skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started programming when I was 14. I'm now 19 and have had the opportunity to work with several other programmers from a very wide age range.

As a young programmer, anyone who has been programming for 10+ years is an ABSOLUTELY necessary resource. Us younger software engineers have a lot to benefit from their experience, and the quicker we realize this the better.

Personally, I haven't noticed any difference in cognitive ability or agility between programmers I've worked with in their early 20's vs 40's. And typically, those who have that extra experience seem to almost always build more reliable and extensible solutions.

I really hate to say it (being as I am 19), I would hire my friend Virgil (who's in his 60's) along with anyone with over 10+ years of experience before I would myself or anyone fresh out of college.
On the other hand, there's no way to fake your code compiling either. We had programming exams in front of Linux shells without network access -- if it didn't compile, you got a 0. This was CS 101 at a big state school.

Unfortunately, it wasn't actually such a great method for getting students to learn the material...
And to quote the CEO:
"Let's not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally - taking share from us in emerging markets."
http://techinch.com/ - Tech tutorials, reviews, and how-tos

http://maybring.com/ - Live/personal blog
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When I graduated with a CS degree in 2003, all of my programming experience was in C/C++. After graduating, I went into web development using scripting languages that were never taught in school. I would have loved to have had classes focused on web development with scripting languages rather than take classes on operating systems and computer architecture. There is nothing silly about that.
For sequence alignment, the state of the art is BWA, which first compresses the "haystack", then builds a trie.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows–Wheeler_transform
or http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2009/...
I'd start with the bible of algorithms: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Third-Thomas-C...

Read that puppy cover to cover, and try your hand at implementing some of the data structures and exercises in it. I studied it in college, and reviewed out of it before I interviewed at Google. Some of the best interview prep I did.

One more tip: when you're practicing, practice on a whiteboard, with no reference material, and only try compiling it on a computer after you're absolutely positive it's correct and have tried a number of test cases. Nothing like simulating real interview situations to help you prepare...
> Your banker was just talking shop.

Respectfully, I doubt that. He seemed to be working through a standard questionnaire for new business accounts, including a lot of questions likely to be of interest if we ever asked for credit/loans. We got much the same questions on another occasion, opening an account with the same bank but for a different company.

Of course, that doesn't mean he wasn't also interested for other reasons professional, personal, or both.
I have tried out both Less (http://lesscss.org/) and Sass (http://sass-lang.com/), but not used either in a big website. It looks like Sass is better – it is more powerful in that it supports more functions and you can optionally use an alternative, less-redundant syntax with significant whitespace and no semicolons. The 2009 post http://nex-3.com/posts/83-sass-and-less by the creator of Sass compares the two, and the two deficiencies in Sass mentioned in that post have since been fixed. From what I can tell from looking quickly at the Less website, it hasn’t really improved since I last saw it. I’m using Sass for my very simple personal website, and it works fine for me.
> Streaming adoption will likely follow the classic S curve, and we’re still on the first part (acceleration) of the S curve. Since we expanded into streaming, Netflix net subscriber additions have been 1.9m in 2008, 2.9m in 2009, and over 7m this year (estimated). While saturation will happen eventually, given the recent huge acceleration of our business specifically, and streaming generally, saturation seems unlikely to hit in the short term.
To me, Jon seems to have demonstrated exactly like the type of resourcefulness YC asks for in its applications [1].

Unfortunately there was no way for YC to predict the Jon had these chops at the time. The fact that YC can make such predictions with high-accuracy, from simply an application and a 10-minute conversation, is very impressive. There are bound to be borderline calls now and then.

If you have de-identified application data, it would be interesting to know what early patterns in applications predict future success.

[1] Jon hustled his way into YC, found a way to make the move when his co-founders weren't willing to, kept the company running and profitable meantime, and closed a large seed round with top-notch investors, in perhaps roughly the same timeframe that he would have with YC.
If you're bashing together some web scripts for your local HR department in a company of 100 people, yeah, OS and computer architecture isn't very useful.

If you're a professional web developer that is creating web sites that need to be reliable, need to interact with other computer systems, and need to be performant even under heavy load, you will if anything find that your operating systems and computer architecture courses were merely the beginning of what you really needed. You need everything you can get when you're trying to make a web page that doesn't take 4 seconds to load. Learning another language isn't really the hard part of the problem.
> If that's the case, then they have the hardware to make this potentially faster, more compact, and more power-efficient than more conventional approaches.

In which cases are those the limits that keep us from achieving "AI"?

