skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Learning the ins an douts
Hi. My question relates to web programming (specifically, developing web apps). I am a programmer with experience in PHP/MySQL, etc, but I do not consider myself experienced. I can hack together things easily, but I have not taken courses such as operating systems/compilers/etc.

I wanted to post this for myself and others who have not completed or started a CS degree. Are there any books out there that touch on these subjects but are geared towards the trials and tribulations of a web application developers?

I have started reading a lot of O'Reilly books on web application developnent, but I wanted to ask specifically if any one knew of books that covered these CS topics (or if those CS topics are even important when prototyping/hacking/building).

I also wanted to share a resource I found. Safaribooks.com is a website for reading web development books online, where you pay $22/month and they give you unlimited access to O'Reilly books (and a lot of other web developing books). I wanted to purchase many different books as references, such as books on front-end, web scaling, css, etc, and found it impractical, but this site turned out being very useful. They have a 7 day trial for those on a ramen budget, perhaps wise to use it when necessary! I found this site useful, and thought it might be useful to other startup hackers as well.

Thanks :)
Not everyone graduates so it is more like every second person you meet has attended college for some amount of time.
QR Codes Hit The Street
Sarcasm? The word isn't even in my dictionary.

Actually looking at it the whole section from marmalade to turbot appears to be missing.

(With thanks to Douglas Adams for the joke).
Document your code - Whether its documenting a Web Service API or documenting a simple class, document as you go. I've been accused of over-commenting my code and that's something I'm proud of.

This is something I'm "guilty" of not doing, but I really can't. In the beginning I was commenting a lot my projects, even writing Doxygen documentation for every class and method. But I find it really disruptive of my programming process. While I write code my thoughts go on pretty fast, and stopping commenting breaks my flow. Doing it after the code is completed does not work for me, I never do it and these kind of tasks accumulate. Moreover when I read code I never read comments, but just the code.

I believe that very well written code does not need much commenting. I put comments when I do something that can't be evinced by the code because is some sort of exception or workaround.
Shakespeare Tops Stephenie Meyer in Facebook Popularity
Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are also more than twice as big as Gmail.
Apparently, Slashdot reader TheRaven64 has read the story. He summarizes it:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1865066&cid...

(tldr: it's about DR0 working on more than one word)
If someone is going there for say half a month, what would be an interesting way to learn about and make contacts with the startup community there?
I agree. Which is why I called it good advice.

However I still think it ironic to get that advice from someone who clearly has such extreme levels of raw talent.
The previous comments cover some of the most important points. It seems like you haven't identified who would make a decision to buy. So right now, you are entertaining a bunch of "keenly interested" tire kickers. They might push it up to the decision-making level, but you can't rely on that. Not for this first sale, and definitely not as a sustainable sales process.

You might also want to start reading some sales books; and remember the salesperson's mantra: always be closing. Every time you interact with the customer, try to close. Often this takes the form of the "trial close" (google that) which can be said half in jest, but is nonetheless a serious way of moving forward in the closing process.

Also consider the possibility that this customer actually has no interest in your product, and are just using you as a data point in their plan to either build it themselves or buy something else. As you continue selling, you'll find that this kind of tire-kicking is a frequent occurrence.
I can't say that this is much of a surprise, I believe that with Java firmly in Oracle grasp, Jobs feels comfortable in letting it go. I am sure he feels that it is not strategic to Apples platform other than sales of Mac's to developers and given that Apple and Oracle are about the only two companies left not playing in each others spaces, he probably feels that it will provide a more timely release cycle for the OSX JVM. I was never that worried about Apple's decision on this, I am far more worried about what is going on with Apache and Oracle and it's effect on Java as a whole.
"What's that?"

"That's my penis."

"Sorry about that."
Facebook's interview puzzles aren't a prerequisite requirement to getting a job. The good developers who don't have time will just interview and get offers.

