skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started early but slow - a friend had a Commodore 64 and we were writing simple BASIC programs at about 7, and another friend had an MS-DOS system with QBASIC. Slightly after then, my family got a Windows 3.1 based home computer, and I used to log on to BBSes and download other people's QBASIC code as well as writing simple (non-graphical) menu systems and the like. I then learned x86 assembler and began writing programs that combined QBASIC and x86 assembler. I also had some exposure to C via the compiler built into a 2D DOS-based graphics package my father used for work.

Around 1996, the family computer got Windows 95, and HotJava came out, and I got hold of the JDK (a very big download on a modem - I had to wait all night), and I learned Java and made a few applets. I also got a Visual Basic CD that came with a book about it. About a year later, I was able to set it up as a dual boot system, and installed Linux, giving me easier access to gcc, and I learned C. I also learned to audit code for security bugs and found a few in popular IRC daemons - after reporting them to the developers, I ended up becoming a regular contributor to the development of several ircds.

I got my first paid programming job on my 15th birthday (after applying to lots of places), for a lawyer who was running a software business on the side, developing native Windows apps.
Selling Android apps in the Market? It's linked to AdSense too. So, if Google kills your website for AdSense abuse, you also won't get paid for your apps which are selling for $0.99.

If you get banned from web AdSense, you also get banned from Youtube and from selling apps in the Android Market.

That's an ugly monopoly.

(edit) source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=590...
> The united states is not at all open to immigration.

It's not open to all immigration, which is different.

IMHO, it would be much easier to get founder's visas and the like if they weren't tied (by their advocates) to allowing mass immigration of low-income folk.
I think that the title of that post does not do justice to the interview. Old-skool vs New School is a tiny part of an interview representative of the psychology of a virus writer. Virus writing seems like the most brilliant way to kill your creativity. Or in other words making your creativity a slave of the most boring of all arts: destruction.
Six deaths a year?

I went looking to verify that statistic thinking it can't be right, but I didn't find what I expected. According to the source below:

"Approximately 27 school aged children die in school bus accidents every year. Seven of these are passengers in a school bus and twenty are pedestrians. Of these twenty pedestrians, fourteen are killed by school buses"

In other words it seems your child is twice as likely to be run over by its own schoolbus rather than to die inside it in a collision!

http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statis...
That sums it up very well.
I was eight.

I got a C64 for Christmas but then-surprisingly the reading-head of the bundled datassette player wasn't properly tuned and thus I couldn't load and play more than a limited few of all the games that came with the C64.

A translated version of the C64 user's guide / BASIC programming manual—I didn't know English then—came with the computer and I started reading it, typing little programs, tweaking them, and then eventually writing clones of my own, later variations.

By the time the datassette problem was identified, sent to be fixed, and returned to me I had found programming to be much more fun than the available games. I did play them and enjoyed many but I'm not much of a gamer even today, really.

(And yes, tuning the reading-head was dead easy DYI job as I learned shortly after.)
I completely agree with this. In fact I'll go another step.

I'm willing to bet that the people lobbing the thinly veiled insults do so because that's easier than putting their stuff out there and having it ripped to shreds by other people lobbing thinly veiled (or not so thinly-veiled) insults.

I've been to enough conferences and been in enough backchannels to see the kind of people who never get up in front of crowds and share what they know sit there are rip on the experience level or presentation skills of those that are putting themselves out there.

My feeling is that if you're not into self-promotion and you don't like the fame then that's very cool of you, but looking down on others for wanting to make a name for themselves is not cool.
Not getting into this case in particular, but

> the manner in which violations are handled, and the absence of a meaningful "feedback loop" where users of the system could be warned and have the opportunity to modify their behavior to follow the rules.

Would also allow the bad guys to modify their behavior as well.
The battle of Towton: Nasty, brutish and not that short
Distractions are a big one. There are too many times I need to walk away from a problem to re-approach it later with a fresh perspective. We have a revolving office in a co-working space and I'm alone here most of this week. I've probably spent 4 hours cleaning it over the past three days, and not only has it helped me tremendously in organizing my thoughts, but the place is utterly spotless.

I completely agree on the working hours. I do have the benefit of being able to work at home, but 8-5 is killing me. If I don't exhaust myself at the end of the day, I can't easily fall asleep. If I can't easily fall asleep and have to get up to be "ready to start" at 8, don't expect me to be productive until around lunchtime... in which then it's lunchtime. So really, don't expect me to be productive until nearly 1PM unless there's a gun to my head. I haven't solved the sleep issue since I was 13, so that's not going to fix itself any time soon. However we can change the hours to be more around when I'm productive, or relax the hours (the process) and emphasize the result.

