skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I took the AP computer science exam without any prep and got a 5. The issue is that classes aren't offered at the Honors level if there's an AP class that could replace it, and for the classes I'm taking (AP Stats, Psych, Physics, Calc, English, and accelerated Anatomy) it's not worth it to take the accelerated version (Anatomy isn't offered above accelerated, and ironically enough is my favorite class; there's actually more physiology than anatomy, and the memorization isn't that bad).
no success advice.. just watch what you do to advertise. Those adwords asswipes banned me for life on the first offense
The best overview I've seen is Mathematics: Form and Function by Saunders Mac Lane: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0387962174/

It has the benefit of being written by one of the top mathematicians of the 20th century.

There are downloadable copies in the series of tubes.
This is very true, I came to realize this very thing by watching the SICP lectures: the important thing is to understand programming as a problem solving method and computers as tools; the languages that carry this method and express it to computers become secondary in learning.
That article is where I initially got curious about the legality. He says offering the same product or service at different price points is "illegal and can lead to huge potential lawsuits", but he does not elaborate or explain why.
How many of them are there illegally, with a sixth-grade education, no skills, and no ability to speak English (or French)? It's not immigration, per se, that's the problem. The problem is the type of people we're getting.
Automating Incremental Nib Localization In Cocoa
E-Book Lending and Libraries
Seven Takeaways From Jason Calacanis' Launch Conference
Wow, a comment like this makes me glad I am with Linode. Way to not value all of your customers.
This post isn't about learning programming languages faster. It is the author of the blog discovering the rudiments of what Alan Kay discovered decades ago regarding programming literacy.
It makes it easier to calculate tips at restaurants in Palo Alto.
Perhaps the easiest way to avoid suit is to set your minimum price up front, say $10.

Split test the prices up the funnel, but on the actual signup page, only charge $10. Nobody can sue you for price discrimination, and you can track how far down the funnel people make it at various price points.

Once you have the information you want, you can raise your prices across the board.
IWantMyName and Dynadot
There's a really effective way of dealing with your discomfort about Apple's policies - don't buy AAPL. Pretty simple. I personally am long on it because I trust what the board's done over the long haul. Might change.
There's not much of a point -- that's why 1.8.7 is still around, and why uptake on 1.9.2 has been so slow.

If 1.9.2 really made every HTTP request go 2x as fast, don't you think every Ruby shop would have switched to 1.9.2 at least a year ago?
You're aware that you live in a state where the police can stop you and ask for your papers if you're brown and speaking Spanish, right?
Muselibrary
Bless: A New Twist on Concurrent Programming
Wow... Sorry to hear it. What was the specific issue? Surely not that it's an affiliate site in general?
I've never read a post by Richard before, I don't want to seem like I'm giving him a hard time, and I'm a happy Windows user, so I'm a big fan of his work.

But this article isn't inspiring from a developer perspective. I've worked in a big IT department (300 people I think),as well as start-ups, so I'm not completely blind to the structures of different work environments.

When Richard first mentioned that everybody has an office, and that he was allowed to paint his, I thought about how uninspiring that is. Same with describing his hardware. Maybe it's just me, maybe it's Richard, but this article did very little to inspire me to go work for Microsoft.

I was hoping for some insight into code planning, the specific challenges faced by building the most popular (at least the most heavily used) desktop consumer operating system.

Richard makes it all sound very routine.
How To Start A Business With No Money
Is employer-based health insurance a barrier to entrepreneurship?
The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study [pdf]
That was a poor choice of words on my part, I was indeed referring to App store/iTunes. I do believe that hardware should be open.
Best Oscar Quotes: No Squirrel For Lawrence
The Do's and Don'ts of Contacting Designers
> This really applies to tech, where honestly people don't really give two shits about your degree if you are a good programmer or have experience on hot projects.

In my experience, this is true up until a point. However, I've been coding since elementary school, and topics like algorithm analysis and graph theory are not things that one typically encounters making games in Java or web apps with RoR.

"If you want to be a world-class programmer, you can program every day for ten years, or you can program every day for two years and take an algorithms class." - Prof. Erik Demaine (MIT)
Also a double-take on Evan Williams cashing out $100M of his personal shares.

That's a big cash-out for a company that's not even public yet. Max Levchin's share of PayPal, which IPO'd and then was bought for $1.5B, was only estimated at around $40M.
We are not all programmers
I'd be surprised if he got standard management fees on a fund where the "bulk" of the money comes from one contributor and they tell you how much of who to buy.
Site (page) looks good to me.

> SEO efficacy

I have just one questions: how are you going to get a 1-page site to rank for popular keywords.

