skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there is huge value in trying to become what has been called a "full stack programmer". In the maning of: try to understand how computer systems work by understanding how each part of the stack works. Don't try to completely understand every subtle detail of every part - try to understand it like you understand how a combustion engine works.

My list would be:

- basic electronic concepts, ie. transistors, XOR / NAND, bit shifters, adders
- assembly language
- hardware layout: CPU, registers, main memory, MMU, interrupts
- operating systems: hardware interface, multi processing, file systems
- networking: packet networks, ethernet, TCP/IP (sliding window, congestion control)
- low level programming: C with fopen & co, sockets, structs, system calls
- compiler construction (this is important!), parsers, translators, programming language implementation and virtual machines
- algorithms: complexity theory, automata, CFGs, common data structures (heaps, maps, trees)
- discrete mathematics, statistics

I think if you can explain all of these in at least a sort-of, hand wavy way, then you're on a good path to become an excellent programmer. I also think that is what a good CS degree should teach you. Try to explain to yourself in a children's story way what actually happens when you click your mouse button. If you don't know something, look it up.
This is something of a case in point for my argument that we really don't know how to deal with it..its brand new, and works on different dynamics than playground bullying.

The methods of cyber-bullying I've encountered doesn't involve a lone 'loser' barraging someone, but entire groups of quickly organized cliques continually harassing people.

And to be clear, they're not limited to terminal based Internet connections anymore, or even the Internet. A phone number is just as good as a chat account, and much less secure.
Just remember all the algorithms and data structures they taught in class (the push stuff). That'll help you some day when you need to scale (while you're pulling).
some previous discussion on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2171381
Ouch, I'm not a DBA nor advocating for hint support in PostgreSQL but were I either, I'd take Josh's broad brush of "old", "lazy" and "ignorant" unkindly.

PostgreSQL is indeed an awesome technology, I'm using it again after several years of working with folks who were stalwart MySQL adherents. I'm glad to be back. The query planner, among many other things, is a huge improvement.
so who owns 42.42.42.42 ? (which is the obvious candidate for the root DNS server)
Fair questions.
A bit of a background first. My co-founders were: an MBA student with a healthcare concentration (Wharton), an MD/PhD student (Columbia), and me, the techie (grad student Columbia). Unfortunately for the start-up (and fortunately for my co-founders), they graduated and moved to Denver (to work at a healthcare company) and San-Francisco (residency), respectively. Although I wanted to continue working on things, with 66% of the founding team away and unwilling to commit to putting in the time, the project is bound to fail. Now, one may argue that I should have continued on my own, which is a fair point to make. However, what I've learned about healthcare is that it's a VERY tough market. It is not because of there exists some crazy technological challenge that the tech world has never seen before, rather because of the people in the industry and the industry's regulations. Physicians and institutions are VERY suspicious of anyone even remotely trying to enter their "domain," and they would thwart any attempt. Our intention was to help them with their workflow, so they could see more patients and thus make more money. When you approach MDs, for the most part, they fear that you may try to replace them (although that was not our intention). It follows with immediate resistance. Also, if you were to get into this domain, you should know that you can't just put up a website in 4 hours and start testing (Snowcolypse!! :-) ). Medicine is so "academic" that people want to run clinical trials, etc. In short, there's a lot of bureaucracy.
Interestingly, I now lead the implementation of the clinical data warehouse at a major medical institution in the US (though I was always a programmer, not a DB or BI guy. Sortta fell into this position). The other week I spoke to the director of the stroke center at a medical institute in Brooklyn NY. A 50-something year old guy, one of the only 1200 stroke experts in the US. Super nice guy, super smart (taught himself python and Fortran to have a common language with the technies and to know when they're trying to pull his leg). He's very much into technology and its applications within medicine (he's trying to push telemedicine to strokes, because every second counts). As he put it, "the problem with healthcare is that the stakeholders think that this is the most complicated domain in the world. People are so arrogant to think nobody has tackled these technological problems before." They, therefore, push off any suggestion for improvement (what worked for Pfizer, BMW, or Goldman Sachs, who have millions of transactions a second, will not work for us!) Same sentiment exists at my current employer.
I guess digital cameras or webcams were not that available either. I am sure than having to take the picture, having it developed at the camera store and then scanning gave more time to think twice. Plus had a much less "private" feel.
As a not-working-at-a-startup person, when I went to the first HN meetup I was impressed by the fact that pretty much everybody I met was working at a startup. That's part of the reason I haven't been since actually, because I didn't think I had too much to add to all those startup people. So my experience was pretty much the opposite of yours. How many have you been to?
Pretty much I think this is one reason why the big names in software industry did not totally adopt the notion of graduating with a degree. What they did was to venture out on the real world and try solving some problems that they have by using computers and understanding how to program it. Pretty much I think it is safe today that 90% (or more) of what's being taught in universities offering CS degrees doesn't match up with what's happening in the real world. You want to program, sit on a computer, find something to solve and do it.
Pardon if I deviate a bit from the main topic.

