skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know Mark well and we even worked together on Genevine for a bit. He's one of the brightest people I know. Seriously, he gets things done fast and understands business along with tech. They're mostly projects, he knows the distinction as shown below in a comment. It's great to build things and tinker. Eventually one of them makes sense to you, takes off a bit, a bigger vision presents itself, and you turn it into a startup. Some of the comments here gave him crap for his track record. That scares me because it might prevent people from building things. On the other hand, I think the entrepreneurship community needs to do a better job distinguishing from projects=> startups. Startups involve customers depending on you, peoples well being via salary/career as employees, possible investor's returns, and a lot of other serious responsibility. We need to emphasize the responsibility that comes with it. In closing though, keep in mind facebook started as a fun project. Zuck had built a ton of things by 19. Eventually there was a point where it turned into a startup. Maybe it's fair to say the turning point of when a project becomes a startup is when the livelihood of others depends upon said "project". Really curious to hear others' thoughts. (Sorry for long rant mode. I'm on my way to the airport on my iPhone. Will probably make some of this subject matter one of my first articles for 2011 after getting some comments here)
Steve Jobs Understands Team Building
Yeah, these rankings are complete and utter bullshit.
Actually it all comes down to a simple choice - Do you want to take the red pill, or the blue pill....
Yeah, ugh, lots of stuff to fix. Not sure why the .org site isn't working anymore.

Ramamia was renamed Genevine last year ish.
As someone who has done flash programming for the past 10 years I've never trusted this index. While I primarily work in objective-c these days, I can tell you from the size of the communities, to the amount of books that have been written, to the [very large number of jobs](http://jobsearch.monster.com/PowerSearch.aspx?q=flex&tm=...) in that field that this index just doesn't make sense to me.
thank you very much! big is http://avecora.com - I've been told it's too big.

threewords.me was an MVP I built in three hours (two of them being design) that just randomly took off. never really meant it to be anything huge.
First, I'm assuming that they can't track usage. Now they can, but if everyone encrypts everything, it will no longer be possible. And filtering or slowing down TLS is not really feasible, because of e-commerce. I'm not certain of this point, but I'm reasonably sure.

Second, why the hell should one bit cost me more than another? Or come slower than another? Because it's part of bittorent transaction instead of a video stream?

Third, why the freaking hell should it be okay for my ISP to spy on me? (Just in case it's not clear: spying is requiered for prioritization)
Réveillon du jour de l'an
FWIW, I'm 32. I guess you can go chasing girls in night clubs when you're older, but it's way easier to do that stuff when you're young.

Similarly it's possible for people to wait until their 40s to have kids, but I'd say it's far easier to have them when you're young and have the energy.
I don't know if I agree with their methodology; YouTube, Blogger, and MSN are probably not the best source of information about the programing community.
How did they prove in court that it was planted there by him ? After he gave his laptop away, everything could have happened to it. Maybe just a cheap trick to punish him for something they couldnt 'prove'.
When I was young, I wanted to become an astronaut.
My friends and I did a "Beard-tober" a year ago -- no shaving for the entire month of October. It didn't change my life - I just looked like a guy with a light colored and somewhat patchy beard.
As they saturate the market, quality pressure will increase.
Excellent, I really admire such young prodigies and all. Points that come to my mind upon reading it,
[x] The likes of Bill Gates,Steve jobs,Larry Page,Warren Buffett and all did like 1 startup. You can easily achieve 25 by age what 40.
[x] I never saw any webpage created by them advertising there personality.

But again you are only 17.
I think a big part of the problem is that the general public doesn't really understand how good software is written. It's a confusing issue, of course, and there's hardly any agreement among developers either. But the notion of a clean separation between "idea" and "execution" seems less prevalent among people who actually write the code. In my experience, the idea and execution are almost indistinguishable by the time a meaningful program has been created.

Certain types of app development, I think, are a creative act more akin to writing a book than developing a very specific, patentable technology. Sorry to torture an analogy, but this has helped shape my thinking lately... imagine two writers are at a dinner party, and one tells the other "hey, I've been writing a book about Beowulf - except this time, I'm telling the story from the point of view of the beast." The other writer thinks it's a cool idea, and (unbeknownst to writer #1) goes off and codes (er, writes) it up.

Clearly, writer #2 has done a crappy thing, but would you call it theft? The reason I like thinking of it this way is that the idea was worth something, but really just as a starting point. The two books produced by the two writers will be dramatically different, even starting from this identical premise. Furthermore, I think that the creative process of actually taking a one sentence idea and turning it into a 300+ page novel will produce an outcome that removes the separation of idea and execution - they will be two different products, two related but ultimately different ideas.

