that aims more directly to ameliorate the socioeconomic factors affecting school performance.
Ray Ozzie Resigns: Microsoft Brain Drain Continues
"Canada also expelled his entire first middle school class because their scores were too low, which the movie didn't note."

That's a huge oversimplification. Canada's intention was always to use his baby college as a pipeline to feed into his school system. He tried accepting older kids who hadn't gone through the baby college, but found that many had severe discipline problems and IIRC he was also having some major staffing problems. So he decided to kill off the grade while he reorganized his staff, mainly on the theory that he needed to start with younger kids in order for the program to work. Anyway I'm in no way defending KIPP or Canada as a whole, but I also think this critique isn't entirely intellectually honest.
What pushed me away from contributing patches and improvements was the Contributor Agreement. I'm sure others feel the same as it is a pretty large barrier to entry.

Making each clojure.contrib.* library more independent makes sense, but it makes even less sense now to keep everything under CA. As Rich said, it is not a standard library - it isn't strictly affiliated with clojure proper.
I'd expect a sly wink of a response that would serve as cover.

Something like, "I've seen that website before, but I can't comment on whether they're the ones who contacted me."
Getting Started: Redis & Python
That's true right up until it isn't, i.e. when you're struggling to understand why your javascript is producing subtly buggy behaviour.
You lost me at user javascript to prevent 'scrapers' from lifting content.

No, you're just preventing -users- from spreading the word. Scrapers don't even run the javascript.
Indeed. Javascript: The Good Parts is a good book for getting past that stage. I feel like I'm finally learning JS, after having used it for years amateurishly, and it's becoming one of my favorite languages.
Now I'm wondering what a functional building toy might look like.
Jhootha Hi Sahi Movie Reviews, Wallpapers
Director Abbas Tyrewala is back again with one of the most anticipated movies of the year ‘Jhootha Hi Sahi’. Sa Re Ga Ma presents Jhootha Hi Sahi. The movie is produced by Madhu Mantena and Abbas Tyrewala and The music of the movie has been composed by the maestro of Bollywood music – A.R Rahman. The film stars John Abraham and Pakhi Tyrewala in lead roles.
Adobe has probably made billions of dollars on Photoshop, and has thousands of people working on improving interaction with a regular grid of color values. This is a high profit, low complexity situation. Most developers are not willing to spend $700 on an editor, and the gamut of programming language source code syntaxes is too broad for a single editor to work uniformly across them. But really, comparing anything to Photoshop is silly.

Some music sequencing programs will in fact allow you to create measures with the wrong number of beats, and have annoying, unproductive interfaces. Premiere is actually really annoying to work with, which sent a lot of people over to Final Cut. Even extremely similar programs like Adobe Illustrator are fraught with miserable design and crappy storage formats.

The OP has valid points, but these apply to most software, and not just IDE's.
That's a tad like asking if an artificial intelligence is sentient, no? :P
Generalists should go for smaller companies, like small web development shops. Those jobs are always, "Programming, plus some simple web design, which means a grasp of SEO, probably Photoshop, occasionally sysadmin work, knowledge of Apache, and you'll have to set up your own version control."
http://money-law.blogspot.com/2010/10/where-partners-come-fr...

It's apparently ranked #30 in terms of # of partners at BigLaw firms. It's an objective metric, but I readily admit that it's of unclear significance since it's not weighted for class size and cannot account for interest or lack thereof in BigLaw at these schools.
Weird, I use Google Maps all the time in Opera, probably almost daily, and never have problems. It used to be a bit slow, but that's changed with the new JIT engine in 10.6/10.7 alpha.
My bet is, someone that came into an interview talking like that would be considered by someone, somewhere, eventually in the hiring process to be "too ambitious" and feel their job is threatened.

What's that saying about not attributing something to conspiracy when you can attribute it to incompetence?

I'm sure 99% of new hires at Microsoft think they're going to change the world just like the guy above. The answers are simple! Just do X, Y, and Z!

It's pretty apparent that you just can't turn the ship that fast anymore at Microsoft. Hell, if a 'visionary' (I hate that word) like Ozzie can't make a dent in the culture, what fate is in store for the rest of the employees?

People wonder why MS doesn't have the kind of buzz among developers like Google or Facebook. My guess is that seeing things like this in the media go a long way.
I've only run into it for library-type data, where Dublin Core in RDF/XML is common.
ah, that makes sense. It's something to consider as you scale, though.

Personally, I think the optimal situation is running mostly on co-located hardware then have cold spares on ec2 or the like that you spin up once a week to test, that you can bring on in case of hardware failure of your primary system, or in case of load spikes.

Of course, depending on your time value, often times at $1000/month you aren't saving enough to justify the two provider setup... and ec2 will be able to get you another unit faster than anyone else will, if your primary fails.

