skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am excited because of the license. If he is successful then that means that other programmers respect and appreciate his work as a programmer to exchange money for it. That means that other programmers (me, in particular) have a chance of making money by selling software, potentially even to other programmers.

It is amazing to me that so many programmers refuse to purchase any software, unless it comes bundled with a hardware purchase (Mac OS X, Windows). Hardware is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars but software is worth nothing?
I also use Dreamhost for my secondary stuff. It's great as a staging server although you don't have full control over the server. If anybody wants $50 off the first year (that makes it reeeeeeallllyyy cheap per month), you can use the promo code LIFEHACKER.

For virtual dedicated, I use Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com) to host The Photo Stream (http://www.thephotostream.com) and they have been excellent for the past two months.
This is sort of off topic, but...

I'm a teenager and I'm trying to figure out what to do for a living. Programming seems good, but I've read two independent sources that say it's lonely. Does it have to be this way, or is it a question of what kind of person you are? Is working in industry X always lonely while industry Y is much more social? Etc.

You can reply to this comment, or aim johnmaxwelliv / email john.maxwelliv@gmail. I would love to make some internet friends =)
I removed it, I understand now - it's better to wait until entirely too much spam arrives before implementing CAPTCHAs.
It can't use TLS so if you use its account facility (instead of Google Accounts), your passwords are sent in the clear. That is one of the big problems with Google AppEngine.
I'm trying to capitalize on the trend of searching for a company slogan or phrase instead of going to the actual site. A lot of businesses are posting ads (non-internet) that say "Go to Yahoo.com and search for <company name>" instead of saying "Go to <company name>.com/<project name>".

This trend should increase with the proliferation of mobile web browsing; typing a domain name is a pain, and I hope to make browser plugins for each mobile browser that capitalizes on this new development.
Content Management Scripts and SEO - Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla
Expensive cities and design jobs are both luxury goods.

Some day I hope to start up a bunch of huge computer labs throughout SE Asia and Africa so that kids can come in and do custom programming and graphic design, undercutting all of us Westerners. I'd rather have disadvantaged teenagers drawing little icons for $5 a hour than working as hookers to get $10 a night--even if it means that designers in the US won't be able to afford to live in downtown S.F., drinking $6 cups of coffee, and buying $5K of gadgets every year.
"Why is it a law that children must attend school if not to underscore the value of spreading knowledge that we've acquired."

That sounds rather naive. Societies make it a law for children to go to school so that they become good citizens of said societies. It is a self-perpetuation thing. Imagine christians would raise their children to be muslims, christianity would not survive long.

Just saying that from the existence of such a law you can not derive that it is a good thing.
I want to join an ambitious startup as a programmer.

No you don't. This may be what you think you want, but it's not what you really want.

Why do you want to join an ambitious startup rather than creating your own?

Why does the startup you join need to be ambitious?

Why does it need to be a startup?

For that matter, why do you want to join as a programmer rather than, say, a graphic designer?

If the answer to the above questions is "because this is a route to making lots of money", then what you want is to make lots of money -- and you happen to have identified "joining an ambitious startup as a programmer" as a way to pursue that goal. Similarly, your goal might be "to change the lives of millions of users", "to become a world-famous hacker", or "to work with a bunch of really cool people".

But whatever you want... well, it's almost certainly not "joining an ambitious startup as a programmer".

