skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I take a "pull" approach myself, and you're absolutely right about him being in a good situation. A CS degree with no experience is more likely to get an ordinary programming job than a self-taught freelancer with 4 years experience under his belt - in my experience.

I just wanted to expand on the "find a job or project or someone who has a real need." This part was tricky for me. I love learning, and my approach for a long time was to just keep learning rather than doing. As soon as I would finish one programming book or tutorial series I'd start on another. If I ran across something new and interesting I would switch over to it. After a long time approach to doing that I realized I had a lot of half-baked knowledge and nothing to show for it.

Finally I buckled down and "did." I started by tackling a problem of my own - keeping focused, on task, and efficient. It has become a tangible project that I will (soon) be able to show a potential employer or even make money off of it. The best part is that it's something I personally believe in and need, so I'm passionate about it. Working on someone else's project sometimes makes it hard to get excited about what you're creating.

If you can't think of some problem of your own to solve, work on someone else's. The best approach I know of here is to find a local not-for-profit organization or charity. Ask them what could improve their ability to do whatever it is they do, or even help save them money and then create it. Give it to them free of charge. This a) gives you something tangible to show potential employers, b) could possibly be a tax write off, c) gives you real world "pull" experience, d) is for a good cause.

Some people might tell you that you should never do work for free. In this case, the work you're doing is benefiting you, even if there is no money involved. Besides, if it's for a good cause then there will be rewards - assuming you believe in God or karma :)

To reiterate edw519, adjust your attitude, find something to build, and do it.
Why does Apple have to be liable for everything you put on your phone? Is Microsoft liable for the viruses and spyware that people install on their Windows PCs?

The liability argument is weak, though Apple may have made the case itself by its stringency with the App Store. Now one could say that there was a reasonable expectation nothing he/she could get from the App Store could cause a problem in his/her life because Apple publicly embarked on a vetting process before offering the app for sale.
Please edit this post and mark it as NSFW.
Missing Feature in Opera Mini (and a temporary solution)
http://www.droidsector.com/blog/2010/12/02/android-and-ios-f...

I'm not sure if the bump numbers are broadly relevant: who is the average user who will be running bump? It isn't a general iPhone user, but instead is a technologically savvy individual usually in a place like San Francisco. There is no relevance there to the broader market.
I actually read Applied Cryptography when it first came out. My experience is that it convinced me that crypto is hard to do right not that it's easy.

"Practical" will be my next technical read.
I have a lot of respect for David Eaves, but in this particular case it looks to me like he doesn't understand the nuances of the argument. He's simply equating internet to electricity as if they were really similar things.

What he utterly fails to account for is the fact that the costs to provide a certain level of bandwidth have been dropping dramatically. You could simply be making regular, equal investments every year and that would be enough to see bandwidth rise in line with consumption. Yes, a 50% year-over-year increase in consumption is matched be a 50-60% year-over-year cost decrease.

Furthermore, Bell (for example) has little incentive to upgrade early and often if they can charge whatever they want. They can simply milk their creaky infrastructure until it breaks down (infrastructure that was heavily subsidized by the taxpayer), and then simply increase their rates to cover the costs of investments they should have made a long time ago if they didn't act according to perverse incentives.

From another angle, fast, ubiquitous, unlimited (for all intents-and-purposes) internet should be a policy objective for our government. Countries that have made heavy investment in internet infrastructure, like South Korea and Japan, are reaping the rewards. This will only become more important.

Canada also has THE most expensive internet access among OECD countries. Period. Full stop.

Finally, this ruling was about imposing UBB on 3rd-party providers, not about UBB in general. Teksavvy already had caps at 200GB and a more expensive plan that offered unlimited access, and as many people don't seem to understand, they're not using Bell's backhaul. They operate their own - they just need to access the last mile infrastructure because it's a bloody duopoly.

I could go on and on and on, but suffice it to say that David is just plain wrong here. It IS as one-sided as we think.
Before anyone wonders: No, this isn't an official TLD. The domains you register there won't resolve for anyone unless they futz with their nameserver settings.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Looks like a bunch of hackers got really bored and perhaps had a beer too many...
So if my IP is XXX.XXX.XXX.42 I can expect misconfigured clients to be trying to connect to me constantly? What could possible go wrong!
I suppose a key element of hellbanning (which I interpret as banning without making it obvious, so for example they can still post comments which look live to them, but dead to the rest of us) is not publicising that hellbanning happens.

