skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wholeheartedly agree. What's more, learning python and using textmate regularly has ruined me for writing in MS Word... Not that I was particularly attached to it before, but I now find it really hard to think or write with all that junk (mostly broken - I'm looking at you styles) just sitting there.
The making of "The Sartorialist".
Best of both worlds

http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/
Father Bed  –  A Prayer for Father Ped.
We do. I'll send that over to them. Great idea!
How the Top Innovators Keep Winning
My experience is almost exactly the opposite. Most programmers care little to nothing about any sort of CS or theory. I've met successful programmers with years of experience who'd never even heard of even the simplest CS concepts like linked lists. How their language of choice actually works below the surface is a complete black box to them, and they're quite happy to keep it that way.

If you meet a programmer who cares in any way about theory, then they are with all likelihood comfortably in the top 50th percentile and probably also in the top 25th.
49 Hot New Open Source Applications
domain handling: iwantmydomain.com;

hosting: heroku.com;

stack: RoR;

version ctrl: Git;

project management: a TODO, NOTES file in project root;

src ctrl: unfuddle.com (free private repos)
Norway has a unified authentication scheme for government sites, but that's as far as it goes. --If the US wants to do that, fine, but if they think private sites are really going to go for it, they're dreaming.

I wouldn't trust the government to handle identification across multiple sites any more than I trust Facebook or Google.
"That Congresslady got what she deserved?" Have we really come to this?
I just came back from getting a morning coffee for my wife. The place was packed like on a typical Sunday morning, including what looked like a family, all nicely dressed from having stopped in after church. As I was leaving, I overheard a man say to his wife: "Well, if that Congresslady dies, it's God's will."

I normally don't get involved with other people's conversations. Really I don't. Especially when they are of a religious nature. Everyone is entitled to their own religious beliefs, after all. But I couldn't help myself. "Excuse me, I asked?"

The man repeated himself. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, and said so. Then he said something even more incredulous: "That Congresslady got what she deserved. That's what in store for all liberals."

THAT did it.

After reading all the reactionary rhetoric on various blogs and forums this morning, I let him have it. I told him I was a liberal and asked if that meant I was "in store" to get shot, too. I told him that a 9-year old girl and a Republican judge got killed, too. Was that God's will for them, too? Were they liberals who deserved to get killed?

Thankfully, I wasn't the only person letting this jackass make comments like that. A few other people overheard what was going on, and immediately tried to show how inflammatory his comments were. Another woman joined me, and appealed to the guy's wife by saying: "A 9-year old girl was shot, too. Imagine if it was your daughter!" The wife didn't say anything and then quietly said, "Well, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We'll pray for her."

After a few minutes (it felt like an hour), I left. Has it really come to this? "God's will?" "That's what in store for liberals."???
This headline is actually pretty misleading. From what I've seen of the project, it is not about the government issuing online identities. Rather they've realized that people already have identities from services like Facebook and Google as well as banks.

This project is aimed at making it possible for people to interact with government agencies using identities they already have. Some interactions require very little security and knowledge of who a person is (leaving a comment here for example) while others (paying your taxes) require quite a bit.
Funny, the article and these comments seem to miss the point. Credentials for what?

If the job requires execution of a known process – automotive repair or neurosurgery I’d want to make sure I’d hire someone who went to the school that had the best experiential training (i.e. residency with lots of hands-on training.)

If the job requires knowledge of specialized science or engineering computations, I’d select students that have gone through a rigorous curriculum in these subjects.

However, if the job requires creative thinking and searching for unknowns, it’s not clear that a brand name school adds any value. I’d be looking for individuals that are curious, agile, relentless, etc.
Feed them rss containing uniquely generated strings. Then google for the unique strings.

Also, block generic user-agents on rss feeds. Most everyone was able to change theirs for delicious, and we did an insane amount of rss traffic.
Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife, and Hide Your Comments
Is it really in the best interest of collecting taxes to defer authentication (and even authorization) to a third party such as Google, or even banks?
You can also use Varnish ACLs to block the EC2 IP addresses.

And if they have a really obvious user-agent you could block that using Varnish:
http://omninoggin.com/web-development/block-unwanted-spam-bo...

And if you're not afraid of using Varnish's VCL InlineC stuff, then you could add rate limiting to Varnish:
http://drcarter.info/2010/04/how-fighting-against-scraping-u...

Basically... Varnish has become my Swiss army tool for rejecting crap traffic (and caching good traffic obviously).
>"Until the PC goes away, and there's a huge shift to do real work off our phones/tablets/other non-legacy devices, MS will most likely be dominant in terms of market share."