--------

Now that I've finished ranting about desires vs. routes towards satisfying those desires: The above is actually relevant to your question. The skills looked for vary dramatically from startup to startup -- a startup which is likely to make you a millionaire isn't necessarily going to be looking for the same skills as a startup which is full of really cool people. Once you've identified what you find attractive about startups, then you can start thinking about which startups currently exhibit those traits, and what skills they look for.
Don’t Get Ripped Off By Venture Capital “Brokers”
How to Recognize a Dark Age
Agreed. Google is playing catch-up bigtime with their "web developer community initiatives" or whatever they call them, but it all seems too little, too late, in comparison with Yahoo! DN...
RailsConf 2008 - Friday Evening Summary
I think it's less Windows vs Mac than Firefox vs Safari. And call me crazy, but my bet is on open-source. Of course, the hardware angle is missing from all that, so maybe the winner will be Android running on an iPhone...
Thank-you for discussing this topic as it's been a major endevour of my life for the last 3 years (http://frye.blogs.com/thebox/2008/05/on-cities-and-a.html). I wanted to get it out of the way so to speak, so I could focus on life's more essential aspects such as living, loving and producing interesting work.
Dreamhost has their problems, but like someone else commented they are very open about everything. Whenever I have had a problem their tech support has responded pretty quickly and fixed whatever was going wrong. I'm pretty happy with them overall. I only use it for my blog, and as a test bed for some stuff. I'm not sure I would run anything important there.
"Facebook raised money in three rounds, seed money in 2003 and traditional venture capital rounds in 2005 and 2006"

Not to make a big deal about a typo, but Fbook launched 2/04 and got funding later that year from Peter Thiel.
City to Google: Keep out
Being good at learning new skills quickly matters more than which skills you know now. (Unfortunately it's hard to demonstrate in an interview and everyone says they are good at learning.)

However, if you focus on this, and just learn whatever specific technologies are convenient for you, then you could later spend only a short time (perhaps a week or two) learning specific skills targeted to a startup you want to apply at.
What is maglev exactly? Googling for these items gets bogged down in the results for their namesakes. Can someone 'splain this for me?
It seems unlikely that Google would brand any phone... such favoritism would go against the spirit of having a truly "open" mobile OS...
I know "me too" posts are frowned upon, but I cannot agree with this enough. So often I see a site that has the most simple alignment issues, and the whole thing goes to shit.

Pick a grid. Stick to it...no matter what. As with anything, once you master it you can deviate from the rules. But if you want to create something nice, try your best to stick to the design standards you set for yourself.
Hi frederiksen. I think I do probably need to relax a bit. I'm trying to take life less serious :)

I am looking forward to getting out in the real world and engaging in human interaction once I graduate. But I think the Internet is a useful way to meet others as well, and possibly make friendships.

I also agree that having friends of multiple backgrounds, personalities, and interests provides great value. But to me it seems like doing this is much more difficult. People seem less willing to let people into their circles or lives if you have different interests or perspectives. Listening seems to be a highly undervalued characteristic these days. These are just my observations, though.

Thanks for the comment.
It wasn't clear to me, is Ruby the first language you've learned? How many mini-projects have you tried, to see what you're capable of? You're better off starting with such projects, than leaping into anything big.

Versatility is important. Try to do many different things in your programming. Even if you don't like some problems, think about how you'd solve them.

At a startup, you'd be one of few employees so you could have many different tasks given to you. If you have experience or gut feelings on how to approach several problems, you're more likely to be able to jump in and not take time flipping through manuals.
Music players are very different from phones - there is a lot more innovation to go around in cell phone apps. Apple realizes this, of course, which is why we see the iPhone SDK.
...price being less of a determining factor for PC buyers these days (in the US, at least) than user experience, brand cachet, and the overall value proposition enabled by a given platform

But the US isn't the top market for cell phones at all:

At over 270 million mobile telephones, India has the second largest such phones, after China, which has more than 550 million. India have overtaken America, which has about 240 million cell-phones. Currently, India's growth is the highest in the world, higher even than China's.

(from http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14684164)

So there is probably room for both Androids and iPhones :)
The startup I work for :)

http://schoolrack.com

We're extremely (this week) close to launching student and parent account types, so students and parents will be able to easily collaborate with teachers via the already existing features we've got, plus we're going to add a gradebook, discussion board, and quite a few other features.
But even if it is an enormous case of selection bias (which I won't argue against, since it's a position I've held myself), it may still be interesting. And to hold that there's such a wide selection bias among the type of people who frequent this site is, I would argue, an interesting phenomenon.
"MagLev... Ruby runtime based on Smalltalk VM"

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/maglev-gemstone-builds-rub...
Especially annoying are points like this:

The only glaring omission from Android so far is multi-touch - the iPhone feature that allows for actions like the two-finger pinching movement used to shrink photos.

