skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the few things I miss about the Cambridge area is the quality and variety of the bookstores. I recommend MacIntyre and Moore for technical used books; Quantuum and SoftPro for new stuff; and Victor Hugo books on Newbury St. for more general stuff.

http://www.mcintyreandmoore.com/
http://www.quantumbooks.com/

While looking for links, I discovered that Victor Hugo books and SoftPro are probably gone now. As I look at the shelf of books I choose to place within arm reach of where I code, probably half came from SoftPro and a goodly armful from Victor Hugo.

If the internet didn't offer a way to buy used editions from anywhere in the nation, I'd have to make a yearly pilgrimage back to Cambridge with a buying list. Thank god for that.
Is Freemium Really the Way to Go?
What point are you trying to make here? That using frameworks is bad because they won't magically solve all your problems? That no magic fix exists? That everybody should use PHP? That C is a bad language for writing a web programming DSL?
Really? If I just come by, they'll let me look around? I don't go to MIT ...
Is Google about to swallow up Digg?
Both The Tasty and The Greenhouse have closed. Go to Pinocchio's Pizza and and Charlies Kitchen before they too are replaced with useless mallstores!!

There are a lot of good ice cream places including Herrell's, Emack and Bolio's, JP Licks, Toscanini's. Conduct a long term comparative study.

Coolidge Corner Theatre is a great place to watch movies.

I've not hung out with them for years and I've heard it's changed quite a bit but consider going to a MITERS party [1]. It used to be more about conceptual art. I think it's now more about technology. Either way though you can't go wrong if you click with the people.

Boston is a great beer town. If you like beer go to some of the Beer Advocate beerfests. One is coming up very soon [2].

[1] http://miters.mit.edu/node/5

[2] http://beeradvocate.com/acbf/
How we read online.
This has so many good lessons in it.

First off dont' expect anything to take off without years of hard work.

Second it takes about 10 years for things to really catch on in software,standards,technology.

Third, many times is is only the creator or a few people keeping large languages and frameworks alive.

Fourth, when you get hired at Google you are officially a rockstar if they use the language you created 10 years prior.

Go Guido go...this visualization is intensely inspiring, of course I am talking about the Python one the most.
MySpace Biggest Chance At Hitting The Refresh Button
Technorati Confirms New Financing; New Business Focus Coming
as am i, if you find any, ping me at web @ my hackernews name.com
It's very standard.

Calc 1: Differentiation up to the Chain Rule, with applications like maximization problems. Basic integration, up to the Substitution Rule.

Calc 2: More-difficult integration techniques (integration by parts, trigonometric substitution, partial-fraction decomposition), infinite series. Most people find Calc 2 the toughest because of the infinite series.

Calc 3: Multivariate calculus, partial derivatives, lots of 3D stuff. Easy, intuitive, spatial.
yeah.
what I did is that I emailed some professors or phds and asked them if they or someone I knew could show me around.
just tell them you're a student and interested in what they are doing. they certainly like to show you their stuff.
just pick the areas from the website above that interest you and email the folks, most of them are very open.
the same can be said about PG or DHH. My parents certainly don't know/care about either.
This article helped me refine an idea that's been sloshing around in my semi-subconscious for a while: a server-side plugin that lets the designer write 100% standards-compliant CSS, and it would be "compiled" to whatever is needed for various quirky browsers requesting to see the particular page... is this feasible?
My initial reaction to the grandparent post was offense, but then I thought about it.

I live in Boston, and I have to say it is much unfriendlier than new york, where I grew up. I am sad for california if what you say is true (although that was not my experience at all when I spent time there).

Even when I visit NYC I don't feel that people are so hurried, pushy, and selfish as boston. When you penetrate the shell, and aren't in traffic, a line, or on the T, Boston folks can be friendly. Sadly, my very pregnant wife frequently is left standing on the T in boston--often no one offers her, or the 80 year old who happens to be on board, a seat.
Funny. But yep welcome to America where if you say anything that is too passionate about something or if you have an artistic, natural take on things people quickly identify you and say you are smoking the funny stuff. Keep that mindset and never create something new or a new take on things.

Tell me why you like explosions and fireworks? I personally think that if we come from stars or the cosmos it has greater meaning than just bright lights, big color, sensory overload. It could mean life or the start of this whole system.

Or we could all just not think too far out of the box because it is safe and we wont' be marked for smoking the reefs because it is not the normal way to look at things.

Now go back to your pharma meds that are acceptable because they shut down passionate thinking or pondering.
Wife suggested greenhouse... Note: we haven't lived there in a bit, so ymmv.

The correction is appreciated! Grafton|Graton was a typo but the edit link has expired, so my perfectionist tendencies will be left wanting.
Apple lost plain and simple because they were closed market, some things never change. You can get an early lead like that but eventually open systems and open markets win out.

