skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is edited, but not to that kind of granularity: http://www.google.com/dirhp
Note that you can also subscribe to their RSS feed on these offers (beware: could be expensive)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/ebookdealoftheday
Did anyone try this? It seems to me that audio is not the best format to teach a programming language..
The problem comes more from the fact that 70% or so of German exports go to the rest of European Union and mostly the Euro zone.

Germany actually kept itself out of the water largely by lifting itself upon its neighbours' heads. Then Merkel will rant about the "lazy greeks" and other amenities.

Actually the problem arises from the disparity between a monetary union without financial, fiscal and debt union. Unsurprisingly, the biggest boy did better than the rest of the pack.
This is one of those 37signals-isms: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch08_Wordsmiths.php
Der Spiegel also cooperated with the US:

With a team of more than 50 reporters and researchers, SPIEGEL has viewed, analyzed and vetted the mass of documents. In most cases, the magazine has sought to protect the identities of the Americans' informants, unless the person who served as the informant was senior enough to be politically relevant. In some cases, the US government expressed security concerns and SPIEGEL accepted a number of such objections. In other cases, however, SPIEGEL felt the public interest in reporting the news was greater than the threat to security. Throughout our research, SPIEGEL reporters and editors weighed the public interest against the justified interest of countries in security and confidentiality.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,731580,00.h...
This is very cool.

Idea: a game where each level you get a terrain and must design the optimal vehicle to traverse it (or does this exist?)
The API also allows a number of different syntaxes for query parameters: question marks, %-style format codes and one or two others as well and support for any particular style is optional. Last time I checked - a few years ago now - the styles supported by MySQLdb and psycopg were disjoint sets.

Another wart: there is (or was) different named parameters to use when creating a database connection. One driver would use passwd, another would use password, for example.

Those issues aside - and they only bite you if you're using several different databases - I really liked the simplicity of the DB API. Coming from the boilerplate hell that was Java's API it was a godsend.
Let's see if this follows Google's previous purchases like Etherpad, Dodgeball and GrandCentral.

Perhaps they'll close down Groupon to new users, give it a really confusing horrible ('flexible!') interface which no one quite understands, then shut it down after a year of development on that interface and 4 months after launch.

On the other hand, all of those were tech acquisitions - this is more of a marketing/advertising one, which Google groks better. It's also a company that already has cashflow going, so there may be more incentive to keep that going.
Agree, but:

1) They're a huge, huge outlier

2) Any of Renaissance's funds are not nearly as scalable as a passive index fund

3) As a hedge fund will still take a big chunk out of returns as fees
"Salting" is not the solution to every problem. More to the point, if you put binary data in an SQL query things are going to break, even if you use tricks like this to make it a bit less predictable. (Really, the probability of random binary data containing a ' character is pretty high...)
Agreed, they haven't always been successful. I wasn't aware that they tried to replace France's government though...
I think the mechanics around how your thinking about growth, revenue, profit and costs affects your execution are among the most "unknown unknowns" among entrepreneurs. But only because this is where my greatest realizations have appeared during the last couple of years. I know now that in reality I knew nothing when I started my company. And unfortunately you mostly learn stuff like this in hindsight.

In conclusion: great post and great topic, keep writing about stuff like this.
GrandCentral came out as Google Voice, which I love and use daily. It has a nice interface and I'd say that it has been integrated remarkably well so far.
ClickFox Raises $18M, Helps Clients Get A Cross-Channel View
Time Management for System Administrators
By Thomas A. Limoncelli

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007836/
Germany has other serious problems though, demography particularly.
Acquisition Finance
+60 Free High Resolution Metal Textures
Here is +60 Free High Resolution Metal Textures, I and many designers like to design with metal texture, specially when they trying to design to show strong shapes. Using Metal Texture is Strong idea.
Via anecdotal comments from business owners I've spoken with here in Philadelphia, most Groupon participants reported no long term increase in sales.

The beauty of Groupon was it's timing, gaining massive ground during the worst recession the country has seen. Business owners would do anything short of giving products or services away for free to get people in their stores.

Their Groupon exposure certainly filled their store for that day, but often at the expense of the business owner (at least two SMB I talked to reported the event cost them more than it brought in) and didn't result in a long term increase as hoped.

The longevity of their profits therefor, if this is more than anecdotal, is indeed in question.
Here you go: http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2010/11/the-truth-about-mark...

