skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
dude learn programming.. dont fall into the trap of thinking you are an "X" kind of guy, where X is "programming", "marketing", "design" and so on... keep learning as much as you can and build what ever you can.. you may not make it into an app but you will learn heaps to propel you forward...
Those statistics end at 1979, but I don't doubt that you're correct. The problem here is not literacy per se: these students would have no trouble transcribing between written and spoken English. The problem is with composition and comprehension.
Usually people use the word "automagically" to refer to something that the audience would be excited about.
What happens when you ask a software pirate for Ubuntu?
New Tutorial - Android Activity and sub-Activity
The VCs from the Silicon Valley don't care that much about how you'll make money, so focus on the product.

This is a dangerous assumption. You should structure your business plan to be able to make money and stay alive without a transfusion of VC money.
In response:

1. Bad grammar isn't limited to Twitter/FriendFeed/etc. It's a problem throughout the web.

2. Weren't the original blogs just online diaries? If microblogging is an evolution of blogging, it would make sense to revisit old ideas to see how they pan out with new technologies.

3. This one applies to the rest of the internet. You can waste hours perfecting a blog post or reading HN or /. or any other social (or nonsocial) news site.

4. I don't know about other people my age (I'm 18), but I remember having to spend time in HS/College working on papers that were over 140 characters.

Also, maybe it's just me, but I end up putting some thought into my tweets to make them fit in 140 chars instead of going over the limit.

5. If you're the type of person that gets distracted easily, it wont matter what you're doing. You'll find a way to distract yourself from what you need to do.
Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008
...it's worse!
I dunno, advanced physics still baffles the hell out of me. And I'm an advanced physicist.
I'm very reminded of that old George Carlin skit where he condenses the 10 commandments into 2.
CERN, Prologue: The Road to CERN.
He mentions that in the "Better Ways to Do It" section at the end -- mistakes he made, ways he could have saved time and effort.
Revealing hidden assumptions in estimation
Why is this news? A company asked for feedback from their users? Stop the presses!

This is one of the least insightful posts ever to be listed on TechCrunch, and is obviously only included because of Arrington's investment in Seesmic. I'm not a TechCrunch hater like many, but there is absolutely no merit in talking about the internal software improvement process employed by Seesmic in an identical way to thousands of companies everywhere.
3-D CAPTCHA: A way to fix the broken CAPTCHAs?
BASE vs ACID and scalability of databases
I think the problem arises when people hear about a concept and try to understand it without knowing the foundation required to really understand it.

Pointers are easy if you understand the basics of how a computer works and know a language like C.

Likewise, closures are easy when you know a little about functional programming and understand first class functions.
Good article.
Another response:

1. My tweets are more carefully crafted than the crap that flies out of my mouth, simply because they are limited to 140 characters.

2. Seems to start as a new point, but resolves to supporting the first. No matter if it is inane, it's social. Being human, social matters.

3. We lose gray matter getting frustrated in traffic and with social interaction. It's a lose-lose. I'd argue time and energy spent interacting (as opposed to not interacting) is not ill spent.

4. Agreed. Minus the reminiscent inclusion of dated technology. Typewriters... meh.

5. Give it time. The format for displaying and absorbing information is lagging behind the method for creating it.
Used Honda Civic, it had just come in earlier that day. Civics and Corollas still seem to have a decent supply (at least here in Massachusetts), but the smaller cars were all gone.
I learned most of what I know about database design through practice and making many enlightening mistakes. In all likelihood, I still don't design databases correctly, but at least going through some bad designs and suffering their consequences gave me an intuitive feel for what I should do. (That intuitive feel has translated into loathing for RDBMSes and relational data modeling in general, but that's an entirely different subject.)

In databases, the cleanest design often has bad performance characteristics. This clean design, called "normal form," which has several different levels, boils down to minimizing the number of times a particular piece of data is stored in the database. In your example, it would typically be a mistake to store the comment twice. It wastes disk space, and all inserts and updates on the comment have to be done twice. Under some circumstances, copies of the comment may get out of sync.

To address your example, here is a simple, incomplete, and probably inefficient but fairly well-normalized table structure for something like HN:

users: id, nickname, password_hash, joined_on, karma, ...
stories: id, user_id (person who posted the story), url, content, posted_on, votes, ...
comments: id, user_id (person who posted the comment), content, posted_on, story_id, parent_comment_id, votes, ...

In this table structure, stories refer to the person who posted the story by the poster's user primary key ID field. I made this ID separate from the user's name, and it would typically be monotonically increasing number (1, 2, 3, ...) or a GUID. (Some schools of thought advocate using a meaningful identifier, and would recommend making the user's nickname the primary key.) In the stories table, the user_id is foreign key into the users table, which simply means that it refers to entries in the users table. Comments also refer to users by the user's primary key, and they also refer to stories by primary keys in the stories table. In addition, comments refer to other comments, which allows parents to have a primitive hierarchical structure.
Ok, I think I can condense this to one sentence:

If your adviser is an asshole, you probably won't graduate and your grad school experience will suck. Don't.

