skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's becoming less common just like programmers who love assembly language are becoming less common.

The entire history of CS could be summed up as a move towards higher and higher levels of abstraction. They still expose you to assembly language in good CS programs as sort of a history lesson or to give you a deeper understanding of how it works underneath, but that doesn't mean people actually want to use it.

C is of course nowhere near as far along that path as assembly language, but it's a spectrum and seems to moving in that direction.
I was an independent consultant for almost 10 years - the first year or two can be the toughest. One of the best pieces of advice that I got before I started was that you know that you're ready to be a consultant when people are calling you and offering you money to do work for them (i.e. your network and reputation is already mature). If you resort to a brokered arrangement the rates aren't nearly as compelling. If you think you've got contract work that will take you through your time period, go for it.

If you want to discuss further, or are interested in discussing F/T work (the company I work at - Monetate - is hiring in the Philly area) feel free to email tjanofsky at monetate dot com.
This. I was trying to explain to my co-workers that this issue has existed for as long as the web has existed and they didn't really understand what I was talking about.

Not until they saw a demonstration video did they believe that it was as bad as I was telling them it was. It is hilarious as a security guy watching "new" exploits come out and watching them go into serious mode since this is a new exploit and it is a bad one and it is going to cause doom and whatnot.

If you can't trust the connection you are on, then time to not use said connection or VPN somewhere. Plenty of places to find hosted VPN services.
I have seen many of my friends and colleagues use Quora alot. And I like their concept. But some how I don't feel like visiting because of their UI. I wish it was little easier to read / skim. May be it's just me.

I was playing around with their CSS. Wanted to know your opinion / feedback.
I have also been up working at 2am many days

Well then, I will have something familiar to look forward to! :)
I still use the 11C I bought in 1988 as my main calculator.
As a Junior in CSC right now, and while I have to say the speed of development in languages like Python and Ruby really appeals to me, I do enjoy C development as well. Unfortunately I usually have to optimize for development time rather than anything else, so outside of a few classes (for example, Algorithms, were execution time was a competition), I end up picking the "highest"-level language. But I think most schools are avoiding C, outside of specific classes (whose goal is to teach C or something C related), because students get caught up in the complexity of C, and the difficulty of debugging it vs. a memory managed language, so they'd rather just avoid it and focus the class on the topic it's supposed to cover.

On the other hand, I know a few people who want to solely work in C because it allows them so much control over how things work, and they're capable of understanding how each and every call they make will basically function. You typically have to look pretty hard for these people specifically, but I find the ones I know are some of the best programmers around. If you're curious about getting in touch with some (I know at least two that I would /highly/ recommend, are looking for summer internships), ping me at mdwrigh2@ncsu.edu
How did you find your article writer?
The key is to have a good sling-back chair and to keep both feet squarely buried in the sand. I find having a low table on your left-hand side helps keep the sand from sticking to the base of your beer bottle, but you can always use a paperback for that too.

In the end, I find it's more about shade than ergonomics, especially in tropical climates where you're dealing primarily with palm trees and their small cross-section. I guess your mileage may vary.
I'm pretty sure that the service is designed to call the phone so that it rings, and you will be able to find it. Like if can't remember where in your house you put down the phone. Not that the service actually finds a phone you left in a public area.
Tell/Ask HN: Starting a Groupon-type site for web services
I was trying to think of was to promote the two startups I recently launched and deal-a-day site seemed like it might be a good, risk-free, way to do it. I decided to "scratch my own itch", as it were, and build one myself. So, I'm starting a sort of Groupon-type site for subscription web services and already have a few sites on board. In a way, it is somewhat similar to AppSumo, but without the bundles. Most of the time I feel like I'm wasting money on bundles as I usually only want one of the site or applications begin offered. Instead, it's just one site per deal.

I was wondering if anyone here, who has a web service, would be interested in featuring a deal on the site when I get it up and running (hopefully in the next couple of weeks). If so, feel free to contact me. (Info is in my profile)

Also, what sites, or kinds of sites, would you like to see featured? I'll try to contact them and see if they're interested.
Neat thought - but I think one of the comments there nails it: "Facebook is aiming squarely for Google’s turf (ads, traffic), and will do so regardless of Google’s success or failure in the social sphere." (Robby Grossman, http://phonons.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/is-google-deliberate... )
The types of software you should make in 2010/2011
Companies model themselves on archetypes people have in their minds. The management at Digg had an idea about the kind of company they wanted Digg to be and they built offices and hired employees to match that idea, even if it didn't quite fit the day-to-day reality of what operations at Digg required. (Companies do this all the time, it's a big reason why newspapers are dying and why so many VC funded dot-coms have gone bust, for example.)
Much like the general entrepreneurial pool.
Ah yes, this is an excellent point and reminds me of some extended contacts that I could refresh. Thanks.
can only be a good thing

Not really. What it could mean is a downward spiral, which is what's been happening in the newspaper biz. Fewer people can't do as much work, which means lower revenues, which means fewer people, which ...