> Ideas on how to get the word out without being ridiculously spammy

Perhaps, (meaningful) participation in forums (related to health, lifestyle, environment etc.) that allow sigs in posts?
This paper identifies two possibilities for someone’s competence after a promotion: the Peter Principle – i.e. the competence after promotion is uncorrelated to the old competence – and the common sense approach – i.e. the competence after promotion is highly correlated to the old competence. Now you can run organizational simulations with different promotion rules: Promote the best, promote the worst, promote at random, promote either the best or worst at random.

As you might expect, promoting the best works well if future competence is correlated to past competence. Promoting the worst works best if future competence is uncorrelated with past competence. Promoting at random works no matter what the correlation really is, and promoting the best or worst can be made to produce the same overall outcome no matter what the future competence rule is.

I find this rather disquieting when you try and map this into real organizations. Could you really do promotions on a random basis ?
About Us | Golf Betting Tipster
It's definitely not out of the realm of possibility that he could get his EGOT.
It is my understanding that police must first have a "reasonable suspicion" in order to stop you, and only then under the new law, if they have "reason to suspect" that you are an illegal immigrant, that they are then required to ask for papers.
The better option would be for Jason Hoffman to say that he stands by his offer & will ensure that those who took advantage of the TextDrive deal will continue to see the same level of service or better that they received back when they bought it. Advertise your new services fine, but don't try to upsell people anytime there is downtime & don't go around telling everyone that these people are whiners getting their service for "free".
Back in 1999, at the start of my career, I did a bit of "catch all IT" for a company, which included help desk and desktop support.

There was one fellow who hemmed and hawed at having to use Windows 2000. He wanted to stick with Windows 95. He ended up migrated, but he spent a furious amount of time getting the Windows 3.1 File Manager working. Apparently on his Windows 95 laptop he had brought it over as well.

He also was using a release of SideKick from 1992.

-----

How is this relevant? I recently talked to someone who does provide IT support for that same company. That same person? Still running SideKick. Still complains about not having File Manager. Also is hemming and hawing about having to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Company is also still on 10Mbps networking. The owner still refuses to use copper, since they're a fiber optic distributor (multimode fiber is run to each and every desk).
“Who’s Got Your Back?” An Investor Story
Next breakthrough: Computers that understand emotions
I've been working with Android SDK + Eclipse, and that seems fairly straightforward, as far as the SDK arena goes. Having used Eclipse for some time, I suppose it was familiar, so the pros and cons are effectively the pros and cons of Eclipse, without really bearing on the Android SDK either way.

I keep trying to work with Appcelerator Titanium, but I haven't spent enough time to have much of an opinion of it.

If we're talking hypotheticals, the one thing in mobile development I would change is to figure out SOME way to build iOS apps without having a Mac. I initially thought that Titanium gave me the ability to, but I was mistaken.
Visit www.control4.com and www.sonos.com for the ultimate automated home! Cant wait to build with these.
> Richard makes it all sound very routine.

To me, that is the most impressive part of all.
He means "wish". He wants to upvote you twice.
Review my geolocation startup
I had a server go down twice due to outages at their Fremont data centre, but otherwise I've been very pleased.
Not sure that really matters. They offer a service, it was down, there was a shitty response. This is an indictment of the response to the downtime, not the fact that downtime occurred. Downtime occurs in every computer system.
Outstanding warrants Jacksonville
The GUI is atrocious. I use the GUI for branch visualization, and, well, I had expected something far better.

I use TortoiseHG and I expected parity.
"Most people in Windows have a private office – with a door"

At my office we've made an effort to keep our workspace communal to the point of removing the 12" dividers that were included with our work tables. This, as you might guess, does result in some distraction but in fostering the relationships at the office people are more apt to like being there.

I'm curious how other large companies and startups handle this.

[UPDATE] Its important to note that we let people work from home whenever they like. So, in the case where they really need to focus, they have the freedom to do so.
Is there any time that Mr. Hoffman's going to call it quits on this thread and actually take it offline in an attempt to resolve the OP's issues?!

Frankly, the tone of most of his comments have been borderline denigrating and it's doing nothing but adding nuisance value to the thread.
It's not terribly hard to teach yourself algorithm analysis or graph theory if you have the motivation. Hop on Amazon, buy CLR, and then go through the algorithms, work through the proofs, and implement each one.

BTW, you can't become a world-class programmer by programming every day for ten years or by programming every day for two years and taking an algorithms class. Try programming every day for ten years and taking an algorithms class. Every world-class programmer I know has done that - they have both the experience and the formal knowledge.
Thanks for your thoughts!

