skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This would require evidence of many young deaths from alcohol abuse. As far as I know, even heavy drinkers are pretty unlikely to die from their habit before age 50. Moderate drinkers, reflected as the healthiest in the study, are tremendously unlikely to die from alcohol abuse early in their lives.

And again, maybe the reason non-drinkers show as much longevity as they do is because those are the ones who have an increased resistance to the negative effects of abstinence. Maybe most of them die much younger. Since non-drinkers are such a minority in most places, this is actually more likely, since the die-off would be less noticeable than if everybody who drank an occasional beer dropped dead at age 40. (I still don't think this is likely either, incidentally.)
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 104
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 104
Manually churning out Twitter accounts instead of using dynamic RSS/Atom feeds makes me sad. It's not even "worse is better", maybe it should rather be "worse is cooler"?
Visual Studio and SQL Server have free Express editions.
In one sense, he already has.
The problem (as I understand it) is that without passing the TCK (which Apache can't get without field-of-use restrictions), you don't get the patent license required to safely run Java in a business environment. I don't think the line-of-business app developers that have driven the bulk of Java usage over the years can afford to risk getting sued by Oracle, so they can't really depend on a non-licensed runtime.
Flagged, title is garbage and doesn't adhere to HN guidelines as stated elsewhere.

Keep this out of HN and leave it for your blogroll crap, and don't pretend you didn't know any better either.
Jeff Miller put together a list of "Twitter Users Most Followed by Readers of Hacker News":

http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-f...
Conferencing is very challenging for more than ten people.

When you say SIP support, what do you mean?
The mvc team is a breath of fresh air, no question. But I'm surprised to hear someone who knows RoR say that they are "pretty close".

There's more to dynamic programming than the dynamic keyword. I don't want to get into which is better, but to say that C# is even in the same league as Ruby for dynamic programming, because of the dynamic keyword, is wrong - if for no other reason that properties from anonymous types (which dynamics are built on top of) are internal. Read meta programming Ruby, or try doing extensive [tb]dd with both, and you'll see how different they are (hint, you don't need DI frameworks in Ruby).

Ruby gems has a rich history, a strong community, and a proven track record. Every ruby developer has, and uses gems. Most packages are in known repositories. Gems has been extended to solve other problems (bundler). NuGet is a good and necessary start, but, again where you say "pretty close", I'd say "pretty far".
Google is not on trial here. As Facebook showed, my data in Google is totally available to me should I need it.

He's explicitly accusing Google of committing a crime they didn't commit, even as he himself is guilty of it.
Ask HN: Early angel/seed investors asking for detailed financial projections?
We are a 3-person, mobile social (east-coast) startup. We had a great meeting with angel investors today. They love the tech and team, but want to see a real economic model-- revenue sources, cost of user acquisition, ad revenue estimates, cash-flow positive time-line, customer segmentation.

For companies that have raised seed rounds in the valley (100-200k range), is this common? With all the talk about pivots and launching quickly, how much do west coast seed investors care about financial projects? Or is this an east coast thing?
I agree. As I mentioned on one of my CV reviews from the other week(Sorry if I didn't get to yours yet, I have my list but it takes me 10-15 minutes to do a good one and I've been short on time). When I get a CV I scan it quickly for an idea of what the person is about then throw it out or in another pile for a more in depth read.

A link to github or a blog or something where I can see some of their work "in the wild" (not just a portfolio link) always gets them in the second pile as I find code a far better indicator of a good programmer than a good CV.
'Communist tyranny' as you term it, is very different from systematic racism. I doubt that the attitude of 'they won't let us' is really without merit - just 20 years ago, MTV would not play music by black artists.

Black America has come vey far, and is one of the most dominant cultural forces on the planet. That's for the peak of the society. The bottom of the society still has to deal with a lot of legacy problems, and attitudes like yours don't help the problem.

I doubt that the majority of problems comes from a sense of entitlement, like you strangely enough, seem to believe.
Don't confuse passion for focus. Passion pulls you. Focus pushes you. You need both.
You have an impressive amount of self awareness - I think that's by far the most valuable thing one can possess.

It sounds valuable, but too much self awareness is crippling. You question everything about yourself, and when you realize your own insignificance it's remarkably depressing.

a) Push the baby out by this week.

I'll try, but there's a long way to go. I've never touched jQuery before, and I'm rusty with everything else I'm using. "This week" probably isn't feasible, but I'll do what I can to have it out by the end of next week. I'll post it here when I do.