#3 and #11 are equally important to me. I need to make some very difficult design decisions that will be very expensive if they're wrong. I don't want them to be wrong and add additional cost somewhere -- whether it be correcting it down the road, or designing something that no one ever uses.
tight : loose
find : lose

Sorry to be "that guy," but I'm seeing this error with increasing frequency, and it would be a real shame to lose such a useful word.
More like badass of the 20th century.
Today's $60 1TB drive would have cost $1 trillion in the '50s
3) Google bills my credit card for hundreds of dollars.

Did you complain? Were you issued a refund? I'm trying to understand how Google justifies withholding past earnings from the site owner and continuing to profit from the YouTube content. If they incur real costs from refunding advertisers, it makes some sense. But if they keep everyone's money, they have an incentive to abuse the system.
before the SEC changed its disclosure rules, firms could release earnings to a select group of investors before it released them to the open market. if you were in this select group, you were basically guaranteed trading profits.

theoretically, facebook or twitter could do the same.
Nice question, have an upvote. ;)
Neither do I, and I wrote the extension. I did it for fun to see what could be done with speech input.
It's infuriating that one may setup a company for the sole purpose of holding patents as property. The entire purpose of the patent system is to guarantee inventors market opportunity with the incarnation of their patent. It's exploitation, and it should be illegal.
Luck is Hard Work - Hustling is Everything
I don't think I'm that far off. According to the calorie counter on the exercise machines, that's what I do while warming up. (I do 1 minute full intensity, 30 second rest intervals, which prevents the puking.)

Your own link suggests 12 minutes of vigorous biking will burn 200 cals as well as 10 minutes of boxing.

http://www.fitsugar.com/health/tools/calorie_burner_input
Joe Konrath Needs To Shut The Fuck Up
Anyone got advice on how to go out and do this? How to calculate fair prices?
Except, Google would then be in the customer service business. I’m not saying they couldn’t throw resources against that endeavor, but think of the time waste of being on the phone vs. having automated responses based on the keywords in someone’s complaint. Cuts down on time/cost from their POV. Not justifying what Google did, just sayin.

It's maddening though in a time when people -- one would hope -- would have access to better customer service, yet, it feels things are as bad as ever. It’s hard enough to reach someone on an e-commerce site, forget social networks (1-800-FACEBOOK ain’t happening anytime soon). Little different scenario in this case, but you get the gist.

The only time they seem to make it easy to reach out to a real person is when you need/want to buy something.
Ask HN: New Year's Resolutions / goal monitoring sites
Okay, so New Year's resolutions can be fairly pathetic, but I can't help asking whether the HNers will partake, and (more to the point) what apps y'all might be using to try and stay on track.

I quickly googled (well, asked the duck) and it seems there are a number of options. eg:

http://habitforge.com/

http://www.joesgoals.com/

http://www.createnewhabits.com [no demo without signup? shame!]

http://rootein.com/

Does anyone want to recommend these or any other online tools?
Good cholesterol levels | normal-cholesterol-levels.com
The rule is "Don't directly or indirectly tell people to click on your ads." The reason for this is that loyal audiences will, if you tell them to click on ads, click on ads to support you. This is exactly what happened. The CTR goes through the roof, the advertisers get billed lots of money, and no commerce takes place.
A lot of people naturally want to promote themselves, whether or not it does any good. You can see this behavior at work when people are excited to be on TV even if it's a 5 second sound bite about a car wreck, or 15 years ago when everyone* posted endless streams of pictures of their cats on their home pages (see facebook).

In some cases people may look down on this behavior (see your friends), this may lead those who participate in it to justify the behavior as necessary (see actors).

In other cases it may be quite necessary for their source of income (see motivational speakers, underemployed consultants).

I suppose you'd have to decide for yourself which category these folks might belong in.

Seeing an uptick there might be the result of the heat currently in the sector. The behavior certainly did seem to peak in 99/00 with the last market bubble. Anecdotally, self promoters often seem to flock to over heated sectors - people that aren't johnny come latelies may just be getting caught up by seeing others do it.
Ask yourself: If she didn't have the headers, could you tell what order the list was in (good to bad or bad to good) or where the line was drawn?

I sure couldn't.
That's a lot of data to be uploading to the cloud, but I read you.

I wasn't saying it wasn't doable, but rather it's not just as easy as grabbing your laptop and a $15 phone, which is how it's being reported, for the most part.
And probably the single most important statistic: weighs close to 30,000 lbs without 80+ bodies on board.
Clickable:

http://habitforge.com/

http://www.joesgoals.com/

http://www.createnewhabits.com

http://rootein.com/
My sister is both a bacteriologist and a doctor.