If you want to get a Ph.D. and do research, pick your adviser very carefully. It is the most important decision of your research career. Grad school isn't like school, it's an apprenticeship.

Pick your adviser (the person you are apprenticed to) on two factors: the success of their past students and how compatible you are personally with them. Their field should be peripherally related to yours, it doesn't have to be very close (1).

I had a great experience in grad school. I also had two great advisers.

(1) My advisers study scattering theory and complex variables. My Ph.D. was in computational physics. It wasn't a serious problem.
That is because, unlike most authors, Tolkien was actually trying to put symbolism into his work--he wasn't trying to just write a novel; he was telling an epic. Being a linguist, he recognized that, in the many retellings of an epic, small embellishments are added in order to provide side stories and submorals.
as a wise man once said "everything that can be socially powered, will be"
The New Captcha?
Great article, I absolutely agree. I grew up in a farming community, and I worked some of the worst jobs imaginable in my youth. When I ever get angry with software I consider I am getting paid 10 times the amount to challenge myself intellectually.

It really is quite humbling.
There went Scoble's Sponsor... | My Philly Network
Ah, so that's where I'm going wrong... ;)
Well, with OSX at least, the trash is in the dock (so not quite on the desktop any more), and most people eject using the single-purpose Eject button on their keyboards. Also, the button is usually marked with an "1/0" symbol, not really an "off", so it really just means "toggle power."
Not on a cordless phone you don't (does anyone really have a phone any more that has a dial tone from the moment you pick it up?)
I took his comment to mean, "I've always understood SFTP to be the FTP protocol that runs over SSH", and so I replied that his understanding was correct.

I didn't consider him saying "like using scp" to mean he thinks "it is scp". Rather, I took it to mean, "it uses SSH to copy files, like scp".

But, I can see how one could interpret it that way. It was not my intent.

I'm staying the heck of out of the pedantry business in the future. This has been a ridiculous bundle of threads all spawned just because I had a bee in my bonnet about how the term SFTP is confusingly misused by lots of folks. I don't even use any of these "FTP" protocols for anything (I use rsync or SVN for website data, and scp for one-off file copies--I haven't used an FTP GUI since I owned an Amiga). I only ever touch FTP for testing problems our users report, and then always using lftp on the command line. I've got no dog in this race...
Tolkien certainly isn't the only author who has ever deliberately inserted symbolism, though. He is, however, one of the few among them who isn't painful to read. There's certainly plenty of symbolism in D.H. Lawrence, but it was put there for the express purpose of being dissected by literary critics.
Speaking of which, I don't know why someone hasn't hooked a closure system into html. Think of it, you can bind links to an instance of the website on archive.org -- if eventually it goes down, you can at least recover what the author meant to point to.
Holy usability nightmare Batman!
not the first time I've seen math captcha but this is definitely a good way to get people not to sign up.
Yeah see Wikia for an example of this. Monitor any semi-high volume keyword and you'll witness a parade of buries/promotions until 1 side finally gives up.
Do you know how zen koans work? They help you understand yourself. They don't do it by telling you about yourself, but rather by tricking your mind into paying attention to nothing other than yourself, even though you might not consciously want to.

In the same way, symbolism is intended to trick the mind into grasping a concept it consciously has problems with understanding, or perhaps outright disagrees with. It's like grinding a vitamin into dogfood--the dog won't notice, but it's getting healthier. You might be an ardant anti-___ist and never want to hear a single word on ____ism, but a carefully crafted allegory about ____ism might have you more of a believer than you knew.
Yaaaahooooo!!!

This seems to be a great idea.
I can surely use this to create a fonts for my work.

I once wanted to create a logo for my web app with my own handwriting. So I wrote the name of the website on paper and photographed it. I got a very blurry image. So dumped the idea. I never thought it was possible.

But I can't create a font for my handwriting. Since my handwriting is partly cursive and partly non-cursive. I write the first and second letters of a word in cursive and the rest in non-cursive. And my 'r','o' 'y' and 'g' vary a lot. They depend on where they appear in the word.
Isn't monitoring where people actually surf more accurate than allowing those same people to 'vote' on a search result's relevance?

I would think many people would vote one way, and surf another.
What's with all the Captcha stories? Any funny business going on?
This submission title looks like a troll, but I'll bite.

The good thing about Coding Horror is that it gets people thinking about issues that they might not have considered before. While the details may not be 100% correct, I think the general principle he's trying to communicate is valid.

I can't speak for Jeff, but one of the things that he will probably admit is that he isn't perfect. I've found that he doesn't necessarily write about stuff that he is an expert on, but mostly stuff he's learning about or issues that people should perhaps be thinking about.