I live in Ireland, and it was quite disheartening when the last budget cuts appeared. Taxes were increased across the board. If you were earning 25,000 Euros a year, you would pay an extra 1000 Euros in tax (and surprisingly enough, this low earner class was the worst beaten income group by hike in tax in percentage terms - 4+% more tax!).

Since its general consensus that banks, govt. etc are at fault (to which I agree), I want to say something which generally is ignored, just a theory. The Celtic Tiger years, due to low Corporation Tax rates, have had the similar impact on the economy as Resource Curse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse). Ireland got rich so fast with all the incoming money that lots of careless spending by government as well as people was ignored. The property prices went up crazy, things became awful expensive etc etc. When nobody cared about how much govt spent or how much banks are landing real estate developers, this was bound to happen IMHO. If Ireland had gotten rich slowly and on its own (by increasing exports, productivity etc), such rackless spending bubble economy would probably never have manifested itself.
You're talking as if children are killing themselves over internet bullying left and right. The truth is this almost never happens and when it does is almost certainly bullying from the real world spilling over into the virtual.

The internet has opened a lot of doors and changed some of the rules, but I don't believe it has turned the playing field upside down as sensationalist news articles would like us to believe.

If anything, as the web has matured as a technology and as a part of life things are probably getting better, since the rules for how kids need to behave on the web are becoming part of the culture and not something their "pushy parents" are trying to convince them of.

Notice how the interviewed girls talk about giving false personal information and about how they promptly cut off inappropriate contact as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. I'm not sure this was the situation 10 or 15 years ago...
I respect your opinion, however I'm quite sure that person who asked this question actually cares about what he does because I don't think he would have posted this otherwise. I mean I could be wrong but this is what I felt when I read it.
They do not seem to be hosting an alternate root themselves. They rely on http://wiki.global-anycast.net/index.php/Main_Page
Anger is certainly an appropriate reaction in circumstances like this, but I find articles like this really gloss over the nature of the shared responsibility for what happened.

Yes, banks and governments (including the US! - we just haven't felt the full brunt of it yet) engaged in many unsustainable and downright fraudulent practices. Asset bubbles are breeding grounds for such things. On the other hand, no one forced homebuyers to take on loans they knew they could not afford, or spend borrowed money at unpayable rates.

Now, everyone wants a bailout. Neither banks nor consumers should get them. Iceland actually did the right thing by taking its banks into receivership and breaking them up. The banks screamed bloody murder and threatened national chaos, and the Icelandic economy did grind to a halt for almost a year. Now, they seem to be on a road to sustainable recovery. This is not true in either the rest of Europe or the US, where the bailouts came fast and generous. Look at today's job report. Is that the sign of economic growth?

While the decisions were justifiable at the time, TARP, TALF, and the like need to be admitted as mistakes and corrected. If this means recognizing all of our largest institutions as insolvent, so be it! The nation requires a banking system, but not any individual bank. It will hurt badly, just as it hurt in Iceland, but the alternative is Ireland and Greece.
1. Should college teach you to program?
This is a philosophical question about whether a CS degree should be educational or vocational. The general consensus seems to be that it should be the former not the latter. It should give you the theoretical foundation that you can apply to almost anything.
Therefore, college won't necessarily teach you any programming beyond what you need to read examples and do assignments, which may not be particularly deep.

I personally think that's a problem. There is nothing wrong with being educational in your sense of the term, but I do think people with a degree in CS should be expected to know how to program.

Not expecting a CS alumnus to be a programmer is like having an architect not know how to draw buildings, or a surgeon not know how to wield a scalpel.

Sure, the degree should absolutely teach you more than just programming, but there is no value in being a CS grad without knowing how to program. It's sort of the low level toolkit that you absolutely must be proficient in to being with.

A strange thing about CS education is that we have all these people studying Computer Science or even Software Engineering without ever looking at a significant piece of software. You learns lots of small examples and lots of theoretical bits, but as far as I can see most programs never take a look at, say, the Apache webserver and explain how all these small things come together to produce a successful piece of software. That's really a pity.
Judging by the number of people in shirts and ties there, I'd imagine a large proportion are in full-time employment and on the periphery of the startup scene.
Original Mac Team: We're not hackers
reading the rules from an rfc mentioned on the wiki, if XXX.XXX.XXX.42 is a valid IP address, the client should try to use that first, if not it should only then try to use DNS to resolve.
BMV Properties
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> I'm not sure the article explains enough to put git into perspective - its mostly a "what is version control" parable?

