skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Knuth says: "Many of the phrases in the following documentation have been lifted directly from comments in the
FORTRAN code. Please regard me as merely a translator of the program, not as an author. I thank Don Woods for helping me check the validity of this translation."

And also:

"By the way, if you don’t like goto statements, don’t read this. (And don’t read any other programs that simulate multistate systems.)"

Even computer science marches on: Thanks to tail call elimination, we can write code that's clean and safe, and will compile to gotos.
Ask HN: How much time do independent software devs spend on customer service?
There's more to creating a piece of commercial software than design, code, ship. What proportion of time do you have to spend on after-sales support e.g. user help, licence queries, collating bug reports, answering feature requests?
I'm turning 30 in April and sometimes I feel like an old dog. Nevertheless, the article made my day, I can't stop laughing over it and the comments, esp. the Penny Arcade link in this thread. Cheers =)
> Except that now you're no longer talking about something that requires the fuzzy handwaving of 'strong' vs. 'weak', which lack the well-defined one-way transformational characteristics of which you speak :)

You missed a (perhaps subtle) point: the thing that has "well-defined one-way transformational characteristics" is an operation (an algorithm), not a type-system. A type-system can be thought of as a set of operations, a digraph specifying all the ways to go from each type to each other type in your system. This set has the property of being strong by default—but becomes weak if any of the operations is non-surjective. This is separate from a sound system, which is one that does not permit non-surjective operations.

For an example of the crucial difference: I can program in "a strong subset of C" (C with all the non-surjective functions/casts removed.) I cannot program in "a sound subset of C." There is no such thing.
Never, this would happen again that one technology/company would have such huge effect.
This is amazing and very useful feedback. Thank you very much. I will work harder to convey my thoughts through stories instead.
Seems like we're seeing less of

perl -e "@w = (119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103); foreach $c (@w) {print chr $c;}"

these days.
How would they play music when jogging or in the train then?
USB drives could use such a feature.

write-lock: prevent it from beint written (and acquiring viruses)

read-lock: prevent it from being read (and passing viruses), only showing the free space and being able to write only in the free space
Criminal defense attorney lawyer Jacksonville
That's pretty high end for an 8088! Is it a PC or PC-XT?
It seems that the survey was only announced on the stackoverflow blog (I am a SO regular and haven't noticed any news about it.) This might have skewed the results a bit.

Update: I have found out they ran a banner on SO to promote it, so my concern becomes less valid. (Not totally invalid, advertising the survey on the blog might still have skewed the statistics towards people who read the SO blog, which might be a little different demographics than the general SO population.)
Respond to pointless questions in Hacker News.
Ask HN: How many startups should an Entrepreneur run at the same time?
I have one main startup that I run at the moment, but I'm getting opportunities to partner with other startups as well. How many startups should an entrepreneur invest time in to when you only have 5 days in a working week?

You can read about my startup at www.stugreen.com
Question 14 is quite telling - 66%+ are using Windows :/

I'd think that the % here would be significantly less.
I used a soldering iron. The holes were round, but with a utility knife to cut the extra plastic, it looked very good.

Thanks, AOL!
You'll also get a version where Hamlet says to Ophelia "Get thee to a bunnery", and she becomes a baker, and they all live happily ever after.

One where he says "Get thee to a funnery", where they invent aeroplanes and go to Coney Island, where a bad corn dog leads Hamlet to declare "Something is rotten in the State of New York."

The one where he tells his mother "Methinks the lady both protest too much", which eventually turns into an Oliver Sacks-esque exploration of split personality.

And one where Rosencrantz & Guildenstern aren't actually dead, meaning Tim Roth never gets a film career and Reservoir Dogs is never created. In that story, the infinite monkeys eventually write Pulp Fiction so normality is restored.
Just because your non-compete has expired it doesn't mean that you're free to reveal trade secrets. Your state almost certainly has trade secret laws that prevent you from ever revealing key adwords, CPA rates, etc. to a competitor.

If a company had hired you on such a basis they could also have been prosecuted for corporate espionage.
"Happiness and success are two different things."

My favorite take on the topic is the old one:

Success is when you have what you want. Happiness is when you want what you have.
Ear-implant with wireless streaming, probably.
> I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years

I have one computer (a Sun workstation) with a 3.5 drive that no longer works. The fun part is I cannot tell you in what year it broke.
How much money can Amazon affiliate commissions generate? A lot of bloggers say they don't make much off Amazon, but I'm wondering how much dedicated sites like this could make. Do you know of any good examples?
Heh heh, this is hilarious .. Aniquity is a technological effect I'll never quite get used to ..

Which is why I'm waiting with baited breath for the release of this thing:

http://retromaster.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/cumulus-firmware...