Unless someone went through another writer's book or screenplay and paraphrased sentence by sentence, or perhaps deconstructed the plot to an extreme level of detail and rewrote it changing names and locations only, I'd be disinclined to give much credence to a claim "he stole my idea for a novel", mainly because I'm not sure an idea, in a general sense, is worth all that much, and by the time it has been turned into an actual novel, it will always have been transformed into something different.

Of course, I don't really know the truth about what happened between the winklevosses and zuckerberg, and of course the movie is an entertaining work of fiction and should be treat "stole". He evidenty used none of the code. Did he go through screen by screen and implement all the mock-ups? If so, that would seem like theft to me. Or did he just run with a very general idea and produce something ultimately very different from what anyone else would have produced - different because two creative types will always produce different products, and better because zuck is far more creative than the winks, and capable of executing on his vision as well.

Ultimately, I suspect that the winks got the best outcome they could possibly have hoped for. Hard to believe their "social network idea" would have been worth $65 million. These ideas were a dime a dozen.
> but I found it extremely annoying to have to 'reset' my hand position every time I wanted to type text in insert mode.

What do you mean, please? Do you mean you were resting your right finger over H?
As posted to a minimalist blog.
I'm not criticizing higher education. My tongue-in-cheek comment was a reference to the book The Man Who Knew Infinity where G H Hardy expressed fear that teaching Ramanujan the details of math might stump his genius by making him feel less confident in his abilities.

I'm also expressing my frustration of not writing down my life goals when I first entered college...but even if I went back in time and asked my younger self what those goals were: "Intern at Revision3!? Man, you think you have it all figured out. I don't know how else to say this man, but..."

and I just made myself feel sad, in a nostalgic way.
This man can really grow a beard, well done!

Most men only have one or two styles they could pull off and unfortunately it takes a while to find the right one…I suspect that's a big reason why many won't even try. A light beard isn't usually too great, either, but you can always dye it and use an eyebrow pen to retouch inbetween treatments.
I'd love to grow all these beards, but unfortunately I have the facial-hair-growing capability of Ethan Hawke (except I had enough sense to give it up when it didn't pan out).
If you are leveling in real life sometimes you wake up and see emptiness of this all. Sure, what you achieved in life provides comfort for your body but body is relatively easy to comfort if mind is happy.

If you are playing game all the time there is not much time you have to be "awake" and you may even never be fully "awake" to notice and appreciate your handicapped life.

People can have handicapped life even when they don't play games. They just stay for years in the same place despite their apparent efforts.
New Entrepreneurs Think Investor Money is All Fun
Formal job applications.
Banned brownies not the only problem in school lunches
Top startup trends of 2010
"The Ruby community" is as poorly defined a term as the "white community" or the "American community."
Yeah ... it saddens me that the only thing I could muster is the "The Pencil", and even that would look funny on me. Oh well, at 24 I guess it's time I accept that I won't be able to grow a beard :)
Thanks, Mark. You have answered my question.:)
I think Branson may not typify the average human ;)
What is this built in? And does it use any Open Source libraries.

I know that you can do facial tracking in OpenFrameworks.
I could see some laptops overheating with that, besides it looking ridiculous and making your activity even more suspicious.
Come on, he's only 17. Why do he needs to focus? He was just doing this for fun. As he grow, he'll have more the sense of business and the will to make money/create a company and will focus on one product.

Nevertheless, this will give him varied experience that will improve his choice and selection later.
Really appreciate the kind words, Jason. Thanks :)

Some thoughts: one pretty important metric for determining whether it's a startup or not is ramen profitability. Not when the project owners' livelihood depends on the project, but when it can depend on the project if needed. However, the caveat is when it isn't profitable at all but still considered a startup (like when a lot of time and money is put in but it hasn't entered that stage), in which case the determination is more murky. Thoughts?
Juce:
http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce.php

It makes cross-platform native app development easy, and is a huge leg up for audio work.
video + canvas + v8 js engine

2011 we will see in-browser video editing
Considering that he has a business and therefore money, he's very likely to be able to do all these things and better than his peers.
The Mysterious Case of the ‘iPad 2′ Cases
You picked home ownership and you pick food according to your income. If you fail at your job you will starve and loose your home because you entangled your burdens with your paycheck.