Thanks for all the advice. It's definitely appreciated, especially now that I've spent the last hour explaining my deficiencies to HN.
Node.JS and Joyent Agreement
Simple question: when to use ASP.NET MVC 3 and not Rails, Django, Flask, Cake/PHP or some other MVC framework?
Best way to pitch a concept is to build a prototype. Design it in Photoshop.
I built a Twilio Ruby gem for a project, after not being happy with the official library (poor code quality and poor test coverage)

http://github.com/stevegraham/twilio-rb
Sure, this isn't a problem in trivial projects. If you want to use types other than what the language gives you, you're going to have to introduce a dependency.
Facebook to Patch API Flaw by End of Day
I could imagine a seed investor asking about such things informally, but it would be unusual to ask for a written analysis. East coast investors are more conservative though.
For Employees, Facebook Counts as Free Speech
Your difficulty and this gentleman's relative lack of difficulty finding a job probably has a lot to do with location. Second runner up is probably credibility. Let me explain.

My experience is in line with the author's. Finding a job has always been relatively easy (beginning at a certain point, which I will elaborate on) and I do not have a degree of any kind. It's my opinion that three factors are primarily responsible for my state of affairs.

1. I started working at a local ISP when I was 15 years old. This was around the time that 28.8kbps modems were all the rage. While I was very green I had unbounded enthusiasm and desire to learn whatever I could about technology. The ISP got a super cheap tech support person and I got paid to learn. After a year I got a chance to do UNIX sysadmin work, and my level of experience began to snowball.

The (fairly obvious) takeaway here is that I built experience. Businesses don't want to train you if they can help it. Not able to find a learn-on-the-job opportunity? Take the author's advice and contribute to an interesting open source project.

2. Befriending an employee of one of the largest ISPs in the United States ended up landing me a development position on a pretty large contract. I worked damn hard, and ended up contributing in a fairly visible way. Because the job was for a company in the Fortune 50 I've since been able to point to it as social proof that I at least have a vague idea of what I'm doing. Employers love this. This is when job hunting became dramatically easier.

You may think the takeaway here is to be lucky, but I disagree. The takeaway is to get to know people that you can develop mutually beneficial relationships with. To this day I still get contract work and referrals from people I worked with on that one job.

3. Location. Companies will sometimes relocate you, but I've never seen one that will do it without there being a very compelling reason to have you on staff (ie, experience and a proven track record). You have to go where the jobs are. Sometimes you have to suck it up, move away from your family and friends, become a nobody, and start pulling in a paycheck. Once you do you can start planning (and saving) for the luxury of living and working in a desirable place.

The takeaway here? Get away from the crowd. In my experience there are at least two good markets for developers, Denver/Boulder CO (Denver being easier than Boulder), and Kansas City MO/KS. I'm not a big fan of Kansas or Missouri (sorry natives, you're all great people), but Colorado is a beautiful place with lots to do outside your cube/apartment. The job markets in both those places are reasonable and you can be relatively well paid even with limited experience. How do they compare with SF/NYC? Not even close, but it's way easier to stand out from the crowd when there is no crowd. Being in the middle of nowhere can sometimes be a benefit.

All that said, good luck.
I've found few projects that are even close to schizophrenic.

I think the thing that people often miss is that getting a patch that works is really only 50% of the process of getting a bug fix/feature merged into an Open Source project.

In a company, the hiring process is an initial crap filter (or at least is supposed to be). In an Open Source project, the filters work very differently. You won't find a lot of (community driven) projects that spend a lot of effort putting together detailed documentation about how to build a project and submit patches. That's because figuring this out is the first level filter.

The second level filter is figuring out the architecture of the project. This can be difficult in a subtle way. In a company, you can usually sit in a conference room and have someone explain to you all of the details of the project such that you have a pretty good idea of how a patch or feature should be implemented.

In most Open Source projects, you generally have to code up an initial version of the feature and then you'll attract enough eyes that you'll get the feedback about how to do the feature properly. If you're a long term contributor, you skip most of these steps and the process is fast. If you've never contributed before, it's almost certainly going to take a lot of effort.

It's all about scalability. Open Source projects significantly reward people that are self motivated and can figure processes out without a lot of hand holding because that's the type of person you need to build a successful project when there aren't any managers, program managers, or formal architects.

I think that's probably the biggest value of the proposed plan. If someone has gotten 50 patches into a major project, it says a lot more about the individuals personality and motivation than it does about their programming skills.
Citing iPhone Ruling, Xbox Defendant Says Mod Chips Are Fair Use
> If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use.

Apps like, um, FaceBook?
Possible but in the UK there's a £100 premium and it's available on all carriers
Some general rules here to make your pitch more appealing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_to_Stick
Really some of these are things you do BEFORE you launch a web site. Do you really test the performance after its live? Really?
>Companies like this could've easily succeeded even 10 years ago if the old-school dot-com companies hadn't blown all their capital on super bowl ads and aeron chairs.

Maybe. There have been a lot of innovations in the consumer Internet business that have enabled the successes of businesses like diapers.com...