That, and the nice white headphones. Why doesn't their OS come with headphones?
What type of hosting are you looking for? PHP, ASP.NET, Python, it really depends.

I've had different experiences with each. For plain old php, bluehost seems alright.

However, may I suggest that if this hosting provides your sole source of income you look at a virtual host. I've used http://www.servint.net/ for a ton of wordpress blogs and it's pretty good.

I've also "moved up" from plain jain asp.net hosting to dedicated hosting.

If you're depending on this as a source of income I recommend you get a dedicated host. In the long run it will pay for itself.

Good Luck!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemstone_Database_Management_Sy... only for Ruby
It shows that disqus wants to keep the comments separate. What do I do when disqus suddenly puts ads on my blog? Or disqus suddenly decides that my blog does not meet their filter because I'm too controversial?

They yank my comments. From that blogpost, their attitude is - we and the comment makers own the comments. You blog owner are nothing in this equation.

That's pretty arrogant.
Note on the problem that a group G of even order contains an element of order 2. Partition G into classes {{x,x^{-1}|x\in G}. This is a partition since inverses are unique. For x\in G, call {x, x^{-1}} the class of x. At least one other element x besides the identity has a class of size one. Otherwise, the order of G would be 1 + 2*(# of classes of size 2) which is odd. Hence there is an x with x != 1 and x = x^{-1}; i.e., an element of order 2.
In ANY organization these skills matter:
SQL - MOST Important - If you can fix a SQL problem (mysql, sqlserver, oracle) you ARE THE MAN.
Administration - can you rotate the log files and fix the problems? Can you assign the correct permissions to a directory in centos, redhat and windows (03, 08) server - You are "teh" man.
I can code in C++, Java, C# & Python but I get the most praise (and raise) from fixing common mis-configurations on our web servers and databases (things the "admins" don't know how to fix) and this is usually a combination of batch files, dos and or *nix shell scripting abilities.

Programming is such a small part of the job, understand the OS and the DB and you own the house!!!!

In the end, if you can simply read the hot fix readme files and apply them correctly, you are valuable. Hello 6 figure income!

The administrator/programmer is a God among boys.
wow...next thing you know there'll be an island full of dinosaurs
I'm not sure I saw the same presumption you did. If I were in their position, I'm pretty sure I'd want the freedom to be left the hell alone, if that were my preference.

The article does strike me as poor journalism, though. It crosses way over the line into the tendentious: I had to ask myself if the writer was a reporter or a representative of some sort of activist group. It's also grossly sensational. How exactly does anybody know that this tribe has had no contact with modern society? It looks to me like all we can say for sure is that they paint their bodies and have grass huts.
Why is there no "down mod" ability for stories such as this. This is hacker news not Reddit.
Second Week Project
I will first defer to cperciva's advice, but I'd like to add that the people most in demand around the bay area right now are generalist who are particularly sklled at designing and building good user interfaces for webapps. There are many talented people working at levels further from the user, and this skill is both truly in demand, and wonderful to have.
As a mobile user, I know exactly what you're talking about. But I have to say that the new virtual keyboards from HTC and others have solved most of the bad input problems.

Also, search engines are becoming more and more important for navigation on mobile devices because as you say, typing long URLs is not fun but finding them is easier. How will you compete with Google and Yahoo!?
Don't be just a programmer. Be part designer, part manager, part innovator and always suggest big ideas.

I think finding people who are masters of all trades (or important ones anyways), is more important than just finding rockstar programmers.

Best of luck
Dupe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201373
I like the phrase 'social scalability'
And btw - I believe the scalability issues are platform / design based. All of these improvements are just that, improvements. The system needs to be built to scale first
I owned a Lisa when I was in high school (my first "business" was buying, repairing, and selling computers, and I found it at a garage sale).

