skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Write what you think about this idea and especially the opportunities explained in my blog post:

http://karussell.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/full-text-search-i...
Fixed link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law
I hate to be a cynic on a great contribution Jason, but I can't help think you're doing this To Get More Entrepreneurs Writing, About PadPressed. Or at least, more attention for PadPressed in the WordPress world.

Ulterior motives aside, it's a great offer, good work on putting it together. Best of luck with PadPressed.

Disclaimer: My thoughts are heavily influenced by having just read your piece on how to pitch TC and get press.
As a master's computer science student graduating in December, I'm curious as to what jobs are available in Colorado. Most of the jobs I've seen (and many I'm not interested in/don't beleive myself qualified for) are in Silicon Valley.

[edit: Just checking StackOverflow Careers shows many Colorado jobs that I hadn't seen before, some of them having been added in the last hour]
Why Big Companies Buy Little Ones
E.g. Search you own or others twitter accounts: http://jetwick.com?q=java&u=timetabling
> bog standard languages like SQL, VB, Perl, et al

Sorry grandpa, but the smart kids these days aren't learning those (with the possible exception of SQL). Look for people with experience with Python, Ruby, Haskell, etc...not freaking VB.
I'm not sure why Fred doesn't mention it, but as your option price creeps upwards, it becomes (for better or worse) a form of handcuffs for employees.

If your option price is $0.50/share and you grant a new exec 200,000 options then it will cost them $100,000 to leave your company once vested. At $0.01/share, your early employees can exercise themselves and bolt.

That's why early Facebook employees are gone, but ones who showed up in 2008 and 2009 are forced to stay or forfeit their options. The alternative of purchasing them and selling them quickly creates a massive tax hit, which is why almost nobody does it.

As a consequence, there are already people at Facbeook who want to quit but can't afford to.
I went to Warwick (graduated with a CS MEng in 2006) and I would really hesitate to give preference to someone just because they have a degree from there.

Admittedly I didn't really take advantage of what was available, but my interest is basically in building cool things during my day job. I don't really code for fun and I'm not particularly interesting in computer science theory except where I need it to make my work better.

I've managed to do pretty well because I can balance above average programming skills with a fairly good sense of user interface and design. But ask me about compiler design or operating systems and you'll just get a blank look.

I suppose my point is that I'm okay, but nothing exceptional and I don't have any real interest in the low levels of computer science. So to hold me in high regard just because I have a Masters from a top university is a massive mistake in my opinion. Heck, if I'd done more than just the coursework and a day's worth of revision per subject (I was also skipping about 3/4 of all lectures), my high 2.1 would have been a 1st fairly easily.

Apologies for the rant, and my experiences at Warwick may be out of date now and may be untrue of the other institutes you've mentioned.
If CS grads were smarter, they’d see this as an
opportunity, because MS is still a vast percentage
of all corporate IT. Yes, VBA is the worst language
in the history of the world, but you can get good money
doing it, and a good programmer knows that it is how
you think, not the language you code in, that determines
your ability.

I honestly couldn't read any further. Money definitely is not the only factor to consider when searching for a job. I won't elaborate, but the important things in life should be obvious to a so called "hacker".

Maybe it's the most important factor when searching for a first job. But as soon as your rent is covered: Search for a job that does not kill your spirits and cripples you from inside out.

Quantity has never been the best argument for anything I can think of right now.
Facebook got an exemption from the SEC from that rule (it's 500 stockholders and $10 million in assets):

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2008/tc200...
Unemployment Offices To Add Armed Guards Before Benefits Set To End
I have someone in mind for who I'd use, and there exist reasons why I'd prefer to hire him as opposed to having him contract, but those are not mine to share. I might consider contracting with someone else as a plan B though.
I ask because I honestly don't know. I have friends who fall under both usage scenarios, but these are just anecdotes and/or extremes. I haven't seen any actual data on the effects of Facebook, either positive or negative.
media6degrees is hiring a Junior Developer in NYC. You get to use all sorts of NoSQL goodness, lots of Hadoop, cool engineering problems where saving 20ms on a realtime request translates directly to the company's bottom line.

www.media6degrees.com

jay@media6degrees.com
"Micro", or managing your units in battle, is also vital. I've lost 4 bases worth of Zerg units against a 2 basing Terran through horrible micro.
GREAT idea. Just posted it here: http://bit.ly/bc55gi.
Pick the dominant colour from a logo using Python
People complaining about the quality of college graduates is nothing new. Most of the people in my computer science classes didn't care about programming at all. Only the people who were naturally very good at it seemed to care much. I recall complaining a lot about the quality of applicants from pretty much day one of my professional programming career.