For example, what robots are limited by those factors as opposed to the actuators?
And I disagree with the "Thinks more slowly" idea. Its just absurd. Really, I think most people in this industry would agree, its a lot more like "Thinks about a lot more".
I reject those commits right off the top.

The things you are complaining about are all things that I enjoy about gerrit. I tend to rebase on pull and use cherry-pick as the submit mechanism so it fits naturally into the flow of my groups.
And the design is still pretty stomach-churning.
Some of the points she made were quite good and somewhat scary, but it shows pretty much what facebook has been this whole time, irresponsible, whether it is with privacy or scenarios such as this one.
I think you're failing to understand the purpose of a patent pool here. MPEG-LA is an organization that licenses a broad-pool of patents to companies interested in licensing them. They actually have a number of pools, though the H.264/AVC one is probably the most well known. MPEG-LA in turn, represents about 30 licensor companies that all have patents (on the order of thousands) in this H.264/AVC pool. The money they get from licensees (on the order of a 1,000 or so) is then split among the licensors (minus an administration fee by MPEG-LA, naturally). MPEG-LA _explicitly_ makes it clear that they are not providing any assurance (in fact, they make it clear, it's impossible to do so) that all of the essential patents to distribute a AVC/H.264 product are included in the pool.

So - MPEG-LA can't "Infringe" on a patent with H.264, as they don't distribute any H.264 products. All they do is license several thousands patents from 30 licensor companies to approximately 1,000 licensees. They have no obligation to communicate, evaluate, or otherwise publicize whether a patent submitted to this potential VP8 pool would be useful to their H.264 licensees.

Now - the question then comes out, "How is it that the H264 LIcensors think they have _any_ protection against some patent holding company out there? What prevents someone with a critical H.264 patent from going after Microsoft, or Apple and asking for $500Million claim?"

Apparently, this is where the concept of estoppel by laches comes into play. MPEG-LA went out of it's way to (A) Put out a call for any patents essential to H.264, and (B) Published, very openly, the names of every licensor. Anyone with a patent that is essential to H.264 has had every opportunity to come forth with one - it's been very, very, very public who they could contact. At a certain point, you can't delay your claims, or you lose some of your standing to claim them. This doesn't guarantee that the licensors won't face a lawsuit some time in the future, but it certainly tips the legal scales somewhat in their favor, and likely reduces the potential for a charge of willful infringement and the damages that come along with such.

One of the purposes of Patent Pools, is to create this "certainty" around the IP strength of a manufacturer. If MPEG-LA is able to establish a patent pool around VP8, and, after a few years, products come out, and nobody gets sued by a submarine patent out there, we'll likely see the codec become more popular, resulting in more licensors, and, eventually, VP8 could become as popular as H.264.

Regardless - I don't see a way for anyone to release a "Patent Free codec" in the Video world for at least another 20 years (2028 is when the last of the MPEG-LA patents expire).
“Tomorrow” is an excuse today
Hackers Highlight Offers of Corporate Espionage
An employer can easily find grounds to chase you for your strictly post-employment work if it can argue that such work misappropriates its proprietary rights (usually but not necessarily trade secret), whether or not the work you originally did for the employer had commercial value at the time you first did it. Starting with a from-scratch codebase may or may not offer you a shield but likely not - this is because the concept of "trade secrets" is much broader than the code itself and a former employer can (normally) easily argue that you are gaining an unfair competitive advantage from your superior knowledge of the confidential information relating to its proprietary product and that you would be misusing such knowledge (which, by law, belongs to the employer exclusively) in using it to do an allegedly independent implementation. The employer might find it hard to win such a case but this would not stop them from making your life hell for several years as you try to defend yourself from such an assault.

Short answer: there is no absolute defense in the fact of your no longer being employed when you do the allegedly offending activity.

BTW, I don't know enough about the Andreessen or Google examples to comment intelligently on the specifics there.
I wonder if they pay lower royalties on live music and that's why they try to jam it into my playlists all the time. In the last year or so I've felt there like there was something just a little off about it some of the song choices and I'd be curious to know if different artists/labels/genres command different rates and if that impacts the song choice.
So the MPEG-LA isn't just a cartel of large electronics and software companies getting together to lock any upstarts (like Google) out of the market and protect their margins?
We've been using it for a small, but growing team. It's been beneficial every step along the way.
It was a primarily a case of "if it ain't broke...don't take a hammer and start smashing".