In the past year with Windows Phone and "the next Windows" support for ARM, they have shown just how competitive they intend to be in those markets. They have spent the last 10 years moving toward hardware independence via .NET, and they are shipping it.
This sounds very Orwellian, but I doubt much will become of this. Based on the statement the article attributes to Locke, it sounds like they're selling it to us as a single sign-on provider. Somehow, I doubt this will become as popular as current single sign-on providers such as Facebook or Google without legislation.
We need a publicly-controlled identity infrastructure that's compatible with the Internet. The problem isn't that internet ID is somehow evil, but rather the government.
According to analytics, I've had 20,000 hits to my website in the last 30 days. 75% of those are reported to be running a windows operating system.

As much as I respect the interesting point of view presented in the article, I sometimes wonder if sites like Hacker News and Slashdot don't put us all into some sort of exceptionally nerdy bubble-think.

Like with the last week or so when everything I read seemed to say "google sucks", "lynch google", "burn and raze googles offices so they can never spam search results again"

What was the rest of the world's reaction to this seemingly endless flood of histrionic blog posts about broken google search results? Crickets chirped and a tumbleweed yawned with boredom.

Microsoft isn't dead. From what I see, in the last 30 days Microsoft is a minimum of 75% alive and we'd all be very much richer if we didn't forget that.

With the utmost respect of course.

Without exaggeration, hyperbole will literally be the death of us all.
For flickscanapp.com + thesocialcollective.com

- Email: Multiple accts forwarded to private Gmail

- Bulk Email Send: AuthSMTP (we setup a small server to act as a central SMTP relay to AuthSMTP to save on costs).

- Hosting: Rackspace Cloud + CloudKick. DB Backups pushed to S3. File uploads within apps direct to S3

- Analytics: Google, ChartBeat

- Project Mgmt: Basecamp

- File-Sharing: Dropbox kinda. We use Google Docs so much that everything pretty much lives there.

- Local Backups: Arq (git style backups for OS X that uses S3)

- Instant Messaging: Skype, heavy users of the video conferencing (my co-founder is on the opposite coast) and screen sharing features.

- Media Monitoring: Watchlister.com (my own project), TweetDeck, Google Alerts

- Code: XCode, TextMate

- Version Control: SVN + Versions, Git (but how I wish there was a Version of Versions with Git support).

- Production: Rails, Mysql, Memcached, Mongo, Nginx

- Blog: Wordpress
I agree that it's not a perfect comparison, but there are undoubtably similarities. In both cases, you're working mostly on your own, on a project that you have to define and that is entirely dependent on your personal level of self-motivation. One of the biggest challenges to running a startup seems to be correctly defining the problem on which to work, and the single biggest hurdle to finishing a PhD is coming up with your dissertation topic.
The mere fact he says that is contradictory. If something is dead/not-relevant - people just not talk about it.

We have daily Microsoft dead posts here. Meanwhile Microsoft is far from dead, netting 6 billion in PROFIT each QUARTER. And growing steadily with 20% per year.

Get your common sense right. Microsoft is a revenue stream - XNA can make your code run on phones and XBox alike and you can profit twice with the same codebase. Use the eco-system, do not lose revenue stream out of stupid prejudice.
Regional Dialects Are Alive and Well on Twitter
Give me an interface as nice as Gmail's, and I'll consider it.

Add that to Google's Spam filtering, and the fact that I have to do nothing other than change some DNS records to get email for free, and it's really hard to bother to use something else.
I agree. I play with new languages (I won't claim learning just yet) out of curiosity and as a very productive form of procrastination.
I'm 16, I need gas money, I'm a pretty big deal
I'm 16 and I just got a car. I now have need for money for gas, snowboarding, hobbies etc. I have a job at the movie theater (that sucks terribly), and I hardly get any hours.

I run a website with my friend (relaxist.com), but that site isn't bringing in any money.

Basically I can work for you for less than adult workers. I'm very good at php: architecture, design patterns, etc (even though its becoming outdated).

I am best at xhtml/css. I can work on wordpress themes, and small php projects as well.

Also, I can do PSD to html conversions rather quickly.

So take a chance, give me some work, or give me some ideas on how to earn some dough.

Lately I've thought about fish breeding for profit and had a whole plan worked out until I figured that it wasn't very viable...
Please don't start using this. It already bad enough with the Chrome. It's a nice effect but I don't consider it particularly nice nor user friendly eye candy.
Actual draft of the proposal from June 2010:

http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf

Note that if [generic scary three letter agency] wants to spy on you it's already quite easy for them to do so (see FISA, CALEA, NSLs, Sugar Grove, etc).
The Facebook will lead the pack. It will also try to establish itself as central authentication authority.
Ask HN: Is there a market for WPF/Silverlight freelancers?
Hi guys,

I'm a c++ developer by trade, but I spent the last year or so working on a WPF project for a local client. I really enjoyed working with C#/WPF and would like to freelance full time in this environment.