Google's are drawn out, but each interview takes 1 hour max so there is an upper bound on your time.
Rands in Repose: The Art of Not
Google's cache has a forum thread on the site, which I suspect led to the creation of the page linked above (which isn't yet cached)

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.woodmann.com/forum/...
why do you recommend going to places with no start up culture and no tech events?
Adding to that, we know that different models for security may very well work better than what we've got. See this article about Israel's Ben Gurion International Airport: http://forward.com/articles/122781/

Mind you, one definitely shouldn't argue from this that adopting Israel's airport security system would be a good idea for the USA (with, among other things, its much larger threatened area), as the article mentions. But it's important to note it, because it shows that there are effective options for securing air travel that don't cause such a devastating invasion of privacy and/or provoke molestation accusations.
btw, Merriam Webster seems to disagree:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incentivize
War Is A Racket, Major General Smedley Butler (1935)
Becoming More Efficient At Making Stuff People Want W/ Founder WindyCitizen.com
Gender Disparities in the Design Field
It's about to get a little crazy out there . . .
A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail
Because the shoebomber and the pantsbomber waltzed aboard without a care in the world despite the enhanced security, and were stopped by passenger action. Post 9/11, passengers know what the deal is. If frisking people stopped even one bomber they'd be shouting it from the rooftops. But they ain't.

So the TSA needs to stop dicking us about on the ground since our safety is in our own hands anyway.
Facebook makes almost no money.

Not only you have no way of knowing that (unless of course you work there, in which case please let me know), but you grossly underestimate their capacity to take a revenue of hundreds of billions and turn it into a profit. No matter what their management is smoking, I doubt they're complete idiots or are squandering it.
"other investors jumping in raising the valuation of companies and thus the salary of engineers"

That was one of the symptoms of the dot-com bubble.

"He does not give any reason why he thinks this current trend is unsustainable"

Fred doesn't need to, because to him it's obvious: if people are making larger investments and thinking less about the investments they are making, they have a higher likelihood of throwing away money. If VCs invest poorly in their current fund, they will have trouble raising their next one and may even go out of business. Then there's less money in the ecosystem, fewer deals get done, fewer engineers can be employed, etc.
These internet cards don't work in several places. I've tried both Reliance and Tata Photon. They usually work in cities, though.
agreed. i kind of started working on a solution to this at some point in time, but i got discouraged. might try and finish it up this weekend.
And what about non-US citizens? What say do they have, really?

All non-US citizens are assumed to be terrorists and must prove their innocence (albeit the same goes for US citizens).
Three Ways The Playbook Can Compete With the iPad
When rumors that RIM, the makers of the Blackberry, were about to announce a tablet, you could have been forgiven for not being too excited.

After all, beyond hearing silly names like ‘Blackpad’, people were skeptical RIM could create a compelling product. Then they actually announced the Playbook – a device with a new OS and some pretty impressive specs – and we all started to wonder: maybe this thing will be alright, yeah?
What I learned about starting a web company
Bling!
Who Has the Most Web Servers?
>Lots of people say that Facebook won't go the way of MySpace. But you know what? Lots of people said the same thing about MySpace too.

The difference is that, when people gave up on MySpace, Facebook was there to move to. Not sure there's anything comparable now.
If you have time and want to visit a fun place then I would recommend Ahmedabad. I love the city (and live in it). A lot of smart people can be found near university road as it has colleges like CEPT or at NID Paldi. But you will have to get involved with the college some how to talk with them. Ahmedabad is cheap and safe (not exactly clean) and has a lot of history.

Edit: We do have a TiE branch here but I seriously don't know about the actual start up culture.
Kindle: The Power Reading Device
The idea was that perhaps they could help improve the quality of this or any other written piece.