They had some nifty ideas (like Twitter-style following of a user's submitted links), which they probably could've implemented gradually and unobtrusively, taking the time to gather feedback and perfect each one. Instead, it seemed like they had a very brief beta, then parachuted in the entire broken, incomplete thing as a wholesale replacement.

It's still plainly broken. The front page is absurd: 4000+ "votes" on the sponsored link, less than 100 on the real links. Fewer than 10 comments on most of them indicates a community that hasn't just declined, it's died out entirely.
The UK-based TweetDeck had raised a little over $5 million in funding.

Then in the CrunchBase box below:

Funding:	$3.8M

Which is correct?

Anyway, congrats to TweetDeck, a friend of mine just started working there a few weeks ago so hope they go from strength to strength :)
I'm saying that as a language, both of those could be used to make far more elegant UI frameworks. C++ doesn't have introspection without hacks - that in and of itself makes it painful to use. PyGTK+ is used pervasively throughout GNOME for UIs. Ruby has MacRuby which you can make great Cocoa UIs with less work than Obj-C.
Pandora commands higher than average ad rates. Remnant (which is bargin basement inventory) is somewhere around $5cpm and I don't think they sell to networks for display to keep demand high. It's actually hard to get inventory there unless you are a premium buyer. For those of you who don't know or care much about online ads, all this basically means is that almost every other publisher (Huffpost, whatever) would kill to Pandora's rates. The fact that they aren't incredibly profitable shows how tough the business is. God knows how Grooveshark makes any money.
It's not oracle specificaly it's that if you are say a structural ironworker during the day and make bronze sculptures as a hobby then a judge will understand they are different.

But they might not understand that being a sysadmin is as different to being a web designer in the evening.
Good luck finding the torrents using Google.

http://goo.gl/dGpjn
I went to a museum once where they just kept everything, I learnt 2 things, one, that the first radio batteries came in more varieties than we have today, and two, never go to a museum that try's to keep everything...
Hi, you should follow your dream, not others dream. If you are looking for job, try to find one that offers best value. In this case, my assesment is that option "a" is the best deal. You get some money, even if company does not make it, and if company make it, you will get from 1M - 1.5M which is still quite a lot of money.

Cheers,
Milan
That would be a pretty bad sign. I sure as hell wouldn't invest in a company that's going to turn around and spend the money they raise on ads. They should be building a war chest and their biz dev and legal teams to get some leverage on the labels. Regular radio pays $0 of their revenue to labels, Pandora pays $.50 of every $1.
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Wow, thanks so much!

BTW, The URL should be http://bit.ly/keynotopia
Smart people will tend to succeed whether they went to university (or college, as you call it in the USA) or not.

Those people who are smart and motivated enough to want to have an academic career will do so.

I don't think they will care that less smart people also get an "A" on their tests. They will go on to study for more advanced degrees while the people who had to hustle for their grades go off to work in a convenience store or whatever.

The real problem is that people who are not smart enough to be studying for a degree even end up there in the first place.

In the UK it hasn't really cost much historically to spend three years getting a degree. (This is all about to change, with fees rising to £9000 soon - still very cheap compared to the USA.)

Many young people here in the UK have felt that it would be crazy not to go and study a very easy degree subject for three years. It's a license to party, with free bank loans attached as standard.

I can't help thinking that attending a university is more of a rite of passage than a genuine learning experience for most people these days.

The tragedy is that these degrees are unlikely to make people more employable. It would make more objective sense to start full-time work three years earlier.

(It's late and I'm tired - apologies if the above resembles a list of bullet points rather than an argument.)
Ah, but she only seems to deal with kids beyond the walking-talking phase, so there's potential for a partnership supplying her with kids for her to mentally whip into later life therapy.
"Then I must have misunderstood your point."

You still are. The core point is different people will measure things differently. The point is that what Person A sees as a minor injustice that he committed against B, B sees as a major injustice because it happened to him. There's an old quote attributed to Mel Brooks where I found it online, though the core quote has been around longer than that: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die." That's the part of my point you're missing (and I do not think merely disagreeing with), people valuate injustices that happen to them much higher than things that happen to other people, let alone their enemies. Part of why I think you can't be disagreeing with it is this is undeniably true; people are not neutrally scrupulously fair on any level when it comes to their own possessions or desires. Everybody carries around an enormous self-bias, for various reasons, not all of them even bad.