It is all in the numbers. Sure there is MUCH more mediocrity when you open it up, and you can control and only allow the best in a closed market. But in the end the percentage of better systems at the upper threshold of the open system will always beat the best hand picked companies that can participate. One big reason is competition, the other is greed and laziness that comes with that.
It takes 10 years to get good at anything. This quote is from OOAD.

>>The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic, some sensa-tional method or tool whose application promises to render software development trivial. It is the mark of the professional software engineer to know that no such panacea exists. Amateurs often want to follow cook-book steps; professionals know that such approaches to development usually lead to inept design products, born of a progression of lies, and behind which developers can shield themselves from accepting responsi-bility for earlier misguided decisions. The amateur software engineer either ignores documentation altogether or follows a process that is docu-mentation-driven, worrying more about how these paper products look to the customer than about the substance they contain. The professional acknowledges the importance of creating certain documents but never does so at the expense of making sensible architectural innovations. The process of object-oriented analysis and design cannot be described in a cookbook, yet it is sufficiently well defined as to offer a predictable and repeatable process for the mature software development organization.

Frameworks are just fine, tools are just fine, any language is just fine. It is all about the skill of the person using it. I have seen good PHP code. I have seen bad Python code. It is about the developer, their understanding and how much they can handle of the system. If a framework lessens what they need to know to something they can manage at their level then it will work.

The job of a good engineer, is to take something complex and make it simple. So there are and will always be great tools to help people get better and the best will dig deeper and after 8-10 years it seems like most of the marketing and b.s. and jungle of software starts to come clear.
The Newest Twist in ConnectU v. Facebook
You missed a lot of much worser ones. Lucky you.
Some Cling to Hope for a Deal After Microsoft Discloses Details
Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Baby
PDF,,, ugh. The thing is about PDF is it is closed and I never understood why Flash gets so much beef but PDF flies under the radar. A collective groan when a PDF is opened happens across the internet as a consistent chorus.

Flashpaper almost killed the PDF but Adobe bought Macromedia and then killed Flashpaper (which is now open and more indexable than PDF). Instead Flash paper died only to be picked up as a killer app portion of PGs companies like Scribd. I wish Adobe would drop PDF for Flashpaper, it is a format killer like FLV video was for Real, Quicktime, Windows Media etc etc that made video a horrible web experience. Flash paper came up instantaneously and is much better, if you want a compact format.
*
There is no subject more captivating, more worthy of study, than nature. To understand this great mechanism, to discover the forces which are active, and the laws which govern them, is the highest aim of the intellect of man.*
-- Nikola Tesla

Hey look everyone!!!11 Tesla was smoking the reefer he said something about nature! effing hippie!
<comic book guy>The ultimate geek workstation? Hah! The seat needs to be at least twice as wide.</comic book guy>
If it hovers I am sold.
You mean Java or Flash? j/k same solution but different implementation. I think there are lots of systems like this it is pretty easy to get browser, OS, etc from all server code I am sure this has been done if not give it a go.
Block on FriendFeed is Live
Hey cowmoo, our startup ( www.hubspot.com ) is hiring now. We're VC funded, have a great crew, located in Kendall Square, and we're looking for someone with data mining expertise. Shoot me an email if you're interested - pfitzsimmons a-t hubspot d-t com Would love to chat.
Information Unit Nomenclature: Bits or Shannons?
My company made a machine for medical labs, and I wrote an app that monitored the performance of those machines. Our basic metric was samples analyzed per hour, and my app would grab the runlogs from all the machines (we needed the data in the logs for other purposes, or I'd have done the analysis on the machines and just transferred the results), count how many samples were analyzed each calendar day, and then divide by 24. Easy, simple, and worked a treat. That is, until one fine spring Monday.

The service manager walked into my office bearing the graph of machine performance, and said there was something wrong with my script. He showed me the graph, and pointed out that most of the machines had exhibited a nearly 5% drop in productivity on Sunday. This wasn't usual; the machines either worked, or they didn't, and they were expensive enough that labs generally ran them continuously. We looked at the graph for a while, and realized that the affected machines were all in the US; the ones in Asia looked normal.

This was baffling, but I did a little checking of the data, and it looked like the script was counting samples correctly. The nearly 5% drop was real.

But the next day everything was back to normal and people stopped bugging me about this, so I just let it go, though I couldn't get rid of a nagging feeling that I was missing something.

I didn't realize what it was until six months later, when those selfsame machines exhibited a nearly 5% rise in productivity, again reported to me by the service manager on a Monday. I looked at him for a moment, then said, "Not all days are 24 hours long!" I'd forgotten about daylight savings time (not observed in Asia), which makes one day in the spring only 23 hours long, and one day in the fall 25 hours long.