I had not thought of the issue of it being a 1 page site (I'm fairly new to the SEO world) -- I'll add a page for each product with more details, photos, videos, etc. as a start. I'll also start looking for forums that I could participate in.

Thanks again!
I'd be happy with almost any percentage of a billion dollars. Annually.
Pro tip: Download the app to take full advantage/ actually use our product (its free).
I'd argue that Digg vs Reddit in the early days would be a counterpoint to your argument. They were very similar, doing the same thing for similar people. Digg went VC and advertised heavily, reddit sold quickly and stayed under the radar. Had Digg not imploded, or had they sold at their peak for the 60MM they were offered, theirs would have seemed the much better path to take.
When the first few lines tell me about how surprised I will be, I expected to hear that people are encouraged to be creative, take risks, try working on project that might end up going nowhere -- in other words, that they promote a hacker culture.

Unfortunately, the things that the author focused on are not inspiring. Being able to paint your office? Great, but how about week-long hackathons where people can code on whatever they want?

Showing the three-level branch hierarchy of your repository doesn't seem to tell me a great story about what it's like to be a dev at MS. Not because there's anything wrong with the branch structure; if you work at a place where coders are given a lot of liberty and freedom, there should be more interesting things to talk about.

EDIT: he has another post which talks more about culture and projects here: http://foredecker.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/working-at-micros...
It makes absolutely no sense that this should be on Hacker News.

And yes, I do know Trent is a `hacker` of sorts. But still.
Released my first one last week.

1. Littlecosm: Fallen: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/littlecosm-fallen/id420245009...

Made with Corona SDK!
I turned down Microsoft when they recruited me in college. Wow, what a great decision.

Now, I run a software firm where no one has an office, everyone pairs (including owners and interns), we have a /slightly/ better ratio than 1 test per 100 SLOC, etc.
I like the concept of having an incentive to contribute.

Seems that when I click on a city it doesn't work ...
Given the rocketing valuations, my guess is a good part of the investors are eyeing a buyout by the likes of Google/Fb rather than wait around until IPO/profits.
While my statement probably doesn't covey this very well, I certainly am not an advocate of amalgamating dirty hacks or throwing any thoughts about good design out the window in the name of speed. You are quite right that leaving design until the very end isn't incredibly efficient or effective.

I'm also not a big believer in the "big design effort up front" methodologies. I tend to think of design (of code, at least) as more of an iterative process. I can't think of a single project I've worked on where a big design effort up front hasn't gone through a huge change before project completion.

Why spend all that time on a huge, detailed design that will end up being partially thrown out in the end when you can make iterative changes and design some things as you go?

Granted, this doesn't work in all situations and you do need good developers who are willing and able to write good, testable code and throw it away at a moment's notice.

If I code something in the "first make it work" phase that isn't throwaway code or can't be completely ripped out and rewritten without too much risk/effort, then I have failed as a developer.

Another mantra I try to code by is: never let perfect be the enemy of good. Perfection is never done and the best design in the world means nothing if it never gets finished.
If you thought our patent system couldn't get any worse especially when it comes to software patents, we get this...

The wrong kind of reform. As the article indicates, it's clear that it makes a deeply flawed system in favor of large companies and patent trolls even more so.
But if multiple people (or groups) actually come up with it around the same time, shouldn't that demonstrate rather clearly that it's too obvious to go handing out a monopoly on?
My favorite: http://demoseen.com/langton.html#*/*/.......*/*/*/*/............
Thanks! Its actually quite easy to get points (just checkin, or contribute info about places). 500 points(which an active user can get in just a week) will earn you $5.00 at any gift card.
Ohh and thx for signing up to the beta :-)
I did EE in school but never practiced as a professional.

I am hang my head in shame.
A successful entrepreneurial career built upon Legos
I have been running Node.js in production for a while, it is kind of a wild-west, Apache/PHP holds your hand for you and takes care of a bunch of things you might not realize.

If you come from a background of already writing javascript heavy apps, the browser is async so there shouldn't be as steep a learning curve.

Node is moving super fast, with some critical breaks between point releases.

I don't find the community crazy good, but Github is saving the day on node for me - being able to quickly browse through forks is a lifesaver
Home Recording Equipment - part 1, The Small Budget Home Studio
I think you're off to a good start.
I hope that in your plans is to add richer data. What did people have at the locations. You can get deeper. Just knowing the name of a restaurant that somebody went do doesn't inspire me to go there.

