skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
" This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it."

Unfortunately, there are two reasons why this assumption falls apart. First, there are a lot of non-Computer Scientists out there writing software. Second, the push for everyone-gets-a-degree credentialing and the cries of "we're short on qualified candidates" in industry have led to a serious erosion of standards in universities; either the topics aren't being taught or students are passed without the lesson being absorbed.

On the first point, I think this is a good and a bad thing. It's good because it's democratic. It means that more people are finding their own way, it means that systems are getting more intuitive, it means that barriers to entry are being torn down. Literacy is good for everyone. But it's also bad because the actually trained Computer Scientists and Software Engineers, aren't focusing on keeping this process going. Instead, they just want to open consulting firms and roll out yet another CRUD business intelligence Web app. Concerning, to say the least.

On the second point, there is a serious problem with the number of people we are graduating through universities. And I don't care what the top universities are doing, there are 50 more low-end state schools and technical schools churning out people to each one of them. I know at my university, I received education in such topics of Software Engineering. BUT--and this is a big but--it was all but unrequired knowledge. I can't say any of it was truly "required", because I ended up working with quite a few of my classmates several years later, and they had forgotten it all. They stood in awe of my prowess as a programmer, when all I was doing was using the same lessons we had all received. If you were good enough at programming to avoid basic syntax errors, you were good enough to get through to the end with a barely passing grade. And few hiring managers care about grades.

These people that I graduated with, they have benefited from the democratization of programming as well. We should make this relationship more explicit. Keep Computer Science pure and only graduate people who are up to the chops. Encourage people who want to write websites to go in to Graphic Design. Make programming on equal terms as algebra and creative writing. We all have to study it, we don't all have to be experts, but the people studying the subject specifically had better be held to the highest standards.
indented -> intended
Ask HN: Bootstrappers, what do you use daily?
What kinds of products, services, communities, or tools do you depend on daily to make your life easier? What can you not live without, what do you wish existed?
Funny how it's a non-problem for some other languages, like Portuguese.

While English allows you to naturally create whole sentences using one-syllable words, it's horribly hard to even put two one-syllable words side-by-side in Portuguese.

That, and "W" takes only two syllables to pronounce, making the grand total six in an URL, the same number required to spell the dots (our domains end with ".com.br", making it three times the two-syllable word "ponto"). And now I remember "W" was not even officially considered a letter until recently, so abbreviations with it are rare.

Before considering a letter harmful, please mind the rest of the world that is also using it.
Jimmy Wales on internet communities working against plagiarism
Boilerpipe is by far the best tool for this that I've ever found (http://code.google.com/p/boilerpipe/). I'd be interested to hear if he is using something better, but I'd be surprised if he is.

I think this is a great idea and very similar to a lot of stuff I have worked on recently. It's cool to see so much interest in these text-related services.
You know, back when "multi core" was an excellent signal for "profiting handsomely from" perhaps this made sense, today, not so much.

One has to ask "Is your marginal cost any different if I run this on an Atom machine or a Core i7 ?" No? So why would it cost more?

This looks like another example of 'old school' software economics colliding with Generation Cloud or whatever you want to call it. These days if you're asking the question "How do I adjust my fees for the size of computer they are using?" you should really be asking "How long can I expect this gravy train to last before I'm wiped out by Open Source efforts?"
What do you like about Responder and Recon? I've never used or seen them (I've used both BinNavi and BinDiff).
How Rich are the Superrich?
This article made me thirsty and I don't know why.
So close, yet so far. Sucks.
Not sure that is the word choice you intended:
It might not be a "bad" one it terms of your chances of being right, but it's "bad" in the sense that it's insulting, frustrating, and marginalizing for the underestimated woman.
It seems like Mark Suster is trying to get a tax deduction on his Justin Bieber fan gear!

The message is: be super talented, be lucky, work your butt off, and then you're set. Pretty superficial article -- I am disappointed by the lack of irony...
Is "App Store" As Generic As Microsoft's "Windows"?
What an entrepreneur could learn from techcrunch:

Be a completely absolutely shameless shill. If you think people will call you out, just make your shameless whoring sound like some kind of brave principled stand. For example, you can say something like this: "I know people will criticize me for writing obvious blatant advertising copy that has nothing to do with this site's subject matter, but I will write it nevertheless because I thought hard about this and made an idiotic banal and meaningless connection between the pop-culture crap I am supporting and blah blah blah."

Also make sure you always include a list. This list will do for every occasion:

1. Be talented
2. Work hard
3. Be positive
... well paid??
We take all feedback very seriously. Pricing and plans is something we're always iterating on.
I tried hard to resist commenting on this subject but obviously not hard enough.
It's kind of a funny thing to read but nevertheless I stick to my opinion that Justing Bieber is the product of someone else. But this one succeeded in creating a new product for a new market. Still I hope that with enough effort I can succeed without having a 70s hairstyle, a choirboy's voice, or a busy childhood.
The founders are runners. Breck did the Boston Marathon in 2:29:36 this year... 73rd place overall.