I fixed the calculation by using time()s, so the script'll work for any time zone. As an added bonus, even the occasional leap second is handled correctly.
One of the great charms of MIT is that, generally speaking, they make it really easy to pretend to be an MIT alum. For example, the libraries are open to the public (though you can't check anything out, of course).

Generally, if you hang around, act friendly, and talk really quickly they assume you're part of the club.

At Harvard, though, you can't get into the library without a current valid ID and a body cavity search.
Zen Planning: 4 Simple Rules for Balancing Short Term Necessity with Long Term Direction
Eight tabs? I have well over 100 open at any time with Opera. This sort of browsing behavior chokes Firefox 2.x. I'd like to see whether Firefox 3 can handle it.
Is it him that is being the douche or is the system rigged where douchebaggery is a requirement to success of this type?
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Right, it's not a commodity at all. Commodity implies it's all the same and virtually interchangeable. Even two wines of the same varietal from the same region and micro-climate produced in the same year can taste vastly different.

Just because there are a lot of choices does not mean it's a commodity. My guess is that the author just doesn't understand wine and saw some numbers.
1200 words is brief now?
Really? Sign me up, sounds like a vacation.
The "big boys" in code don't charge $250/hour -- that's SAP or similar platform specialist territory.

Code generalists run $80-$150/hour for truly excellent engineers.

I do work in the Albany and NYC markets, and $120/hour is typical. $700-$1200/day is a reasonable range to consider in the NYC market. Downgrade that for most other markets.
Scheme. Barf.
Web 3.0: Caught with our pants down again?
Can a Night Owl Become a Morning Person?
How Deep Are Yahoo's Cuts?
Apply for internship at companies.

e.g.:
http://www.microsoft.com/college/ip_overview.mspx

Entry bar for interns is lower than FTE, and if you do well it's a lot easier to get hired later on.
10 things I hate about Web 2.0
Yeah, huge fan of Diesel. I code a lot there.

And Randall Munroe apparently goes there a lot, because he started an IRC channel for Diesel folks!
AP Goes After Bloggers For Posting Article Headlines And Snippets
You are partially describing what GWT does. Except that it doesnt do much special in the way of CSS yet...

But in terms of Javascript/HTML/AJAX, it compiles separate versions for each browser (which are automatically loaded), virtually eliminating the need to handle various quirky browser behaviors. And any standard Java app server works fine for the server side, nothing special needed there.
Microsoft’s Not Bluffing —  Look, it might be the biggest poker bluff …
True but in name it was supposed to be portable. They definitely got that right first, thus the prevailing winds but it is not the only format that prints well now and it is also not the only "portable" format. PDF was commonly used as a locked out portable format (unchangable) for "security" as well.

Maybe ODF or Flash docs (now that SWF is open) will win out. I was just saying that Adobe essentially killed Flashpaper as it was starting to take hold, if you look at the history literally right after it hit the scene Adobe bought Macromedia.
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For a couple of projects weren't particularly big, we required this set of "specs" before release (for internal use):

- Requirements specification

- Design specification

- Use cases

- Test plan

Plus some reports. The design included a functional specification, but all of these documents evolved iteratively, so as it turned out the design document was mostly an after-the-fact record of what we did. But I don't think anyone here is an avid supporter of BDUF, so what else can a team do to prevent foolish code, other than requiring everyone to show their stuff and explain themselves regularly? If your up-front specification is comprehensive enough to prevent any bad future programming decisions, you don't need a programming team to implement it, you just need a compiler for it.

Maybe that's the deep secret to "Worse is Better": bad ideas are exposed to the harsh glare of other developers early on, but it doesn't sting so bad because nobody expected perfection. Humble is better.
This is not what Twitter is for
The key to writing good web apps is to remember that the web part of the web app is just that, a part. It's not the whole application. An ideally-structured web application will be a normal application with a thin layer of glue to make it talk to the web. Usually your framework provides the glue, but it seems that most developers try to make the framework a religion and way of life instead of a glue. This leads to unmaintainable and untestable applications.

Anyway, the rule of thumb is... if critical code can't be executed without starting a web server, your app is designed wrong. (I've seen developers that write all their tests in Selenium. This is a huge waste of time; make sure you can test the backend code without making web requests. Only use Selenium to test JavaScript! Even then, Test::More from the JSAN is quicker.)

I've given lots of talks about this, if you want more details. Here is a web-specific one:

http://www.jrock.us/fp2008/catalyst/start.html

(left click to advance the slideshow)

Here is a non-web-specific one:
http://www.jrock.us/ppw2007/testmore/testmore.txt

If you want to see it as a slideshow, try this:

http://www.jrock.us/ppw2007/testmore/takahashi.xul?data=test...

but on my machine, recent versions of firefox seem to not execute takahashi.xul correctly. So just read the text file ;)

Anyway, have fun.
Dotcom Confidential
Daylight can be replaced with "full spectrum" lights, esp if you live in places where sun is infrequent (e.g. Seattle).