I think that is why foodspotting has gotten so much PR (if not traction).A user can see the food and get inspired to go.
I've worked in both environments. Honestly, the best environment, IMO, is working from home -- office is second. Shared office spaces are a distant fourth.

I'm the type of person who needs a lot of solitude at some times, and at other times, I love to blast music, pace, juggle, and gorge on chips.

When I need the solitude, when I'm in the zone, I don't want you taking a call from your gf, or deciding with some other guys in the office where to eat lunch.

Likewise, I may need to spend 12 hours doing nothing that looks productive. Just kind of thinking as I listen to music and do something mindless like pay bills. I feel like at even the most liberal of open floor plan offices I've felt inhibited if I spent a day or two doing what looks like screwing around. And don't get me started on pair programming.
Video Tutorials on Computer Programming and More
Thats partially the reason I started the OpenPOI Project in hopes to distribute our data as well as increase its content via the community. I am also driving around Seattle taking pictures and writing down information so that I can self- populate it too.
Hotmail now has a limit of 25GB. Setting up an email forward to a hotmail account is an easy solution.
I have heard that people at MS do something called "app week". This appears to be a week between milestones where you take a week to build something that can be built in a week. Usually just tangentially related to their product. Maybe this author can talk about that at some point.
I was hoping to know more about what corner cases he hit where he had to write subjectively ugly code and what part of the ecosystem hasn't matured yet (libraries for certain problems missing, etc). For me, building real applications and solving real problems in any new stack comes down to those two things not being much of an issue.

I remember a friend and I hacking on a RoR app a few years ago where we spent more time trying to get Ruby Gems to play nice rather than actually writing the app. Now, those problems have been mostly shaken out and are a thing of the distant past. Is Node past this productivity immaturity hump yet?
It's the title of the original post, not editorializing for HN.
It is so sad that LinkedIn says this could affect their IPO. This basically shows that the Chinese government, by leveraging the large population and market, could indirectly dictate what a US company could and could not do in order to please the Wall Street folks. I hope things won't go much worse in the coming decade. A Chinese myself, I sometimes just don't want to believe when some people are saying this century will belong to China. This Chinese authority continues to do what essentially was what Qin Shi Huang did 2,000 years ago after he conquered the whole China [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of...]. And it did not end well.
Reading this almost makes me want to cry.

It's still all to common these days to find developers with 4 year old machines, comprised of scavanged parts (from people leaving) running Windows XP.

A level of bureaucracy forcing you to maintain 3 tickets (at least) in 3 different systems to make even a typo fix in a production system with 3 day minimum turn around time.

Servers with less RAM and resources then your 4 year old desktop. Laptops? Too expensive so just use this 8 year old IBM one when we need after hours support. Source control? Use TFS which is the most god awful ticket manager/source control system the world has ever seen.

Private office? No, shared space, with people having loud meetings behind the developers at all hours of the work day. Corperate firewall blocking things like stackoverflow. A view from the office? No, other people can have that, you look at a concrete wall.

I guess the moral of this is work for a company that values developers. Keep that in mind while looking for a job if you are one.
Sorry and this may get me downvoted, but this comment shows significant naivete about both B2B and B2C business models.

First, neither is easy. But "B2C is predictable and not too risky" is patently absurd. It requires attracting users, keeping them and figuring out a way to monetize them in some economically sensible way. And this is while competing with 1000s of other services trying to attract attention as well. VC portfolios are littered with carcasses of B2C startups that never caught on (and those are the well capitalized ones)

With regards to B2B, I think you're describing B2B in a consulting context vs. B2B SaaS. In SaaS if done right, you have people with a pain and with real money to solve that pain. As a result, you don't require millions of users to make good money.

Of course, one is not better than the other. Depends on what you know, what gets you excited, etc.
The bitter tone? My apologies. It's just the writing from TC strikes a nerve in my at how bad and perverse it is. In any case I let that leak through in my response to you and others. Again, sorry about that.
So if I stop paying, the games I already bought are worthless, right? After all, the headline says "if you buy a game." Yech.
Great article. Writing my node.js project has exposed me to all of the things listed.

One thing I have to say is that NPM is good, but good be better with it's distro integration. The ubuntu install has broken permissions by default, which forces me to install stuff with sudo. I haven't had the time to try and fix it.
Do your developers have to do any creative work, requiring deep thought, or are they just code monkeys?

If the former, do you provide a way for them to get away from the distraction when they need to think deeply?
> Does an implementation of Venti exist?

Yes.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/venti/
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/libventi/

And Fossil is a core piece, too:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/fossil/
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He's working on a TV show based on his "Year Zero" concept album, so if he wins an Emmy for that, all he needs is a stage play or musical.