So I can really have something cool about computers to teach my 3-year old in a decade or so! :)
Proper encryption can be a help, there, I guess. Especially if you write your innermost motivations and feelings, you'll never want it to be available to anyone else (at least until you're dead).
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect ubiquitous wireless connectivity of one kind or another, and cloud storage. As for what form the device might take, who knows? It would have been pretty hard to predict smartphones in 1990; I expect further consolidation of devices, but have no idea what they'll look like.
The answer varies from "1" to "as many as you want".

The answer also depends on what you define as "startup".

From the business's point of view the best thing is to have your whole time, attention, and commitment. Most businesses do not benefit from their founders' attention being divided (on the contrary, they suffer critically from this).

But from a personal point of view, having your fingers in many pies is clearly beneficial, especially before you know which of your businesses will "stick".

I think the answer to this is changing as the tools available become better at allowing us to be very effective with short bursts of work, but what's certainly correct is that you should not say no to opportunities - but be conscious of how much you can contribute to each and what it's costing you in terms of work not done on others.
5 disks? What were you running?
I think you are attempting to create rationalizations for users' behavior from numerical data. This is dangerous. Low conversion rates do not necessarily imply any particular reaction to the signup form -- for that matter, the entire notion of a "low" conversion rate is suspect unless you have a thorough understanding of the domain and the traffic mix you are seeing, which is rare for an early stage startup.

On the basis of several years of dealing with non-technical users and their reactions with OpenID and other single signon technologies, my opinion is that in aggregate non-technical users are very confused by them and confusion leads to failure to convert. The most common user behavior is to create a username/password at your site and use the same credentials they always use. This is what they've been doing for over a decade now. The newfangled options have not been explained to them and they do not understand the fundamental "Facebook Connect replaces having an account with this service" value proposition. For that matter, many of them have a severely broken mental model of what having an account means in the first place. (I have some users who are convinced they need one bingo account for the blue Googles and one for the green Googles.)

I would certainly implement accounts for your service, and test that against Google. This assumes you have 100+ visits a day, which you'd want for A/B testing. If not, I'd implement accounts and deemphasize the Google option (e.g. give it a simple text link when the signup form was prominently visible with big colorful buttons). You can always test later after you have some traction.

With regards to technical users, I have no data which I can share with you but I strongly, strongly suggest rethinking any strategy which does not have internal accounts unless you are committed to customer acquisition via spam-early-spam-often viral mechanics.
I know that line from the preamble of the Copyright Clause, is cited in every discussion about copyright that involves at least one American. But I doubt it's the actual reason.

To come back to my example, the USA PATRIOT act starts with "[An act] to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, [...]" but do you think that's the only reason they passed it?

(I don't believe the USA PATRIOT act is a good example, it's just the first I could think of at the top of my head. If you look at some acts that introduce tariffs, you'll probably see more obvious hypocrisy, where it's clear that the act was introduced because some lobbyist got their say.
My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that then overwrote the stack and booted me into a machine code monitor.

Then I wrote a Forth operating system.

This was on a 16KB machine (I had the expansion pack) with a 1.7MHz Z80.

Fun days. I still have the machine and its complete circuit diagram. I should get it out again, but then again, I don't have time:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095231
Doctors. Lawyers. Bankers. Military forces.

Plenty of occupations require you to put your occupation ahead of your personal life.
Franchise Opportunities
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I'm a little floored by the average compensation of StackOverflow users. 70% report being in the game more than 6 years, but only 5% are making more than $75/hr ($150k/year).

I understand that the numbers are a bit skewed by people in countries with lower costs of living, but seriously, a developer in the 'states who can code his way out of a paper bag shouldn't be taking a job for $60k a year. Yet it looks like a lot of people are settling for them.

Guys, you gotta stand up for yourselves.
Given infinite time, isn't it certain that a given object will, by itself, transform into a folio of Hamlet? I mean, aren't there all sorts of random events going on at a low level?
I remember getting a few funny looks from the stores in the Electrical Engineering department when I requisitioned a few (probably at least five) boxes of 3 1/2" floppies so I could install Linux (Slackware) complete with a pretty full X11 environment (I'm pretty sure X and its apps was split over at least 12 floppies).

This would have been late '93 or so.
Indeed. I don't think we have any actively maintained code written in Perl. I know a lot of plumbing written in it, but it's not in need of new features.
When They Are Throwing Money At You
It is reflected in salaries:

http://i26.tinypic.com/8ywawn.png
Documented Procedures Required by ISO 27001
> Please remember that in many languages the form of the numeral depends not only on the number, but also on what it is you're counting. And you don't always know that if you're deep inside a library.