I'd pay $10 without thinking twice for a chrome extension that simply ensured the correct versions of there, their and they're were replaced based on context when they were misused. Hmm, I wonder how hard that would be.
Microsoft surrenders on Linux Kinect hack
I'm far more worried about Chinese emigration. It used to be that Chinese students came to Canadian universities and then start companies like ATI. Now they come to Canadian universities and go back to China or Taiwan and start companies.
20% vs 33% for “Others”: Why are Gartner and IDC estimates so far apart
Wouldn't it be much better to base this off the upvotes of people with similar tastes instead of e.g. the article text? That might get you the best of both worlds (social/Bayesian filtering.)

It's possible that you already meant this, but it wasn't clear to me, at least...
You're right, I think I misread some number somewhere :) .

Still, the distribution is not even, of the 7 million millionaires, a huge percentage are probably just over the one million mark.

You made me download the Capgemini report (I love data and reports :) ), and it says:

"A disproportionate amount of wealth remained
concentrated in the hands of Ultra-HNWIs. At the end
of 2009, Ultra-HNWIs represented only 0.9% of the
global HNWI population, but accounted for 35.5% of
global HNWI wealth."

Btw you can download the 2009 report (PDF, requires registration) here, though it's lacking in the "actual figures" department and it's more of the "text and graphs" variety:

http://www.capgemini.com/insights-and-resources/by-publicati...

As an Uruguayan (South America), I'm always aware that you really can't comprehend really how rich people in the U.S. are (and Bay Area in particular, the Bay Area has probably one of the highest per capita incomes in the world).
Hah, I can't believe woodmann.com is still alive. I used to read through fravia's website's mirror there.
SMBs can now leverage enterprise accounting software in the Cloud
My guess would be that that number is much higher for developers (at least not .NET developers). Just look around at conferences.
Heck, just look at this: http://james.gosling.usesthis.com/
Previously the TSA was just security theater. It was useless, but it wasn't too annoying so people went along with it. Prohibiting printer cartridges on flights are just the latest useless version of this.

But I think they're crossing a line with the scanners. They're really getting a groundswell of opposition, and I'm not sure how they'll be able to deal with it as such a dysfunctional, myopic agency.
Not familiar with those....are they interchangeable for money?

I'd like to be able to easily send $5 to a friend via facebook, or 25 cents to the author of a blog post I enjoyed. Others have tried the micropayments, but it needs a heavyweight to really pull it off. Maybe facebook can buy a startup that has it nicely figured out technically, but can't get traction.
Amusing Beer Moments
Reminiscing is never good, especially when you used too drink too much back in the days.
The linked article has been slashdotted, but does anyone know if the security implications are as horrible as I think they are? (Crossing process-kernel boundaries, crossing VM boundaries, ...)
Obvious sarcasm, and I agree. Facebook has become synonymous with insecurity, poor privacy, and scams. Why anyone would trust them with personal info is beyond me.

It's not that I completely trust google either, but they do seem to have a better track record of having their users interests in mind.
>connect an Asterisk box

I'm pretty sure Asterisk can use a cellphone over Bluetooth.
Considering History Research Paper Topics
A good history research paper is important to receive a good grade. One of the most important elements to a good grade is a selection of an interesting history research paper topic. For those students who are unaware of the importance of a good topic, this article is for you.
They'll actually have to get people to use it before being large (the whole "active" part). I'll never use it and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
But very very few people would get 1/10 of 1% these days at FB. More like a tenth of that. Nothing to sneeze at, but it's a long way to that $100B valuation still.
Janestreet uses an Enigma as a prop to make their New York office look better.
Ask HN: Posterous or Self Hosted Wordpress blog?
I recently got into learning Python and will soon start fiddling around with App Engine or Django and I wanted to start blogging about the whole process + document some problems that I might have and possible solutions, etc.

Should I go the Posterous route or should I proceed with a self hosted wordpress installation?

Ideally I'd want it to reside at www.domain.com/blog .. I'm not sure if I'd be able to do that with Posterous .. Wordpress seems a tad too heavy when it comes to Posting but the plugins make it worthwhile.

Also, how good is Posterous w.r.t. Google Analytics integration?