Oh, and your running friends can already use this over at Running Warehouse, for example: http://www.runningwarehouse.com/descpageMRS-ASKNS3M.html
Don't worry, I know better then most all the issues you face in doing what you are doing, and frankly, you're being smart about it, which is why I'm rooting for you. =)
No it doesn't. Not one bit.
Works great! Nice to have: concatenation of multi-page articles.
Finiteloop = Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook
In Minnesota, they always stretch out the dub-ull-yew. However, "rapid speech" is not something you'd ever encounter there.
I heard they paid $9000 for it.
When enough time has passed for an URL to be resubmitted (I think it's a year or two), I think that the previous submission and comments should be resurrected (using a second karma score for ranking), not an entirely fresh story started.

Simple to implement; accumulated wisdom is not lost.
And yet, linux.conf.au managed to self-organize at this scale with a completely different set of organizers each year.
The King's Speech wins, The Social Network loses
Don't worry. Some of us old codgers still enjoy themselves.
With Steam Valve understands the problems of DRM and the disruptive nature of digital distribution. They appreciate that you can't just slap DRM on digital goods and pretend that they are now effectively identical to physical goods (where scarcity can be controlled more easily). Thus they make sure to offer many inducements to sweeten the pot after souring it with DRM. They make distribution easy rather than a chore, they add new features (like "steam cloud" configuration management, multiplayer conveniences and social software functionality), and they leverage the digital nature of goods to put on incredible sales (where sometimes you can buy a fairly recent game for as little as a few dollars, right now you can buy Braid, an award winning game released just a little over 2 years ago for $3).

There is nothing fundamentally uncrackable about the DRM of any games available through Steam. Indeed, many games on Steam are available in cracked versions. Nevertheless, this doesn't change the value of Steam or the ability of Steam to do amazing business. Often times it's just plain easier and better to buy a game through Steam than to go to the trouble of pirating it. That's very much a part of Steam's business model. Embracing digital distribution and adding value to digital ownership, in contrast to the typical approach which is to poison digital ownership in the hopes of crippling it enough to make it conform to the characteristics of physical ownership (i.e. constrained scarcity).

As to open donation models, I think you have a misconception about the idea. It is utterly irrelevant if the number of people who donate anything is vastly exceeded by the number of people who play a game (or listen to music, or watch a movie) without paying anything. What matters is the total revenue. If you can make more revenue by having 2,5, or 10 times as many people donate money even though 100x as many people donate nothing. This situation may tickle your "unfairness" sense (but to that I'd ask, do lending libraries do so as well?) but at the end of the day the artist still nevertheless has paid the rent and put food on the table, and that's what's important.
Free?! The link directs to PayPal page asking me for $29.00...
I think it's the non-linear processes that have trouble with the back button. Clicking back should go to the last modal state. If your app is fundamentally non-modal, then the last state is outside your app and clicking back should exit (after persisting all state, of course).

But most apps can be broken into at least a few states. For any document based app, like Photoshop, navigation should probably move between document views. Any modal dialogs should be closable with the back button. You don't have to use it for everything, it just has to do something sensible and non-destructive at any given time.
I had an ex with natural talent for art. She never went anywhere with it (took the safe route and became a nurse instead), but she was just plain better at art than other people, with considerably less effort.
Is it a sign when all the prices and ordering info for their products has vanished off the site? or is this SOP when a company is acquired?
So what are Disqus's plans now?
Gruber said it
http://daringfireball.net/2011/02/the_next_six_months
Congratulations on getting some nice media coverage. How is this different from Formspring or the hundreds of other annoying quiz apps on Facebook?
How about this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wo...
Your comment is flawed
I like djb's tools, but dns isn't one of them. The whole "can't have names with dots in them" thing is painful. (see rbldns as the canonical example)

Having created a nominally secure name service in the past, I feel like I have at least a reasonable understanding of what it takes to build one. That being said, its unfortunate that IETF got 'standardized' before they could successfully pull off a secure naming infrastructure (ISC's efforts not withstanding).
how do I upgrade my existing account? when I try to sign up, it wants me to create brand new account. there is nothing in admin panel that offers me to upgrade, am I missing something?
I have a hard time understanding why people don't like admitting that just as we differ on the outside (beauty, fitness) we are also different on the inside (metabolism, disease susceptibility)

I can only speak for myself, but "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" sums it up pretty well for me.

Beautiful to whom?

Fit for what?

Susceptible to which diseases? Concrete example: Carrying a gene for sickle-cell disease is obviously bad... unless you want some resistance to malaria. So which is it now, good or bad?