The deeper problem (in the newspaper example) is very few of the employees have skills that can be leveraged to increase output while reducing headcount. Newspapers are loaded with coal-shovelers. Fewer shovelers, less coal. If you've built your business on coal-shoveling and the value of coal drops, it's very hard to find a profitable kernel to retreat to.
Everyone realizes the rant was from 2006, right?
I can see the resemblance. Thank you for that link.
Keep in mind that if you do any kind of proxy caching (Rack::Cache, etc.), AssetHostingWithMinimumSsl is going to cause problems (if, say, Safari generates a cached response, serves images and CSS from http:, and then any other browser is served that response).
The other thing that's hard to explain about consulting to people who don't do it is that even when you do have work managing the pipeline of new work is very hard.

You don't always know when the current contract is going to end. (And will they be able to pay for this month?)

So you may have more work than you can handle - but you also have to keep fishing for more work to ensure that you won't have unexpected down time. And that puts you under pressure because you are creating demand you often can't fulfill.

It may be easier if you are Yet Another Generic Common Technology Contractor because you can always trade leads with a pool of friends/colleagues.
I use a simple OpenVPN or L2TP/IPSec provider + client app on OS X. Minimal setup and I can switch it on/off easily. I reviewed the one I use earlier this year, though this it now outdated because at the time they didn't offer OpenVPN and that was my biggest beef with it: http://paulstamatiou.com/how-toreview-surf-securely-with-vyp...
GMX - E-Mail, FreeMail, Themen- & Shopping-Portal
Engineering courses give a basic overview of writing in C, but that's about it at my school. I haven't taken those courses since I'm not an engineering major, but I helped my friends with the material.

Most of my programming courses are taught in Java. I've brought it up to the faculty though about moving us away from being a Java school. The issue that they presented was that the teachers may not be as familiar with C/C++ as they are with Java. My reasoning behind all of it being that Java is not a good learning language since it adds too much abstraction to get a good idea for what your code is actually doing (i.e. memory).

It doesn't particularly matter though as students who are interested in programming will learn what they want on the side.

For your situation though, I'd avoid people who classify themselves as being a 'Java/Python/C programmer'. There are too many languages and too many problems to limit yourself to merely one or two languages. A good programmer will be familiar with at least a few languages and be able to pick up a new language/framework quickly. Basically it breaks down to simply finding someone who has an interest in programming.

Also, I like C.
Unity looks nice, but its improvements over GNOME seem to be mainly cosmetic -- not compelling enough to pull me away from the simplicity of dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/), at least not yet.
dailyburn.com is excellent for tracking fitness and nutrition.
How to segment traffic by gender to increase your website conversion rate.
Would you be willing to lease the domain to someone with a good idea?
You could hire Computer Engineering instead of Computer Science majors, they usually all know C well even if they practiced it in relation to hardware\embedded systems.

[at UIUC everyone does C++ Data Structures, but CS starts with Java, CE starts with C ]
The belief that gold holds an intrinsic value is wrong, and the advice you derive from it is incredibly misguided.

There's nothing special about gold. It has some nice properties that make it intrinsically valuable, but not more than copper or other metals. The reason basically all cultures value gold is that other people like it also, and it is hard to counterfeit.

That being said, gold goes through the same ups and downs in perceived value as any other commodity. For what I have read, it is trading now more or less around its long term historic value (think centuries long). If there's so much buzz about gold now, it is because it is coming from a few decades long of sub-valuation, but this is correcting fast, and the pendulum begins to swing now to the other side. If you are not able to pick your time correctly, you'll be loosing money soon enough.

Besides, there is the fact that it is a long time investment. If you are forced to liquidate your position to pay whatever need you have, you will probably loose money. And there's the commissions that will eat out on each transaction, so you better hold to gold until it is a really good time to sell.
In the context of "redistribution of wealth" people aren't talking about statistical distributions.
> If I've got $1,000,000 sitting in my bank account and interest rates are low, I'll earn a low return AND get hit by inflation.

Maybe its an anomaly, but the rich people I know don't have all, much less the majority, of their cash sitting in bank accounts. They leverage their money to get more money. Oftentimes through loans.

> If I've got $200k in debt and interest rates are low.

I doubt an actual poor person could get a loan for $200k. Maybe a payday loan. But we probably have differing ideas of what poor is.
Spliting semantic hairs it seems... Rapleaf is not collecting "interest" data just because they are curious; they are collecting it because the claim they make to their customers is that you interests define you and your intents better than explicitly stated preferences.
Many years ago a neighbor of ours, riding his son's motorcycle at something around walking pace, collided with his daughter's bicycle, and fell off on his head. He died, she got away with a broken arm.
I have become completely lost in this conversation and am now contemplating writing my next project in wood.
Did anyone ever enjoy writing C, especially data structures?