The thing to remember about "the cloud" as implemented by ec2 or the vps providers is that recovery from hardware failure is a problem you still need to solve; In many cases you'll see problems with your ec2 instance, and you'll have to kill it and bring up your stuff on another ec2 instance.

Instant provisioning is a powerful tool, but it doesn't completely remove you from worrying about hardware.

This is the value proposition of something like Heroku or engine yard. they handle more of the sysadmin stuff that you would otherwise have to worry about if you were running on ec2. It can be a big win in some cases; but keep in mind... they are charging you a premium for that service.
I'm a fan of Charles Stross's Accelerando. It's epic to the point where it takes place across generations. It also has the nice benefits of being free online, and you'll occasionally see cstross post here.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803284

... with many comments.
ever see currensee.com?
As a blog directed towards programmers, I have to ask what your visitor browser breakdown is; I don't know why you'd think 40% is bogus for this type of audience.
Thanks for the added context. In case I've unfairly summarized the author's point, here's the graf it comes from:

But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about “amazing results,” even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Har- lem Children’s Zone, Whatever It Takes (2009). Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty.

One might salvage the author's point by saying that it's simply arguing that charters aren't a cure-all; that the disciplinary problems that sabotaged that middle school class are going to exist for any charter, &c.
I have been striving towards joining the inbox zero train, All my mails from the last month has either been converted to tasks or filed in some way.

The only noticeable improvement I have seen is that I go thorough all my emails (I might have ignored a few whose subject line didn't catch my attention in the past) making me catch some semi-important things I might have missed.

Unfortunately filing in Outlook has its disadvantages as search only works on the whole mailbox or one folder at a time, hence if a mail can be categorized in 2 folders, you might have to search twice (which looks stupid when someone is standing over your head).
Because plugins usually open split buffers that are horizontal by default.
Isn't the name a bit of a problem?
This guy I think is coming from the angle that if the time with others is not beneficial to you, then there are better ways to spend that time.

I think if you look at what you think is your other times, you'll find that those times have benefits for you and as such belong to you. If you think those times belong to someone else, you are living your life in the wrong way. This is what I think he meant.
It's mostly style that's the problem. IE8 is better but you don't get any niceties (rounded corners, etc). IE9 looks like it will be marginally better (eg, you now get rounded corners, but not much else).
If you have been unemployed for 2 years, I would expect you to have an acronym list on your resume longer than anyone with an actual job.

Being unemployed can offer HUGE advantages in terms of being completely up to date on the latest and greatest, something most employed people simply don't have the time for.

You don't need a job to tech you the tools of the trade so make sure you walk in with those already in your back pocket.

There have been plenty of crafty people on HN who have built up a resume with experience by simply offering free services in order to prove they can do something. I would suggest you do the same at this point.
Would you be able to share a little about the 20 lbs in a week?
Ah, I've had such problems before. I fixed them by deleting all my preferences files, which I shouldn't really have to do. I'll try a clean install and see if it fixes it, thanks.

Good thing we have sync, at least.
Direct instruction papers almost universally focus on test scores and not comprehension which is a serious issue. It's great that test scores shoot up at schools that use direct instruction but it'd be even better if the kids actually understood what it was they are doing.

I didn't speak to the enjoyment of the job as all I can provide is anecdotal evidence from seven years of observing the classes that I've volunteered in and comments from my wife's time as a teacher. Even this year I have observed that the children and the instructors seem to get more enjoyment out of less scripted and more creatively structured lesson plans, but that's as you said, not the stated goal of education. I would however argue that the rote memorization of facts and formulas isn't education either, the ability to solve problems and think critically in addition to knowing facts and formulas is. That's where I feel direct instruction really fails.

As to easily replaceable teachers... Well, if we are only going to allow scripted lessons, prevent the instructor from using their training to detect which students aren't understanding or incorporate supplemental instruction and alternative methods for those students then why even have teachers? Trained monkeys should do just fine.
Bingo. If job positions advertised themselves with clear examples of projects I'd be expected to tackle within my first year on the job, I'd be a lot more likely to consider switching.
"Pick up the phone

I find it surprising how out-of-vogue the phone is — so much stuff is just faster on the phone!"

As a general rule I very strongly disagree with this.

The phone is a good tool if you enjoy revisiting the same discussion again, and again, and again, each time with a "telephone game" (there's a reason it was named such) misinterpretation of everything that was previously discussed.

Sure, there are appropriate discussions that can take place over the phone, but in this industry it's usually a good interpersonal vehicle, but a horrendous way of coming to decisions or communicating ideas.
Articulate or die: why you must have a written value proposition
Any bad experiences with Y combinator?
Seems like everyone I talked to or post I read loves it. Is there no negative experience? If there is, please share.
Teachers are another similar category.
This stunt is an attention catcher but he can't seriously expect to get a job without at least an interview. And not some bullshit where he interviews the company. There's no way in hell I'd hire him without first checking his competency.