The parable walks you through git's data model and is therefore git-centric. The metaphors used are a rather thin veneer on top of the way git actually works instead of a thick and leaky abstraction.

You could apply the high-level concepts across other systems but they would not map as cleanly or completely.
How Saya Hillman Made A Business Out Of Dinner Parties
Where is 21-25???
I'm 22.
It looks great, particularly when compared to MyRegistry.com. Is there a way to pull in existing registries from Target and Babies R Us? That seems to be where most pregnant ladies start, and then end up desiring more from other non-registry sites.

If I put babyli.st on my shower invite, I imagine having some extremely confused Aunts and Grandmothers... but if I can say "Babyli.st, Target and Babies R Us" that would be more generation friendly. They can go to Target, and it updates on Babyli.st for my savvy friends.
What data does Google harvest without renumeration?

When it comes to PageRank, the implicit offer is: Allow google to use your links (intra-site and extra-site) in its algorithm, and it will make your site searchable via Google.

If you don't want Google to use your 'hard work' of collating and vetting links to other sites, then disallow the Googlebot via robots.txt

On the other hand, Microsoft refuses to allow anyway to disallow click traffic patterns involving your site to be used in its algorithm. They are thus mining the links from your site to another without even having to renumerate you by giving you a chance to be indexed in their engine.
Right! Coming up with standalone C means coming up with your own versions of hard-to-write simple "system calls" like memove.

I debugged a memcopy (taken from Linux! 10 years ago) on a RISC processor - it had 12 bugs in a dozen lines of code. Not designed to run on RISC but shows how hard it can be to get this stuff right.
I'd expect this group to be the highest ranked... why would this be hidden/dead?
I upvoted you. My apologies for the gender assumption.
Hmm, perhaps a closer analogy:

Traditional Web Server:

The pizza shop receives a call for the initial order and starts the pie. Then the customer calls back periodically to check if the pie is done because the pizza shop cannot call back or deliver.
I'm graduating with a EE degree but I don't feel like I know how to solder.

I'm graduating with a ME degree but I don't feel like I know how to weld.
Grandma, "Event-Driven" is just a fancy word for magic. Don't worry about it.
> Don't try to excuse bad security practice with "user experience"

Thank you for saying this. It's distressing how many people are rushing to his defense, by saying, basically, "well he's successful and rich, what do you know?"

I know that I'd be pretty pissed if my passwords where being stored in plain text and got leaked all over the internet - and most of the people using this non-excuse would be to.

There are plenty of ways to provide the same service of mailing out passwords that PoF has without leaving plain text passwords laying all over the place. Since the founder is supposed to be such a screaming genius when it comes to programming and running servers, I'm surprised he didn't know any of them....
Chrome 9 released. A dash of speed, 3D and apps
Right; but I believe git to be a source-control system!

Forgot to mention: there are also build-control-systems, release-control-systems. All often confused/muddled in discussions.
Im new and trying to learn java and need help
hi so im new to all this and im trying to learn java for developers and i have this project thats taking all my time and forever to figure out can some one please help me cause im like spending my life trying to write this out

{Write a program the produces the following output
see link for picture
use at lease 2 methods
use multiple for loops
your output statements should each print only 1 character}
Sadly missed last nights HN meetup. But just wanted to say I'm a London hacker working on a Seedcamp '10 winning startup.
From my experience people can programm() or they can't. I rarely have seen someone "learn" programming. A CS degree has nothing to do with it.

Becoming a good programmer is something different.

() Deconstructing problems into smaller problems and expressing those in computer commands.
One of the few positive things to have come out of the financial crisis of 2008 is that it has probably killed any prospect of Scotland becoming independent - we used to be promised that we could share in the same kinds of success as Ireland and Iceland if only we had the courage to go it alone!

I doubt if many people have the appetite for being stuck in a small country with a financial monster like RBS or HBOS.

[NB I am a reformed Scottish Nationalist]
Don't really understand what this is for or why it's valuable. Would anyone care to explain?
It's certainly difficult to send a decent screenshot. If Evernote had a feature like the drop-upload of cloud app, they've be money.
MealTik, local homemade food network, just got LaunchRock'd
Think AirBnB for homemade meals. Find meals or host a meal. Do it for fun, networking, or money.
Five Useful Security Tips for Web Developers
Oddly enough, I read this and came away without capturing anything of value from it.

Write more. Thanks. Already knew that.

I hate to sound snarky, but it's very ironic -- this entire post had the feeling of somebody sitting down to make themselves write something, anything -- without developing much original thought. In fact he quotes his cofounder quite a bit instead of coming up with insights of his own. He mixed together two very subjective ideas, "what makes good programmers" and "what makes good writers" in a way that didn't manage to shed light on either one. At least to me.