Yes, society has come to some basic agreements, but that's not relevant to my point. I explicitly stated that retaliation isn't always unjust, and for another I also explicitly said that while each side perceived its retaliation as just the net effect is an unjust spiral. The perceptions are not the same on all sides. Every major conflict in the world is between a righteous and holy side that only commits justifiable and regrettable retaliation against the bad guys who inexplicably engage in acts of pure, unadulterated evil just for the fun of it and just won't leave us alone... and this describes the beliefs of both sides. Sticking the happy side of this label on "our side" with Anonymous is not something I'm ready to do, not ready to overlook the means to their ends, however wonderful the ends may be.

And none of this is a refinement of or a contradiction of anything else I've already said, just trying to lay the same basic point out yet more clearly.
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The first word that popped into my head was "lawyers"
Great story! And guys, I personally think the discussion should focus more on "...and Then Raised $1.5m for My Startup". He clearly has no hard feelings for YC and even said "they did the right thing".

To me the story speaks of the rewards of true hustle. That and making sure you're family is 100% involved in your start up too, as his wife sure helped too!
Xkcd: (
you forget that carriers decide updates, not the manufacturer.
In the business world, there's a significant distinction between a scripting language or not: whether it needs a compiler. This is a very relevant and real distinction for enterprise-scale applications and implementations.

Code being in a scripting language means that the "operations" data center folks can tweak and poke it. Need an extra parameter passed in or a magic constant changed? Just do it. But compiled code is no exaggeration often an order of magnitude harder to maintain. A whole chain of change requests must come into being, from whoever found the need back to a "developer" who has the right tools and environment and access to the source and even knowledge of what and where the source is. (We don't see that kind of problem at the scale of a YC startup or a well-managed Google-size tech behemoth, but organizational tech knowledge is a gigantic problem for companies whose primary problem domain is not tech. Like say a bank or medical provider or retailer.)

I've written significant amounts of code in SQL stored procedures when C# (we're a Microsoft shop) would be a more appropriate platform, simply because my company's culture is that SQL is accessible and open to the business analysts and managers while C# really has a walled-fortress image. It grates on my sensibilities but "scripting" really does save effort in the long run simply thanks to greater transparency.

Back to the original article, it's really just saying that a scripting language has lower barriers to entry and maintainability, which is absolutely true.
No, neural nets have topped out long before that saying came into effect. They aren't useless, but don't be fooled by facile analogies to the human brain; neural nets as we actually know how to make them do useful things are rarely the best solution. We don't know how to train complicated ones very well, and the simple ones we know how to train are still very slow to learn vs. many other techniques, yet simultaneously bring very little to the table that aren't done better by numerous other techniques.

Reminds me of genetic algorithms and programming; no, they aren't necessarily useless, but remove the facile analogies to real-world processes and they carry a lot of expense for not a lot of gain. Only rarely are they the right choice.

Goals aren't results.
My thoughts exactly, but apparently I also have a defective gene inherited by some alien splicing of the magpie genome into the human species, because damn do I like shiny!
The Toyota thing was obvious propaganda, constructed just as a story was needed to boost sales from American automakers.

The businessmen that run these monolithic media corporations, for whom news is only a small part of the total holdings, need friends with political power. The politicians need someone to make them look good. It's a mutually beneficial relationship; the businessmen get a fast track to DMCA et al, the politicians get a fast track to making their choices from earlier look good (bailing out American autos, in this case).
The gas pedal getting "stuck" is a result of the scary, not the cause.

About to hit something unexpectedly->slam foot down on wrong pedal->omg the car accelerated when it should have stopped!
What kind of idiocy is in the MP3 codec? Did Mark publish anything talking about this? That's fascinating!
Thank you. I was thinking maybe one of the companies ended up not taking Yuri's money.
Some people respond poorly in emergencies. The fight-or-flight response causes their brains to lock up and they freak out, instead of making rational decisions. They'll burn out the breaks trying to break normally, for example, or just do nothing until they run into something. Even though in such a situation any combination of fully breaking, shutting off the engine, picking the accelerator pedal up with the edge of your shoe, using the emergency brake, or shifting into neutral would probably be more than sufficient.
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In the courses I have TAed (also in an Ivy League school), homework made up 20% of the grade, and the rest was from exams. With that breakdown, it doesn't matter much how much or little help you get from the TAs, the main purpose of the homework is to help you learn the material.
"... It dragged C++ programmers halfway to Lisp, in the sense that hardware abstraction through a VM and automatic GC gradually became acceptable. ..."

that's funny in a bad sort of way, funny but true.
Gosh that seems like such an easy coup to pull off. I wonder why Microsoft hasn't stuffed more of their short tenure employees into management at other companies for discreet takeover purposes.