She knows about HeLa cells, but she has forgotten who Henrietta Lacks was (she only heard the name once or twice in class).
Cory Booker: The Mayor of Twitter and Blizzard Superhero
Skype Explains Outage In-Depth
Very well done, thanks guys. It helped me with an issue I was having.
Today no one pays tax on stock until they sell it. What this guy seems to be proposing is that no one except founders pays tax on stock until they sell it. He calls that "distributive justice" but I have a hard time seeing the justice in taxing the same asset differently depending on what hat you happen to be wearing.
2010 VIm Guide Roundup
Now, they either start with Javascript or learn to program on their graphing calculators. They are usually interested in graphical apps, so Java/Objective-C sometimes too.
Greece: plenty of entrepreneurs, not enough cooperation
What is wrong with design and Scrum?
My high-school (The Science Academy of South Texas) offered computer science for incoming freshmen and later a CS 2 class. I assumed that this was normal because there was a CS AP exam.
Ask HN: Which website do you use for following CES 2011?
One minor nit: Backbone.js requires Underscore.js (and json2.js for legacy browser JSON support if Backbone.sync is used), which doubles the size of the include. Obviously not a deal-breaker, since both combined are about a third the size of jQuery.
Envy Labs is doing awesome things. They are also a frequent sponsor for Central FL's (sporadic) tech events.
See: MagicRuby, OrlandoBarCamp, etc.
Fallen Search Engines of 2010
My main sources of news are:

1) HN for news about technology, startups, and some programming

2) Reddit mainly for entertainment now, maybe a tiny bit of news, psychology articles

3) New Yorker for interesting articles about topics I would never think of learning about.

4) Economist to get a good idea of all important things going on in the world (I don't read them cover to cover, more just skim. Reading a full issue would take almost a day of my time).

5) Ny Times and WSJ rss, mainly just read the headlines and read occasional articles if they catch my eye
Heroku for...
Great book, but how often it has already been posted on HackerNews?
Same here - I was influenced in my first BASIC program by the Wargames movie and "Firefox" (Clint Eastwood, not Mozilla) and had a password protected diagram of an ascii uber figher jet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNixDlRoMvA
By "we" I meant reikonomusha and myself, as the context made plain. I don't see how calling something an ugly hack isn't a form of calling it bad, but never mind.

Numeric and string literals are all that were ever under discussion. `OverloadedStrings` is a language extension, not a compiler extension; it is a candidate for inclusion in later specifications, not in the new Haskell 2010. The Ghc supports it with a language pragma. That it, and the associated IsString class, didn't exist in Haskell 98, the previous specification, is obviously due to the fact that there was not widespread use of types like ByteString and Text for handling text; if there had been it would have been, surely; the idea is pretty straightforward.
Around the time humans invented agriculture.
I do think the Ruby community takes it to the next level. I've commented several times about how I find the Ruby community to be the most irritating.

Is it unique to the Ruby community? Certainly not, but if you find yourself around a better class of people, you may notice that they're not Ruby developers ;-)
Started at 8, 1982 Apple IIc/e. Stopped for 13 years to wait for better graphics and the internet.
Uhm. Someone should tell them that.

If I go to, say:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096928/

there is a "watch now on Amazon Video On Demand" link to the right of the page, rent from Blockbusters, buy from Amazon, etc etc. Even pre-acquisition they had "buy" links to the right, which I assumed were Amazon affiliate links.
Cheat sheets in general are pretty awesome. I, for one, have five or six of them plastered all around my desk at work, for easy access. vi shortcuts, CIDR notation, TCP/IP stack... things that I need to access frequently are most easily read from a simple cheat sheet.

This one's going up for sure!
I agree with your sentiment but I'm not sure I agree with your point.

The problem with taking the attitude of "its all about recognition" is it ignores the fact that (a) other people are willing to take credit for stuff you do and (b) others might take the stuff you did in a direction you don't like.

On the first point it shouldn't be news to anyone that there are people who will take credit for things they didn't do. The way those people succeed is by finding things that were done by people who "just want to hack stuff" and then claiming they did it instead.

On my second point people who have a claim to helping with your work can hijack it if you don't take your proper credit. Many problems with RSS came from the fact that Dave Winer claimed ownership of it and took it in a completely different direction from its RDF roots. I don't want to rehash that technical argument but that fact remains most of the people who followed Winer did so because they thought he "invented RSS" (or "was the Father of..."). The reason people thought that is because Ramanathan Guha didn't self promote like Winer did.