It was pretty neat, but I already had an Amiga by then (then being 1989 or so), so wasn't particularly impressed. What did amaze me, however, was the price of the thing. The fellow I bought it from had all the receipts for everything: $10k for the Lisa, $7.5k for a 10GB hard disk, $5k for a 5GB hard disk, and about $5k worth of software and ancillary stuff, if I recall correctly. This sum seemed unbelievably large to me back then...and it was more than the purchase price of both of my parents cars combined.

The external hard disks were absolutely massive, and had huge cables. The other thing I remember is how godawful slow the thing was. It took forever to boot, and starting applications took forever. Since it didn't multi-task (which I had already become addicted to using my Amiga), switching between applications was an exercise in frustration. And, of course, since the Lisa existed for a very short time before the first Mac arrived, it wasn't really a machine one could get software for anymore. The screen was kinda tiny, too.

When we went to the Computer History Museum my girlfriend got a chuckle out of my excitement in the "PC" corner of the museum...I kept exclaiming, "ooh, I had one of those!"
This stuff is brand new. Obie is essentially blogging the announcement straight from RailsConf. More press will come soon, I'm sure.
Hah! I listened to LOTS of music, good and bad. I went to tons of local shows and tried to figure out why the bands that sucked sucked and why the bands that rocked rocked, even when the bands that rocked were playing very simple music. I also did a whole bunch of recording, and spent a lot of time tweaking settings to try to figure out why my guitars sounded crappy and such. Eventually I figured out that the solid bands sound 100X better because they know how to get the right sounds from their instruments... and thus I began learning about amp manufacturers and popular models (can you tell me what the differences are between the distorted tones on a Marshall JCM half stack, a Vox AC30, and a Fender Twin? What about between pinstripe and coated drum heads? Picked and fingered bass? What's a "scooped" sound?)

And then there's just giving my mixes to people and listening when they tell me what's wrong.
Start with Verilog, go on to Assembler, follow that up with C, then study C++, then learn python, study HTML/CSS. Only go this route if you're pretty smart, otherwise just learn PHP.
Javascript: Generic Resizeable Container
Pricing: Google App Engine vs. Amazon EC2
All of them. Or, none of them.

Basically, you need to be able to do everything. From graphic/ui design/css, to html, to the MVC stack, to the database, to the system administration and the networking.

For a startup, being a jack of all trades is far, far more valuable than a specialist. How much use will a startup have for JUST a programmer that won't touch the database or the servers? If I'm hiring a developer who is ostensibly going to be coding in Rails all day long, their ability to do design and database work is just as important (if not more-so) than their actual experience in Rails.

Take a look at the stack above, and learn more about whichever one you're least comfortable with. If you've never touched photoshop before, download their 30 day trial and at least familiarize yourself with it (good frequently-used "beginner's" task: making a transparent PNG of something like an arrow). Never set up a linux system? Clean out that old windows box and install Debian (server) and set it up as a file system.

Rinse and repeat.
I think I have to mod you up for that.
No, I would be very liberal in accounting for interview-nervousness.

Now, if it appeared that the candidate had no idea how to solve the problem, that would be a different story.
Get Acquainted with Microformats
Firefox 3: Native Ajax File Upload
On Women and Assets
I'm not sure if this is what you're after but Supermemo is a fantastic learning tool.

It uses a system of spaced repetitions to significantly increase retention and memory. It's been around a long time and has been refined over many years. The creator was featured in Wired not long ago..

http://www.supermemo.com

Unfortunately it's windows only.
Sprinkle: easy Ruby on Rails VPS slice provisioning
Testing IE Versions Just Got a Little Easier
How to: Upgrade to Rails 2.1 RC1 from Rails 2.0.2
MySQL versus Oracle Features/Functionality
Myers-Briggs used to annoy me because there were always a lot of questions I could go either way on. The third time I took it I figured out what to do. I divided my answers into two columns. Anytime I had an unambiguous answer, I'd put it in both columns, but if I felt split I'd put opposite answers in each column. I was curious as to whether this would yield interesting results, and it did: I got a 50/50 split in two of the variables (that is, I'm evenly matched in IE and TF), and an extreme bias in the other two (I'm about as N and P as you can get). This matches how I feel about myself pretty well. I found another amusing way to verify the approach: if you combine the opposites to my extremes you get SJ, and the SJs turn out to be my arch-enemies. I read the description of SJ and it makes me squirm and think, why would anybody be like this? These people are neurotic bureaucrats. The world would be better off without them!