Of course people are different, and that's awesome. But the idea that you can give people "scores" on a bunch of axes like the ones above, and then figure out who is "better" or "worse" seems to me naive at best.
Install MacPorts: http://www.macports.org

Add /opt/local/bin to your PATH (bashrc or zshrc or whatever you use).

sudo port install libxml2 and sudo port install libxslt

Then sudo gem install nokogiri --no-rdoc --no-ri should run with no issues. That's all I had to do for the system ruby (1.8.7 on OSX 10.6) and 1.9.2 via rvm.
If you're monetizing your content via adsense then they're taking 32% of your profit.

Right, and that's absolutely expected. Apple should feel free to take 30% of anything purchased in-app. What they shouldn't do is force vendors to charge everyone else 30% more for the same product.

It would be like Google saying, "if you want to show an ad on your blog, you have to give us 30% of the money you make at your garage sale". It simply makes no sense.

Want a marketplace where no one buys anything, there are confusing payment options, and your product is next to 10 task killer apps, well then there's a Marketplace for that.

I want one where I can pay $10 for a book on my Kindle and read it on my phone when I don't have the Kindle with me. Paying Apple an extra $3 so that I can read my books on my phone doesn't make much sense to me.

But that's why I don't own an iPhone. My phone is a chunk of circuit boards that fits in my pocket, not my life.
The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 4)
3 words: Cold War over. Copy and paste all you want. It still doesn't change the fact the government will need to curtail spending, and perhaps raise taxes once the economy recovers if it doesn't want Greece II:

http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/national-debt-skyroc...

I know it's a conservative web site, but the chart is generated from WH OMB data. I'm all for closing loopholes. Flat tax! We'll just need to fight fewer wars, subsidize fewer corporate farms, and not give 90 year olds hip replacements for free. Oh, and raise the retirement age.
From an actual, yet unnamed, Apple Staffer:

http://www.cultofmac.com/apple-staffer-ipad-3-is-the-one-to-...

That's what I was thinking of. Kind of throws a wet towel on the already rumored incremental iPad2 release.
C is not a language optimized for stability. The possibility for segfaults, buffer overflows, etc. and the lack of a sensible mechanism for handling them other than "write the program correctly" demonstrate this. It is, essentially, a language optimized for writing Unix.

Shell is not a language optimized for stability. It is optimized for interactive use, above all else - it's not even a very good scripting language, even though it's historically been used that way an awful lot.

Python is not a language optimized for stability - it's not even mentioned in the Zen of Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

The primary focus of Java (at the time of it's creation) was "write once, run anywhere". The primary focus of Java (now) is "languages that compile to JVM bytecode are nifty - plus, we have C-like syntax but are a high-level language".

The primary focus of Erlang, before and above anything else, is program stability. OTP exists to increase stability. "Let it crash" exists to increase stability. Parallelism and message passing are in the language not because they're neat, but because (if they are used at all sensibly) they will increase stability.
The companies providing the APIs don't have to justify the "why". When I was working on Facebook applications a few years ago they would change the API calls and rules almost monthly, app developers had to adapt or die. The changes were often due to apps abusing the system in one way or another, but Facebook defined what was abuse or not. Sometimes the changes just looked completely arbitrary and sometimes meant that some applications were just not possible anymore due to vanishing API calls.

Exporting the private data from Facebook is considered a big no-no, from what I remember the TOS might only allow you to do so for a short period. Maybe that search service gets away with it because it stores an index based on the private data and not the private data itself. If Facebook gets uneasy with how close the index is to the original data or what private information leak might happen if Greplin is compromised, that could be a good enough reason to put a stop to it. Facebook not getting into a private information leakage scandal is probably more important than allowing a startup to live on Facebook data.
Do you have XCode installed? Nokogiri is a native extension, I don't think you can build them without the compiler tools installed.
We were indeed the first to really identify the market for mobile photo sharing.

Really, indeed. I built an iPhone photo sharing app about two years ago (It was my self-assigned "How to program in Objective C" project), and there were at least several others that came before mine.
According to Google Street view, Dos Perros is in the same build as Relevance, the guys who run the conference.
Yep, i worked on TxtMob, and at Odeo when we came up with Twitter. The idea of twitter came from a hackday project of Jack, Noah Glass, and Florain Webber. But they were all aware of TxtMob as we'd done a presentation and evaluation of TxtMob a few days earlier.

At the time, you could only use twitter via sms. It's since become much less tied to SMS. I'm not even sure if you CAN do the whole signup and user creation via txt message alone anymore.

The problem with txtmob was the group creation process was always clunky. If you could solve that, make it easy to create groups and start participating, then it might still take off. At one point we even had a version of txtmob which let you sign up and sign off via asterisk, using voip. Looks like pretty much what you did. That was after twitter launched, so we never really put a lot of work in to making it stable.

