skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Xfce is my main desktop choice for older laptops that don't have a while lot of computing power, but where I still want to have some sort of window manager.

It is sad though that the developers mention that I am going to be losing functionality because I am running Xfce on FreeBSD ... I've noticed the trend as well, more and more things are being written only for Linux and are not being ported to alternate operating systems such as FreeBSD.
I have seen numbers that suggest it costs about as much to keep our road system maintained as the fuel costs to drive on it. Basically add up the cost of bridge / road matience, deicing, DMV, highway police, truck weigh stations, drivers ed, and new roads and you find our highway system is heavily subsidized.
Because Minix is neither overly complex, nor obsolete. It nears the sweet spot between simplicity and functionality - I don't know how much of that I can attribute to its architecture. I don't think it has anything to do with academic credibility or holding grudges.

That's my opinion, of course, and perhaps my CS professors stuck to Tanenbaum religiously.
I too find that partnership interesting. Mainly because of the fact I can't quite figure out what could Groupon bring to the table for Tencent if they already have Tuan QQ? Am I missing something?
The most interesting sentence of all is this: "More recently Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky tried to kill our acquisition by AOL."
This is awesome! Wonder how they transcode.
"I'm willing to bet you'll hear more about them here in the coming year, they're funded by Kleiner Perkins."

Make the timeline five years, and specify this particular product rather than other products and ideas that the team/company may produce in the future, and I'll take that bet.

I'd be absolutely stunned if "an immersive iPad app that combines your Google Reader, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook accounts to create a personalized magazine. Whenever you see or read something you find interesting, it lets you comment on it or share it from within the app" becomes successful beyond a small niche audience. No matter how much money they've raised or who invested in them. Investors, even smart ones, make stupid mistakes all the time (and this may not be a stupid investment if the team is awesome, and flexible enough to evolve their company into producing something of great value).
Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't.

Not all the people I socialize with are into computers. Most aren't. You can't make all your friends in your own industry. I don't care if a person is a man or a woman, unless there are seriously extenuating circumstance I won't work or socialize with them if their assholes. The problem is that in geek circles there is a heavy social penalty of advocating that someone be ostracized for behaving like an asshole, everyone has to be included no matter how much no one else wants to hang out with them.

There are a lot of anti-social retards in tech regardless of gender. I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms. As the OP pointed out quite accurately in their post 'I realized he was just an asshole who probably wouldn't get too far in life anyways.'

Many people are hardwired to respect the opinion of anyone who forcefully and confidently expresses it. It's a two way street though, want people to think you know software engineering or any other topic? Just say something reasonably intelligent in a forceful and confident way, also if someone else has said it that they respect mention that person as having saying it. Most of the debates in software engineering are subjective in nature as much as everyone involved in the decision likes to claim otherwise.

If you know your rhetoric you'll have no problem intellectually disarming most people in CS. CS geeks think they only pay attention to logos but realistically there are a lot of CS decisions made based on ethos and pathos. I'll probably be down modded for saying this but the appeal of open source is based largely in ethos and pathos, and not logos.

I'd settle for more people in tech who can write working code with out being an asshole regardless of gender.
This book really convinced me that Javascript can be awesome:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748

And of course there's all these fancy new things being built on top of it, like CoffeeScript. I just recently realized that it's not the horrible monster I always thought it was.
Software development is already overburdened with paycheck-chasing dilettantes who are barely capable of cranking out reams of code that sometimes works. Unless there's some reason to think people with even less interest in the field would do a better job than us "wee hours of the night" types, I don't see why anyone should want to draw them in. Instead they should find their calling, and if they're being turned away by trivia, this isn't it.
This is a really interesting situation, certainly not one I'd thought about before. My knee-jerk reaction was "well, this sounds like something you should start a company to solve." (ASL to speech apps?)

I'm rarely the pitch recipient, but I'd be interested to know how people would respond if you carried a video of your pitch on your phone. Sure, you'd have to iterate it a lot, and that's trickier with a video, but it might enable you to deliver the initial message clearly.

The other idea that comes to mind is . . . what about an interpreter? Could you go to events with a friend (or, ideally, a cofounder) who you can communicate with, who can then relay that information effectively?
I am not deaf but have fairly limited hearing on one side, so much so that if an alarm goes off and I am on my wrong side I wouldnt know.

For interacting with people I have come to realize that I instinctively use signals form the persons lip movement. I cannot lip read from that signal alone, but it helps me to disambiguate what one is saying if I can see their mouth move. A side effect is that if I am not wearing my glasses I will have difficulty following you.