Also recommended is physical activity. A small, foldable exercise bike is ideal for apartment and can be used at the same time as lights.
Last September, I flew to Australia to visit my family. My normal routine (roughly) is sleeping from 2am to 9am.

Somehow the jetlag worked its wonders on me. For a couple of months after the trip, I was dog-tired by 9pm and asleep by 10, up at 6. Somewhat sadly, it wore off, but at least I started getting stuff done in the evening again. I found I just wasn't productive in the mornings.
Some people actually blog about ideas they'd like to see: http://blog.stevepoland.com/

One way might be to combine a platform (PC/Mobile/Voice) with a communication medium (RSS/Twitter/Video) and think about ways people could use a new combination. For example, Voice + RSS = people 'reading' the web from listening to a phone.

Another way might be if you are using a service already but there is a serious 'feature gap' that you could address, i.e. how to find out what Twitter users are linking to? Sure you would have to de-code tinyurl addresses, what else would you have to do to accurately report that figure? (Idea was suggested by Merlin Mann; he is another guy who frequently posts ideas he'd like to see).
Very true. So let's keep _why's page :)
Cambridge Brewing Company. Go get a growler of their pale ale. Yum.
> A small, foldable excersize [sic] bike is ideal for apparment [sic] and can be used at the same time as lights.

Real bike riding is more fun, though. Riding at night is especially nice because nobody else is awake, there's no traffic, and the wind is lighter.
BTW, sickest class ever. Most of the dev team at Dropbox took the course. It's a mindbender, plus you get to hang out with Gerry Sussman.

Pretty much every lecture is spent examining a different programming approach and demonstrating that it's either trivially implemented in Scheme, more elegantly implemented in Scheme, or actually not worth implementing in the first place.
Huh. The only thing other than the name that I really hate about "Web 2.0" is that it's on top of HTTP. Kludge after kludge trying to be stateful with a stateless protocol.

At least that's how I feel when programming web apps.
What don't you like about scheme? Specifically, what don't you like about scheme used as a language for teaching?
Winklevoss
Options +MultiViews

I love it.
And how would riding at night help in becoming a morning person?
Microsoft ASP.net or Ruby on Rails?
How do ASP.net and Ruby on Rails compare? I couldn't find a technical comparison online and found only "microsoft sucks" answers elsewhere. I would like to understand the technical differences. I'm considering them for a social network project.
I disagree with this. A site like this isn't getting the bulk of their search traffic to their homepage. They have thousands of minor pages indexed for search terms that only a handful of people search for. Multiply this by 10,000 and you get their search traffic (long tail, blah blah blah) There's no "one page" that if there's a large rank drop will affect.

Note, this is very different than, for example, an e-commerce site that sells "widgets", and is ranking very well for the word "widgets". For them, a ranking drop could be devastating.

Now, that being said, they are dependent on Google for the bulk of their income... but there are worse things than tying your fortunes to Google's financial well being.
Oh, fuck this Web n.0 shit.
Back in grad school when I was working on papers, it seemed pretty essential to have an experience PhD involved in the process. No matter how "great" the idea I had, there were always a lot of complications. For example, making sure I had the appropriate literature review done, did controlled comparisons against best of breed algorithms etc. I would write an abstract of your improvements with hard numbers and the conclusions that you draw from them and also a 2 page summary explaining all this, and email it to a friendly applied mathematician.
PDF is not a closed format.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html
Because you are up before the sun (at least in the winter).
For those looking for golf real estate
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I read Tim's last book on business planning and got good value from it. Might pick this one up someday as well.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217306
> Hell, my idea of enjoying life is hacking around and coding products. Not many things are better than learning useful stuff. check profile for age

At 16, I probably would have said the same thing, but only 5 years later, I'd advise you that there's no rush. There is really a lot of time in life to be great at useful stuff and learn a great many things on the side. My idea of enjoying life in college was falling in love, traveling, and taking poetry classes. If I could do it again, I'd replace my CS classes with drama and a foreign language (studying abroad), and spend free time learning CS on my own. (I'd keep the Math major for the mental rigor)

There is nothing in a CS class you can't get out of a book/working on OSS projects, but a lot more you can learn about life with a good acting, literature, or history class than you'll have time to for most of your life afterward.
Well, you'll probably need to add 'server administration' to your list of things to learn, since by going with Rails you'll probably need your own VPS and have to manage all of your mongrel servers and make sure they stay running. They tend to use a lot of memory.