Japanese, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word

Take the counter 本, for a commonly-used example. That's used for: "Long, thin objects: rivers, roads, train tracks, ties, pencils, bottles, guitars; also, metaphorically, telephone calls, train or bus routes, movies (see also: tsūwa), points or bounds in sports events. Although 本 also means "book", the counter for books is satsu (冊)."
> Video formats are extremely complex and require huge amounts of expertise to make.

And yet, we have volunteers with knowledge who are constrained by patents (I'm sure x264 guys could come up with an awesome codec, and Theora team could do much better if they weren't limited to technology they got patents for),

And we have companies willing to support development of codecs (BBC Dirac, Google) which, again, are constrained by patents.
I own the three bestsellers (48 laws, 33 strategies, art of seduction). Calling it modernization of The Prince is wrong (I also own The Prince AND Discourses on Livy) - it is more a condensate of the works of people he refers to and cites: Niccolo Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Baltasar Gracian, Otto Von Bismarck, Carl Von Clausevitz, Napoleon, Platon, Aristoteles, Friedrich Nietzche...

All the great classics - as such Greene's work is an excellent intro into the world of classic political and strategic theory... What I have realized after reading some of these classic writer's works is that many of philosophers that are so popular today were nothing short of charlatans - this field (strategy and politics) has been so well researched that classics are indeed the best reference.

I particularly love Sun Tzu and Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (you won't understand prince unless you have read Discourses - Prince on its own is a dangerous book. For me it is more a satirical piece and if you fail to grasp sarcasm in it you might get burned).
Even boring old C# can do that.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/11/bitterness-anger-and-betray... -- there's a comment there which describes myspace's acquisition as, well, a failure.
Also a nice reminder to expect the unexpected in your work. I bet most programs back then trusted there was a disk in A. Now installers are relying on the existence of C. But what if you boot from USB? The '/' solution is a more elegant one in this case.
That doesn't mean that all new ideas are useless. If everyone is afraid to come up with new ideas, simply copying the old ones because it is 'safe', no advance or paradigm shift will ever happen.

Luckily, there are people daring enough to try something new.
Google Adsense revenue sharing search directory
Sonys problem is that they make the most expensive games console hardware, but make a loss selling it.

If I were them I'd fix that first. And get rid of the ridiculous and outdated blu-ray crap. Spinny disc things? In this day and age?
Cleanup bill estimates I've heard so far are in excess of $15 billion. There is an estimated $2 billion in damages to roads alone. Expenditure like this would take anyone for surprise, including seemingly wealthy countries.
Random != all possible combinations. (Right?)

What if you have infinite monkeys that all happen to always type a Y after a T. Bad habit.

They'd never write Hamlet. Ty be or noty ty be.

Given infinite time, and infinite monkeys, isn't it possible that they would still always keep making the same typo? Or that the random letter combinations that they make won't include all possible letter combinations?
I'm not seeing anything like this, or maybe I'm just being forced out of the industry.

I get screened out by HR because I don't have the words "computer science" on my resume, even though I've been programming for the past 25 years, 15 professionally.

If I get this far I get a phone screen where I'm completely fluent in anything they are talking about, but I don't have years of scrum experience, or I didn't come from an "agile" shop, or I prefer the alternatives to Rspec and cucumber, or whatever the new hotness is.

Then I get screened out by the developer interview because I'm not in my 20's and probably can't relate to their hip young "culture" and they don't know what to make of me, especially in the Ruby world - but Perl is not as bad and I'll probably just give up on Ruby and go back to Perl.

Then I get flooded with calls from head hunters, all for the same one or two jobs and its always a complete waste of time.

Its frustrating to read articles like this. Are they true or just compete fabricated bullshit as a prelude to increasing H1B quotas?
I'm in my early twenties, and this makes me feel old too. I have an 8088 too (which contains both an A and a B drive), I should fire it up again. Though mine has a Hercules graphics adaptor (everything is green!)

hums the california games chiptune
I have several USB drives with at least the former feature.
Are there people who seriously just go to college for 4 years and learn coding like accounting and then just do a 9-5 job?

Yep. I went to college with people who didn't like programming.
The video from the first Lift training is available here: http://vimeo.com/groups/75631/videos (skip the first 14 mins).
It covers what you need to get started with Lift.
I have had my own software development company since I was basically 22. Every few years I get a full time job and let the guys know I might go feral again. So I usually get the "2 years" clause on anything I touch. A very small price to pay for being my own job reference, really.
Classic case of thinking that being right should be all that matters? With interviews and hiring it all comes down to the first impression...
Hi Jon,

Interesting idea. Seems like it'd be a good novelty gift for my family to get me for example.

I guess you are already thinking this way, but it seems fairly natural to offer a birthday card, and maybe a range of other geek products around this.