Thanks a bunch.
Learn and use a modern scripting language
Learn thogoughly and embrace the philosophy of a modern version control system
Be familiar with NoSQL solutions like MongoDB, CouchDB.
Learn a functional language — or more than one.
Study agile methods and concepts.
Reviews of City Bridge Dental Care Winchester
Sure, little nazis is hyperbole and not useful for the discussion, but there is something that bugs me. Godwin's law is usually used to imply that a reference to Nazi's means a conversation has jumped the shark.

This marginalizes legitimate parallels. The loss of rights and slippery slope toward a totalitarian state in Germany started gradually, like putting a frog in cold water and gradually turning up the heat until it boils.

When my choices in order to travel are to be 1-seen naked, or 2-groped, at the government's behest this is a serious loss of rights, and comparing it to serious losses of freedoms in totalitarian states is perfectly fair.
At the risk of sounding like a jerk, you're asking the wrong people. This is a community of builders, you need to ask the users (or potential users). Go interview small business owners in your area. Call up companies and ask to talk to the office manager. Let them know that you're interested in building something that will solve a problem of theirs so that you can sell it to other small businesses, but that you're not trying to sell them something, you just need their help in identifying painful problems that nobody else is solving.
Fred's Storm Clouds are not just about higher valuations and investor competition, but about the unsustainable speculative behavior, with "investing without due diligence" as a prime example.

That suggests startup land is filled with a few fake gold rushes, and in any gold rush, those who deal in oxen and wagons tend to do well. Maybe the oxen dealer here is Google Adwords, StumbleUpon, and anyone else that allows you to buy your traffic to temporarily juice Alexa / Compete results (I've heard enough anecdotes to know plenty of people advocate this tactic).

I wonder which startup will turn out to be the big Madoff Startup?
“ASAP” considered harmful
You could probably gut it and put an Arduino inside of it that played MP3's.
I am relatively new here, not based in US, and a bit confused: why is Instagram considered somewhat a huge success in the tone of the article, that Google HAS to learn from it? There has been free iPhone Apps with similar growth before. There's no clear monetization method. There's nothing that competitors can't copy in a week. So what am I missing? Is there something I fail to see here, in the context of what makes it a successful startup?
I've only used LESS (and less.js, mostly the latter), haven't seen any problems so far, neither performance, nor otherwise.
Auto Transport Spokane, Washington
sorry i didnt get it.. why do you need my contact? feel free to implement this thing, i don't hold any patents for this AMAZING idea :)

I rely on your sense of justice and just added red Ferrary to my amazon wishlist
So you never purchase anything online?
Just goes to show how meaningless "open" has become.
Leftronic - looks great but I haven't been able to check it out in person.
A Radical Proposal To Avoid the Mallification of the Web
Even if genius isn't simply the product of hard work, it would still be a useful lie to convince everyone that it was. Hard work might not be sufficient, but it's certainly necessary. And even if genius isn't achieved, you'd still get pretty close with just hard work.
Fun, but if you have a managed switch, there are some even more interesting things you can do, like bandwidth monitoring:

nTop - http://www.ntop.org/news.php

And realtime traffic stats:

http://iptraf.seul.org/

If you run SIP on your network, you can capture call setup information to debug phone issues:

http://wiki.wireshark.org/SIP

And even extract RTP audio streams to investigate call quality issues:

http://wiki.wireshark.org/RTP_statistics
I don't really understand where my point fell short. So, if a bully punches you, you will punch them back. Good. Okay. I honestly have no issue with that. But why do you feel the need to suggest that it's the only possible way that could work for everyone who ever gets punched by a bully?
Farewell Facebook, short documentary about digital suicide
Anyone happen to know if this passes cleanly through AMD-V? There are a few really cool debugging facilities on modern x86 processors (e.g. branch-wise versus instruction-wise stepping) that aren't handled in any VM that I know of.
What's so great about Dalton? A lot of failed companies have brilliant people at their helms.
Pencil on Firefox
That would look nice on the living room cupboard, but you can't beat this one for glamour: http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/tvv1/pht10.html

Perhaps someone here will be able to decrypt that encoded Haiku...
Have you found that it produces stylesheets that are noticeably larger than what you would have written in just CSS?
My biggest data point is Google.