Invest in S&P 500 ETF (SPY) starting at inception
Growth of $100,000 from 1/29/1993-8/30/2010
Buy and Hold: $324,330.15
10 Best Days Removed: $156,354.12
10 Worst Days Removed: $692,693.90
10 Best and 10 Worst Days Removed: not listed, but very close to Buy and Hold (the green line in the chart)

Rob Bennett's followup comments are quite good, as well.
It's also a function of the transition from paper based storage to primarily electronic storage of documents - something which has only occurred in most organisations within the last 10-15 years.

Probably governments will try to tighten up their security in response to the Wikileaks, and I'm anticipating more internet authoritarianism such as government sanctioned permits for bloggers or people running web servers.
Yeah, and it took years between the acquisition and before they let anyone new get an account.
Implementing git.
Exactly. It's so damn easy to not make these mistakes. I don't know how people manage it.
Thanks for the encouragement. Will definitely keep trying to :)
You mean you missed all the buzz about Google being behind on local?

The local ad market is $170B a year in the USA alone. Online is 12, TV is 70. Doesn't take a genius.
Funding in Science is becoming a huge huge problem, well beyond the criteria used to distribute money. We need a major revolution on how people actually work and think. At least in the biomedical field.

There's a lot of talking about it, I wonder what we can do to act.
it also directly encourages learning. like a real life skill tree/character sheet.
This BBC is a very nice summary, thanks. It looks like it accounts for payments that are not directly to the Member States too, which is the hardest part to account for (I base this on the total payments to France which must include the CAP (agricultural) subsidies).

I have only briefly searched for a couple of reference countries, but it seems that about 1% of the state budget contribution to the EU is the 'normal' amount, with the 'net' expenditures (after discounting for income) is only 30% of that at most (for Germany, for the lesser net contributors that number drops exponentially). So that seems very small, certainly less than I had expected.

Then again, most the most expensive government jobs (social security, medical insurance, pensions) are governed at Member State level, so maybe it shouldn't be that surprising.

So anyway, then we can reduce the original question to 'is there more than 1% income redistribution between states in the US'. Which I think there will be, since Medicaid and SS are federal programs, right? Plus military spending, which redistributes from states without bases or research to states who do have them, and which makes up a big part of the federal budget.

Maybe my initial feeling was wrong, and there is much more redistribution between US States than there is between EU Member States. I'd love to spend the rest of my day researching but I'm afraid I don't have time for that ;)
Well...I wouldn't classify starting a blog as a startup/viable long term business.

If you are, indeed, starting a digital publishing house then I think you need to come up with a viable/more sustainable business model more quickly than just relying on advertising at some point in the future.

Hacker Monthly is a perfect example of this. They released a few editions, then quickly put up a pay wall.

A blog, in the most generic sense, I think is better served being a 'free' marketing tool. The main focus should be, as 37Signals so eloquently put it, to teach your users and subsequently build an audience.

Edit: I would also like to point out that I don't disagree that there are some businesses that make sense for pageviews/uniques - my main point is that we (the industry) are still suffering from the bad branding caused by the 90s boom & bust. i.e. start a company and figure out revenue later. I am suggesting such a drastic shift, in an attempt to drastically change that mindset. Once that mindset is changed, then we can loosen a bit - and 'encourage' some models that require pageviews first (but perhaps by that time we won't need to, because more platforms like http://www.flattr.com will be mainstream and bloggers can get paid for each article, than relying on advertising).
Clever bike lock scales light posts
Hence somewhat.

I don't think the politics are immaterial. They may influence in exactly that way. Reporters, news shows and everything else has biases. When it's an opinion article, that bias is the central component. When it's fact based reporting the bias is a smaller component.

The context here is "WikiLeaks’s continued and reckless pursuit of classified document disclosures seems to have much more to do with the proclivities of the organization’s founder, and very little to do with building knowledge or improving democratic discourse." and "by continuing to analyze new disclosures I am tacitly supporting this."

I think that the above is somewhat of a red herring considering that we are talking about source documents released verbatim. How could wikileaks' bias come in to play? Withholding documents where people sound good? Withholding documents where the "other side" sounds bad?
It looks like a random search to me.
Like a cross between JellyCar and Crayon Physics?
I don't see this in the matrix:

Has the business skill to figure out the technical needs of the organization, and the political skill and motivation to introduce and deploy changes as needed.
git is not mainstream. it's mainstream on HN and for people who read blogs and care about their craft. This makes it a good indicator of a person's level. Not that you have to use git per se, but having used one of git/hg/bzr or at least hearing of them and trying them out would also do the trick.
That entry was the only Windows-centric one in the whole table. Plus it was prefixed by 'e.g.'. And finally even if all the examples were in Windows terms, I hope that someone given the responsibility to interview new hires would be able to abstract from examples to general principles.