When I was younger I got a lot out of reading: http://www.ericsink.com/Career_Calculus.html. As someone who isn't naturally the best programmer this helped me put a lot of things to perspective. I'd imagine anyone starting out would be well served by following his advice.

These days I try to spend at least some time every night trying to improve my skills in some tangible way (e.g. reading a book, writing code for a side project, etc.). If you're having trouble finding a job you like just spend as much time as possible learning and you'll do just fine.
I'm loyal to Java (read: will choose this language over others in the general case because of my experience in it) because it's the language I, by far, have the most experience in. When I was ready for AP Computer Science, the AP test was in Java. From there, half of my classes in computer science were in Java. C was the other frequent language.

With that much immersion, when I started doing things on my own, I would naturally move toward Java because I was rather good at using its API, and writing in it flows most naturally to me.
This video might give you some insights: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Tom Chatfield: The ways games reward the brain
Study finds support for presidential Net 'kill switch'
If I'm not mistaken, (please correct me if I'm wrong,) Don Dodge's job is to do PR for Google. So this seems like just band-aid for the bad PR from Lars Rasmussen's departure to Facebook.
There's validity to that... but if so, what does this imply about the two drugs? Apparently that ecstasy users are far less likely to increase their use to unsafe levels - ie, less addictive. And if not, it's even safer than it appears to be, because I'd imagine most people make the same assumption.

Either way, it falls solidly on the side favoring ecstasy over tobacco.

How would you define a "hit" anyway? Doses don't really compare, and even if it's 1-cigarette/1-pill, it's all societal how much is in each "dose"...
#2 and court them hard. Show them why they should join with you. Why #2? Because when that person joins, they know that they are wanted, that they are needed and that you respect what they bring to the table. It will be hard to sustain #2 in a very large organization but that is one of those "we'll burn that bridge when we get there things"
You can also checkout the "Diffusion network", etc.. for #rally4sanity here: http://truthy.indiana.edu/memedetail?text=%23rally4sanity...
I can't wait to try this out :) It looks like a very cool concept, and while watching the video, I doubted it at first. But I think with practice, that could prove to be the best mobile keyboard ever.
Amazon Web Services @ Seattle

So many cool things going on here. And so many open positions. Remote: probably not, but who knows.
I like to keep my eye on these browsers. Conkeror got very close to being the sort of browser I would like to have but was just a little bit too slow compared to Webkit based browsers.

One thing that puzzles me about this though: why lua when you have access to JS engines? Would I have to use two extension languages to write a plugin which touches a webpage and the chrome?
I did my CS degree a long time ago in the UK. I did a 'sandwich degree', 2 years at college, a year working for an employer and a year back at college. Everything, and I mean everything, of lasting value I learned in that time was learnt during the industrial training year. Things like seeing projects through to the end, being accountable, getting it right whatever it took, knowing how to figure things out for yourself, doing what was asked for and not what I felt like doing.

Employers want people who get things done with the least supervision. Java is becoming this generation's BASIC, it bestows the illusion of knowing stuff without having undergone the sheer hard grind of becoming usefully experienced and battle hardened. Knowing Java is merely the beginning and, as is becoming clear, not even a terribly useful beginning at that.
Actually I think $10 is on the upper range of magazine prices I've seen. Most video game magazine get away with charging that because they also include a CD (worthless but whatever). Other than that, I rarely see magazines above $8, most of them are in the $6 range.

If you subscribe you usually get 70% off that too.

This is my personal experience.

You guys gotta make enough to cover expenses and time so charge what you need.
Blekko is hiring. We launched today. And there is lots and lots of interesting stuff to do here. Full time software engineering positions. We are located in Redwood Shores, CA.

http://blekko.com/ws/+/blekkojobs
Yes, but Facebook is fungible. In the same way that MySpace and Orkut were. The only thing that's holding people on your website is other people and a bunch of dumb games. You can say whatever you want about Google, but there is not a single search engine today that is as good in all cases. That's why I'll bet my money that 10 years from now Google will be well and going strong, whereas I have no idea what will happen to Facebook.
Original comment for this sub-thread

>"I'm familiar with a handful of PhD holders who didn't even attend the University that granted it."

"Like this?" I asked. The parent comment was vague and my enquiry was, in part, to ascertain whether the commenter was referring to those who get degrees by being rich and|or famous or whether he was referring to direct purchase.

Now he has expanded on his point my question is largely moot but the comment stands to point out that there is another class of individuals given degrees that didn't earn them (by fulfilling _academic_ requirements).

I found it annoying at graduation that some people being given degrees by my Uni simply because those people were doing their [highly paid] job (being actors, sportsmen, politicians, company directors, etc.).
Even tho this was a good read, what does it have to do with my above comment?
Great article, very educational. The only way to do that a startup can do that kind of errors is beeing the daughter of a multinational like motorola
I love keyboards when I'm using my laptop, a desktop, or a blackberry, but I've never gotten the hang of of the virtual keyboards on either iPhones or Android.

