skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Atomo's an EDSL in Haskell. I think I'd have to consider Clojure to be a Java dialect by your definition.
Yet another example is organizing color libraries / color swatches:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/CSDR
Why employees are priceless - that's why we can't pay them very much. Founder are less important, so figure we can compensate with money.

Groucho: If I paid you wages, you'd be wage-slave, you wouldn't want to be a wage-slave, would you?

Bellhop: I quit
I'm assuming your hypothetical flying cars transporting people around cities are dramatically safer than today's general aviation (light aircraft piloted largely by well-trained enthusiasts and professionals in controlled environments).

If I had to bet it would be on the "driverless" car.
Unfortunately, it looks like the other half of their strategy is astroturfing HN.
We like to say there is no stigma associated with a failed startup. Quite frankly I think that's bullshit. It may not hurt your chances of getting hired again as an engineer because you will likely have great experience from it.

But you will have just spent months/years promising people you were going to improve an aspect of their life (through your business solving their problems, or maybe through getting more financial independence for your family etc.), and you were unable to do so. In many cases you've been trusted with extremely important things. You will have been trusted with a leadership role (in society, not just a company), and you will have failed, regardless of the value of the experience. Startups don't really get traction (outside of social) without serious contributions: being involved in solving hair on fire problems.

So, let's say you're starting a banking/commerce related startup like PayPal, and some fraud happens on your network which ultimately leads to it failing to gain trust (though it is relatively secure) and thus failing to gain traction and failing. Sure, you may handle the breach well, and go on to have a high paying job as a security analyst or something based on your specific experience.

But good luck trying to raise capital again. Good luck getting your friends and family to support you and take you seriously when you're going down your second "I'm quitting my job to give everything I have to a startup." Good luck recruiting engineers who know you as the ex-CEO of failed startup XYZ, etc.
I read that post a few weeks ago, while looking for a script loader. Very interesting indeed.

I fired my editor and coded my own loader (i'm a wheel designer somehow I guess).

I called the result Loadfire http://simpliwiki.com/loadfire.js.html

A funny difference with the other is about the way I deal with dependencies in the asynchronous/evented context of Javascript. Basically: active waits, specified programatically.

The other solutions either ignore the issue and fallback to synchronous like operations or provide some "declarative" ways of specifying the dependencies, but not flexible enough for my needs.

I'm happy with the result (on browsers that supports .async that is).
I'm not saying all infrastructure projects are a bad idea. I'm just pointing out that the thesis of the author is silly. Jobs are being created in India rather than in the US, and better infrastructure won't bring those jobs back.

In the US, a single bridge collapse is a national outrage, and a sign of "crumbling infrastructure". India has had at least one major collapse per year for the past 5 years:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/more-sports/bridge-col... http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/india-bridge-coll... http://articles.cnn.com/2008-10-19/world/india.bridge_1_metr... http://www.rupya.com/archives/2007/09/10/hyderabad-bridge-co... http://www.indiadaily.org/entry/bridge-collapse-contractors-...

The NYC subways are crowded at rush hour. Here are Indian trains:

http://www.google.com/images?q=india+train&um=1&ie=U...

Suffice it to say, jobs are being created in India rather than here in spite of infrastructure. If infrastructure mattered, the jobs would already be here. US infrastructure is top class - roughly the same as in all other first world countries (Japan, France, UK, etc), and is orders of magnitude better than that of India or China (no week-long traffic jams, for instance).

(Not trying to single out India, I just know more about India than China, the Philippines, or other popular outsourcing sites.)
If you download the email dump and search through the attachments (requires pre-processing or loading into a mail client), you'll see that Palantir does market their software as helping agencies better respect civil liberties while getting results. Who knows what they say in person or whether this is true.
I'm sure you'll manage to find other words to describe Gaddafi.
Considering that it's only for 48 hours, I wouldn't think any of these factors (snoring, bathrooms, no backout option) would be relevant.
I think this comment is a little harsh. I'm a genuine cloud user interested in new offerings such as this one.
Another advantage to keeping a plaintext copy is that it can be quickly formatted however an employer may require it.
HN is seriously degraded if this is being downvoted. If this doesn't ring true, then you haven't been a startup founder.
Tell HN: Call for Hackers & Founders National Event Sponsors
We're looking to put together an initial Hackers & Founders sponsor list for folks interested in reaching and engaging with national chapters throughout the US. In the early stages of planning, but please ping me over email daveambrose at gmail dot come or Twitter: http://twitter.com/daveambrose

Feel free to reply to this thread with your interest, company and any thoughts for sponsorship.
Remember that regular Haskell has pragmatic destructive arrays as well (e.g. repa, vector, hmatrix).