How does one go about finding clients for freelance work? I'm guessing it's a mixture of networking, online advertising, and job board postings. However, I'm not sure where to start.

Does anyone have any advice on how to get started?

Thank you.
That's an interesting list, if for no other reason that I hadn't considered the differing needs of Euro vs US startups.
The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

— Dr. Linus Pauling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling
This is getting bookmarked. A lot of great examples here.

It'll be nice when clear, personable copy isn't so noteworthy.
Norway has a unified authentication scheme for government sites

The UK has a similar system, although surprisingly few people know about it: http://www.gateway.gov.uk/
I interact with the IRS once a year having to remember a short PIN I created years ago and can't figure out how to change. My bank has a very strong knowledge of who I am partially via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer and because I login to it on a much more frequent basis.

It isn't that my bank would change the role of the IRS, but I'd login to the IRS using a strong identity issued by my bank versus this silly PIN I use today.
I developed something similar here:
http://hipchan.com

And why redis? It's definitely the wrong database for the job.

couchdb is indubitably a better choice here.
I agree 100%. And I send resumes rather than LinkedIn profiles. I've worked in corporates in great teams and HR have been, well, HR (an industry where people generally end up after being unable to do whatever else they wanted to).

But perhaps you don't want to work in an organization where parts of the organization are allowed to suck? Where hiring is considered important enough for resumes to go straight to your manager? There's a not a lot of these places, but they're often the ones with the top talent (and they're likely to find your resume than you have to chase them).
If Apple gets away with this, i expect the Church to demand the same for www.twitter.com/jesus.

Because you know, people do get confused. Like UK's Daily Mail.
How the hell am I supposed to keep working under the table and dodging the IRS, if they're able to track me down because I just posted to Hacker News from this IP address?

God, it gives me a cold chill feeling just thinking about it.
Eh, maybe for a different company.

Another part that plays into this is that you _have_ to patent something, or someone else will. Google pretty much had to register a patent or face getting pwnt someday.
Why? Might as well ask why they go to bars, or socialize at all. If you don't get it, then nobody can answer you.
about a third of my Christian friends on facebook used
direct quotes of the Bible to contradict him

Yes. In the meantime, Fox news is still claiming the position of national spokeschannel for Christianity.

it's to spend more time actually listening to the moderates.

The problem is that I'm not the one that needs to be convinced by the moderates. The moderates need to take action to reach those, such as the parents of Bill Zeller, that actually need convincing.
Wikipedia defines a homoiconic language as a language

in which the primary representation of programs is also a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself

This definition doesn't seem quite right to me. It seems like it would apply to C because C source code is a string which is "a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself".

Wouldn't a better definition be "a language in which the source code and the corresponding abstract parse tree have identical representations" ?
You're correct on all those points. And yet, to someone with no formal training in CS (I'm an arts grad), python is so much more transparent than any of the MS stuff I've had to use. I think it's primarily the predictability of the naming scheme and the resemblance to pseudocode. The command line is not that hard to get your head around, and you get dicts strings etc with the first few chapters of Dive into python or 'How to think the a CS'.

In fact, it may be that these introductory materials are explicit about basic language concepts which makes learning python so easy — they're not focussed on solving your immediate problem (coding X), but solving the problems you will face over the next few years/decades.
Newbies often try to "do it wrong." I also wrote lots of really horrendous BASIC. It was a learning experience. If you think of tab-soup as a Python newbie right of passage, that's your prerogative.
I would actually like to see the ability to have simple documents as leaf nodes. Sometimes bullet point lists aren't quite enough.
The "problem" is that you don't want the job badly enough to submit your resume in the format asked for. And that's only your problem, not theirs.

Businesses are set up to do things a certain way. Often exceptions are fine, equally often, they are not. Since you don't have visibility into exactly why they want it emailed, just follow instructions.

There are many positive ways you can distinguish yourself as a unique snowflake; this is not one of them.
On this topic, are there any other good examples of languages that are as homoiconic as lisp? Or is lisp the logical extreme of what you get when you follow that line to its end, so by definition there can "be only one?"
We've had really good work done by Adam Garner of Trigger Studios - http://www.trigger-studios.com/
Embrace constraints :)

I have linked to another page or perhaps to an Evernote document which is what I used to use for todolists (but their formatting was painful occasionally).

Agreed though, that if they're going to allow notes, the notes should be more full-featured.
Damnit, stop making it look easy.

I've been relearning 
programming
 Java and trying out the Play! framework, and a slashdot/HN clone is to be my first project of substance. I want a few more features, sure, but man... way to make me feel slow.