For one on one I can manage relatively well by situating myself advantageously. But for groups, interviews and telephone calls it becomes harder. I also have to know what language you are using. If I guess that wrong, and even if you are using a language I know, I can hardly make out what you are saying. This has put me in odd circumstances: someone starts speaking to me in my native language, when I expect that person to be speaking in English. In such situations I am usually fairly lost.
As with other similar industries (music, gaming, movies, etc), the publisher provides the content provider with one VERY vital service: marketing. And if you don't think that's a valuable service, go look at the App Store and tell me how many of the top 10 games are made by indie developers not going through a publisher. (http://iphone.ezone.com/?p=984)

Before the internet, when media was physical, you needed a publisher to help you manufacture the book as well as market it. In the internet age, people can produce their own product now. Anyone can make their own ebook and put it on their website for download, but no one is going to download it without substantial marketing efforts. That's why publishers are still needed.

However, I think it's BS that ebooks sometimes cost more than physical books.
Looks Great. Good Luck Kyle. BTW I am a loving user of Forrst. That being said, I think your link to forrst is buried too low in the copy. Maybe put it up top with something like "I can help you make products like this...LINK". Just took me a while to see the Forrst link and make the connection.
Gaius Marius figured this out. As did Napoleon.
Networking doesn't have to be face-to-face.

I built my company with a partner who I'd only met in person once before we started the company. We'd worked together online for seven years, though, and knew each other very well.

Sure, networking has value, and it's important during the fundraising process...but if your skills are strong in other areas, focus on those. Let your partner do the networking, if you aren't comfortable with it.

Also, don't let the networking urge get too strong. Building a great product is the single most important aspect of starting a company, so don't get distracted by what you're not good at; do what you do better than anyone, and you can find someone to work with who is great at the other stuff.
No joke. As far as I can tell there really is no reward.

You get "invited" to D.C. to attend a reception where you have to present your app to a commission. Your app then gets featured on the FCC website. You have to pay your own way there for all of that and can then get reimbursed by the FCC...up to $500 per person.

What exactly is the incentive?
Xfce should speak to the HN crowd, it's the MVP of desktop environments. It's fast, uses little memory, has a no clutter interface and is pretty in an austere way.

GNOME is the kitchen sink of UNIX desktops. It has everything and does everything (the KDE crowd will disagree with me here). Slightly more polished, better integrated, accessible to the casual user.

I'd recommend GNOME over Xfce to most people but if you want a desktop that doesn't get in your face (and flies!), give Xfce a spin. http://www.xubuntu.org/ has a live CD you can try out.
Amen.

I'm slowly leaving the field because of the smell of it. I want to work with professionals, not idiot-savants in sandals and hoodies. There are professional shops, but they are few and far in between.
What do you say to people when they say that programming is not demanding?
Yes - they do actually.
Because the others aren't "sabre-rattling brutal countries that fund terrorism".

It's not having nukes that is the problem, it's what people think you will do with them.
Great Article. Tom also touched on this a bit in this talk at Startup School this year. http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178966
That definitely wasn't the case at my high school. The high-school coders were almost exclusively some mixture of C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, and maybe bash. There probably were nonzero people who had used Scheme, but I'd be very surprised if it were more than one or two.
Show HN (again): OpenCirclez
You gave us some feedback on OpenCirclez (http://www.opencirclez.com/) about a fortnight earlier(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059407), and we heard you!

1. We differentiate from FB, MySpace by allowing you to connect to people outside your social circle. Also, the focus here is on the activity, which can help you find friends with common interests.

2. We've fixed the geolocation, and would like your feedback if the "Geolocate" button works more intuitively for you.

3. We've pushed the Twitter bar higher up, keeping it in line with the first search result. Let us know if you think this is good, or if you think it should be placed in line with the search box.

4. Is the overall purpose conveyed better on the front page? If not, what would you expect to see?

From Riyaz(primary developer and UI dude), John (master of the eye candy) and myself (server side guy), thanks in advance!
The problem in ASTs is worse because it's not just the functions that have types getting rippled through them, but it's the types themselves; some processing function f maps AST_0 to AST_1, then g maps AST_1 to AST_2, but the vast majority of the nodes in AST_0..AST_2 are the same, only augmented; but you want to verify that the right nodes got eliminated / transformed. I've ended up taking (a) dynamic, explicitly checked approaches to the type safety issue of making sure only the right nodes turn up in the right ASTs, and (b) writing code generators to deal with the type repetition that ends up being needed in languages that don't have the right amount of expressiveness in the type system.

Even when the type system is expressive enough, carrying around all the type arguments can be painful, even if you have higher kinded types. It makes one want a statically typed Lisp with a macro preprocessing step, or something.
Tuesdays work best
Did you manage to read through the whole wall of text? Distinct impression of crazypants...
The 1998 ACM Computing Classification System
Rather than 2010 being a weak year in film, could your taste differ from that of movie buffs/critics because I don't think I saw anything but top-tier reviews for The Social Network. I thought it was superb.

IMO, 2009 was a weakish year.
Reverse the role and think about if someone came to you or you were looking to invest in a company. Would you invest in yourselves?
If you're asking if I read the entire article, yes I did. I don't know if the guy (bruben25) is actually crazy, but he certainly doesn't come off as the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Edit: I see what you're pointing to now (bruben25's wall of text in the Google Webmaster Central thread). I didn't actually read that but I'm checking it out now.
The problem has been discussed a lot here and I believe that you are correct that no amount of gymnastics will allow one to escape this dilemma.

For example, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1789435
The Revolution will not be televised. It had to be said.
[Edit: if you missed the cultural reference, this will bring you up to speed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS3QOtbW4m0]
1) From my observation females on average are more sensitive to [perceived] criticism than males.
"Sensitive" in the sense that females usually avoid such experience.
Males might be sensitive too, but they might try harder to overcome it.

2) "Try harder" attitude is not necessarily better than "Avoid potential confrontation" attitude. But the difference might explain why there are so few females in software development.

3) There are other reasons behind gender ratio in software field.
For example, software development requires more abstract thinking which on average is easier for males. Females focus more on more practical things and care a little bit less about abstract stuff.

4) All of the reasoning above is about comparing averages.
Individual female might outperform average male in abstract thinking and "try it harder" attitude.
Awesome, thanks. There are a few great ideas in your post I'll implement.
I'm not deaf so I'm afraid I can't give personal experience, but I guess what I would do if I couldn't casually join in conversations is:

* Participate in the online versions of the networking groups first... Get people to know your personality, who you are, and the fact that you're deaf

* Wear a namebadge at events so that people can put your face with your name and you won't just be some random

* Ask any "Formal" networking events if they could invite a SL interpreter to come, and try to get some sort of video coverage of any talks so that other hearing impaired people can watch them online

* "Buddy Up" with someone with better hearing so they can network with you, introduce you, and if nescessary, explain you need a bit extra help with participation

* Take a small computing device so, if you can't read lips, you can still read typed answers

I'm sorry if any of these are patronizing, as I said, I've never been in that situation before. FWIW, I think buddying up is probably the most helpful idea.

Best of luck, and if you're in Brisbane, Australia, I'd be more then willing to come hang out with another programmer, regardless of how their IO ports work.
This is the thing that bothers me about the film; I just don't know how what happens in the film relates to what really happened, and even if I cared to find out I'd only hear a bunch of conflicting versions, and many of the key people have by now been paid serious money to never tell their versions again. Was Saverin's contribution underplayed? Overplayed? What about the Winklevi? Is Zuckerberg more of a jerk than he comes across or less of a jerk? I don't know, I'll never know, and I don't especially care, except that I will forever have one unreliable version of the true story in my head.
I suspect that you talk from experience when you make the claim that 'Most programmers got into the game because they love programming.' I currently work in india, and my experience here is that most folks who enter programming do so because of better pay, more glamour, and more international travel. I don't have any studies to back up my observation, just my personal experiences in the last few years.

I also believe that their training/exposure to CS in college is not uniformly good, and that they are put into an environment where they are already expected to know stuff which they have not been exposed to. Good organizations spend quite some time on training, but many do not.

I personally believe that before a programmer is given autonomy, it is vitally important to have people with good, attitudes who are willing to admit to mistakes and learn constantly, who have some measure of comfort with the fundamentals of programming ( which works across languages ), and who are mentored properly ( by which they have people to turn to whenever they get struck and need to figure out how to proceed further ). Most middle managers have no clue as to what programming is and hide behind a layer of techno-talk and they really are often unable to provide a sense of direction or purpose to the programmer.

While i agree with your role for management in creating a good environment for your emplyees, giving them a lot of autonomy, allowing them to master their tools, and having a sense of shared purpose, i believe that these require a few fundamentals to be met before the above environment is productive.

I admit that these observations are biased and not based on any scientific studies, so take them with a pinch of salt.
Exactly by the time you would leave the field, software development would be in really high demand (like in ~1999 tech bubble times).
I love MS, Gates and even like Ballmer. Having said that, get a load of this gem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

Amazing how commercials like this were helpful in the creation of such an empire. Oh, how the times change.
If SEO is going to part of your strategy and it's an exact match domain, then you could reasonably spend 4, 5, or even 6 figures. Internships.com is a good example of an expensive domain that was bought for a startup - here's a Mixergy interview with the founder that tells part of the story: http://mixergy.com/robin-richards-interview/

I also wonder why startups never seem to consider buying existing sites. Yes, your app is different from what's already there, but you could stand to gain a lot from the existing content, traffic, and incoming links that the site already has.
The AC will be on 24/7 but surely it will use less power if it has to get rid of less heat.
REVOLUTIONIZE windows tablets with a single app.
Thanks, we'll try to get these fixed ASAP.
Read more at http://www.taptype.me

Follow TapType on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/taptype
I think it would help if the app did something other than forcing you to connect with Twitter. The MVP shouldn't really be a landing page.
Designing a Multi-threaded Game Server
The funny (sad?) part is that I had a lot more material I could have used. The point was clear though, so no need to be mean.
I'd like to suggest that you consider creative commons licensing the designs with right of modification to multiple parties. There are locality-related aspects to tutoring, and success may depend on factors difficult to assess. I mentor startups in Singapore and there are multiple founders looking at this area. Why not let a bunch of people try out the templates and see what happens? Thank you for your very generous offer regardless, John Young alkimie.com
Did anyone else lol at The Social Network every time they said "He's wired in"?http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/e1tss/did_anyon...
Networking isn't a prerequisite for being an entrepreneur. Many entrepreneurs work from wherever they are and enjoy a mobile lifestyle and do all communication electronically - even networking.

The most effective networking I've done has been via discussion forums like webmasterworld and via email lists. It's also way more time efficient.

If you are worried that you lack a core skill or lack funding and need to network to find a co-founder or investor, just be straight with the folks you are communicating with - tell them you're deaf and you'd rather communicate via text mediums like IM, email, etc.

If you have a skill set that is core to starting a company, put it to work and good partners or investors will find you as they see how talented you are.

Learning sign language is not hard, so if you do find a great co-founder and you need to work in person, you'll probably find they'll put in the effort to learn ASL. Us geeks enjoy learning new languages.

Best of luck.
Will definitely read the story, thanks!
Remember: Google does not want click fraud. Yes they share in the revenue, But it is detrimental. The goal of google is: Sell ads, sell the fact that google ads = profit for your site. In reality having insane click fraud is ok, as long as everyone is happy. Obviously people stop doing business with google if click fraud gets rampant.

The only question is: Is most click fraud happening on google, or other advertisers? This could be where google succeeds, "we have 10% of our competitor's click fraud, we are the trusted network"
Which is also why more data centers, including Google data centers, are being built in cool climates. If you're exchanging for cold outside air, you get to keep more of your servers from melting down without paying more for cooling.
Observers: Duvalier's return to Haiti
For the problem 4. Monkey Beans:

At each move, the number of beans in the urn falls by 1. So, after

23 + 34 - 1 = 56

moves, the number of beans in the urn will be 1.

At each move, the number of white beans in the urn either stays the same or falls by 2. Since the initial number of white beans is 23 and odd, as long as there are any white beans in the urn, the number is odd. Since the number of beans in the urn falls to 1, the number of white beans must fall to 1.

Suppose there is 1 white bean in the urn: If there are no black beans in the urn, then we are done and the last bean is white.

Else we keep playing and observe that at each play the number of white beans in the urn remains 1. That is, there is no way to remove the last white bean from the urn. So, in all cases, the last bean in the urn is white.
Completely understandable. I'd like to add more, but I've to walk a fine line between my ignorance on the tech side and revealing too much.

I'm great with the business marketing, and connections side. Not so much on the development aspect, but not totally in the dark.

If you've any recommendations on what to add, I'd like to hear them so I can edit the post.
Tencent is largely an engineering driven company. This deal would bring a salesforce into the company while bringing local revenue throughout mainland.
Indeed, as this poor student discovered the hard way...

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/03/13/208259/Sophomore-Uses...

Believe the Camel when it says -- third edition, page 69 -- "You will be miserable until you learn the difference between scalar and list context."
I think that the % of women graduating from CS programs is a horrible indicator of the % of women programming in industry. The author hints at this in the last paragraph.

At Clojure Conj I think there were 0 women (other than guardians of minors) out of 200 people. On programming mailing lists I almost never see female names.

I think CS graduation rates might be much higher for a number of reasons. I think females have higher college graduation rates overall in the US, they may be more likely to switch fields and pursue a graduate degree, to switch out of programming after graduating, and in a field like programming where many are self-taught they may be less likely to learn programming out of the classroom.
Interactive JavaScript Console With TextMate
This kind of problematic wording is typical of Federal RFPs. Generally, you end up calling the federal project officer and getting clarification.