(he uses 'methods' somewhere also to talk about code organization. I hope we're not going to say 'it's Java/C++ centric because in C there are only 'functions'')
It comes with PDFs of the slides used in the lectures. Presumably it's meant to mimic a classroom lecture. While I'm sure screencasts would be preferable, I don't see a huge problem with doing this.
Introducing Nancy, a lightweight web framework inspired by Sinatra
I don't think people should be expected to pay a few hundred bucks a year to access scientific papers

Well, people can go to libraries, of course. But what kind of a business model do you recommend for the ACM, if you don't approve of the one they've got?

When I had a free student membership due to participating in a programming contest I found out that I couldn't read almost any paper I wanted without also subscribing to some SIG. Some of my professors have also expressed frustration when trying to dowload papers from ACML DL even though they've been members for decades.

Bizarre. I've been a member for over a decade myself, and never had a problem. I just pay for the "Digital Library" subscription ($99, if I remember correctly) and the world's my oyster.
The same reason that you don't make all variables global.
Yes, the Australian economy depends heavily on China's at the moment. If China proves unable to maintain its current growth rate, Australia is likely to suffer a pretty severe downturn.
So what do you mean? It doesn't work so well because you would score low(er), or because you think the methodology is fundamentally flawed? When someone skips a few steps, e.g. jumps straight to writing a book and skipping the 'read books and discuss with peers' steps, is that a net positive or net negative thing?
"We're sorry, but your promotional code was invalid."

no joy for me.

Edit: works for ebooks only for me, not for printed versions. I'm outside the US, so that may be a factor?
Lisp interpreter in 90 lines of C++
EBay And PayPal B.F. Mobile Stats: Sales Doubled; Payment Volume Up 27 Percent
> Their opposites, passive investors, will by definition do about average. In aggregate their positions will more or less approximate those of an index fund. Therefore the balance of the universe—the active investors—must do about average as well. However, these investors will incur far greater costs. So, on balance, their aggregate results after these costs will be worse than those of the passive investors.

This argument is wrong? edit: it's like saying this about strategies of chess players, one group is using strategy A and another is using strategy B:

Chess players using strategy A are known to perform about average (by the nature of their strategy). So this new strategy, B, has to perform about average too.

This neglects that there are other strategies than A and B. The whole world is not either passive investors or hedge funds.

And he's saying something even stronger: there is no subset of B players that is better than average.

So while he may well be correct in his prediction, he makes it sound like he has a mathematically tight argument for why he is correct. But the conclusion of his argument (that active investors will perform about average) is not the prediction of his bet (that hedge funds will perform about average, and because they have higher operating cost they will lose).
> That entry was the only Windows-centric one in the whole table

The table also mentioned Powershell, VS.Net and VBScript

> And finally even if all the examples were in Windows terms, I hope that someone given the responsibility to interview new hires would be able to abstract from examples to general principles.

That may be true but I think Unix is something any programmer should at least be aware of.
Easy way of gaining or losing five years of life
the thing that bothers me about this is that google is a product company, not a services company. groupon is a service. a service that takes 2400 (and counting) employees to pull off. the entire business model does not seem to be a good fit for google. that said, i could see some really slick integration with google's local products like places, maps, and now hotpot.
Bespoke OS blip caused chaos in the air
Aren't these diplomatic communications? Not tactical military ones?
Just because a person "learned programming by way of web development" does not give them any excuse for not understanding fundamentals. Just because modern dynamic frameworks abstract away lots of "hard" stuff does not mean that your dreams wont come crashing down without any understanding of computational complexity theory etc.
on Gliding Snakes
> I don't think anyone expects perfect adherence to "international law" by the USA.

> The phrase "violation of international law" tastes meaty, but it's just tofu.

Good and valid points, but mildly tongue-in-cheek my response to your first assertion is "I do!"

I'm not an American, but I deeply appreciate what America has done to move the whole world towards a system that values innate human rights, the rule of law, and representative democracy [1], so when America behaves in a way that contravenes its own publicly stated values I am genuinely disappointed -- even though America owes me nothing. I agree that "international law" can't be easily defined (and therefore can't be adhered to), and it is not always easy to judge the moral value of an act, particularly without the benefit of hindsight (one of the best known examples being the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan), but there are other cases where it is clear. If America clearly acts against its values, it weakens its credibility when it tries to promote them to the rest of the world.

We can of course distinguish between America and Americans -- admitting mistakes and punishing those who commit them is the way that America can deal with them and keep its credibility with respect to its values in tact.

