skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool! Great presentation, I really like the design on the web (haven't had a chance to test it out on the ipad yet).

I've been working on the exact same idea as a minor feature for a larger webapp, although with node.js and redis.

Out of curiousity, how much are you using redis for working with images? I've found it to be great for quickly dumping objects in (hashes, strings and lists mostly), but I'm curious how much you would actually use redis in an app like this. Surely you aren't dumping entire base64 encoded string representations of a room's current image in redis, right?
Thank you! The why is very illuminating.
But there is a different game with the average, which is to find popular comments and flow.

it also reduced the value in commenting on old but important threads because they would not be as popular.

I think any simple average is wrong. Would you buy a stock based on it's average selling price over the last year, and compare year to year? Plus in stocks there is risk. I wish karma was more of a market, and had intrinsic value.
Did you read the article? It's based on a direct quote from venture capitalist John Doerr:

“That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo Inc. co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in — which was true of Google — it was very easy to decide to invest.”
Single page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/weekinreview/28tyre.html?_...
Ok, here's my app for November. Previous Look - http://www.previouslook.com

The Tell HN submission - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1950729.
Real Madrid vs Barcelona live streaming
Yes, I do suppose you're rather grateful you don't have to deal with obnoxious North Korean tourists, or with jingoistic North Koreans posting on web forums.
And the followup will likely be: Many teachers teaching to the test, not teaching so students master course material.
Apple, Microsoft, and Google called out by Mozilla to "stop being evil"
Lisp interpreter in 4 lines of Clojure!
https://gist.github.com/720413

Sorry I know this is rude, but I'm tired of seeing so many posts about lisp interpreters in high level languages, the vast majority of which don't mention macros -- the only plausible reason that such an interpreter would really be useful (mine does support macros :)).
I wonder if the frequency of the "jerking around" is hard-coded for the lengths of this particular pendulum. It would be cool if it could automatically determine which movement patterns add energy to the system after trying for a while.
If you're being paid by tax dollars, taxpayers should be able to fire you for any reason that they please.

I agree. The rub is that it's not usually the taxpayers making that decision, but their elected representatives.

I believe there's already a commonly applied differentiation between appointed and civil service[1] positions.

[1] I don't know if these are the actual terms, so corrections are welcome.
Python 3D Game Library - Hello World Tutorial
Might put a warning that the link is a direct download.
> int i = 0 not code because modern compilers don't need to know about int at first.

Where "modern" means "any non-utterly-stupid compiler built in the last 40 years or so".
I imagine the quality of applicants to YC has gone up considerably in the last five years, and many of the applicants who were selected then may well have struggled to get through the current rounds.
The answer to many questions an entrepreneur has is the same answer I've heard for many poker scenarios: "It depends."

Is your MVP going to cost some time and money to build? Maybe you need some angel or VC money, if it isn't maybe you don't. Companies like YC have thrived because the answer to the funding question is more often "just a little money, especially if you throw in some decent advice and maybe some press coverage" rather than "we need 3 million dollars up front" these days, at least for a lot of web apps.

Will you need a heavy sales force? Maybe you need that "balanced team" up front, maybe you just need developers.

What makes entrepreneurship (and poker) so fascinating to me is that there isn't one answer for every question, but also why there seems to be conflicting advice.
Why would you have to specify it's an int when the compiler is perfectly able to discover that himself?
Any chance on a nice Demo video? With the App costing 10 bucks, it'll be nice to see it in action before moving in for the buy!
Why not work on projects together for fun or profit?

I have a few projects where I could use a decent javascript/jQuery guy or gal in the SF Bay area.
Spelling, not grammatical. (i.e. I think they meant "Principals")
See their FAQ:

*Have you seen this Google language, Go? How does Rust compare?*

Yes.

Rust development was several years underway before Go
launched, no direct inspiration.
Though Pike’s previous languages in the Go family
(Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo) were influential.

Go adopted semantics (safety and memory model) that
are quite unsatisfactory.
- Shared mutable state.
- Global GC.
- Null pointers.
- No RAII or destructors.
- No type-parametric user code.

There are a number of other fine coroutine / actor
languages in development presently. It’s an area of
focus across the PL community.

tl;dr, Rust seems to not ignore the last 20 or 30 years of computer science.
Don't be ridiculous.

1. It's not ugly

2. It's how CPUs work

3. It's how most people think
similar idea
http://blotjot.com/
"...the value Google is getting out of my work is worth many multiples of my total compensation. And that’s a position that every engineer should strive for, since that’s how you can be confident that you will remain gainfully employed."

As an entrepreneur, something about this statement bothers me... something about all the value I create getting skimmed off the top and taken away by someone else. Yeah, that's probably it.