So there are consequences to self-promotion that extend beyond one's personal recognition. If you don't take the credit and leadership role due to you someone else often times will.
I was 10. Got started by copying GWBASIC code out of magazines.
The author abused his relationship with Google. He treated
his most important customer as a cash cow. He ignores the
fact that many of the advertisers footing the bill will be
just like him - sole traders and small businesses barely
scraping by.

That's unnecessarily harsh. The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind: by endorsing the ads that were being displayed, he would get more money, but they would get more, serious, traffic. Suppose he had a private contract with an advertiser. Then that advertiser would applaud him saying 'please visit companyX: they sell stuff you may very well want to buy from them and they support this site'. There is no reason to suppose the intention was different in this case.

It seems you can display Google's ads, but should never comment on them in any way, not even to say 'Gosh, I really like how they so accurately list companyA, companyB and companyC as relevant for my site.' The first rule of using AdSense is, you don't talk about AdSense?
The Best (and Worst) Startup Logos of 2010
Feathers fly over 'Angry Birds' teaser on Windows Phone site
Put AdSense on your site (if you haven't already been banned) and look at what ads are being displayed. Then, go and approach those advertisers directly.

For pricing, decide how you want to get paid. You have 3 basic choices: CPM (per 1000 ad/page views), CPC (per click) and CPA (per action, i.e. someone clicks your ad and then buys something from that site). The easiest for you will be CPM. So, set your prices low, like at $2 per 1000 ad views. Raise prices based on demand. My best piece of advice is that you will not get rich from one site. You need to have several websites making a few bucks a day to make a living.

Also, those advertisers are most likely advertising on other ad platforms as well. AdSense is king of CPC, but other sites specialize in CPM and CPA. Check out Commision Junction to get some ideas. There are many ad networks out there. And, if you want to run your own ad network, there is open source software to help you setup and manage that too.
11. I wanted to crack shareware games so I learned some C, Assembler and some Softice debugger skills.
So if users clicking on ads without the intention of buying is click fraud - what about when a user accidentally opens one of those lame ads on a youtube video when they were actually trying to close the ad? I certainly had no intention of giving the advertiser any money and yet it probably registers on their end as a click.
If you're someone who /hasn't/ had good experiences pair programming, this sounds a little like saying he just needs to find a True Scotsman.
Now that his accounts have been suspended, can he even pull the videos from YouTube? He may have to send a dmca takedown notice just to stop YouTube from profiting off of his misery.

As an aside, now that he has been 'sacked' by google, google's making 100% of the advertising revenue from his videos instead of some lower amount. That's very convenient for google.
Don't hang out with people who put others down. Whether they are right or wrong is immaterial. Most of them just want to feel superior and their negativity can do you absolutely no good. If you do hang out with them, you'll become one of them before you know it.
>and continuing to profit from the YouTube content.

I believe ads are only shown on youtube content with the permission of the copyright owner. There don't appear to be any ads on his videos at the moment.

Here's an example video of his: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ma_hZ00Nqk&feature=playe...
But the vast majority of the seized funds are from a source that is demonstrably not click fraud (his Youtube videos). The author shows the injustice of Google's heavy-handed, binary method of labeling people fraudsters and taking thousands without a fair hearing.
He also knew something was wrong with encouraging AdSense clicks as noted from the article:

I did get the odd subscriber sending me an email saying that he had clicked loads of adverts. This is called demon clicking. I would reply that I would prefer them to only click on adverts they were interested in.

I allow my subscribers to leave comments on the films. If one of them mentioned clicking on adverts to show their appreciation - well it’s a nice gesture, but I would edit their posting to remove the mention.

It sounds to me like he enjoyed his visitors padding his AdSense revenue, but took a look-the-other-way attitude to their getting click-happy. I'm sorry, but it sounds like he sacked himself. When you work for someone else you have little control over getting sacked. When you work for yourself you shoulder more responsibility and control of your fate (as many on HN know), which includes knowing the terms of partner agreements you enter into. It's not like Google buries their zero tolerance policy for fraudulent click behavior under hard to read fine print.
The Latest Groupon Funding Figures: $950 Million At $4.75 Billion
When taking a big fall rock climbing the advice is to relax, enjoy the fall and shout something. Animal noises are the most fun, expletives the most common. The shouting is to make sure you're breathing out as you fall onto your harness rather than breathing in, and to give you something to concentrate on so you don't tense up in fear.

I'm not really sure why it helps, but I can certainly say it does. I know that when I panic and go stiff it hurts more as my tense body hits the rock. Even when in a similar mental state, hitting the rock with a relaxed body is less painful.
PS3 Master Key Found and PS3 Dongle ID Key Generator Released
I've always thought for some people, destruction is a form of self-expression. Sometimes it is the only way they know how to create.
This seems like a good argument against passing laws in response to a crisis.

(See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_act )