From a spam perspective, it's great and I wouldn't change the current process (real people can request reinstatement, and I believe it's a fairly straightforward and fair process). But some people have been deaded, changed their ways and could add value, and as you say don't seem to have realised. I know that if I get a run of comments with no vote behaviour (up or down), I'll log off and see if I can see them, to ensure I'm still alive and haven't jumped a shark somewhere.
Mailinator
True, performance on older mobile hardware's not great, my old htc hero runs the demos at a pretty glacial pace. But it wasn't so long ago that javascript performance was apparently so poor that web apps would never catch on and remember this is an alpha version so it's going to get quicker.

I do agree native apps are going to be more appropriate in a number of situations though.
Perhaps the 42registry should try to get openDNS to support .42, that would certainly open up a MUCH larger amount of people that its available to, its also reasonably easy to change to using openDNS servers.
The reality is that no one knows how to do any professional job when they graduate from college. What we learn in college is mostly how to learn and how to problem solve. The problems we solve in college, whether stumbling through our first sorting algorithms or writing a paper about the role of Prussian nationalism in the 1800s, are not tied at all to the problems we have to solve professionally. And that's okay.
When it comes to being a practitioner, whether producing commercial software products or writing analyst reports on public companies, the job itself is the best training. What you have to bring to the table is the curiousity and ability to learn and problem solve that get you up the learning curve quickly, and the professionalism that makes you a reliable and welcome colleague.
Yes im the same way. What ive learned to do is manage and organize the ideas. Some people are serial entrepreneurs. Ive found that i am this way. I have alot of ideas that im passionate about developing. So ive learned how to manage and organize them. Ive also learned to try to find people that are like minded. Which can take some trial and error. The one important thing is to not doubt yourself about this. Be trully passionate about your ideas and about developing them. People will see this and respect it and want to get involved. Also really develop skills around your ideas. Be it a strong business sense or a strong technical sense or a strong understanding of the market youre in. This will give you a stronger leg up and the ability to deal with multiple projects.

If you actually want to chat more about this and talk about your ideas send me an email. Im always looking to network with people.
Fonoso - how my new MVP came to life
More precisely, it's a mass noun (as opposed to a count noun).

Count noun: a program, some programs

Mass noun: some software. (you can't say "a software" or "some softwares")
That side effect of posting on SO that you improve your writing is interesting. Never thought about that but it's so true: it's good if you an answer but it's better if you can tell anybody about it such that they understand.

Nice layout of http://writers.stackexchange.com/ !
A Batesian Mimicry Explanation of Business Cycles
That's great, if you have the time to filter it all. I use HN because it takes way less time than checking all those RSS feeds. I might miss interesting things, but those are beyond the point of diminishing returns. If it saves my time, I'm happy.

Filtering in HN has it's problems, but I don't turn off the spam filter for few false positives in email either.
I'd forgotten that one. Hash based challenge-response authentication does require the server to know the plain password.

This sort of authentication is useful when you don't trust your transport mechanism (i.e. logging in over HTTP) but do trust the server's security. There are other ways to achieve this though. You could use DH or a similar key exchange method to decide a secret key (DH can do this without letting eavesdroppers know the key) to encode the password with for transport. You are then avoiding both plain transport and plain storage, where hashed storage on its own requires plain transport (unless the transport mechanism is separately encrypted, by SSL/TLS in the case of HTTPS) and hashed challenge/response requires plain storage.

Securing the transport (by using HTTPS with a signed-by-a-generally-trusted0body certificate, rather than HTTP or HTTPS with a self-signed cert) is the better option for a web based application though.

Of course, a site like PoF is not going to use any of the above. As has been identified (and, assuming statements in other comments here are true, admitted) convenience and laziness on the part of the programmer are far more important to them than DoingThingsRight(tm).
Yeah, instead of talking about starting, how to and when to start... Just use your time well! Voted +1
It's funny, I used to be a pull person. I learned by doing. It worked great.

But at some point, I picked up a book because of a recommendation and it was astonishingly good (Cocoa Programming on OSX, Hillegaas). It gave me a real sense of confidence and overview that I was lacking in all my pull-learned topics. I guess this is because pull only ever provides very localized knowledge but you rarely see the big picture.

Since then, I tend to push-learn at first to get a feeling and overview over a language or framework and then gradually switch over to a more pull-oriented approach. This has served me very well. Some books out there are real marvels that can get you started with a new technology very painlessly. Gathering all that knowledge would take a lot longer. Yet, there is nothing as instructive as getting your own hands wet.
It's a combination of 3 and 1, I'd wager.

I've worked in startup environments in both the UK and the US.