The primary interesting thing about DDC, in my view, is the effect types -- the type system can infer what kind of monadic effects you're using.
That site has a really nice design, and it even works in IE6.

> Does "You are what you eat" apply to developing?

No. Most of us who develop software do so in a job or for a client. That determines the priorities. Will it be good, cheap or fast? Most developers have to do it cheap and fast.

Most people have control over their own diet. Unless your doctor or partner tells you otherwise, you can stuff yourself with twinkies.
The question isn't, "are founders more valuable than employees?". As you've pointed out, that's trivially true. The question is -- as it is with beachfront property -- "how much more valuable are they?"
If you implicitly consider the market to be fair, yes. It's a kind of fair though...
Nokia is still rolling out Qt and they estimate by end of year it will be market of .5 billion phones. So Ovi + Qt is a very real market for at least the next few years. Meanwhile Microsoft transition hasn't even begun.
The point of my comment was that I believe everyone should have the freedom to be a developer. Not that they must be a developer. No one, especially me, has suggested that anyone must do anything.

We're talking about freedom here; and I'd like it if users had the same freedoms I've enjoyed over the past couple of decades. That includes having source available for a large percentage of the software I used, so I that I could learn from it and modify it. No one forced me to become a developer in order to use Firefox, but I've always had the freedom to look at and modify the Firefox code (and thus I could, at any moment and without warning or asking permission, transition from being a Firefox user to being a Firefox developer). I think "developer" is a pretty fluid concept, in an ideal world.

Anyway, as I've mentioned elsewhere, it is the difference between "may" and "must". You believe I am saying "must", when my intention is "may".
>"How about GCC or LLVM?"

I assume that unlike the inhabitants of your ideal world and myself, you are a professional programmer. Why would I run LLVM or GCC instead of Visual Studio Express Edition or program in C rather than utilize a .NET language given that neither really supports Windows in the first place?

For me, free OS's aren't an option. They don't offer the tools I use to practice my profession. To the degree I program, I have access to really good free programming tools on the Microsoft stack and better integration with my existing tools. And to the degree which I desire to learn those programming tools, being partial to physical books I enjoy the benefits of Microsoft press which simply don't exist in the copyleft world.

Again, that's not to say that copyleft doesn't have benefits, but even the best tools are full of dependencies such as the requirement to install Perl to install the Eclipse editor...again something I don't want to have to explain to my father.
I guess I've mistaken the stand-point in that, my bad!
I don't know your mom, and I don't know what she is or isn't capable of doing. I also don't think it's helpful to believe that the word is out to get you, regardless of personal situation.

But that said, you're absolutely delusional if you think that everyone in this country who wants to become a lawyer or a doctor or a better-paid whatever is capable of doing it. There are a million different reasons why most people will never become lawyers or doctors...or computer programmers. The reasons are all quite real, even if you've never had the misfortune of experiencing them: some people are born into grinding poverty. Others are never educated while young. Many people just aren't intellectually gifted. It isn't their fault, and nearly everyone I've met is doing the best they can with whatever they've got.

Right now, there are thousands of people accumulating debt in third-tier law schools trying to do what you suggested to your mother -- but most will never get anywhere, no matter how hard they work. There are culinary schools full of aspiring chefs, vocational schools full of people trying to learn their way into a trade, and literally millions of other people who have been told that their lost factory job can be replaced with something better, if only they spend enough time in community college.

Just because you had the disproportionate good luck to be born into a situation where you can become whatever you desire, does not mean that everyone else in our society has been granted equivalent opportunity by the big genetic lottery.

Said another way: empathy is a useful skill, but you don't have much of it when you're 12.
Crypto Museum
Free Handwritten Fonts
Hubbub - HTML5 Parsing Library in C
Samet's book is the definitive reference, but I have trouble understanding his explanations. They do a good job of summarizing what's distinctive about each technique relative to the others, but a poor job of explaining what the techniques are. This is a pitfall of technical writing, especially by experts: it's easy to produce something that's intelligible only if you already know the material, which defeats the purpose (assuming your purpose is explanatory and not only compository). Still, the book is indispensable as a reference.
Java hate has nothing to do with being cool. I can honestly say that it is a horrible language because I have programmed in several dynamic languages and the amount of grief you have to put up with in Java to get simple things done is unbearable when you have seen how much easier things are in dynamic languages. How many people are developing missile guidance systems on android? Most people write small applications to automate some aspect of their lives and forcing people to use Java for that kind of stuff is just beyond me.
Who is to say your idea of how an abstract concept like "freedom" should apply to software is more correct than Stallman's?

> I think everyone would be better served saying what they really stand for, starting with changing the name of the FSF.

Okay, I'm stumped. If not the spreading of free software, what exactly is the FSF's agenda? Because without any specifics your comment is just more FUD.
You should be using the combined number for Germany: 35% or so have a post-secondary degree. (If I'm reading the statistic correctly.)