/Honestly, learning the ins and outs of a web framework of Rails caliber is very time-consuming.
You have to add one to get started, then you can delete it.

Business rule bug...
Maybe he's a Calvinist.
Yes, apparently we have. While I didn't really expect it would be heard in person (and rather doubt it is all that often), this sort of attitude has been fairly easy to find online for some time now.
My dad has worked at a grocery store for almost 33 years, and he's 50 years old. He always made good money (especially for not having a degree), and did a good job, but I never felt like he actually liked his job, especially with all the crap he has to go through from both employees and bosses. He's been salary for a long time, and has worked probably an average of 60+ hours a week for the past 12 years.

This always had a profound effect on me. A long time ago I decided that I would always strive to have a job that I truly liked, something that payed enough but didn't suck the life out of me. I'm in a job that I love now with only a Bachelors, but I kind of got stupid lucky with it. A PhD is really the best ways to secure a job that you'll likely love. You may get paid lower than you'd expect for someone with your skills, but money isn't everything.

I don't know anyone who has gone to school for a PhD just to get a better paying job when they get out.
Do other Usenet groups have similar lists? The article implies yes; I haven't seen any.
> I know they seemed dangerous as late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed.

Didn't get it. They seemed dangerous because Paul wrote an essay?
Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Abrashs-Graphics-Programming-S...) includes a good sized chunk written about Quake as it was being developed. Even though the book is now about fifteen years old I still count it among my favorite programming books because it is the only one I've found that decently narrates the mindset of optimization, of turning a problem on its head in order to find a better solution.

Because the book is essentially a series of collected magazine articles the section on Quake development will have one chapter that reads "hey, this is what we're going to do!" followed by "well, that didn't work, but this does!". One important aspect of post-mortems and development journals that I find is frequently missing is a detailed look at what didn't work technically and why, which it has in spades.

edit: The book is also available as a free download: http://www.drdobbs.com/high-performance-computing/184404919
You're actually advocating screening employers based on how well they respond to you breaking their recruitment process?
Buying plastic with plastic: 30% of cosmetic surgery patients make under $30K
It seems everybody is opposed to this sort of thing, but I love the idea of having a single piece of ID that works universally. I guess there are issues with identity theft being made easier, but I think the benefits outweigh the "privacy" concerns.
Good point on the cherry-picking of staff members. I could definitely see Google releasing something like Google Me based on their Gmail and if they did something like Buzz, you'd have your entire company (Google App domain) in the open.

In this day and age, information travels fast enough that trying to keep a lid on your top talent is probably useless, but still good to have that information under your control.
email me at calebjbradshaw@gmail.com

I have work converting psd's to wordpress themes.
The PhD contract is just a single contract, and a position only becomes permanent after a third contract in a number of years I think.

Once you get your PhD, and you're rehired at the university, you get a different position, starting the counter from 0 again.

But no, if Norway had the three contract rule as I described, the people you know would have been fired already.
The new german ID is supposed to serve for online idenfication (only if the user wants to). The accompanying closed-source "ID app" was broken on the day of its release, they were not handling SSL certificates properly.
I found this to work very well.

Only thing is you need to append keys randomly, say one out of 5 requests, in different locations if possible. And you should hand out 20 or so different unique strings.

Then use google alerts to find them republishing your stuff an send DMCA takedown notices with Google (don't send them a c&d first so you have the element of surprise and maximum chance of causing real pain). If they don't take care of the DMCA issue with Google, Google will remove their pages from the index. They won't know why but their site will slowly die.
Isn't sending resumes to HR doing it wrong, anyway? They can't ever hire you (unless, for some reason, you want to work in the HR department), but they can decline to pass on your resume to those who can. Better to correspond directly with a hiring manager.
That's a fun idea. Thanks.
Since when is capitalism is broken? Seems like during great recessions everyone wants Keynesian systems and when things are going great we want a classical economy.
Remind me again of why we "need" a solution such as this? All this screeching reminds me of the people wanting a centralized solution to spam in the 1990s via government control or micropayments. We don't hear from them anymore because of spam filters and increased storage and bandwidth.

My google account has double authentication now, telephone as well as a second email address, and serves as a central repository for all my other accounts across the web if I happen to forget a password. I can change providers if I want as well. Further, my VISA card is tied to my identity for purchases and donations. But anything that doesn't involve that isn't tied to my identity.

So please just go shove it with your "need". It just makes me furious that this is even being proposed, it's totally unnecessary meddling and we all KNOW it will be abused.
Top salesmen sell company products - average salesmen need new next products
will do - thanks
I happen to use twitter as a live RSS replacement. For at-a-glance news and tech titles, it's great.
Not just the development community as a whole, but how many of their own developers would just walk out the door.