In the US, being an entrepreneur is seen as a good thing, and people bond, mesh, and engage as a result of their common interest in stepping off the standard path.

In the UK... not so much. The vast majority of founders I know are a) busy working their nuts off and b) pretty bitter, due to the UK attitude to entrepreneurs (urgh, why would you do that? Starting your own business is stupid).

I guess what I'm getting at is that entrepreneurs in the US and the UK are pretty different - in the US, they rely on a support network of other entrepreneurs, and are part of a community. In the UK, you're on your own, definitively, and entrepreneurs shy away from potential support networks because they're so used to any large group of people being overwhelmingly comprised of naysayers.

Oh, and finally, London isn't the entire UK. You want to see startups? Get yourself out of the city. Bootstrapped startups start elsewhere in the country, as London is so disproportionately expensive - Bath, for instance, is chock full of 'em.
How is the fact that our children (ok, my young siblings) are coming up in a world where bullying happens in a field vastly different from the playground not a problem?

I certainly can't pass on my experience of how to deal with cyber bullies, I don't have any(oh, but flamewars I understand), and I suspect that the entire newest generation is going to have to invent those protocols themselves. That's horribly unfortunate. When children kill themselves because of it, that's horrifying.
Graduating with a CS degree from where?
To quote Randy Pausch: "The brick walls are not there to keep us out, they are there to give us a chance to show us how badly we want something."

They are all in your head anyway. I've been thinking about the Harry Potter thing of how they get to the train station for wizarding school by running straight at the brick wall with confidence, which carries them through it and to a different world, where a train awaits to whisk them off to a magical place, a place to learn yet more magic. I think it's a great metaphor. The brick walls aren't really there. Just go at them head on, believing they aren't really there.

Oh, and there's no spoon either.

Best of luck.
http://www.ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/members/david/

"David Cournapeau

a French PhD student in signal processing at Kyoto University"

France and Japan...he hasn't exactly been living in places where English is prominently spoken with grammatical accuracy...cut him some slack. In fact, he made the exact same error of pluralizing "software" as "softwares" on his website.
How does the proposed OpenJDK governance fare in the open-by-rule benchmark?
If you don't mind my asking, what happened to that startup?
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You know, I know that bcrypt is the cool new thing, but I don't think it's really that irresponsible, and certainly not completely irresponsible, to use a hashing scheme with a huge salt. I understand that bcrypt is super slow and therefore super awesome since the bad guy will have to sit around longer to decrypt your whole database, but maybe we should be a bit more careful with things that are termed "completely irresponsible". Something may be adequate and not be the best option, and something may be inadequate but not be "completely irresponsible".

For an example of complete and wanton irresponsibility, see Plenty of Fish.
Why Plenty Of Fish Stores Passwords in Plain Text: Because they're incompetent.

That's it. You don't need to write an entire article.
21-25 please?
I think you are being a bit harsh. The meetup was never intended to be an event purely for the early stage startup entrepreneur. The primary goal was to allow the users of Hacker News to meet in the real world, talk about their interests and share experiences.

I've met many fascinating people there, who between them have been through all stages of the startup life cycle and made many new friends.

I am sorry that you got stuck talking to a bore. In my experience people like that have been very much the exception rather than the rule.

Anyway, I value all feedback and want the meetup to be as useful and interesting as possible so if you have suggestions or ideas on how to improve it I would love to hear from you.
This sentiment is true, I think, for any profession, graduating with an undergraduate degree just gets the door open, you still have a long way to walk. Similarly, if you're an English major reading The New Yorker, you may not feel like you know how to write a decent piece.
And someone in the thread about tech interviews was claiming that it's ok if candidate cannot express his thoughts as long as he is a good programmer…
Oysters disappearing worldwide: study
Am I the only one who feels this is blatant and tasteless self promotion?
If it's life critical software, then yes.

You don't get to blame civil engineers for structure failure if the steel provided had material faults (that couldn't be detected by said engineers exercising due diligence).
It seems to me that there would be a benefit in checking ip addresses so that you could only click the link from the same IP that requested it. That way snoopers have even more work to do.
A good idea to explain git from its historic perspective!

I wonder, though, if some graphics would not have helped. People who hesitate to use VCS or who barely understand SVN will have a hard time understanding git without any graphic explanation of the DAG on which git operates, I presume.
Big salt, little salt, smoked salt, epsom salt. Nothing you can do with your salt protects you from the attack that bcrypt protects you from, which is the same attack that harvested passwords from the Gawker hashes.
I only ever explain git to people with the aid of a whiteboard for exactly this reason. Drawing the DAG makes it much more clear, and it's what I see in my head when I type commands now...
In Bob's case, he's now busking. He's doing something in the public space. He's essentially forcing his performance on others or gifting it to passerbys with his actions.