Beyond that, I'm not sure your numbers are comparable. First, you're using “some college” against graduations. Secondly, the better metric of associate/bachelor doesn't really apply since most EU universities' main program is a master's (though only slightly broader than the U.S. bachelor's) and associates – or candidates/licenciates – are not distinguished, as they're typically considered contained within the master's program.

Edit: though from what I understand, Germany's education system is pretty rigid, you get bucketed into a certain educational path pretty early. I don't think any of the other EU countries has a system quite like it. Please correct me if I'm wrong before I get around to reading an article about it.
I've read every comment just to find somebody who mentions this. I'm not in the US (Actually in north Africa), so I watch Aljazeera whenever I want. Why the Americans are not trying to address the question of why they're missing out on such delicious journalism is a fact that I cannot fathom.
I'd go more along the philosophy of "you are what you read" when it comes to development. No one knows everything (or anything for that matter) so you should constantly try to better yourself.
Really? Then go start a company. I'm completely serious.
Thanks for these excellent links. Getting a boulder to start rolling is the hardest part :-)
I worked for a startup that failed. My impression is that the founders were never quite the same. It can take a huge emotional toll, especially if you're in the business with your friends.

Around here we take pains to emphasize the bright side of failure, but that's because nobody needs to be coached in how to mourn. Mourning comes naturally. It is carrying on
in the face of negative feedback from the world that takes practice and coaching and teamwork.
A better question might be, is a startup founder who achieves a lucrative exit 1000x more valuable than a founder who fails? Because the reality is that most founders don't get 1000x the compensation of their employees; in fact, such cases are exceedingly rare.

There is a lot of risk in starting a company if you're not independently wealthy. But I would question whether a 1000x payoff that is as rare as a lottery win is a more effective incentive than say a 10x payoff that happens more often. Maybe it would be healthier to invest smaller amounts in more companies, rather than investing enormous amounts in just a few as part of what Mark Cuban correctly identifies as a glorified Ponzi scheme (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231082).
When you build a skyscraper, tell me what is the most important floor? The foundations. The founder is the foundation of the company. Above this foundation is often build billions of dollars of value.
Lamabot (fortune cookies and Markov chains)
Homodyne measurement of Earth's rotation with game controller and record player
Thank you for the suggestion (and for all your comments)! We really appreciate the feedback. Travel is a direction that we are very excited about. I've added your comment to our ticket tracker, so we'll revisit it when we get the travel features.
It's a weird little backwater we're in if the only perceived risk in starting a company is reputational. Most companies fail. The risk is financial. The people you see founding companies "again and again and again" generally fall into two categories:

(1) people who have never founded anything successful and have nothing obvious to lose, and

(2) people who have already succeeded (like Calacanis) for whom the risk is any the myriad of other things they could have been doing to make money during that time period.
For perspective, here's the most popular recent articles on China:
http://searchyc.com/china?sort=by_points
Companies pulling out, being blocked, hacking, plagiarism, human rights violations, book banning, even making T-shirts there seems to be a bad idea due to rising labour costs and a shortage of yarn...
positives: a pretty cool but unworkable giant tram concept

Doubt things are going too badly for you in Shanghai though?
Kayakers snap photo of England’s version of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’
Founders don't have the final say on compensation! The market does! If you think you're worth 5% of a company you're applying for, demand it. If you're worth it, you will get 5% --- maybe not from any specific company, but from some comparable company.

If you think you're worth 10-20% of a company, stop applying for jobs and go start your company.

It is absolutely a seller's market for talent right now. If you aren't getting what you think you're worth, you have nobody to blame but yourself. Your current company may not give it to you --- for the role you fill, they may believe you're replaceable for less cost --- but that doesn't mean you can't get it on the market somewhere. But you have to make the effort. People absolutely cannot in the real world whine that things "aren't fair" and expect improvement.
I was born to a single drug addict, into a family in which no one had finished high school, and spent part of my childhood on food stampes. I understand empathy and that I lucked out in some ways, but I had anything but disproportionate good luck. I enlisted in the army at 17 and spent a year deployed. That's how I paid for college.

"It isn't their fault, and nearly everyone I've met is doing the best they can with whatever they've got."