On the product itself, it might be good to do alphabetical sudokus also - for 16x16 sudokus this could lead to some interesting message possibilities perhaps? Also, are there any other puzzles that lend themselves to this sort of customization - wordsearch perhaps?

I guess those are the two ways I'd consider expanding on an appealing starting idea.

Good luck, and let us know when you launch.

Best,
Ed.
I've come back to this comment several times in the past few hours, trying to write something to help you understand, yet at the same time, not sounding condescending, and I've decided I can't do it. You simply can't connect remotely to the kit we use - you have to be in the office for at least a few days a week.

Other work we do involves data that we are contractually obliged not to allow out of the building, and still other work involves teams of people working together on algorithm design and implementation. We've tried, but the existing on-line tools are simply not up to it. We've even worked at trying to create better on-line tools, and come to the conclusion that it's currently not worth it.

But you're a CS student, so no doubt you'll be working on solving the problems we have, and by the time you're in the work place you'll have the solution ready. We look forward with eager anticipation to being able to have people work remotely. Getting more and better work for the same pay would be a great business opportunity, which is why we still invest around 10% of our annual budget trying to make it happen.
I live in Australia and already try to live mostly in the cloud. I have more than enough mobile data transferring > 5Mbps anywhere that I happen to be to live completely on cloud-based technologies if such technologies existed for all my requirements.
Find out what hurts
You haven't actually read the article, have you?
(format t "~{~c~}"
(mapcar #'code-char
'(119 101 39 114 101 32 104 105 114 105 110 103)))

=> we're hiring

FORMAT is a turing complete DSL for formatting output; here you see ~{~} iteration directive.
I'm not surprised at all. The average staff programmer at a big corp isn't making much more than $50/hr. Programmers at small companies are usually making much less.
Remember punching single-sided 5 1/4" disks to make them double-sided?
Not much better. Modifying a gun to turn it into a weapon means you are taking a legal weapon and turning it into something illegal.

The import and creation of automatic weapons in the US is restricted to law enforcement and military. Mere POSSESSION of an unregistered automatic weapon is a felony offense. The two cases are completely unrelated.

Jailbreaking a PS3 is equivalent to jailbreaking a phone, with the possible exception that doing so may be a violation of DMCA, since it theoretically enables the copying of DVD/BDVD/games.
> "Please Insert Disk 13" OH GOD WHERE IS DISK 13, I CAN'T FIND DISK 13. - Jeff 16 hours ago

I have exactly this memory as well.

My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5.25" floppy drive and a 40 MB hard disk. It was an embarrassment of riches - how could you ever fill up 40 whole megabytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I was set.

As it happens, I still have most of the files I created on that original computer, and can even run my old BASIC programs using DOSBox on Ubuntu. I had to copy the files via 5.25" floppies to another computer that had a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive; and from there on 3.5" floppies to yet another computer that had a 3.5" floppy drive and a CD drive.
Same for Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany - prepaids with data are really cheap these days.
Building A Central Loghost On CentOS And RHEL 5 With rsyslog
I have a USB stick with a write-protect switch. Unfortunately, the switch has broken. Now the drive will contain 128MB of obsolete early-00s data until the bits diffuse away.
I'm not too surprised by 5% making more than $150k/year; there aren't that many $150k/year engineering jobs even in high-cost-of-living countries. Usually you have to move into management, start a business, or have a successful consulting gig if you want that kind of money.

For example, the vast majority of Google engineers make under $150k: http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm...

Or, say, IBM engineers: http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/IBM-Salaries-E354.htm?fil...
I had an in-person old fogey moment when we were going down geek memory lane talking about modem banks and rotary dial phone. The intern didn't know what a telephone modem was and had never seen a rotary dial phone!
It's not Apple that wants you to use SMS - it's EVERYONE.

I bought my first mobile over twelve years ago because of SMS, not voice, as it replaced the pagers that me and my friends had.
Results counts on Google are wildly inaccurate.
Sounds a bit like you had a Sinclair ZX80.

Been there, done that ;)
Scientific Evaluation of Charles Dickens [pdf]
Visualizing countries, wealth and life expectancy (video)
This gave me a good laughter, and I'm only 30.
The selection of answers for #9 ("What is your involvement in purchasing?") were incredibly well formulated — one of the best survey questions I've ever seen.
you can not have infinite number of monkeys since there is a finite number of bananas.
http://marcoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/format-fear.jp...
The Data-Centric Modus Operandi
The first metazoa living in permanently anoxic  condition
Mine broke when the eject failed, I used a paper clip to pull it out, but lost the paper clip. When it started smoking I had to pull the floppy's power - thankfully I had the side open to my computer so I didn't have to turn the whole thing off before I caused an actual fire.

I think this was back in the early 2000's.