Perhaps his friend choses food and roof far cheaper then he could afford in order to have more time to spend freely not on paying for those.
Ach, sorry, didn't realize mine was unlisted. Ok, I tried using the HackerNewsers contact link, we'll see if that gets through.
I'm 19 and got nothing more than a Google Summer of Code and some halfdecent apps. Makes me feel insecure :(
I suspect the trick is to grow a big unruly beard and then plan how you're going to cut it. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get almost a dozen styles out of one beard simply by trimming a little, taking a picture, then trimming a little more until you get to the next style, and so on until the last picture might be the soul patch. With enough planning (and the right genetics) you could do all of his styles in 2011.
So it is preferable to participate in real life instead of game because it is uglier?
When creating a 2d grid array with all values the same, slicing one row multiple times works way faster than creating each row for each column.

for(var y=h;y>=0; y--) row.push(0);
for(var x=w; x>=0; x--) grid[x] = row.slice(0);

It seems to me that this method should work without any problems, but I may be wrong..
Minimalism as a viable intellectual strategy: a rebuttal
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Acknowledging that you're an idiot is the first step :) It means that whether you're good or not, you know enough to know that you can never stop working at it, and that's a good trait to have.

If you like, I can review your resume privately and let you know an idea of your chances, as well as make any recommendations to help make yourself more attractive to good tech employers.
But what we'd really like is to be driving their cars that run on air.
The Next Web Has a Brand New Look
Book Lovers Network : Twitter like Rails App.
Yeah, I kept finding myself trying to use 'hjkl' like arrow keys, then when I went into insert mode I would have to move my hand back (and lose my train of thought). Basically, 'jkl;' feels more intuitive to me. Hardcore vim users will probably be aghast at remapping something as basic as cursor movement and say that I should "learn to do it right". But it makes more sense to me, and I haven't found it to be any less efficient.
This is exactly the kind of materials PR agencies will churn out for companies. Some are better done than others, but in the end the only reason this story was produced is to get exposure for the company being mentioned. This one's pretty good in that not only does it promote the materials themselves, but it also has an angle on why professors should look into writing for them as it can exceed their university salary. And what a score that they managed to get their piece placed in Forbes.
In retrospect, it probably would have been a good thing.
I wasted a heap of time on WoW as a teenager, certainly I could't seen myself doing that now but looking back I can't say I have bad memories of those years. Could have I been doing something more productive? Probably. But would have it gave me the same level of enjoyment? Questionable.
They are risky investments in projects which supposedly have high rates of return.
An article about the psychology of gaming which I found quite interesting:

http://ifat-glassman.blogspot.com/2009/11/work-games-and-sel...

Personally I'm finding my interest in games is waining. A whole bunch of very impressive AAA games came out this year - in the past I would have played all of them, this year I only played Bad Company 2 and Halo Reach. I think I no longer have the time/energy to make that initial investment in a game, where you jump through a bunch of frustrating hoops until the fun starts and/or you feel immersed in the game world. However, I still enjoy the competition online - outsmarting other humans in a game of skill and strategy. So I play Bad Company 2 on Live frequently, but I don't pursue the social component of it (friendlists, clans etc). I'm not sure if I'll ever get bored of that.

And for that reason I avoid WoW like the plague: endless human competition, massive social aspect. Bound to be addictive (mind you, i'm not sure what you actually do in WoW gameplay. the adverts are all cutscenes)
Good read. I'd like to add that a lot of the good parts of WoW, (PvP, Social Interaction, Character Customization) have equal or better equivalents in other games that take up far less time. League of Legends, Call of Duty, Counterstrike, Warcraft/Starcraft can all easily be played with friends and in moderation.

Devils Advocate:

Who are we to say what a "real" accomplishment is. Maybe spending 6-8 hrs in a virtual world every day makes that world real to someone. If that world becomes reality then goals met in the virtual world are real accomplishments to them. In the grand scheme of things isn't life just trying to be happy killing time until we die. If I go to the gym every day but spend most of my life miserable is my life any more fulfilling than someone who spends 8hrs a day playing WoW and loving it?
The fonts you're using are really ugly, at least to me. Even a default Verdana would have been better.
After using MongoDB with Mongoid I strongly disagree with the premise that over the next 5 years SQL databases will be the default and NoSql limited to certain niches. And I know SQL better than most. Alter table ... or db:migrate no more for me.
Facebook passes Google as most popular site on the Internet, two measures show
I'm using Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP and I'm experiencing the same problem...
I really like it here in Nashville, TN and the cost of living is lower than most of the other cities mentioned. We have a lot of momentum behind tech entrepreneurship here right now too.
The main page claims "the ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors" yet the definition page says that all they do is search for "$LANGUAGE programming" on a few sites and add up the hits. The sites are Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, MSN, and Yahoo. None of these are particularly relevant to the industry and search results could be affected by a wide variety of factors. I don't see how any conclusive meaning can be derived from this methodology.

I find it strange, for example, that Scala is not in the top 50 and Clojure is not in the top 100, while languages I've never heard of make the top 20.
Crowdsourced Front-End Dev Interview Questions
I love the idea, but why does WoW need to do this? Any game could do it. A fitness club is especially well-placed to accomplish it.

Hmm... I think it could also work well as a Facebook app.