Movies do shoot on location, and people do watch when movies are shooting in their area, and the studio doesn't charge for that.

Now, if Bob were to either record his performance and sell it on the street or build a box around himself and charged people to enter to see him blickit, the situation becomes analogous. You're trying to essentially paint me as saying that a baker can force you to buy a loaf of bread by shoving it in your hands. I'm not.
I live in London and am working on a startup.

I used to go to quite a few tech events in London but found I was spending too much time with like-minded people (techies) and not enough with people who had other backgrounds and interests.

These days I pretty much just go to LRUG once a month to socialise with the good friends I've made there over the years.

HN strikes me as a fairly diverse group though, so I'd be interested in going to the next meetup.
That just shifts the responsibility onto whoever made the decision after being presented with an accurate assessment, PHB or not.
I guess scala isn't already complex or rather implicit enough.

Is this implemented as a library or does it also require changes to the language/compiler?
Re: DrinkTank's policy of vetting attendees, it reminds me of a phenomenon that might be pertinent to this discussion http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
Just for the record, I believe the OP over at StackOverflow is actually a woman. At least, I think their nick was "Wendy" when they first posted it.
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I agree with jasonkester, come up with a unique project that uses the technology you want to be hired for. Cut out TV/distractions on week nights and build it out. Use that as a show piece for getting the job you deserve.

Also, try to avoid big job sites like Monster or Dice. If you really want a Java (insert any other technology here) job, find Java bloggers you admire and track down where they work. You should be able to find a number of smaller companies with people you know can teach you a trick or two. With the field narrowed down, try to run into those people at tech meetups and let them know you're in the market. Follow up with comments on their blog posts or joining their conversations on twitter. If you don't come off as a stalker, you should be able to parlay a decent job offer out of it :P
Why Intel is closing Seattle lab, and what it means for the future
Why PostgreSQL doesn't have query hints
Haha I blame my three concussions senior year.
Perhaps this is a candidate for the Enterprise provisioning model, rather than the general-audience App Store?
> I believe that there are two ways to get good at anything, "push" and "pull".

This is a great way to describe these different ways of learning. I'll be using these terms again. Thanks.
My suggestion is to find a side project or something to get involved with. That will give you something to guage where you are and ways to improve.
Tivo Ad Scorecard - See how many are watching what ads
People who choose not to view the movie are irrelevant to the discussion. Don't try and attach pirates to that group. One group is moral, the other not so much.

Taxis say "I will drive you across town if you promise to pay".

Movie studios say "I will show you this performance if you promise to pay".

The promise is implicit in the act of watching/riding. You don't get in a taxi and explicitly say "I will pay you to drive me around". No, you get in a taxi and say "Take me over there". The promise of payment is implicit.
"Which way entire nations jumped when the money was made freely available to them obviously told you a lot about them: their desires, their constraints, their secret sense of themselves. How they reacted when the money was taken away was equally revealing."

So true, for countries and people.
Freedom to Read, Freedom to Write: Celebrating Document Freedom Day 2011
Explain “Event-Driven” Web Servers to Your Grandma
Interesting way to think about it. I found it funny because I've been working on ray tracing algorithms lately and it reminds me of that situation: They're both some form of optimization problems where you need to connect knowledge/light sources to problems/observers. Tracing from the knowledge/light source end is not efficient because you have no idea what will turn out to be important in the end, but tracing from the problem/observer end is also not efficient because in the end you have to connect your problem/observer to some knowledge/light source otherwise the entire path turned out to be futile.

Some form of bidirectional or multi-pass algorithm is likely to be more efficient here... ;-)
I agree. Everything should've auto-update. Infact this makes more sense in iOS than Android as Apple reviews the updates also - that way users can be sure that the new update wont do anything fishy.
The problem is that everything you do on the internet will haunt you forever, even after your death, and the kids don't realize this.
Rob actually asked "who is thinking of starting a startup soon, or has done so in the past couple of months", which may have prevented people who have started a startup or have been employed by one from raising their hands.
I, myself, did not do computer science at university (I did civil engineering), and regret that a great deal. Not only does learning this stuff make you considerably more hire-able, it also enables solution of problems more sanely than a naive approach.

The real thing I feel that I miss is not being able to recognise where known algorithms/data structures could help out, something I'm working on fixing.