1) Internet adoption rate is 2-3x higher now than it was in 1998. Companies like Pets.com weren't just building their own brands, but also educating everyday people about the Internet.

2) There were no self-serve distribution channels like SEM or affiliate marketings that had any scale. Google was founded the same year as Pets.com and Adwords didn't surface for a few years after that. The only ads you could buy were CPM banners, integrated sponsorship deals (AOL bankrupted several companies with these types of deals) and offline media like TV commercials. Additionally, media buys were a lot less accountable. I was selling online ads at this time and some of my clients weren't even tracking registrations by source let alone sales on their website.

3) Businesses like Amazon and Zappos have helped create a completely different model for logistics that simply didn't exist 10-12 years ago. There is a reason that Pets.com had to spend tens to hundreds of millions on infrastructure for warehouses, etc.
Repeat After Me: Investors Are Never the Story
BTW, if you have a range of answers, map it onto range of colors. Don't use blue for no, red for weak yes, and purple for strong yes, because chromatically purple is between blue and red.
Although I was born in Taiwan, I moved to Canada when I was 4, so I pretty much grew up with (north) american culture.

I have to say family plays the biggest role in education. My mom forced me to learn the 9x9 multiplication tables in grade 1. By the time we actually reached multiplication tables in grade 2, I was already able to find the areas of simple shapes like circles and trapezoids.

But after grade 4, I didn't receive any extra math education, and had the same education as all my peers. Never had a tutor, and I continued to get 90s in my math courses all through high school.

You mentioned the idea of: "What's the point in trying? They won't let us succeed."
And I do hear that a lot from my black peers in high school. If you say anything that can be mildly interpreted as racist, then you're in big trouble. Like "don't walk in dark alleys at night" trouble.
There are outliers of course. Our valedictorian was black, and he had the second highest grades in the graduating class. (top grades belonged to chinese kid. I'd have to say that 8/10 of the top students were asian)

I wouldn't say that the "communist tyranny" had anything to do with our academic performance. I'd definitely have to say that asian culture is far more competitive than other groups. Either you get high marks, or get yelled at by your parents.
More like Zynga apps. Could you imagine if Farmville could easily get a hold of the emails of all of your friends? God help us.
While I certainly understand the merits of having a prototype, the competition is structured to focus on concepts (we don't have a lot of time to prepare).

If we were to build a prototype we would want it to be really awesome, which isn't too realistic right now.
Facebook allows that kind of control by preventing data export.

In other words, "If everyone uses Facebook for their data control needs, we'd all have perfect data control."

This sounds suspiciously like an argument for DRM, which all end up failing and being bogus. Remember those email client plugins that would keep people from printing or remailing an email, that would have only worked if just everyone you sent something to had it installed?
The average citizen under a communist tyranny had far, far worse problems than being denied suffrage. Read The Gulag Archipelago and The Black Book of Communism for an idea of the horrible sufferings that the Soviet Union imposed on its citizens.
This is absolutely not true. If your program is not race free, then you're going to have problems no matter what your concurrency model is. The memory model is not a property of the program, it's a property of the platform - since in Java you're programming to the JVM platform, the fact that the platform is very exactly specified is what allows you to show that your program is race free.

I think you're looking for a very different sort of specification than what the JMM provides. It doesn't provide you with exact specifications of exactly how threads will behave, but no system that I'm aware of completely specifies that and any program that relies on that is fundamentally broken on any platform except exactly one version of one platform anyway - that which it was written and tested on. It's simply too dependent on the exact OS and version, the exact version of the processor, and a million other factors you can't control.

Instead, the JVM, the JMM and company work together to exactly specify the interactions between threads that are safe. It turns out that this really is all you need to know to write correct concurrent programs, and you don't have to worry about combinations of anything, or how threads are implemented, or how many processors are available, etc etc. Additionally, with the j.u.c libraries in Java 5+ there are sufficiently good abstractions that you don't need to worry about any of this low level gore much.

Seriously, if you're going to be writing multithreaded code in Java, read the book. It's awesome.
Ask HN: I'm a front-end dev. How do I get started contributing to open-source?
It's (relatively) easy for a programmer to get started contributing to an open-source project. Find a project you like, in a language you're good at, and start working. Not as easy for a front-end dev. I do HTML, CSS and JavaScript, passionately. How and where should I start looking for open-source projects that need my help?
Good stuff. Thanks!
That's no missile, it's Tony Stark.
> "the mortgage payment on an equivalent place is, in my experience, >2x the rent"

People buy rentals in order to generate positive long-term cash flow. In a sane housing market, rent will be only slightly less than mortgage + taxes + insurance in the short term, and rent will rise with inflation while mortgage payments stay fixed. Thus, after a few years, rentals bought in a sane market will generate positive cash flow; otherwise it would be foolish to buy a rental property. (If you compare the historical price-to-rent ratio in most cities [0] with the expectation of price-to-PITI of 14 [1], you'll find that renting is indeed slightly cheaper over the short term, but only by about 20%, not 100%.)