But if you just want to do neat engineering work, then, sure, I get it.
Any chance you can make a read/write web version? I would gladly pay $10 a MONTH for a multi-user team version.
I do not see how they are trying to do the right thing when in this case the right thing would have been to state which specific information puts lives at risk.

The fact that they did not state so simply adds credibility to wikileaks case, that these are fanciful allegations without any evidence whatever.
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1950632
There's nothing great about being the Napoleon of CEOs. Get some proper rest. Enjoy the company of your friends and enhance those relationships. Get perspective on personal life before stress bites you in the ass.
Just-Eat is the largest player in the market (revenue of around 700 million dollars/year), SeamlessWeb in the US are the next closest competitor but they're a long way behind.
Government Employee Unions should be outlawed, plain and simple.

Indeed.

I can't imagine a credible excuse for "bargaining" with your fellow taxpaying citizens, except through the electrocal process.
PayPal Looks Beyond eBay to a Mobile Future
Compared to Go:

* Rust does not have NULL!!

* Rust has parametric polymorphism.

* Rust has more predictable memory/cpu usage thanks to forgoing global GC for a novel memory management model based on stack allocation/RAII, immutability, isolated processes and reference counting.

* Rust has a very Erlang-like model of handling failures.

* Rust has typestate, which is an easy to use way of proving properties about your program statically, or check them dynamically via assertion.

* Rust has no shared mutable state.

Those are facts. My personal, more subjective, opinion is that Rust is a lot better thought out than either D or Go. If this niche is too crowded, I'd rather see them go and Rust win. :) But given that Rust lacks shared global GC, I guess you could say it's closer to C++
I disagree.

It was an example designed under pretty specific constraints that preclude the suggestions he was making.
Ask HN: Launch an App Month - What did you launch?
Curious to know how many took this up and actually launched something.
That's always been my gripe with client-side JS tests as well. For large frameworks or libraries (like jQuery), I'd definitely unit test in a heartbeat, but for end-developer code which is mostly code fired after the DOM is ready, calling plugins verbatim, and binding user input to actions, Selenium is really a much better use of my testing time than adding in unit tests for those particular use cases.
I'm glad the NYT is shedding light on this topic but, perhaps the most important aspect of standards based grading is almost burried in this article.

One of the basic premises of SBG is that students know exactly what knowledge and skills they have to master. They are assessed and then encouraged to address weaknesses so that they can be re-assessed. This is opposed to a "gotcha!" based assessment system.

This approach can have a profound impact on students because it encourages them to assess their own learning and take the initiative to grow and improve.
Rust is not very functional at all. E.g. no lambda, no closures (yet).
If the test accurately reflects the course material, is there a difference?
Does this have an advantage over well organized documentation? How about just adding a tags field to the metadata?
Works for me (64-bit linux chromium 9.0.595.0)
Men wanted for hazardous journey: AdGrok (YC S10) is hiring.
Took an idea from jacquesm (thanks!): http://fcgadgets.blogspot.com/2010/10/ad-spaces-gadget.html

Launched this last month: http://www.textmyoffice.com

Some other things still in the pipe.
Now that you mention it you're right, it does have that SUPERLATIVE NOUN - VERBS AN ADJECTIVE NOUN! structure doesn't it. I shall have to take a long look in the mirror.
Yeah, I get paid around $1 for 1000 impressions.
Introducing Google Earth 6—the next generation of realism
Only after Mac got successful. If not, it won't be the best times of their lives.

Here's another bet: ask them if they want to do that again for at least 2 more times with different companies and unknown leaders, wonder if they'll take it.
Today In JS Episode Five: A roundup of the latest JavaScript news
OT: Why are people using Vimeo over YouTube?
That's definitely a good idea, I will probably make one later on today.
Did Doerr really say that? I'm asking because the examples don't really support the thesis. It seems like Jerry Yang would completely invalidate David Filo as an example. Also, I can't find any indication that Jeff Bezos ever attended Harvard or Stanford (according to Wikipedia he attended to Princeton and he graduated). Marc Andreessen attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also graduated.
Create and manage daemons in Ruby with Titan
I've created a gem called Titan that helps you creating and managing daemons in Ruby.

There's also an example that covers how to create a start/stop script in Ruby using Titan with Thor.
mahmud turned me onto Abdulaziz Ghuloum's An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf ; I can't stop raving about it.
Interesting. So cutting the funding of Baltimore public schools by $3-5k will make school choice effective?

http://www.somdnews.com/stories/03032010/entetop162900_32193...

(The richer suburbs, e.g. Charles and St. Marys spend $3-5k/student less than Baltimore schools.)
One venture capitalist saying something stupid (for the moment assuming that quote is a literal one) is not representative of a whole industry. I would hope -and have evidence of- a more balanced view by others.

