skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the general sense, I don't program anymore. I work around programming (both by breaking other people's programs and reviewing source code), but I'd say the past 12 years or so the only programming I've done is limited to small scripts written to make a specific job easier.

I'd love to say that the reason I haven't been programming is due to my company's policy strict intellectual property agreement (wherein I'm forbidden from working on open source projects, or publishing any code); but I stopped coding before that was even an issue.

The past few months I've rekindled some of my interest, I have some things I'd like to work on, and I've rediscovered an interest in math that has lead me to start to fill in some of the gaps of my experience. I'm hoping that interest doesn't fizzle out (as it usually does), and I actually make some headway on some of my projects.

In some ways I feel like we're in a golden age of programming; if nothing else I'm more excited about the state of things then I've been anytime in the past fifteen years.
>Capitalism and free enterprise produced everything good.

>National parks were not created either.

National Parks consist of isolated bits of something good that was there long before man. They're definitely not something good produced by free enterprise, rather something good still there because it was protected FROM free enterprise.
what a brilliant waste of time. Love it!
No big surprise that a disciple of neo-modernism would present their arguments with a title straight out of an apple marketing campaign.
I was trying to keep my comment succinct, but what I mean is that at the fundamental level, programming is problem solving, and so is running a business. The ins and outs of particular businesses and particular programming languages or computing platforms may vary, but if you're skilled at problem solving (and it is a skill) then that skill is equally applicable in both arenas.
"...isn’t specific about what the exact problem is..."

I would presume it saying "the power brick is defective" is a really, really good specification about what the exact problem is with regard to a "safety issue." TechCrunch also labels it as "USB Charger" (which makes me think of just a regular USB cable) when in the email it says the "USB charger brick." What I REALLY hate is that TC never, ever goes back and fixes grammatical errors/typos/misleading statements when it screws up an article, it just adds an "update" at the bottom of the article. Have they not heard of TL;DR?

At least the notice email was well written.
That seems to support the claim that this is a recent departure from the "general and historical" caps on interest rates, though: most states have long had usury laws with interest-rate caps, and national banks were only exempted from them in 1980.
One great way of doing this is to interview for jobs that you think you're not qualified enough for. I've gone to so many interviews over the years, that after a while it doesn't matter if some company X doesn't take you. You just stop worrying.

I have a couple of friends who never go to interviews, unless their skills match the job description almost perfectly. They rob themselves of chances to get more money, more experience.

"Son, let women figure out why they won't screw you. Don't do it for them." -- Shit My Dad Says
I don't think its a bad font. I just don't think its a good font if you are interested in readers enjoying the experience of reading.

The article was good, the font was a bit of distraction. Thankfully readability is there to rescue.

FWIW I am on a mac too.
1. Daily 10,000 unique views of sites/products by the summer.
2. Raise online income from "pennies" to $2000+/mo.
I'm actually impressed with Azure's figures. Those seem to be pretty good numbers for being one of the younger platforms.
While witty, this is incorrect.
>"for some reason I’m seemingly out on the end of the axis as far as risk-tolerance is concerned"

I wonder whether most people would rate themselves above or below average in terms of risk tolerance. Is this something we tend to have a good picture of, or is it more like the Dunning-Kruger effect?
"Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"

http://norvig.com/21-days.html
I should say, though, that when I started reading HN, I was a first year CS student and had no practical ability to program.
- Learn to build acoustic guitars, seriously jonesing to work with my hands more.

- Publish my next book on uncertainty, art and entrepreneurship

- Reanimate my digital publishing and book marketing brand

- Continue to be present with my wife and daughter

- Grow my revenue base via commoditized knowledge and speaking

- Enjoy what I've got when it happens.
| Overusing our WiFi | TechWeek
Now Jeff Jarvis Needs To Shut The Fuck Up
Not necessarily. It can also indicate that we don't really understand a phenomenon, which can be a very valuable observation.

Certainly better than assuming we know something to be true that later turns out to be unsupported, eg. high fat diets causing to high fat humans.
I am willing to pay more money if you build your products in the US / Europe / Japan and actually do QA.

Most people won't. I'm not sure I would. I don't inherently see anything wrong with buying goods made in China or Taiwan - there are plenty of companies (eg Apple) who manufacture high quality goods there.

US labor has massive issues too - I wouldn't want to own a car made in the US.

As for your router, my Chinese-made Buffalo does everything yours does (plus wifi and runs dd-WRT) and cost me $30. Your argument would only stand up if everything made in China was poorer quality to US made, and that isn't the case.
As a designer and serial entrepreneur, working closely with programmers, HN has a the best signal to noise ratio of timely, relevant & inspiring technology news. So in recognizing both my design strength and programming weaknesses, I read HN to leverage my product development and design skills, while improving my ability to understand the major issues and communicate with my technical peers.
1,273.