The case of the abduction of the German citizen seems on the surface to be a fairly clear case where America should allow due process in a friendly democracy to take its course. But perhaps there are other considerations that I don't know about... either way I'm grateful to wikileaks.

[1] However imperfect our democracies are, the current alternatives are a lot worse, and I'd prefer to be optimistic that we'll discover even better methods to govern people in future.
I would add a "Discrete Math" row under Computer Science. Of course you can manage without it but it's true for other items as well.
But if you're filling a RoR web development position does it matter?
Why can't Google hire a crap load of people to manually sift through the most common queries and identify the spam and penalize those sites?

Google is worth billions. They could easily afford to hire 10,000 people to do this full time and it would completely transform their results.
I still don't understand why HN doesn't allow users the opportunity to change a vote on reflection.
Ah thanks for clarifying. To me, those metrics were ones that should have been tracked from the beginning. But I understand that it is painful (and difficult) to admit when something you've built is used for something that you did not intend it to be used for.

If you actually do have paying non-adult-content customers though, the battle may not be lost. I'm saying this without much knowledge on your revenue model, but instead of suddenly alienating the adult-content customers, it might be possible to let them continue to use your site while you slowly focus on giving more value to your non-adult content customers. In this way, you may be able to steer the direction of the company and substitute the revenue base in a less destructive manner.
Etherpad is making its way into Google Docs... of the 3 you mentioned, only Dodgeball was neglected.
Scr.im » Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.
Almost certainly not - which is why these kinds of tables are so silly.
How to Write Faster JavaScript Condition Expressions
Apple iPad released tomorrow (nov 30) in Norway (google translated)
Using this logic, if one sleeps 3 hours less than 8 (that is, 5 hours), In a 40 year period that would be 43800 hours (365 * 3 * 40). That amounts to 1825 days (that is, 24hour days) which is equal to 5 years (that is 365-day years, a simplification).

Teorically if you slept only 5 hours a day, you would live 5 years more in wake time during your lives, but... perhaps there should be studies correlating sleep deprivation and a shortest live span.

Nonetheless that is an interesting theory if we combine it with polyphasic sleep, which could ease the effects of sleep deprivation.
Businessmen: don't outsource your code.
Meetups have been happening in Bangalore too. Join the Bangalore HN Google Groups and you'll know when they happen:

http://groups.google.com/group/bangalore-hn-meetup
Being able to give a list of weaknesses in something like git, a sensible discussions of the pro/cons of the approach taken by git, a comparison with the behaviors of other systems (with their pros and cons) and some idea for potentially improving it.
On the topic of eBooks, why on earth is the iBooks Store so useless? The selection seems to be tiny and the only way to browse is through very broad categories like 'non-fiction.' it's like Apple out it up there just for show and don't seriously care about it.
Repeated submissions: the sign of a good article? Incidentally, I'd first seen it on the original website[1].

[1] http://www.indiangeek.net/programmer-competency-matrix/
Introdução ao Cracking com Ollydbg do Zero.
It's worth mentioning WikiLeaks insurance file here, an already-distributed file which they claim contains some really juicy secret(s).

http://www.google.com/search?q=wikileaks+insurance
The EU is diverse and has a lot of different member states. Germany's largest trading partners are not Ireland or Greece. Far from it. It is France. Germany is also the largest importer in the EU. For many products it sells there are suppliers somewhere else in the EU.

The problem of Ireland and Greece are not so much caused by trade deficits with Germany. There are problems caused by trade deficits (while at the same time Germany is transferring lots of money into the EU by its EU contributions and investments), but Ireland's problems were caused by its bursting housing bubble and its banking crisis. Greece OTOH has internal budget deficit problems (expensive public sector, corruption, arms deals, ...).
What would be the corresponding levels for security knowledge?

I ask, because I feel it is a weakness in my knowledge base, and would like to see the steps to improve my learning in that area.
Certified Hot
You'd be surprised at how often a cleverly chosen data structure or algorithm can improve a web app. For instance, where I work our frontend code uses tries, heaps, and other data structures (and using these makes the user experience noticeably and measurably better than using slower data structures).
Um, if you don't care about the CS section, do not ask the CS section questions.

That is why the matrix is conveniently broken into specific sections.
But surely you get credit based on what you write, not just for writing it?

There are some pretty bad blogs out there and, IMHO at least, it wouldn't take much to write something which was worse than not writing at all. Caring about your craft is good but whether they're actually good at their craft is best judged by the content of what they are posting rather than it's mere existence.