I'm sure there are plenty of other websites that debate the finer points of database design.. perhaps they too should stop blogging in case that someone takes their advice too literally. :P
I'll toot my own horn and share my site, which started as a study tool for myself but that many people have also found useful (it's open source):

http://eidogo.com/

You can study joseki, search for board patterns in pro games, play GNU Go, etc. The board part is modular and can be embedded into any webpage. Like GoBase, it has a pro game archive, but does not require registration or payment to view.
Straw-man generalization.

Read the specific claims in the article about the mothers who persuaded their sons to leave the Taliban.

We need to imprison or kill the violent people who can't be reasoned with, but we need to offer an alternative to those who are capable of choosing one. Over time, their numbers will grow.

Educating, and eventually, empowering women helps on all fronts.
It's tricky because most database writing is about SQL and OLTP and other practical things, but studying those things without first understanding the basic concepts of set theory and predicate logic is kind of like studying C and pointers without first learning about computer hardware. If you learn about pointers first they're confusing, but if you learn about hardware first they're obvious.

Ted Codd's big idea is fairly simple: "we can store data in logical, rather than physical, structures and then use logic statements, rather than algorithms, to retrieve the data."

Wikipedia can often end being more confusing than enlightening but the "informal introduction" on this page is a place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relation_(mathematics)

Here's a page I just found about predicate/first-order logic:

http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/logic/log019.htm

This book by Chris Date covers a lot of basic relational database ideas, but his writing is a bit tedious:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/159059746X

After that the main mental challenge is just learning to think in sets. Joe Celko has some writings specifically about that in his various books.

After that, the best book I've seen for SQL and practical issues is The Art of SQL:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596008949/

Hope that helps. There's a lot of really bad writing about relational databases out there.
I agree with you, but I have a hierarchy for "things I respect". On the top of my list, are people who write useful open source projects. emacs, Linux, Perl, SBCL, Ruby, Python, whatever... the list goes on... they're all good. I often disagree with some decisions their communities make, but they are writing excellent software, giving it away for free, and then letting me make whatever changes I want to it. How can anyone complain about that.

Moving along down the totem pole, are people writing other types of Free Software. Do we really need another open source forum app? Not really, but at least you are trying to share your software with the world. Trying to be helpful is almost as honorable as actually being helpful.

Continuing, we have useful proprietary software projects. I will probably not use these (instead opting to get whatever algorithm from a textbook and write it myself), but I'm not going to complain about their existence. Mathematica, Matlab, some commercial Lisps, etc. fall into this category. Code I can't see and modify kind of sucks, but this sort of software is useful.

Nearing the bottom are the "apps developers" you talk about. They spend a lot of time blogging, and the rest of the time writing marginally-useful applications that are closed source. Sorry guys, I'm just not all that excited. I'm not going to use your app, and I'm probably not going to learn anything from your blog (since there's no code), so it's just ... meh.

Finally, we reach the bottom of the totem pole. This spot is reserved for people that spend most of their time talking about "software development" but never actually doing any. I could name names (the only reason we know about these people is because they SEO their blogs), but I won't; I think everyone knows who I am talking about.

Anyway, not sure what the point of this post was. Oh yeah; please write open source software. It helps everyone, and sharing is fun, and it will make people like you! If you have time to write about it, please do, there are thousands of people that want to hear about how you developed free software. The story is interesting, and for details, the code is available for perusal. That's always good.
Aza and Jef Raskin's evangelism of static interfaces make a lot more sense in light of this. Thanks.
DavidW, what was the book?
The worst thing about a PhD for me was the artificial size of it. A really good PhD is probably a natural series of ideas that spin off from a single theme - but in my case it was a single idea excessively dragged out. Smaller, quicker iteration on ideas is so much more satisfying and better for creativity.

I kind of hope that more people fill their 'do something creative' niche with startups in the future. Its more satisfying, not least because other people caring about what you do is essential for a startup.
Apple Sues Mac Clone Maker Psystar
These articles are sometimes interesting when the person writing them outsources everything. That way you get the true cost.

But 'omg o hay i built an app with 5$.... ( and 5000 man hours but that doesnt count right )' gets old
Cliffs Notes version: "I like programming."
Gentlemen. Please hear this.

Hydrogen has a carbon footprint. It's just "indirect".

Virtually all hydrogen used the the world today is produced by "reforming" natural gas. "Reforming" is a process where natural gas is burned with limited oxygen and some water thrown in. The chemistry is a bit tricky but hydrogen is produced and CO2 is exhausted.

You can produce hydrogen electrolytic decomposition of water but it results in about a 90% loss of energy. Very expensive proposition and if the electricity was generated with any kind of fossil fuel then that production process generated some carbon.

Only way to use hydrogen without a carbon footprint is to use electrolysis where electricity is generated with something like wind or nuclear.