If you've recently learned programming but haven't been in front of one of our supported surveillance platforms lately you may still be counted in this number - please feel free to update it!
The only occurrence I can find of the word webmaster on that page is using it in an example of a client setting the From request header.
For me?

· Rails 3 became everything I wanted Rails to be — I've come from Django and am really loving the ecosystem and the way the documentation has matured.

· Varnish — just an awesome piece of software. Fantastic job of caching, from small sites to large, without having to write mountains of config files. It's something you can drop it from an early stage with little cost in time, and know it'll be ready to help an application as it grows/scales.

· SSD's: didn't realise how good they were until I got a machine with one. I don't think I can buy a new machine without one now.
I hate sites that don't tell me what they are at first glance. I don't know what this is and I'm not going to watch a video to find out. I am an average user with a short attention span, and I'd give you advice on targeting people like me, only I'm not sure what it is you do and whether average users are your target audience.

Please. All it takes is a paragraph. Hell, you don't even have an "About" page.

Edit: I'm sorry that this sounds unnecessarily harsh, but it bugs me to hell that I have no idea about what I'm looking at. =]
Fear and interrogations? What’s your evidence for that? The “fear” in the headline of the article is shameless editorialization, the author of the article and his source make no further references to fear or interrogations.
In the U.S. at least, there was a period of 150ish years where that was the case. Most states passed usury laws pretty soon after the U.S. was formed, and by the mid 1800s almost all had pretty strict interest-rate caps. They were loosened a bit towards the end of the 19th century, though some were strengthened again in the early 20th.

In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn't enforce their usury laws against nationally chartered out-of-state banks--- the usury laws of the bank's state, not the customer's state, were the only ones that applied. That effectively killed usury laws, because it meant that banks just all incorporated in the states with the weakest usury laws. Then Congress completely preempted state usury laws for nationally-chartered banks in 1980.

But from sometime in the early/mid 1800s to 1978, most states had interest-rate caps in the 8-14% range, and most are still on the books, just ineffectual.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G_aUxbbqWU

Written by 14 year olds. Several orders of magnitude more difficult than what mark has done. (A lot of asm, 3d code, matrix maths, fitting together pascal, c, asm in DOS, etc)
Techstars Boston applications are open
It depends. If you are the main author of a large project, and you look forward to extend it by taking contributions in a direction that carries any meaning to you, integrating code at random won't magically result in a better project.

As the author an maintainer of several small FOSS projects, I rarely receive pull requests that I can merge right away. In that sense, a distributed VCS doesn't really improve over the patch-by-mail approach for random contributions (it does helps cooperation among regulars however).

I can also tell you right away that a FOSS project without direction or maintainer quickly dies, independently of the VCS. Successfull forks are very rare. Mostly, projects with good potential but no maintainer get simply dumped and reimplemented by another programmer.

If you are a maintainer, you will appreciate all the points the authors is making. If you are making a contribution, adhering to all the points will increase the odds of your change to make it quickly and improve the software.

Also, conversely as a contributor, I don't spend time on projects which have no maintainer or lack direction anymore. Having the source of a project (especially large) sounds useful at first, until you realize that maintaining it without the inner knowledge is a daunting task. It only makes sense if you are willing to use it extensively (and become the new the-facto maintainer).
The Sony's specs do not seem to measure up to this RED unit, at least from what's been posted in this thread and the spec sheet I just skimmed.

The RED also has a substantially higher "whoa" index.
-Get my first iPhone app published (So close right now!)

- Get my second iPhone app published

- Find a job before I graduate in April

- Maintain my website better, and try to blog interesting coding discoveries when I find them

- Improve my Javascript abilities

- Overall: Be 'Better' ( http://www.merlinmann.com/better )
It looks like some weapon designers decided to make a camera.
That only works with coherent in order memory operations. Once you add the appropriate memory barriers, it looks a lot more "atomic".
I can't program enough to bring my ideas to life, and it frustrates the hell out of me. Yes, I'm capable of outsourcing, and I do, but boy do I wish I could do more than I can right now.

I've got 3 or 4 books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf open on my iPad at all times, and I toy with online tutorials, but learning Farsi was much easier :)
I quit Reddit cold turkey by deleting my account. I have only occasionally looked at the front page since then, but it hasn't re-hooked me; getting rid of the orange-red compulsion and the karma score was really effective at breaking the addiction.

Now if only account deletion was enabled on HN...
Ways to solve the problem once and for all:

- Listing the sites that hotlink it would be a nice idea.