While I agree with your general sentiment, most people are not doing the best they can. You know what I do 3 nights a week? I have a study regimen, right now I'm working my way through a probability book. A lot of people that could be doing the same thing are playing WoW or watching Big Brother. I have a 1 year old and a 3 year old, and I still make time to study on top of my job as an engineer, which pretty much means that I don't watch t.v., play video games, etc. Most people don't make that sacrifice.
What browsers do support this? Do it break when the user changes font size, as I've read somewhere?
Q Circles: The crop circles of iRacing?
A neat little article about a small bug caused by numerical inaccuracy in physics simulation.
Man you're fucking evil. You're killing the store. Don't you want a place to browse books and magazines, physically? You a) failed to buy b) /took a book back/ because of a $1.50 difference? Don't cry when the only place you can buy books become mall kiosks with pulp, like airports are.
Sorry, I'd rather donate to developers rather than, indirectly, to lawyers.
I will buy that it can cause problems with personal relationships, though working 12-hour days as a startup employee will do that too. But the idea that failure hurts you as an entrepreneur is just factually incorrect. Unless personal incompetence was obviously the reason for failure, failed founders have a much easier time raising money and hiring for a new startup.
How about you just go to your library, and ask for a book via Inter-Library Loan if they don't have it in their collection?

Your proposal seems to me to be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
PSN Card Code Generator
This seems similar to the pyramid model of Graham, Joshi, Pizlo (2000).

Modeling how (they think) human vision works, they made a heuristic based on clustering and top-down refinement. The map is clustered into a small handful of groups, and these groups are placed in a shortest tour. Each cluster is then clustered in turn into another handful of sub-groups, and these sub-groups are inserted into the tour at the position of their parent.

The pyramid algorithm is highly parallel with, IIRC, the same time characteristics as the space-filling curve algorithm.

What made the connection in my mind was that the simplest implementation of the pyramid algorithm is to cluster by simply dividing the map into quadrants; when you do so, you end up with the same space-filling curve they use at the top of the page.
For posterity, the url to the article itself (as opposed to the blog) is http://trentwalton.com/2011/01/26/you-are-what-you-eat/
Reputation? I have no idea who founded Webvan and I don't think I'd care if I did know. In modern America, there's little if any shame attached to having your business fail - less shame, really, than being fired or simply having a low prestige job.

I agree that the difference is that the founders risk something. What they risked was just money and time. And risking time can be risking more than you'd think because there's an opportunity cost to not creating a career.

It boils down to risk-amortized market for money and time; capital and human-capital.

This is just the market. There is no fairness guarantee mechanism. If I have a billion dollars to put at a very, very slight risk, it is still worth much more than your willingness to risk your time, your "reputation", your health and your $100K.
There's a wealth of books on open source development tools and languages. You can even find them at B&M bookstores.
The 401(k) generation is beginning to retire, and it isn't a pretty sight.
Why The "Bubble" Is Good In Aggregate
It (OpenOffice/Libre Office) is already a decent competitor to Office. I've used it for a decade or so. The last version of Office I purchased and used was Office 97.

That said, this particular group of folks might not have had a significant hand in developing that decent competitor. I don't know enough about it to know if they're the people I should be donating to. Forks are complicated that way. I'm a little suspicious of them needing 50k right off the bat like this, but it's been a long time since I've followed development or the people involved very closely. It's such a huge project, it probably does need a reasonably large and funded organization to really push it forward, and I obviously wouldn't trust Oracle to do it.

We are, however, probably reaching the end of life for desktop-based office suites. I use Google docs for writing everything except books at this point, and I've considered trying it for a collaborative book, as well. Likewise spreadsheets...I haven't made a spreadsheet in OpenOffice in a couple of years. The free software fanatic in me worries about this move to a platform I have no control over, but the convenience and power of online editing is hard to beat.
I was just about to reply something along those lines.

Failing at your own startup is a bit like burying a child. You start with all these dreams of a bright future, and one day you find yourself facing the stark reality that it just didn't work out, that there's nothing you can do anymore to change that, and that basically the last X years of your life, where you sacrificed anything, were pretty much for nothing. "Well, at least I learned a lot!" is very little consolation in that context.

It's a pretty fucking tough time to go through, burying your startup. I've been there, and hell, I'll probably get there again some day, but it's not the kind of thing that you go through without after-effects.

As a startup employee, you're a bit like that neighbour who watches the previously happy couple tear each other apart and finally divorce. My, ain't it tough for them, geez, I hope it never happens to me.

As the founder, you're right in the middle, ripping your dreams to bits.

And the best part is, after all that, people still expect you to pick yourself up and do it all again!

Edit: I suppose I'm being a bit melodramatic here, as pointed out by the two responses. That said, I do think that shutting down your failed startup that you poured your dreams into is a deeply demoralising experience. Character-building stuff, I think they call it, when trying to cheer you up.
This is head-explodey. If the engineers don't like the deal they're getting, they can go work for other companies. If they should be getting a better deal, they will. There simply isn't a glut of dev talent right now. There is the opposite of that.
What is it that I'm looking at?
Wrong. Why would I need a dedicated app when I have a smartphone? Just make a great mobile site. I check Amazon all the time when I'm out and about, no app required.