Edit: I'm joking, of course. SJ is so much my polar opposite that I have a hard time understanding or empathizing with them. I just find it ironically hilarious to read a typology that's designed to foster understanding and find myself dismissing 1/16 of humanity as basically adding no value.

Edit 2: As of this moment, the SJs are less than 3% of the respondents to the poll. Evidently I've come to the right place. :)
I highly recommend LunarPages. Best thing is their low latency and modern systems. They're one of the few with a lot of clients yet almost universally positive reviews.
Silly man.
+1 for MIT's OpenCourseware
DH is crap. Them being open does not detract from the fact that their servers keel over every time your site gets a bit more traffic. I left them and never looked back.

Also stay away from Joyent.

Depending on your needs, Media Temple might work. And a friend swears by Royalty Hosting although I haven't tried them.

I'm playing with Mosso at the moment and they seem good.
Surprise of the Day: Maglev Ruby VM
Ask HN: how did you fix problems with bad sleep?
I am exhausted most of the time, because I never sleep well. Doctor diagnosed "restless legs syndrome" and wants to give me pills, but I wonder if there are any other things to try? Just interested in any stories of how people fixed their problems with bad sleep.
When Is AJAX Effective, And When Is It Not
You have to be able to learn anything, fast and only do things the right way, the first time.
Following "juci" now - poor kid, I know how it feels to talk into a void...
OpenPhotoVR (Photosynth-like photo browser) is now embeddable
If you want to say plus 1, you should just vote on the comment instead of making a new post. It's both nicer to the author and it reduces the noise in the thread.
How Man-Made Noise May Be Altering Earth's Ecology
For anyone living in emacs I highly recommend org-mode (part of the standard emacs distribution since v22)
Use Namespaces to organize your JavaScript code
Business Logic vs. Free Software Idealism
"... i would love to see a way to pump all this discussion on hacker news into disqus ..."

This quote resonates a lot. Especially after reading Stowe Boyds` response "Fred Wilson on Leaving The Instigator Out: Small Worlds v Big World" on exactly this problem ~ http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/05/a-vc-web-discus.htm...
Exercise is a cure for many things, including poor sleep. Take a brisk walk in the afternoon. 20-30 minutes is fine. It's not guaranteed, I guess, but it always works for me.

Also, if you're a coffee, tea or soda drinker, switch off to herbal tea or plain water after lunch. Caffeine has a 6-8 hour period of effect, with the peak effect happening at about the 4 hour mark. If you do drink things with caffeine, consider reducing or cutting them out entirely. I can drink 2-3 cups of green tea in moderation without any adverse effects, but more than one cup of black tea is too much (and one isn't quite enough, so I don't drink black tea). Coffee and sodas aren't worth it, to me, as the caffeine in coffee is a jittery spike and all the sugar in sodas makes me sleepy by lunch time (which totally throws off getting to sleep when I actually want to at night).
Not exactly sure why you're being downmodded.

If I follow, you're just saying (if a little enthusiastically) that DB/server administrator skills for hackers matter in a startup.

You'd be right - at each startup I've ever been involved in I've done everything from written code, configured the server, fixed the server at 3am, answered the phones, licked stamps for invoices (ok, not in modern times) and fetched coffee.

Startups generally don't have enough scale to hire one trick ponys.

In a younger founder/early employee, I'm not looking so much at programming ability as entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to get stuff done. Even the coffee run.