- Changing the script on the hotlinked files to pop-up a warning that the site is doing something improper and urging people to contact the owner.

- When that doesn't work, break the sites.
Get off the computer and pay attention to your new wife!
Video games: the addiction
That'd be resveratrol. There are now various supplements on the market so that you can get the dosage that is alleged to be helpful.

Also, resveratrol is not the only substance in red wine that is alleged to be helpful. Another is, of course, alcohol...jury is still out on whether low-dose alcohol can help cardiovascular health in the long term.
In terms of relationship, my advice will be the same whether you're starting up or working in BigBoring Inc. It boils down to 3 things:

1. Time: Make time for each other. Schedule it as if it's a big important meeting with an investor if need be. Even better is to have a routine that naturally makes time for you two to be together. Whatever it takes.

2. Talking: Always talk about everything that might be going wrong or right. This is especially true in the early days as you figure what this marriage thing is all about. No relationship I know of broke down because the couple communicated too much.

3. Adapt: What you have now is not what you're going to have in a year's time and certainly not you'll have in 2 years. Your startup might succeed or it might fail. You will have unforseen family obligations come up at the most inopportune time. One of you might lose their job or get ill long term. In short: life will throw you curve balls and you two must deal with them and adapt.

This usually where people insert some cliche analogy, but I'll spare you :) Congrats and good luck!
Don't piss her off and most importantly she's always right :)
If you anger her enough she can take more than half of everything.

Down vote if you want. I have yet to see a marriage of two people I know not end in divorce or where one or both are trapped in a loveless marriage.
Wow, I had never heard of someone doing major reformatting, reorganizing, or refactoring on someone else's code before submitting a patch! I would say that anyone who would do such a thing doesn't understand what it means to work with other people!
Now you should open source it ;) haha just kidding. What concerns me most is - why did you have to do this? Even with your MBA super powers you weren't able to convince a real programmer that your idea was worth 2% of the whole shebang for translating it into binary? I'm afraid that if more MBA types take to implementing their own ideas there will be no more "garbage" filter. But this will be an opportunity for others to improve, hack and thwart the implementation into something "better".
You can definitely fool that:
http://www.adambarth.com/papers/2009/adida-barth-jackson.pdf
You mean in 24 hours? I think its gonna take me at least a few days lol
Does this 'URL' help? I think you have to be a member of github to see this. Nice viral mechanism lol.

git clone git://gist.github.com/761348.git gist-761348
> Not-for-profits are often run to benefit the folks working for them.

You may be right. I can think of a few not-for-profits which seem to be benefiting not much more than their few founders.
It's perfectly fine with the font-size bumped up to 14px or so.

Fonts don't kill designs. Designers kill designs.
Techmeme's top 50 headline list for 2010
I've been married and divorced and I'm still in my late twenties. Not sure I can help you with any maxims on maintaining a healthy marriage but on the startup front I would suggest you strongly consider a pre-nup - or if the wedding is this evening, a post-nup.

I sincerely hope you never end up in a divorce situation but during mine (under California law) I had to give up 50% of my equity and options rights in the startups I've been involved in that occurred during the marriage because they were 'community property' (ie owned by the couple).

I'm not a lawyer, but if you have your own startup and your wife isn't a shareholder and you divorce she is entitled to 50% of anything you vested during that time. It works both ways if she is also involved in startups (ie you would get 50% of hers) and to that end you could agree to trade/cancel things out. I was able to buy my ex-wife out because I didn't want her to remain involved in the company but it was very costly. There's a longer and more gory story in here but this isn't really the place to get into it plus confidentially issues come into play.

When you get married, you don't really want to think about divorce. In the same way when you form the company documents for your startup, you don't really think about an IPO or an exit - yet in both cases at that end point some of the decisions you made at the start will come into play and so it's important to get things in order now.

EDIT: Another tid-bit of info - if you exercise options or sell the company your spouse has to sign-off agreement on the documents. Again, if you end up estranged from your wife that can cause all kinds of delays and issues.
and all of the sudden, the new years clock done in sql seems useful.

hope you don't go over your bandwidth quota ;)
EC2/S3 and Azure is in a different league than AppEngine. AppEngine is more similar to Heroku. If you use AppEngine to compare with EC2/S3, then we have another Google lemon adding to an already long list such as Orkut, Waves etc
What a nice thought. Someday someone is going to benefit from the code I wrote. LOL!

I feel like 10,000 miles away from that right now.
Windows Phone Marketplace security cracked by 1 guy in 6 hours
single most important tip from a geek who's been happily married for 5 years now:

The wife is always right !!
Many designs of thermostatic shower mixers will throttle back the hot water, rather than allow the occupant to get burnt.
رأس السنة
ha ha. Me too. :)
Great post and a wonderful read to kick things off for 2011, thanks for writing this.