Here is what I remember from college:

./program

Segmentation fault.
I do occasionally make my own bread, and I grew up on a farm. So? I'm not an expert in either, but I can dabble. Why keep yourself from learning something new?
Important development at Digg | Digg About
Security through obscurity. Information is dangerous. Two sentiments that you're espousing that I consider bogus.
I've known about this for awhile, which is why I use Firefox + HTTPS Everywhere by the EFF, to force encryption on Facebook.
Atom processor?
I used to work at a fab in Fremont. It was one of several Silicon Valley fabs that are now no longer operating in the Valley. Its owner at the time, Agilent, cut eight to nine thousand jobs in the early 2000s:

http://news.cnet.com/Agilent-plans-more-layoffs/2100-1006_3-...

Last year Agilent, which is still a big area employer, cut another 2700 people:

http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/layoffs-hit-thousands-at-ibm-a...

It is worth remembering that Silicon Valley's first name is "silicon" for a reason. The area made its name with hardware and fabs. The folks in the area who are fifty and sixty years old are proportionally more likely to have extensive experience in hardware and fabs than in web development, and many of the fabs are closing down. Moreover, because it took a lot of people to run a fab -- more in the past than today -- there are a lot of those people.

Yes, life here on HN is great, but that's because of the tiny sample size. For example, what is the total number of people who have been employed at any YC startup over the last decade? I bet it doesn't add up to eight thousand people.

So it depends on your skills. If you want a job running a lithography tool on a production line your job prospects are different than if you want a job writing Ruby apps for a YC startup.
iirc, he said they become boring people who bitch about property taxes.
I've been doing independent consulting on and off for many years, but there have been many times when the work wasn't there for me to pay the bills, and I had to go back to a regular day job.

Early on, I also missed several good opportunities because of my lack of sales experience.

Don't quit your job until you've secured some small, part-time independent work. Spend as long as you can doing both, and don't quit your day job until your workload gets too big.
Try looking for Electronic Engineering grads. I may be a few years out of date, but it certainly used to be the case in my experience that they get more C level coding than those from the CS world.
Sniffing Remote Router Traffic a través de túneles GRE
I have a friend here in the states who is from Iran and he spent many nights during the protests refreshing twitter and Facebook. I can't say whether twitter changed the way the protests went, but they seemed the best way to get a sense of what was happening.
I actually had the option of using a few languages for my Data Structures/Algorithms class, and chose C. Granted, execution time was a competition and I'm a relatively competitive person by nature, so that influenced, but it really wasn't all that painful, and in fact direct control of pointers made some of the data structures easier to manage, in my opinion. Plus being on top of the rankings for efficiency is always nice :)
I had fun dealing with input management using the standard library only. Without any directions on how it worked or what to use.
Ditto.

CompE graduate here, my C education was almost exclusive to microcontrollers. The only other class that focused on C was the operating systems class. Both were fairly low-level in their respective areas.
Results of the Greplin Programming Challenge
try Lego: http://aleptu.com/images/2009/04/lego_difference_engine.jpg
Exactly. Macros are the icing, not the cake.
A poor person might be someone who had a steady job from 1995 to 2008, and, circa 2005, got a $200,000k loan to buy a house, then lost their job, and is now struggling to make payments on the loan, perhaps scraping together cash through odds and ends. If you assume the largest expense they now face is dealing with that debt, then a wave of inflation would normally help them, so long as their was some relationship between the inflation and their wages. And please note, that relationship would not have to be very tight.
I don't think people who know what a window manager is are the target market for Unity.
"CS" is broad; targeting specialties within the program may work better. I used tons of C for operating systems and networking lab courses, but I had friends focusing on (for instance) HCI or AI who rarely touched it.

Also consider looking at physics and aero-astro majors. Lots of embedded or algorithmic work, so I hypothesize lower level languages like C are more common.
And that reminds me of a relative's story:

It was his first time at NY, and he didn't know which neighbourhoods were safe, so he went driving his rental car through some shady neighbourhood - and of course some shady looking individuals approached him.

He quickly asked in Spanish for directions, and the guys told him not to come back, as this was an "unsafe neighbourhood" and "their territory".
Certain debates are timeless. I think that in my children's time there will be programmers and that some of those programmers will be unable to understand what their tools abstract away.
Thanks for the feedback. I just wanted to correct you on one point:

mixes have two settings: visible_to and editable_by. Only mixes that are editable by everyone fall into the category you describe. People can choose "self", "friends" or "everyone" for any mix.

I think the problem is not the privacy, it's the complexity and lack of a good user flow... what was your experience going through it? Did you give up at a certain point? Was it kind of lame?