And yes, I did read the 'article' as far as it is worthy of the term.
How Chinese DNS censorship affects everyone
On the flip side, much of the value you are able to create may come as the result of the infrastructure and colleagues provided to you by that same "someone else". Seems particularly true at a place like Google.

When you work for yourself, you get to keep 100% (minus taxes) of (probably) a smaller number; whether that is best for you depends on your personality.
30 minute build gets 10+K page views in first 12 hours
Personally, I hope this doesn't describe a trend that swings too far in the other direction; smart assholes are just as bad as well-meaning idiots. I'd rather work with (and try to be) a smart, courteous person.
I'll take your word for it with TeX; I use LaTeX and I know other people who have, but I don't know what professional authors or publishers use for typesetting.

However, I think your specific example doesn't reflect the argument I imagined you making. Your comparison is someone smart who doesn't know the tools (Ruby, Rails, Javascript) with someone who knows them well. If it were a short project, at least, I agree with you; I'd probably take the guy who knows the tools.
Yes, according to the WSJ:

http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/05/08/why-ventur...
Insurance companies do the same thing: they do statistical analysis do determine factors that correlate with whatever it is they're looking for.

VCs aren't in the business of being fair; they're interested in making as much money as possible. If they find that white males are succeeding more often than other groups, they're going use that to maximize their profit.
I have failed a course in college because I forgot to do the homework. 100% on midterm, B on final, fail on the course. Whoops!
I don't think the article is much of a surprise. I'm more surprised that class and social background weren't also highlighted as an indicator.

The fact is, people are prejudiced. Some venture capitalists might have money, but also possess very little investment / business acumen - and so, feel they have to rely on a prejudiced / cookie-cutter 'template' of what makes a successful CEO.

If an investor is not willing to examine a person and situation objectively (and look past superficial details), they're probably not very good at the VC game. In which case most of us would be better off without them anyway.
To make sure the programmer realizes this as well.

(It's a reasonable opinion, albeit not mine.)
Okay, so Google has a problem retaining the subset of great engineers who're also entrepreneurial.

That's still a problem.
Very true.

My mom started using standards based grading this year in her IB & honors chemistry classes. She's been very successful so far with it and her students have been rising to the occasion with their re-assessments. From her, it sounds like defining all of her tests and assignments in terms of the standards (knowledge and skills) they cover and grading them as such has been difficult, but effective.
Yell at the writer for licensing it Creative Commons.

I'd consider it tribute for putting a worthwhile book into the world as such.
There's room for debate on whether grades should reflect homework completion and timeliness, but some of the grading practices were nuts:

"...their grades are more accurately reflecting their knowledge, not whether or not they brought in a box of Kleenex for the classroom, a factor that had influenced grades at Ellis in the past."

I applaud the effort to separate knowledge grades from "life skills" grades. I can't imagine anything more useless than making a kid repeat a class or defer their graduation when they've already acquired the requisite knowledge.
This post came about because too many people were bringing up the same arguments in favor of JS crypto in response to my 2009 talk on common crypto mistakes. One dev went so far as to call it "host proof", which is nonsense. You can see the discussion in the comments.

http://rdist.root.org/2009/08/06/google-tech-talk-on-common-...

To show the security problems, I describe three implementation approaches: traditional client-side app, server-side app, and Javascript crypto. Each is evaluated based on its fundamental trust model, as well as any unique potential weaknesses.

JS crypto is all about trusting the server, same as with a server-side app. But it adds quite a few additional problems:

1. Numerous libraries not maintained by cryptographers

2. New code has not been properly reviewed and no clear "best practices" for implementers

3. Low-level primitives only

4. Browser is low-assurance environment

5. Poor crypto support

6. Too many platforms

7. Auditability

I end the post with a challenge. I'm willing to reconsider only if there is a fundamental change in JS crypto. For example, web browsers could standardize a high-level crypto API for use by JS, including a keystore in persistent storage. That kind of change could make JS crypto potentially useful. But until then, I stand behind this analysis that it is dangerous and misleading to users.
I know it's SF Gate and all, but it's surprising to me that Hacker News is listed above sites like Reddit and Digg.

I think it says a lot about how our little (but obviously growing community) is seen.
You're talking about out-of-school. I agree with that part. I'm talking about in the school. No matter how hard you encourage your child, the math curriculum comes at the same pace. No matter how much you encourage your child to love reading, they get the same crappy history lessons. There's no benefit to "expecting" more from the school. Nothing happens when you do. There's no meaningful way to "expect" more from your school.