I'll be giving this a test run when it comes out.
Nothing is Critical (prioritizing)
that's why I love Tom, he speaks to corporate america, but says whatever he wants.
This was brought home for me vividly last year. I sent an email out for Halloween to a few hundred people, neglected to send one out in November, and got an email from a lady in Kansas asking if I could please resend the November newsletter because her Yahoo must have eaten it. People like getting emails?! People like getting my emails?!? The newsletters are nowhere near my best writing: here's this month's holiday, you should play bingo, here's how. But at least some people miss them when they don't get them.

I swear, there is so much we don't know that we don't know about our customers.
Logitech’s Light-Powered Keyboard
See also http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/26/end-to-end-perform...
Prof Nutt told the BBC: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used.

You could then make a driving speed chart like this.

Driving 35-75 MPH would get a very big bar for both harm to others and harm to drivers, due to the volume of accidents that occur at those speeds.

Driving 76-100 MPH would have a smaller bar, because fewer drivers drive that fast.

Driving 101-130 MPH would have an even smaller bar, as you're getting into a small subset of reckless drivers.

At the bottom of the chart, you might have speeds that can only be achieved with high-performance sports cars. 160-200 MPH would have a tiny bar for both harm to others and to the driver, as barely anyone possesses both the recklessness and equipment to drive at these speeds.

So, then, that chart can get a headline reading "Driving at 35 MPH 'more harmful' than driving at 200 MPH."
Why is it always: they win we loose. That is nonesense. They might win, but we don't automaticly loose. There is some misconception in there. Economics aren't sports.
Amiga trademark is for sale (legendary '80s computer)
Authentication vs Authorization
I met this guy in person and he was very impressive. Not only he has keen sense of business, but his technical aptitude is top notch too. Frankly, I never thought a guy who drives a Ferrari to know too much about compiler optimizations for multithreading architecture :|
My boss at my current co-op was interviewing people for next semester. He said one of the students, who had supposedly taken Operating Systems, couldn't tell him the difference between a thread and a process.

/facepalm
Once again Patrick has made me think twice about what I can and should be doing with my webapp customers. These show-and-tell type posts are worth a lot more than face value...
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Well, you can look at the individual University's pages. Having courses in a PhD, or having something like a "PhD program" in general, is still very rare.

The common model is to take a job as an assistant researcher with the chair of your Professor, work on your PhD thesis and papers 50% of the time, and be treated like cheap slave labour by your professor the other 95% (sic!) of the time.
> Or possibly the Segway (still waiting for the second generation owner on that one)

You mean third generation? The guy who acquired Segway died at the end of September in a Segway accident: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/segway-owner-dies...
Slim Odds for Inventors; More Companies Solicit Ideas Online
He mentions a lack of engineers well-versed in MS products. Is there good money to be made in doing consulting using MS tech?
>You're conflating search engines with all human knowledge contained on the Internet, even though there are many search engines and many alternate ways of finding information on the Internet (not to mention how much of the best information isn't on the Internet).

I am, because all the information on the Internet is useless if you can't find it.

>completely ignoring the astonishing fact that Facebook has signed up a double-digit percentage of the entire world population in a single social network.

Everyone in the world IS a single social network, barring several small isolated tribes here and there. The phone network is a single social network. Email is a single social network. Facebook formalizes and makes access to this network easier, but to a lesser extent than Google makes access to the world's information easier.

>the fact that you can maintain passive contact with networks an order of magnitude greater than what is possible via traditional social channels.

That is a fair point, and I'm certainly not denying that Facebook is useful, but I stand by my assertion. If you could somehow quantify and compare the difference made to society by search engines vs. social networks, search engines have a far larger impact.

Let me put it another way: Google is to the printing press as Facebook is to ???

Yes, Google is nothing without the rest of the Internet, but so is Facebook, so I'm content to run with that comparison even if it's not perfect.
Managing Virtual Team? Read Personality Poker by Stephen Shapiro
rm -rf /

format c:
Gold Fever
You can even publish semantic data with http://json-ld.org/
So far in my experience, good design does far more to help maintain velocity than tests.

In most applications I've been stuck on, the tests ended up being an impediment to development -- because the design was poor. The tests helped to reveal dependencies, so people who were working on bits of code could easily identify what dependencies they had to fix when they made changes, but that also served to underscore how badly coupled the various components were.