I feel like I need to get a web designer and just re-design the experience.
I recall in 2006/2007 a lot of my clients were asking if I could build integration with Digg, into their existing sites. Digg was huge back then, and my clients put a lot of thought into how they might get more traffic from Digg. Several of my clients thought it was essential to have a Digg strategy.

It is amazing to me that Digg could have fallen this far.
How can security risks be mitigated in virtualized systems?
As a person who knows what a wm is and just tried out Unity, I can confirm this on my part.
Anmelden | Facebook
Ask HN: Opinions on the best PHP IDE?
Dear HN,

I'm having trouble finding an adequate IDE to use for my PHP development. I'm part of a small company that has a relatively very large project base. I've been going through the IDEs of choice, and haven't been able to pick one. Could you help me out?

Here are the requirements:
-word wrap
-remote debugging
-easy integration with SVN or CVS
-fast text suggestion
-fast in general

I've tried the following IDEs so far: Eclipse, Netbeans, PhpED, Zend Studio 7.1, PDT. All have their issues - many don't have code folding, and stuff like Zend and Eclipse are fairly slow (at least when compared to PHPed. However PHPed has poor integration with Linux and is also the costliest of the bunch.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
"Fewer people can't do as much work"

In most cases that's true.

However, it's also a possible and very feasible way to cut away the excesses and keep on-board core pieces that can compensate for the losses. For example, a company I used to work for had a massive layoff when the bubble burst in the early 2000s. They learned their lesson and had very gradual employee growth while they still continued on lucrative projects eventually expanding rapidly today.
> Plenty of places to find hosted VPN services

Care to recommend one? I've had a few unsatisfactory experiences (terrible bandwidth, unreliable servers, etc.) and would love a good recommendation.
Some people may still have their landline only to call their cellphone when they misplace it. Encourage these people to cancel their landline and donate a portion of the savings to you, so your service will always be available.
I made something similar, albeit slightly earlier (inspired by the same tweet-challenge) http://antimatter15.github.com/venn-google/venn-google.html
The two questions:

1. Prepaying debts reduces your cash in hand and hence your flexibility. Running out of money is the biggest risk for a startup. Long term debt can extend your runway at the expense of interest. The downside is that cash in hand makes it more difficult to be really cheap.

2. If your goal is to have a software firm, doing consulting is a potential distraction because you will not be able to leave your customers hanging after six months, and the potential revenue stream will look better than not being paid.

Based on your post, you might look at sticking it out for a year as a first step in making your startup happen. My advice is that if you leave, then leave to do the startup.

Good luck.
Long-time lurker, this is my first post to HN.

My school(Tennessee Technological University, graduated a year and a half ago) still requires a semester of C/C++...there were a couple other classes where you needed to know it to interpret the professor's example code, but were allowed to code in other languages if you wanted. I enjoy C, but feel more proficient in other languages as far as getting things done quickly. I guess I just don't use C enough to keep a good grasp of it.

I think students would get more benefit out of being forced to only use C(and assembly?) for the first couple years. It would help them get a better understanding of what the higher-level languages have going on under the hood.

I've been doing web development(Ruby) the past few years. I've played around with extending Ruby with C, but not much.

If you are looking to hire, I might be interested...its about time for a change-up in my life.
I just left my well-paying job to start working on my idea about 4 months back. I didn't have much savings (I've been hasty to quit my job), so I am working on consulting gigs part time. It pays enough to cover my bills and petty expenses related to my project.

As @bravura mentioned, selling yourself is the biggest challenge you have in order to get good consulting work. If you go for small gigs that you can do in your free time, you can quit when you feel comfortable doing it.

PS: It's always better to settle your debt before you start living off inconsistant income.
Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash
Stop Trying To Make “Trickle-Down Economics” An Economic Thing
Firefox extension makes social network ID spoofing trivial
It's been my go-to icon search for a long time, but how are you bringing in revenue?
As a teaching language, I did enjoy C. I didn't know C when I was studying CS, and until then I used higher level languages that did all sorts of inexplicable things. C was the one layer above assembly that made sense, and helped highlight when something was really a hardware issue versus an algorithmic issue. (eg. limitations of mmap and fseek in relation to database performance)

For production, I wish I had the time or need to optimize code I write, but too often, a server upgrade and reconfiguration is sufficient. At least I depend on some one else writing something great in C (linux, nginx, etc).

Been looking at GoLang and Clang to make the experience a little less painful.
Photoshop's power = macros and actions (IMHO there are commercial outfits producing actions for Photoshop)

I have yet to see a web based design tool that has a good macro system - even basic ones (like auto align, increase/decrease font size, etc.) are missing

It's like telling someone who uses emacs to go and use gedit.
Here's a wood compiler:

http://bitbucket.org/cheery/z_woodc/overview