I still think it's a good idea, i say go for it! Hosted VOIP as a service makes it MUCH easier to do this today, than in 2004-2006.
The shebangs are better of Google's AJAX crawling scheme. If you set it up right, just as Twitter has, Google has no problem crawling the content.

http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/
Cool! A German retail site offers something in the same direction:

http://www.mirapodo.de/groessen-kompass

I've been working on a similar concept for dress shoes.

http://sizeadvisors.com/
I worked at a big streaming media company and there are significant DRM challenges with serving video in a way that protects the content. When you're trying to get serious content deals from producers they will dive into the deepest level of how you handle their content to make sure it meets their own internal standards before agreeing to anything. Companies like BitGravity are developing solutions that meet these requirements. One idea might be to expire the hashes in a 5 minute rolling window which would still give a huge caching advantage to ISPs:

1. ClientA is authorized with video service.
2. ClientA gets 50mb of hashes to buffer
3. ClientA starts downloading hashes sequentially, requesting more hashes from the service as the queue is emptied.
4. ClientB is authorized with the video service.
5. ClientB requests same resource and gets same list of hashes.
6. ISP can cache the hashes for 5 minutes and get some savings for popular content.

I think this would be a very good solution for live broadcast where you're looking at a huge number of people requesting the same content, but for VOD it would have limited return.
The Dropbox app on iOS can play mp3 files so you don't have to use iTunes to sync your music.

iBooks having DRM is (IMO) a problem with the publishing industry, just as DRM on music used to be a problem with the music industry. I want Amazon, and Apple, to push the publishing industry into dropping DRM on books.
Well, they are starting to plan really early. Maybe they're opting for that this year?
Don't forget MMS. That came long before...
When you are no longer a student, it will not be so easy. IEEE and ACM (at least) will charge you for articles, and without an IP address registered to your university, all you'll see is abstracts.
ASK HN: Review our new product: WordPress Module: Security, Auditing and Backup
Mac OS X Lion features hidden tribute to Steve Jobs
Evernote 4 iPhone / iPod touch app starts with a clean slate
Hey Lubos,

We definitely need to add something to the Admin Console about this. On the to-do list. :)

You can upgrade by:

1. Signing in to the Admin Console
2. Going to Settings
3. Scrolling down and clicking “Change plan”
4. Clicking the “Full Service” tab
5. Choosing the plan that fits you and hitting the “Change” button

Let me know if you have any issues/questions!
I read an article years ago, which I can't seem to find, that gave a completely different reason for this phenomenon. Real estate is so expensive that large numbers of teens and twenty somethings have no hope of moving out of their parents' apartment even if they are working. This means there is an entire demographic with plenty of cash to spend on high end (preferably compact) technology. I have no way of knowing if this is actually the case, but I don't think the OP does either.
One of the things I found interesting about Google's process was that everyone had input on their tracking system. Thus even when a person was a 'good fit' if there was someone in the company who had worked at the same company/time as the candidate, and suggested that the company pass, that carried a huge amount of force.

When ever I recommended someone I would check to see what the other folks that knew them added into the 'mix' if there was someone who clearly had an axe to grind (hey it happens) I'd try to talk to them one on one and figure out if it was a 'real' issue or just a past injustice that was motivating the down vote.

Sometimes it was warranted, there are good people who just don't fit with a company's culture. Sometimes it wasn't. One manager suggested that even if it was just sour grapes between the candidate and the employee it was a 'good signal' because the candidate burned their bridges willingly. (Although I'm a firm believer that people mature and change over time, not everyone subscribes to that philosophy either)

Be nice, be courteous, if they turn you down move on.
I have not worked with Joomla or Comentum but have done extensive work with Drupal. That said, there's a reason Drupal has become widely adopted with grassroots campaigns. They often have limited technical resources, just lots of eager volunteers. Drupal has a great theme engine with a very active community so you can do quite a bit of look n feel stuff with simple web interface and no PHP work. If your mockup needs to do anything dynamic then Drupal's very extensive framework might be too easy to get lost in.
I would love some feedback on a new product we just released to the public.

It is a security plugin that will add some things that are missing on WordPress. Including:

-Full auditing trail (so you can track everything that happens, including logins, logouts, new users, new posts, posts being modified, etc, etc)

-Active response - Based on the audit trail, it will block certain behaviours (multiple failed logins, spam bots, attacks against known WP vulns, etc)

-Backup - Daily backup of your site (DB + files)

-1 click hardening - A quick option to run some best-security-practices hardening into WP.

Link:
http://sucuri.net/wordpress-security-monitoring

Anyone can download it from here (only parts of the plugin that are paid - auditing + backup), the rest is free:
https://wordpress.sucuri.net/wp-sucuri-plugin.zip

Any feedback on the landing page, plugin itself, screenshots, etc are more than welcome.

thanks,