But I think these new lithium ion batteries that are supposed to come out next year are going to get the job done a lot more efficiently.
The New Apple Walled Garden
I would love to hear how it does.
By that measure TV companies, newspapers, and magazines are also just glorified advertising companies. Except they're not - and neither is google.

PS: What would be non-glorified (i.e. regular) advertising company?
Program trading is fine, if the environment is better. My problem at my last job is that I had trouble getting work done because the environment was extremely loud.
Celko used to post on usenet. I was looking to see if had anything useful to say and someone asked what books he recommended. He replied:

"The real trick is to spend some time with a good theory book first (I like my DATA & DATABASES), so you have an overview of RDBMS concepts. It makes the language much easier. Can you imagine trying to larn Fortran without knowing algebra?

I like Rick van der Lans book for a language reference and intro. Then move on to Hernandez and Viescas. And finish up with my stuff."

Rick has a book specifically for MySQL:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131497359/
Yeah... this was an odd Techcrunch review, it sounds like they were negative just because they couldn't think of anything obviously positive to say. Techcrunch has mostly stopped covering startups at Slinkset's level, but Y Combinator is interesting.
There was an initial post about Captchas and that one linked to a few others. This is how the usual flavor of the moment on YC comes about.

You see the same phenomenon in blogs where you have a few bloggers all blogging about similar toptics at the same time.
The example given in the articles entirely fails to describe functions as being first-class citizens. Python also lacks full continuations, unless the article is referring to Stackless Python. What is described in the article as continuations are actually generators. Finally, the meta-programming described in the article, while valid, really only scratches the surface of what's possible with meta classes in Python.
Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?
Despite all the negativity above, I just wanted to say.. I kinda get a feel for what you're trying to do and there's definitely a good idea lurking in here somewhere. I am reasonably convinced your present implementation is not /quite/ right, but as long as you're agile on your feet and respond to what feels the right thing to do, you might end up with a hit.

Turning these sorts of ideas into hits is a bit like landing a helicopter onto an invisible boat. There's no target, you're just flapping around in the breeze, but if you delicately push it the right way, you might end up with something (or nothing).
Finding the name behind the gmail address
Lawmakers ponder what's worse: A Google/Yahoo deal or a Microsoft/Yahoo marriage?
What? The apparently LaTeX-generated strings aren't even wiggled, embossed with some 3d kind of style, or anything. It can be probably really easy to transcribe it back to text and solve easily.

If they're trying to make their captcha as hard as possible to crack (and as hard as possible for others to actually solve it), they should have taken a cue from Rapidshare, with something like "For numbers with cats next to them, take the natural log of that number in place of the number itself."
Not exactly making the world a better place, is it.
Honestly so far it seems to be really good. The voting enables anonymous feedback, which already, only one day in, has lead to some surprises in how we perceive our priorities. For example, I thought I should do a mipmapped particle system, but it turns out at least two people disagree with me.

Also, it's as easy to use as basecamp (and an order of magnitude easier than bugzilla or trac) so lots of people are using it.
The classic nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. The problem with your argument is that it's simply not backed up by evidence. There are plenty of cases of children who grow up in virtually identical environments, yet go on to have widely varying interests. My brother and I grew up experiencing basically all the same stimuli: same parents, same TV shows, same music, same magazines, same everything. As adults we couldn't be more different.

There's more to this picture than just stimulus response/valuation/categorization.
Dabble DB: the best online database I know of (8 min. video demo)
Imagine what cracking this will do for the world of image processing! :)
As some of you may know, Dabble is implemented in Smalltalk (heresy), using a custom object database (mega heresy).
I'd happily take this over mass obnoxious in-your-face spamming any day.
Affectionally called "the echo-chamber effect".
If you read the mySQL manual it pretty much lays out the various performance issues for you.
Oh! These might be interesting. Charles Peirce was Tedd Codd's teacher and clearly had a big influence on his thinking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce#Mathematics

And, in the beginning there were 2 different teams at IBM trying to implement Ted Codds ideas. The ISBL team stuck faithfully to Codds ideas and the Sequel team kind of bastardized them. But SQL won in the marketplace. Hugh Darwen is still bitter:

http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/HAVING-A-Blunderful-T...
It's interesting to hear that some parts of Craigslist are 90% spam now. You'd think that under a traditional parasite-host model, the spammers wouldn't want to completely kill off the message boards / classified sections where they direct their attacks. Once the users are gone from what was once a useful part of the Web, no amount of spam there is going to yield any results.
Hysterical: "A bot attempting to brute force a solution to the above example will need to work its way through (26)(25)(24) = 15,600 possible combinations. Asking for the identification of four unique features gives 358,800 possible combinations while 5 unique features will render 7,893,600 possible combinations"
Serious Games^d^d^D Things