Communication is important, yes. Am I missing something? Was there something else?

Like I said, not trying to attack the writer, and I apologize if my tone is harsh. I know many times I have to write things over and over again, coming at the same topic from multiple angles, before I really nail it. Perhaps this is what's going on. (In which case I begin to wonder why it got so many votes)
I believe it's a self-hosted mashup application for all your social networks. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think it's a pretty neat idea, although most normal people are only connected to 1 or 2 social networks. I myself connect to Facebook for friends and family, and LinkedIn for professional contacts. I don't see the point of sharing personal stuff on LinkedIn too.

-update- From the looks of it, Locker only supports Facebook right now...
Just because you are rejected by VC's or YC doesn't mean anything. Even best of the VC's make mistakes, here is a firm which missed companies like Apple, Intel, Google, Paypal, Ebay etc...

http://www.bvp.com/Portfolio/AntiPortfolio.aspx
I'm a bit confused as well. Hopefully I haven't been hellbanned myself!
If you had just spent $3 million on a super bowl commercial, how much would it be worth to you to know the immediate response to that commercial when it airs?
I wonder how it would have done priced at $12 but immediately discounted to $9.99? (Not only is it easy to see how cheap it is, but it's also on sale.)
How to get a job at Apple
I believe this is a decentralized social media platform - "Diaspora" but by someone who knows what they are doing.
you get between 5000-1000 executed events per second

As a point of comparison, I put together a quick Python script that defines a simple single-threaded event dispatcher and then does the same thing as your testPerformance() test, and it handles over 296k events/s on my machine (where javaEventing handles 3.7k).

This use of multi-threading is used to achieve full asynchronisity

The way that you're currently synchronizing, the only concurrency you're seeing is for your handlers. You only trigger and dispatch out to handlers one event at a time.

There are two scenarios where threads are always going to be unavoidably slow: high contention, and processor-bound tasks with more threads than processors. Your current synchronization policy pretty much assures you're going to run into high contention, and if you're using this for processor-bound tasks, you're going to pay a severe tax for the number of threads you're generating, as well.

Put in the threadpool. Take a look at ConcurrentHashMap and CopyOnWriteArrayList. Work on your synchronization policy. High throughput concurrency and eventing is hard, but Java actually has a lot of nice building blocks to work with. If you want a good overview, you should check out Brian Goetz's Java Concurrency in Practice.
You're wrong. DES crypt(3) hashes have had salts since the 1970s. Capture of complete password databases is exactly why you hash passwords instead of storing them plaintext. I don't think you have the requisite background to hold a strong opinion about this subject; you should just take our word for it.
Any startups or hackers in the Tampa area?
Just moved to Tampa and looking to meet some more people and maybe find a group to meet with from time to time. Is anyone running a company or living in the Tampa area?
I dance capoeira, and although it isn't full-bore cardio, you spend enough time in the right zones (over the course of an hour) for it to count. Plus, it's good for all-around strength training. I didn't start out with any extra weight, so I've put on a few pounds of muscle across all the major muscle groups.
Elizabeth Taylor debilitada pero bien maquillada
That certainly works, but it seems like a large part of this market would want numeric-only URLs, and so you couldn't have e.g., 1.2.3.4, or 1.1.2.3, etc.
I am a pull-learner as well. My physics undergrad and grad courses occasionally required that we program in Fortran, -that's what our profs used.

I once asked the head of our program why our degree didn't require any CS courses, but did require that we learn to code. She smiled and said "Well, we think you should just learn it." That short conversation made an impression on me. It wasn't in college study things, I was there to learn how to do things.
Show HN: my new project, an anti-snub dating site
A JSON parser (of sorts) in roughly 150 lines of C code. I'm not the author.

https://github.com/quartzjer/js0n
Haha, I am sure you would have thought of me as 'that guy'. I'm not in a startup, I'm quite young, very interested in technology and from time to time work on web development 'side-projects'. But I want to work on a startup in the future and I want to meet intelligent people interested in creating startups. Surely that's the point?

I understand that you want to meet people that are more successful than you. You want to meet people that you can learn from. Or at least to meet people that are on the same level to you that you might share the experience with or work with. But that's exactly the same reason that people with less experience go.

So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being hypocritical because this would be missing the point: you judge the evening on its value to you (as opposed to the value you're given others by effectively mentoring them). That is just what I do. However, at the very least I expect you could find good developers, future employees, interesting stories and people to bounce off ideas and help test your software.

edit; As others have stated: if you are really interested in startups you should probably be at home working. ;)