I guess the moral is that too many mediocre wannabe agilistas try to use testing to cover up bad design.
Air Force bounces Windows XP, goes all-in for Windows 7
Ah I didn't know that there were some special /slashtags, this is even a parametric slashtag...
I have been through so many of these tools - creating a really good wireframing/prototyping solution is obviously not a simple task..

Been looking for an alternative to Omnigraffle, mostly due to its lack in the prototyping department.

Really loved the way Mockingbird handled this but the nativeness and user community of Omnigraffle still makes it hard to beat..
The Mac App Store has the following rule:

"Apps must be self-contained, single application installation bundles, and cannot install code or resources in shared locations."

I don't see how the utility in question could be a single app bundle (no daemon, no startup script, etc.) and still perform its job of muting the volume on startup.
I see how that might be a thought, but it's actually the opposite. AppSumo is absolutely awesome for SaaS businesses as it's a customer acquisition technique- get them hooked for 3 months with what amounts to an extended free trial. If they like it, they stay.

For downloadable stuff, like PadPressed, it's not the best thing in the world, especially when we're surrounded by even more awesome people like WooThemes.

I helped do this, just because I want to see everyone get these tools + blog more. Simple, straight forward :).
I'm not really looking at the moment admittedly, just concentrating on my MSc, but when I have a browse the job websites or notice boards that's the impression they leave. Plus I know CS graduates who have never managed to get a job with their 4 year degrees and don't work in IT at all.

But yes graduate programs is probably my best bet (I live in Glasgow which has a few big operations locally, eg JP Morgan), although I wonder what the ratio of places to applicants is. It just seems a shame that the normal job adverts are strictly aimed at experienced professionals, when an intelligent and enthusiastic beginner/graduate could probably pick up the skills needed relatively quickly; but I'm not complaining, I realise how greatly productivity varies from programmer to programmer and how risky hiring could be for teams/companies.
Thank you for pointing it out again. We are not our customers.

I'm now heading towards mailchimp to finish and put online my email collecting form.
I agree although I would say the trend would still show Microsoft leading the bunch. This statistic would be very interesting indeed though. Perhaps even desktop operating system versus mobile operating system.
Designing a Drag & Drop Experience for the Web
I can't quite understand if you're saying GA's are neural networks, or just that both of them are overused. Either way, one of the big problems is that the heuristics for a heuristic algorithm must be designed by with human insights. In this case, and in many other cases where GA's have been applied successfully, a fundamental new insight is discovered by the algorithm.

I do play some SC2. There are a bunch of built-in AIs that use heuristic algorithms, yet they are all easily defeated. The GA in this case is really about searching through an immense space to find good candidates.

To give you a feel for the complexity of the building problem, consider this. There are custom maps where are all you do is practice your initial build order, with absolutely no opponent. It is pretty well accepted within the SC2 community that you should use these practice maps in order to get better. Another way to think about it is that this build order will probably cause Blizzard to tweak the game due to how fast the roaches come out. This game has been in development for 10 years, yet there are interactions of the building process that are not understood by the developers themselves.
Ask HN: 1 Programming Language to Add to my Skills?
I have some free time from now until the new year, and am wondering from the community, if you were to learn 1 new programming language right now, with a focus on how important the language will be over the next 3 years, what would you learn?

Assume that you are very experienced in the "common" languages like C++, Java, and PHP and want to learn one of the "up and coming" languages that are becoming more important. Assume also you want to become a 7/10 on the new language, and be able to apply to jobs in that language come 2011.

Thanks!
"Look at Aero Engineers and Physicists as well as CS students.".

Exactly, look outside of traditional CS. Econometrics produces very good quantitative people, for example. Teaching them C++ is the easy part (relatively speaking).
> The wheel has turned further, and MS is seriously worried about the lack of young people immersed in their technology. If CS grads were smarter, they’d see this as an opportunity, because MS is still a vast percentage of all corporate IT. Yes, VBA is the worst language in the history of the world, but you can get good money doing it, and a good programmer knows that it is how you think, not the language you code in, that determines your ability.

The sooner VBA dies, the better for humanity. Thus, the so-called ignorant CS grads should better be called humanity saviours.
I think most students don't care. They don't ever understand what's going on with the pointers and are often content to just keep trying combinations of the syntax until the appropriate result comes out and the compiler stops yelling at them.

Maybe the point is that if you don't require C++, students will (obviously) often pick the language what provides the easiest way to complete their lab in a timely fashion so they have social time or time to work on other classes. Even those who DO care and would absorb the low level knowledge provided won't take that "risk" by doing their labs in C++ since early on it just means their work will take longer to complete than classmates.

Note: As I said my school always allowed the usage of C++, usually allowed Java as well. It's definitely a bad thing if courses require Java to be used.
Learning to make better predictions and decisions
Big Omaha Video Series: Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV