skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My freshman year of college, I was working with a person in the introductory programming course. We worked together for hours at a time. I'm, by nature, a very patient person and was willing to let this person work through the problems and figure them out. However, at the end of the course the person was none the wiser about how to program (even basic things).

This person changed majors to another engineering discipline and is doing great in that field. It still requires the same engineering-esque reasoning skills.

By no means am I the perfect teacher nor does one anecdote make a data set. However, because of that experience, I am very much inclined to believe that there are very smart people that just do not have the inclinations needed to become a programmer.
I think that in some ways programming is a lot easier than some areas in that it is often very easy to get feedback on whether our work has performed or not (especially in this day of TDD).

Contrast this with a lawyer writing a contract - you can't write unit tests, there is no source code debugger and most contracts never get "executed" in the fullest sense of being interpreted in court so you don't really know what they mean in practical terms. This would drive me crazy.
Also, finding a web host that supports Python or Ruby may be easy, but finding a web host that doesn't support PHP is damn near impossible.
The invisible yellow dots identifying printers went a long time before becoming common knowledge. I don't believe TFA for an instance, but it doesn't seem an impossibility.
Interesting story, thank you!

Were they interested in the work? Was their ambition to get in to programming (was that the major they wanted to go for)? And if so what was their motivation to do so? I've found that fascination with technology helps a great deal here, if you are not typically intrigued by how stuff works and like to puzzle then programming will probably not be the kind of challenge that you take to.

I remember when I first learned (or tried to learn) to program. For weeks I was just looking at the book without any progress whatsoever, finally it clicked and when it did it was like 'oh, that's how it works'... After that it came easy (most of the time, at least). But if I had quite in those first few weeks I would have literally gotten nothing out of it but a bunch of frustration. So I would presume that it is possible for people to get stuck in that particular phase for a long time.

Maybe it's the programmer equivalent of being 'tone deaf'?
A prototype noise-canceling device that silences the dentist's drill
Who is Using Node.js And Why? Yammer, Bocoup, Proxlet and Yahoo
There are three categories of college degrees, when it comes to helping you advance your career:

1. A small set of elite schools: Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech. Having Harvard on your resume will always stand out. "Harvard, huh? Certainly worth a look at what else he/she has done."

2. A school that happens to match with the hiring person -- you happened to attend whatever state school or private college that the hiring person went to or knows well. This is basically nepotism.

3. Everything else. UoP is most likely to end in this bucket.
This brings up some really weird reader that screws up the layout in Chrome. Here's a standard one page link instead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environmen...
This is obvious.

I mean isn't it basically a fluke that we all ended up as programmers? I don't I'd think be half as interested in computers as I am if my dad didn't bring us home a computer when I was 3 or 4, or if my grandmother didn't randomly get me a book about "How to make your own website" for my tenth birthday. She didn't get me this because I'd shown a particular interest in computers, it was just one book among a bunch of books "for boys", most of the rest of which were about football. So the relationship between the society in which I grew up and the gender it assigned me at birth also contributed to my becoming a programmer, and definitely in more ways than just being the reason I got that book. I also happened to be lucky enough to participate in a programme for "talented" kids, and one of the courses they offered was in programming (they taught me Java when I was 13), and I was able to use the skills I learnt from that to pick up Javascript and PHP (for my website). Then one of my older cousins introduced me to Linux, and that kind of paved the way for me becomming a "real" programmer, when I started writing little programs to make my life easier in Linux.

And it was basically luck that all of those things happened, and happened at the right times in my life so that they all had the effect that they did. I might have ended up doing something completely different if, for example, my parents weren't able to afford to send me on that course at which I learnt how to program properly. I became a programmer because certain things happened at certain times in my life to make me interested in programming and to give me to means to pursue that interest. Luck was the reason that those things happened to me, not the way I think or because I somehow have a magical programmer brain that made me destined to program. That's obviously absurd. Those things could have happened to anybody. Everybody can be a programmer. We're not better than everybody else.
Thanks, that was great!
You are right - for what it delivers $180 is more than reasonable. Unfortunately people tend to compare it to the free IDE's. Of course, Wing is free if you are working on an opensource project.
Open admissions and small courses can be found at a community college for a fraction of the price for-profits charge. My main concern about for-profits are reports from their adjuncts that they've been pressured to pass students who perform poorly. A lot of their students also lack basic reading and math skills because for-profits don't have the remediation requirements you would see at a community college.

I'm all for seeing what market forces can do to improve education. But I'm worried that a lot of these students are going into massive debt to get a degree that won't be valued in the marketplace, due to lack of academic standards.
I agree that motivation can counteract for lack of talent, but I do not think that is as absolute as you make it here.

No amount of effort would have made me run the 100 meters within 11 seconds. Sure, there is a level I could have reached, and one could call that running, but I couldn't have made a living from it.

Qualitatively, I think programming is similar. Quantitatively, it is different; many more people can get a job as a 'programmer'. Nevertheless, I still think there are people who couldn't work hard enough to compensate their lack of talent to get one of those jobs.

And of course, the number of programmer jobs in the world depends on one's definition of programmer. At one extreme, HTML and Excel are programming languages. At the other end, there are maybe a couple of thousands of programmer jobs in the world.
I wonder if this kind of "extra fund" will become commonplace for successful micro-vc / super-angels. If you put out 100 $500k investments, and one turns out to be twitter, you are going to want the capital to keep a pro-rata share and follow on.

Raising money for that should be easy, especially if you restrict the fund to existing investments and only charge fees on invested capital.
While I do not know the exact figures, there still is a good possibility for Apple to gain

They pay for H.264 license to distribute their decoder, but collect royalty for their patents from every other codec vendor, device maker and commercial video distributor in the world.
Anecdotal means "Not necessarily true or reliable, because based on personal accounts rather than facts or research" so the claim that it his mother is, itself, anecdotal.

Kind of inherent in casual, internet conversation... hard to avoid.
But what about Preset 3? Has it, at long last, been stored?
Currently your comment, which adds nothing to the discussion except a simple spelling correction, has more upvotes than the parent. Sign of the times for HN?

Not to say spelling corrections are never useful, I think they often are, but I don't understand the mindset that upvotes them over comments that actually participate in the discussion.
Vinod Khosla at Caltech: Extrapolating the Past vs Inventing the Future
No. Being able to program is not really a requirement for holding down a programming job. I have honestly worked with "programmers" on dev teams who never actually got a line of code into the product -- because thier code was always gibberish that barely compiled, didn't actually do anything, and was easier to just rewrite. Somehow they made management happy so continued to get paid.
The Ultimate Solution For Xcode Auto-Versioning With Git
New 3D technology without glasses (what could possibly go wrong?)
I watched this last week and I would second your recommendation.

Some of the individuals represented in the documentary could have come straight out of the Enron documentary.
An employee using their own computer presets all sorts of liabilities and risks both to the employee and the employer. The decision needs to be made in consultation with a qualified lawyer. It presents an intellectual property and security nightmare.
Y Combinator Inspired Hiring Process
Just in case, the poster is not around, even the moderators can do that, right?
This is why I like the word "hacker" outside of it's more "modern" meaning. A programmer can be nearly anyone with some basic skills, but a hacker is a fundamentally different animal from the rest of the general population. The hacker doesn't even necessarily have to be better than the bulk of his non-hacker, regular programmer, peers (though I imagine you'll often find that to be the case) because it's not about skill, it's about mindset.

It's certainly not limited to programming either of course. I would likely consider a career electrician who moonlights as a coiler (of telsa coils) to be a hacker. If I had to put the meaning of it into words, I would say a hacker is anyone who has a passion for the art of something, as opposed to someone who merely participates.
I have to agree. I think that it may be more of a "mode" I get into. My wife is able to quickly identify whether I have been coding because I have not entirely switched off that mode, as is evidenced by my unwillingness to let a problem go, my continued debate until all facts are accurate, etc.

Since this behavior is not conducive to maintaining a relationship, we have developed a flag system to let me know when I need to take some time out to talk normal to her.

Oops. There it goes again (flag system). At least I didn't say boolean.
Is Chess with Queen Odds a Provable Win?
I think your argument is flawed. Programmers do think differently. It is similar to the difference between a shy introverted person with few friends and an outgoing extroverted person with many friends. A great salesman could take the introvert and get them used to more social interaction. The introvert could learn about all kinds of social cues and ways to connect with people in any situation. So then you say that there is no difference between an introvert and an extrovert - look at how many friends the introvert has now!

There are many people in this world that don't use analysis and logic in the same way that programmers do. That doesn't mean they can't learn, but the fact remains that many non-programmers currently do not think the same way.

I do think most people are capable of programming, but I think it is misleading to say that "programmer thinking" is something everyone already does.
I never found the RSS icon too useful. I think Firefox should keep the ability to parse RSS but most feed readers have an auto-discovery feature and that's usually enough.

In sum, the icon is another example of a broken UI for RSS, which is otherwise a great technology.
I love this section:

"I strongly recommend to call wipe directly on the corresponding block device with the appropriate options. However THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS THING TO DO. Be sure to be sober."
Did you miss where I say, "And more importantly..."?

And which chips are on the roadmap to have WebM support? I don't know of any announced QCOM or NVidia devices that have WebM support. The only I've seen is Broadcoms, and its certainly not on par with the existing H264 HW accelerators.

And if Intel doesn't add WebM support, which I don't believe they have commited to doing, this could be long haul. Because desktop isn't sufficient with respect to codecs, you do need desktop chipset support with respect to acceleration. No one will be happy if they can't watch 720P video on their high end computer.

Best case scenario is that we see WebM having the level of coverage as H264 has TODAY is probably 2013.

Like I've said, there will be those of that fight against WebM and you'll fight for it. Maybe we just end up with a fragmented world.
Programmers do 'competitive sports', code golfing and what not. Sure there is a level that you can reach, but you can't make a living with code golf no matter how good you are.

Excavator jockeys hold egg peeling contests, and of course you need to be really good at that to be able to even begin to control a 30 ton excavator to peel an egg without squashing it.

The only reason you can earn money with running is because:

(a) everybody can do it (so we can all appreciate a good runner)

(b) we can judge your expertise by the clock (in 1/100th of a second, as if that matters)

But in the end that's very likely a large amount of innate ability and an even larger amount of training. Setting aside your life to be able to run a world record is in itself not worth anything to anybody - if you fail. But if you succeed we will place an inordinate amount of value on that because of media exposure and national prestige.

Running by itself has little to no value, even very fast running (unless you're trying to get away from that cheetah).

Programming is a useful thing, at almost every level of skill and the more you do it the better you become.
How about a comparison to a known standalone unvirtualized box?
The initial cost of buying a domain name is normally high, but it is far more effective than advertising via other sites (e.g. google adwords).

If you are not very well versed in how people actually search for information, you would probably lose a lot of money either way... but in the advertising model you would lose less initially.

Over the long run (say half a year or longer) the domain name route would probably be the cheaper route -- if you pick the right one.
Posted below is what the note states exactly, so there's no loss through translation:

The note will automatically mature and be due and payable five (5) Years (60 months) from the date of this note, with accrued interest at 6%.

Some or all of the entire principal amount of and accrued interest on this Note shall be, at the option of holder, converted into shares of the Company's equity securities (the "Units") issued and sold at the close of the Company's next equity financing yielding gross proceeds to the Company of at least $1 (the "Qualified Financing") equal to the value paid in the offering at said round of financing. The number of shares of Equity Securities to be issued upon such conversion shall be equal to the quotient obtained by dividing (i) the entire principal amount of this Note plus (if applicable) accrued interest by (ii) 100% of the price per share of the Equity

Securities, rounded to the nearest whole share, and the issuance of such shares upon such conversion shall be upon the terms and subject to the conditions applicable to the Qualified Financing.

If Holder has not converted prior to Maturity Date, the Notes shall be convertible, at the option of the holder and only upon maturity, into common units at a conversion price of $4 per share.

Holder may also convert, at any time, some or the entire principal amount of and accrued interest on this Note into shares of the Company's equity securities (the "Units") at a price agreed upon by Holder and Company. In no event shall the parties agree to a price that is less than the most recent closed equity financing price paid. If the parties fail to agree to a conversion price, Holder shall only convert at the next Qualified Financing or upon maturity as stated above.
Sounds like you should move to better employers :)
Hi, How about you add some of your own flair to the site? Everything about the site screams mixergy and andrew. Except its you interviewing. Just because andrew seems to have no issues doesnt mean you can con and confuse visitors. Sorry about the harsh review but this is blatant copying. Other than that, I agree that more interviews from more sources is always welcome.
`mplayer "mmsh://proedvid.stanford.edu/knuth/musings/101206/101206-knuth-500.wmv?MSWMExt=.asf"`

For those of you who hate it when your browser decides to try to embed videos...
I agree with the part about every sufficiently smart person being able to program if they're willing to learn and put the time.

With that, everybody should be willing to agree, as long as you do not give a definition for 'sufficiently smart' and 'programming'.

I know that may sound mean, but without attempting to define these, any counterargument to that claim can be rebutted with either "but he's not sufficiently smart" or "but x is also a form of programming"
Is Facebook Temporary?
I think the delusion may stem more from the fact that there have been far more software engineers than say, lawyers, law enforcement agents that have had a huge impact on society. This doesn't mean they are at the absolute top of the heap - I think there is an open recognition that there are a number of other sciences that are having the same type of impact right now.

Whether or not this has anything to do with a truly "different" way of thinking, that's up for argument.
But it's only there if the page you're looking at has a feed, and it indicates the presence of a feed through auto-discovery.