On a related note, I often think about this quote from Benjamin Franklin:

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
I’ve found that carving out a little bit of time each day makes a huge difference.

Your spouse knows what you’re doing and supports you, so make a little time daily to recognize that commitment to you, with a commitment to them.

From previous threads things I've seen and put into action that really work:

- Have a sit-down dinner together every night.

- Spend at least half-of-one weekend day out of the house together.

- Spend at least 15 mins of uninterrupted time talking and focused on each other in the morning, and before bed.

More good threads on this topic:

http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1620335

http://searchyc.com/submissions/marriage

Lastly, SUCCEED!

The dividends of success provide financial stability which is a cornerstone for a happy marriage.
maybe you didn't look at the URL

http://projects.csail.mit.edu/beehive/

It's an educational system... teaches 'tute students about programming against bare metal.

Now go back to configuring your linux machine(s).. OK?
I think it's to early to call this a startup... you need to think about your potential revenue sources. ;~)
http://gizmodo.com/5427058/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts-dow...

http://gizmodo.com/5319275/report-iphone-leak-interrogations...
From first principles, it wouldn't make sense for alcohol itself to be beneficial. After all, the body treats it like poison, the liver filtering it from the blood stream. Drink too much poison, and the liver gets tired and shuts down, and then you have liver failure.

But there are some compounds in some kinds of alcoholic beverages, mostly red wine, that are thought to be beneficial. Of course, you could get the same benefits by skipping the fermentation process and just drinking grape juice.
I am a engineer and a unix admin in a previous life so i can code simple scripts, read/understand php/javascript (or copy some code snippet from the interweb and modify to my liking). Also as a electronics engineer i can understand high level comp sci theories...But obviously i am not a real hands-on programmer and it didnt stopped me from making millions from web projects!
"Minimalism" as it is described here is just a personal version of technocracy - the arrogant belief that you actually know enough to produce explicit, precise long-term plans. Kept under control, and used for shorter terms (say a year detailed, and two more sort of general and subject to change as you learn more) it can be useful; otherwise it often is just a personalized version of the old Soviet "Five-Year Plans".

ADDED: Rereading this, I think I missed my point slightly; the problem with minimalism as described here is that it locks you in too much to your current plan; it reduces your flexibility to adjust your plans as you learn more about your problem space.
I think you hit on something very important - that the buyers who decide what gets sent to the bookstore matter a lot.

Let me give you a couple of examples from the days when my parents ran a general and Christian books and music store...

The store was located close to several antique shops - women would go antiquing, drag their husbands along, then stop at the bookstore. Our bookstore had a huge selection of books on antiques and collectibles for just this reason - stuff you would be hard pressed to find even today in a Borders or B&N, like a $200 book on Tiffany Lamps, or even a $30 book on Depression era pressed glass.

Of course, the men were often bored - until they saw the books we had on cars, trucks, car repair, woodworking, military aircraft, etc.

We would sell at least $1000/week of car repair manuals such as the Chilton or Motorcraft series (and this was a small store). The $17 book on small gas engine repair (lawnmowers etc.) did very well also.

When we found people were restoring old Mustangs, we started carrying the $80-$110 Hollander Interchange manuals, which tell you which parts from which Mustangs are exactly the same for each year (e.g. a suspension component from any of 65-68 Mustangs might be identical, making it easier to find the part).

If you walk into a Borders today, you will find very little customization of each store for the local market. For instance, in the York, PA, store, home of a big Harley Davidson factory and filled with people who like hot rods (big cruise nights in the area) ... not even a small table packed with such books.

Second example: the Christian music buyers were always focused on the teen market (Christian Rock like Petra, etc.) -- but Christian music-buying teens usually have far less allowance money (IME) because their parents are more conservative.

So our music selection ignored the teens, and focused on having the music that the parents or other Christian adults would want (tended to be Christian country, Sandi Patti, and Christmas albums). Those folks, being adults, and in the prime of their earning years, had little hesitation in buying, often multiple items at a time. The buyers at other stores turned up their nose at such folksy stuff, to their detriment I think.

Imagine the sales lost by bookstores nationwide by focusing on Twilight books, heavily discounted, which attract distracted and less-rich teens, versus looking for and exploiting local niches.
1. Watch out when she starts to call your computer your second wife or mistress. You need more time for her.
2. Don't buy her geek toys/gadgets as gifts.
3. Make her the priority, not the new venture.

As for tonight, just relax, enjoy and make her feel wanted and loved.
Probably mostly the Gzip - the code is very repetitive. The RLE helps too.