I'm google.com/profiles/<whatever>, but reached at <whatever>@gmail.com. I suppose Googlers get a <whatever>@google.com email ID.

Similarly for Microsoft.

I suppose AOL and Yahoo! could be counter-points, though...
I agree. And as for the original article, I have to wonder when people use the phrase "simply hard work" if they have ever worked hard themselves. "Hard work" is called "hard" work for a reason; and focused, creative, intellectual work is the hardest work there is.
http://www.google.fi/#hl=en&source=hp&q=7-inch+table...
And how do you expect iOS devs to create their mobile apps?
13 Features of Regular Expressions
Okay - look at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. The bird's nest, the water cube, the opening and closing ceremonies.

Now let's compare it to the London Olympics in 2012. Then you can tell me which culture is more creative!
Check out newsblur.com. The code is on github (all python and js).
Innovators take note.
How was the author's productivity doubled? Where is the proof? How long has this been evaluated? Was it more than one day and a few strolls?

It's already known that the brain is a "muscle" and thus needs rest to function properly. What I'd like to see from the author is more about why hourly rests might more positively benefit the brain than some other interval, and why.

Otherwise, most of this is pure speculation!
A sync tool between Mac Outlook 2011 and Google Calendar and Contacts
I broke textCAPTCHA with Python
I had yesterday off and so spent four or so hours writing this.

I haven't made it recognize all of the cases. It still gets a few wrong, but usually it'll just say FAILURE when it can't solve it.

As the page says, it's just a ~300 line grammar file and a parser-generator with syntax directed translation to solve the questions.
I haven't been able to read the article either but, from teasing apart the /. comments, it appears that they are extensions to the normal debugging support and aren't an immediate cause for concern.

(If it's just a way to trigger a breakpoint based on the contents of a write, then that's only a subset of the documented capability.)
Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library
You should try gammu, it has great documentation and support for modems. Using cell phones seems spotty on whether they will support sending or not, but I think that is independent of the software.

http://wammu.eu/gammu/

also I chose to get a bigger 8 port modem from here.

http://www.bailing88.com/en/product_view.asp?hw_id=119

I definitely recommend their service.

works great with the latest kernel's and is usb.

seems to price out at about $50 a modem independent the size of the modem pools or a single.
i partly agree. on the one hand, we're all builders and could take good ideas and run with them.

on the other, we're also thinkers. i have more ideas than i could ever find the time to build, and are usually at least mostly busy with our own best ideas
I'm Tired of Creating Your Content
One day, I'd like to have a library like Jay Walker's to add this to. He's even got a Sputnik in there, along with his Enigma.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker...
Israeli Security Expert to Canada: 'Full Body Scanners Useless'
Well, but can it? Some places are still unreachable by pat downs, and people have always hidden stuff there to get it into jails, etc. So what is the point of pat downs?
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email_address
Ha, leave it to Silicon Valley to create a bubble in the middle of a deep recession.

Actually that is properly the reason - it has become so cheap to start a company that can exit for a large sum, that it is one of the few good investments left in the country.
Almost certainly not; the features are modeled after the DRx hardware debug registers. You can't access them from userland, and the debug registers are already virtualized.
Compass CSS is the killer feature of SASS I think.
You should also preemptively yell "OPT-OUT!" when declaring your intention to opt-out.
SOAP is officially dead, long live REST
Poll: What Kindle Do You Own?
I am curious to know what kindle model you guys have.
Kindle 1
Kindle 2
Kindle 3
Don't have one but want to buy a Kindle 3 soon
I have a different ereader
Kindle? I have an ipad
Don't have and want one
Apple and Oracle announce OpenJDK project for OS X
What sort of device are they going to use to "check in" when they're moving about?