Sites evolved away from having links to the feed in the HTML text BECAUSE browsers got this feature, led by Firefox.
Of course, anyone who uses an auto-completing IDE must be an intellectually stunted amateur.
I cringe just watching him.
Vote for Chrome, but Chromium
Very cool product!
Thanks for this link, I would have otherwise skipped this article for now. I received a warning that nyt was trying to store data on my system "for offline use."
iPad. I spotted that later, too late to fix. :(
I disagree. PHP is a web framework. It comes with built-in functionality for talking to databases, extracting form variables, setting cookies, outputting HTML, routing URLs - everything you'd need expect to need a web framework for with other languages.
The weird wallpaper can be a sign it's Knuth's Computer :)
Anyone can hold down a programming job without being able to program. That's unfortunately one of the main issues in the industry. Most 'professionals' are complete rubbish.

You can "teach" anyone to play the piano. But only a small % of them will be able to play it well.

Difference is, anyone can tell if someone is a great pianist, but being a great programmer is much harder to measure.
The Microsoft versus Facebook comparison is not apt.

Facebook takes something like a 50% cut of the money made by Zynga with their Facebook app.

Microsoft did not create a walled garden so did not have the opportunity to charge for running on their platform.

Software as a service and (to a lesser extent) the various app stores are different. The incentives are not the same.
10 petabytes - visualized
It appears from the outset that Evergreen was operating in bad faith in accepting government stimulus, but they did have their back against the wall.

China has dirt cheap labor, no pollution regulations and strong government support -- how can any US manufacturing survive against that?
If we follow your logic, C is a framework for building OSes.
i'm much more interested in ec2's variation over time
Venture capital firms are definitely taking note of the seed stage opportunities. From what little I know about the VC business, I believe the problem isn't that the money doesn't scale to make lots of small investments. The problem is that people's time doesn't scale. Fred Wilson can't keep up with all his emails, and adding more people to the firm isn't going to solve the problem. On the other hand, although having a public "VC" firm like a public stock market would solve this problem in a great way ("invest in the startups you're interested in"), the SEC enforces laws to prevent willy-nilly selling shares to the public (blue sky laws an all that). Makes sense.

So that's why we have sites like KickStarter and I think you will see a lot more of that kind of thing going on to fund entrepreneurs in the next 5-10 years. Which is a good thing, IMHO.

I have a few ideas along these lines, but no money to execute them at the moment. They are fairly simple but have a lot of moving parts, involving lawyers, settings things up, etc. If anyone is curious as to my ideas about improving seed funding for everyone, contact me at my email address. http://magarshak.com/contact . Especially if you work at a VC firm and want to spin something off like this :)
I love #3, especially the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!
Well, generally they tend to fault themselves and others. Really, it's more the faulting of others that annoys me the most.
The idea that they need actual evidence to lock you up is so 20th century...
Your point that Firefox led site owners away from linking to the feed is an important one which I hadn't considered.

I also agree the icon's useful for indicating an existing feed. It's easy not to think about this use, because most of us probably just notice it when we need it but rarely click on it.

Other than the icon being an indicator, I don't find the way Firefox handles feeds too useful (that mix between bookmarks and news feeds).
Well, if you buy Meyer's Briggs types, programmers do think differently than others, because programmers are not uniformly distributed among the different types.

HN survey: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722
And there have been better, more "scientific" studies about this that does find that there is a correlation between career and personality. I agree that the story telling is a bit us vs. them, but it doesn't mean there isn't a difference.
I think it would be very handy. Not everybody realizes that the email you put in your profile isn't publicly visible; so they don't bother putting additional contact info in their "about" section.

Yes, it's true that "if you want to talk to somebody badly enough, you can probably hunt down their email address" but why add friction to the process? Ok, I get the folks who uses it as a filter "if you're too lazy, or not smart enough, and can't find my email, I don't want to talk to you." Fine, but I doubt most people feel that way. And that just argues for making the feature optional (that is, let users set a "receive PMs (Yes/No)" flag in their profile.

Iuguy makes an interesting point though:

Besides, you can always reply to someone's comment and ask for a way to get in touch with them.

The problem with that, as I see it, is that such a message is usually going to be (relative to the rest of the conversation) off-topic noise that nobody else cares about.
Build Your Own OS (from scratch)
I think the particular thing about PHP that makes it framework-like is that it handles HTTP almost 100% transparently for the PHP coder. In any other language I've seen, the coder is responsible for handling and outputting HTTP headers, parsing the query, etc... PHP just does that stuff.
> I never found the RSS icon too useful.

I did. I never actually clicked on it, but I find telling me that a site has feeds valuable, because if I'm interested in the site's content I can just paste its URL in Reader and know it will work.