I'm going to mull this over and see what I can come up with. This could really drive society to improve itself in all kinds of ways.
Great post Alex. I've recently started to experiment with Clojure on SemWeb apps, RDF, SPARQL, etc. In your post you talk about how Clojure enables you to abstract better than Java. I was just hoping you would discuss a specific example (maybe even in a production environment) instead of how many LOCs you saved.
Yes you are right, May be the little "credit" is nothing but I'm working to add more info about the authors and how it works ,Thanks for critique i loved it.
Probably redundant to mention it here but hands down and by a country mile: news.ycombinator.com aka Hacker News.
Home - Aya
Congress badly damaged public capital markets with Sarbanes Oxley, which is stifling the most important exit avenue for startups-- the IPO.
It seems like the problem is the addiction. The author seems to acknowledge this is the title, but goes on to mostly treat WOW or gaming addiction like it is semi-unique. Granted, blizzard intentionally includes many elements that are more or less designed for addiction (quite common in the industry/genre) and that intention is troubling.

But otherwise it does seem like it shares a lot of traits with other addictions. You can waste your life away watching TV, playing games, shooting heroin, blogging, gambling, refreshing facebook, whatever. To be sure certain of those tasks seem much more likely to lead to addiction (warcraft/heroin) but it's clearly not the only factor.

There is also the question of whether addiction can be a pre-existing condition more or less waiting to go off. I am far from a psychologist, but I know that drug addicts often suffer from depression or other mental problems and it seems likely that instead of the drugs causing them, at least some times it was the condition that lead to the drugs (though I'm sure they become heavily intertwined). Are WOW addicts more likely to be depressed or agoraphobic? It seems quite possible. Would they have all developed this because of the game? I don't know.

I would like to see the industry self police itself a little better. Online games may always be addictive, but are lots of "brain hacks" intentionally being used by the genre to extend lifetime engagement. They're easiest to see in the more transparent copies - Zynga, foursquare, xbox live achievements. Maybe they should need to cut the most manipulative of these out or suffer chinese style regulation. We do, after all, try to shield kids from alcohol and tobacco.
His wife supports him.
Great achievers tend to try and fail often
No, I'm talking about HLR queries. See the related 25C3 talk.
Game makers (and some website owners) are discovering what some religious and cult leaders have known for thousands of years: you don't have to give somebody a drug to make them an addict. People are perfectly capable of generating their own addictions without external chemical help.

I _think_ what's going to happen is that we come up with a new moral code -- much like the thing where drinking before a certain time was considered bad, or the idea of doctors prescribing pain pills for themselves anathema.

But really, it beats me. We have a generation of people addicted to a sedentary activity in a way that's never happened in human history. It's very difficult to predict how all this will play out.
Does anyone else feel like a complete fool for having thought these guys were capable of pulling this off?
As an adult, I've personally lived in Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City (where I now reside), Los Angeles, and Boulder, Co. If I had to chose one, I'd chose Boulder. Why?

- Great tech scene.

- Great VCs (Brad, Ryan, and the rest of the Foundry Group are a great bunch of guys).

- Great weather (unbelievable amounts of sun every year).

- Amazing hiking just 10 minutes outside the city. Go a little farther out (30-45 minutes) and you can follow some trails that will take your breath away (figuratively and literally :-).

- Great skiing close by if that's your thing.

- Great food -- not a ton of choices, but some good choices.

- Very quick and easy access to a major airport with cheap daily parking (about 45 minute drive and if you take the tollway, you'll never -- and I mean never -- have any issues with traffic).

- Easy access to both the east and west coast.

The downside is that Boulder is a bit homogenous. There isn't a lot of racial/ethnic diversity in my humble opinion.
Genius! because if their cars do get fire* there's always some water to douse the flames

*http://indianautosblog.com/2010/11/tata-nano-recall
Er... no. That's not it at all. I'm baffled how you could have read that into the quote.

The point is that World of Warcraft was taking all the time & energy that could have went into improving her life, and that she besides not on any sort of growth trajectory, may well have been getting worse - that she wasn't investing even the minimum necessary to keep her life (such as it was) viable.
Simvastatin side effects , normal cholesterol... | Gather
It's easy to extend to life at a macro level, but it breaks down pretty quickly.

First, it's a bit more akin to life if you were a serf in medieval times where your whole life is a repetitive task to serve the local landowner (ie. Blizzard).

More importantly, WoW reduces rewards to regular, metered system which I believe is damaging to self-motivation.

There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer.

It's tempting to make a philosophical analogy, but there's a major difference. If we are brains in vats we have no choice in the matter; but choosing WoW means choosing an experience in a constrained world, completely devoid of any of the nuance of the physical world, despite the quantity of shiny objects.
Crotchety Old Power Users