In the situation you described, where mortgage is >2x equivalent rent, that's a sign you're in a bubble market. In such a market, it's a terrible idea to buy. (IIRC you're in Seattle, which is almost twice as bubblicious as the national average. It has been a terrible idea to buy in Seattle [2] for most of the last decade.)

> "all other expenses be equal, etc etc, a renter has a lot more free cash flow than a guy paying a mortgage"

If the guy with the mortgage bought in Seattle between 2003 and 2009, he's going to have poor cash flow, but that's not a criticism of buying in general, it's a criticism of buying at a bad price. In a normal market, the renter should have more free cash flow over the first few years, and the buyer should have more free cash flow starting about 5-10 years in.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/price_rent_ratios/ -- see the P/R ratio tab

[1] using this calculator to determine monthly PITI; the rest of the math is straightforward. http://www.realestateabc.com/calculators/PITI.htm

[2] my good friend Tim runs http://seattlebubble.com/blog/ , so I've been following our crazy housing market since 2005.
Here are some famous Miku Hatsune videos.

Po pi po (the vegetable juice one):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0-2lzA7_Cg

"Yukkuri shiteitte ne", which means "take it easy", a Japanese meme/philosophy based on the "yukkuris":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cHsNnDfmDs

Disappearance of Miku Hatsune, about someone deleting the vocaloid program from their computer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN7mR_ECQjo

It's worth noting that all of these videos and songs are completely fan-made. There is no official representative of Miku Hatsune; that's sort of the point. You can make her sing anything you want. She's more of a platform than a star.

There are several other vocaloid singers besides Miku. The whole thing is very popular on the Japanese video site Nico Nico Douga.
Only because that list segments by country. If you add up the EU countries you'd have a bigger market than the US and that is as much a single market as the US states are if what you're selling is electronics.
Google Gives All Employees 10% Raise
If they are putting their money into you and your company they should be comfortable that you have at least thought about making money.
As someone who went through the acquisition of a software startup, the year in golden chains, and who is now working 12+ hours a day at a software startup again my biggest problem with working at the "big" (in mentality and geography if not employees or success) company was that it atrophied my skills. This is of course ultimately my fault for not working harder to improve myself during that time, but I certainly at the time got dragged under the water by all the wrong incentives.

Standing out enough to get recognition, compensation and other perks required a minimum of legitimate technical innovation and rewarded all the wrong kinds of effort, mostly political maneuvering and the cultivation of a swaggering, executive demeanor that I really hated about myself. Now that I'm back to being judged by my (esteemed) peers on the basis of my direct work product, I'm learning at a crazy pace and enjoying life more even though I'm tired from the long hours.

Startups may not be for everyone, but they are for me, and that would likely be the case even without the possibility of an exit payday.
"If it is a missile, then clearly a group of people with a boat should go and recover whatever it is."

How is anyone going to know where it went down?
C++ isn't that hard, I got a pretty good hang of it after a couple months on my first project out of college. Why is a Python project "more realistic"? the learning curve is probably similar.
I'm already using Backbone in production. It has been a huge boon, not only in time saved but in forcing me to design things well.
I meant this as a general answer to the brute-force-mitigation-without-DoS-vulnerability problem, not as something SSH-specific. Somewhere on my hard drive I have a half-finished draft of a spec for a Kerberos replacement implementing the idea.
I think he's addressing the "do what you think is great regardless of what others may tell you" style of "be passionate". That is really bad advice.

The crucial thing here is "do a reality check". "Put your all into it" is only, only good advice if you combine that all with a reality check. Otherwise, it's the fodder of wasted lives.
Certainly. Facebook uses PHP, so it would be odd for them to support only Ruby.
My only point is that the scenario yariv frets about is exactly what FaceBook did to grow.

Before I joined FaceBook I would get regular emails about all of my friends on FB that had uploaded my contact info via GMail.
> A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

> ...known to reside, like Jabba the Hutt, at the center of the Milky Way.

A lesson to all the mainstream writers out there: don't drop references if you can't get them right. :P
I just blogged minutes ago with a solution for you: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/11/10/how-to-land-a-job-at...

In the case of a sysadmin job, this is how I would do it: start showing some expertise in configuring Linux virtual instances, discuss why and how you manage them, share tips and tricks you learned. That will do you a lot of good on your resume, help you land interviews, and help you convince during those interviews. Especially if you are competing with other college grads with 0 experience, you'll stand out.
Both C and C++ are ISO standards. Oracle doesn't own them and can't buy them.
Or, the company gives raises... But only to the staff who aren't developers, becaause "Hey! Those Developers have poor social and business skills anyway, they'll never know!"