The question of why we're getting a certain class of person when they hit 18 is a different question from what the schools are doing and how well they are doing it, and if you want to actually improve schools it's important to stay focused on that task. If the only solution to "improving schools" is to improve parental involvement then I for one seriously question what the schools are bringing to that process at all, and if they are to be intended for merely augmenting a parent-directed education they are grotesquely ill-suited for that right now.

(I say this as someone actually planning very seriously on home schooling my kids, so that's how I look at schools. In fact they can provide a couple of services and as I understand it they are legally obligated to do so, but if you actually want a parent-directed education they are still almost useless.)

Based on your message I don't think you understand the theory behind school choice, either (and I'm explicitly labeling it a "theory", though at this point I think it's a pretty safe one). The important thing about shopping schools, and indeed the important thing about capitalism in general, is the second-order effects of the policy. (This is why so many people have such a fundamentally hard time wrapping their head around the concept of a free market. The far more viscerally appealing but fatally flawed first-order theories would be dead by now if it weren't for this, instead of hanging around wrecking up the global economy as they do now.) The point is not that you can move your child from one crappy school of today to another crappy school of today. The point is that you can actually drive crappy schools out of business, while meanwhile another good school can actually start up and succeed if they are good. It's a second-order effect of creating a highly competitive selection process that produces a pool of schools that are better in general, not merely the right to send your kid to a slightly-better school.
Seth is an awesome guy - and he does have a social life... I've seen it. Did you guys ever stop and think that maybe there is a man behind the curtain and a reason why his name is EVERYWHERE. Maybe he has just found an amazing formula for getting press???

He is that smart.
"Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?"

Because it would be tremendously difficult to grade the students on both things separately.

One of the problems with schools and our society in general is the idea that you can take something complicated and distill it down to a single, meaningful number. Another problem is the notion that you should even try to do this. We're taking this to ridiculous extremes.

I can easily say in a single sentence, "Johnny has mastered 95% of this material but he's apathetic, only completes half of his homework on time, and throws spitballs at his classmates." Done. How hard is that?

Are they trying to save paper and ink costs on report cards?
I'm not intending to be obtuse. Even after a second reading, I still don't think the description you give quite matches Drew's use of the term. In his description, wikileaks is being brash and causing trouble, not just shining a light on absurdity through wit. Further, wikileaks is not using any wit, simply publishing everything verbatim.

If Drew hopes to be taken seriously by the US Government and keeping his security clearance (probably highly valuable in his career path) he can't exactly cheer about Wikileaks. This sort of measured, slightly negative review is essentially a bow to power (and there seems like little reason for him to write such an article other than to bow conspicuously before authority).

Drew is also a Homeland Security Fellow, whatever that is.
His argument against Bytecode is unconvincing, in particular version hell and optimization limits in bytecode. The part that is convincing is the fact that we can't get vendors to agree on a bytecode.

It's unfortunate that the most popular platform in the world will continue to look like it was cobbled together by CS 101 studwents who weren't particularly great students, and were drunk.

People thought Windows 2.0 was bad as a platform. It's like we have Windows 2.0 for the life of the web because there's too many vendors in conflict to actually make it decent.
Kudos to Mozilla. The chance of failure for this project is very high -- there's lots of new languages coming out all the time, and existing languages have huge infrastructure advantages. It's nice to see organizations take a flyer on something that has the potential to really make our lives a lot better.

Rust's design decisions make much more sense than Go. Rather than designing C+++, they've ditched shared mutable state, a global GC and null pointers, and the stupid parts of the C syntax.
Insurance companies do this, because they can't invest time in getting to know each end-user of their services personally.

Venture capitalists, can and _SHOULD_ invest time in looking beyond superficial details - and ultimately be able to understand each proposal on a deep level.
Separating the two seems the most sensible to me.

The article asks the questions:

Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?

This strikes me as a false dichotomy, and it sounds like it has been in use with no catastrohpic effects.
Simply having :for and :similar tags would be helpful I guess.

nnext :similar #{next rest} :for #{seq}
swap! :similar #{send compare-and-set!} :for #{atom}

(filter #(contains? (:for %) atom) (ns-publics 'clojure-core))
True in practice, but on a blackboard during an interview, it obviates the need to recode for the follow-up "now reverse the string in place" request.
It wasn't???
Seriously? He's an idiot for saying this, but...

"...nerds, with no social life who dropped out of Harvard or Stanford"

Is probably the actual important part. For example, I'm white and male. By these criterion, I would not be selected, because I didn't drop out of an Ivy, and have a social life...

He should relax his criterion so that he allows non-male non-white nerds who dropped out of Stanford/Harvard, but I kind of doubt the candidate pool would change much...
FTA: "A startup is totally the wrong place for me."

There are startups out there that depend on superior engineering for their living. Off the top of my head, this guy would do very well at Heroku, Dropbox, RethinkDB, Clustrix and FlightCaster.