skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't. Excuse the cynicism but it sounds to me like you're complaining. Did you happen to be involved in a start-up that isn't doing so hot and you believe Google is to blame?

Sorry but just because this is the internet doesn't mean real world business rules don't apply. There is a difference between form and content. Your only reasons for preferring Oyster over TripAdvisor is that the page is cleaner and there are less ads? Ummm if you had actually used the two services it would become clear that TripAdvisor has better content. And again, just because this is the internet doesn't mean that there is no barrier to entry. Think about the search engine market, the social networking market, the audio statistics market (c.f. the totally off Last.fm article also curretly on the front page). Try displacing those guys.

Point is, if Oyster in fact proves to be a superior website in the long run, it will hopefully (and probably) get its due. But to expect an algorithmic search engine to order results based on hope is just... wrong.
contracted hours do not equal actual hours worked.

And according to the bls the average american works about 34 hours last time I checked.... So teachers still work more!
Played it for a few minutes and dominated a handful of tanks with the helicopter. I'm usually a huge fan of this style of game but I think they are more fun in 2D than this style of 3D.

I wish someone would make a MMO version of the Tank game on Wii Play. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMqEoZivjnU)
I pretty much knew what it would be, but then again disappointment is rarely unexpected.
Ah, I was off by one.
I didn't say that rubber rooms are a problem in Providence. I'm saying that examples like those in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere are indicative of the state of public education as a whole. I'm saying that I support almost any means necessary for public education reform, the Providence case being one of them.
> Memory is also not a problem since all modern operating system allocates stack memory as needed.

A modern OS can only allocate memory as needed with a page-level granularity.

For many millions of threads, this is not good enough and will waste GB's of memory completely unnecessarily. Maybe in a decade wasting GB's of memory will be negligible (but then we might want trillions of threads!). And pages seem to be growing too, so the OS granularity is too coarse for micro-threads.
* When I first started going I found that git was rather hard to for me to wrap my brain around, especially since it so radically changed the way certain commands worked.*

I've found Git really easy to use coming from SVN. My main problem has just been the Windows tools haven't been as intuitive as Tortoise. What issues did you first have with Git?
As you said, I am sure we do differ in philosophy - I feel like your dislike of things you can't customize to make them more useful to yourself and the idea that "if a user goes looking for an option to change something that annoys them in the interface, then the interface is getting in the way of the user" (in addition to the other arguments; I won't bore you by quoting all of them :) to be missing the forest for the trees.

The motivation that I admire behind this feature (and I presume that you do not) is making a choice that makes some (most? all?) users uncomfortable (surprised? annoyed?) because they believe it will make the service better (in the most broad sense possible).

People being aware of what is trending has the potential to keep people abreast of up-to-the-second current affairs, thoughts that are permeating the community, and ideas that similar people have that you may find intriguing.

The community also has a prevailing interest in Twitter making money, since if it folds, the community ceases to exist (this is for values of community contained in "people currently using Twitter") and any good Twitter Co. can provide ceases to increase.

Are these good enough reasons to introduce a truly hateful piece of UI? I don't think so. I'm glad they're willing to make decisions for reasons like the ones above, even if I think this one was not a good one. I personally am unconvinced trending topics can be introduced well, but I don't think introducing unpopular things is bad, especially when it's unpopular for the reasons you've stated.
Doesn't work for me at all. Win 7, Chrome 9
Performance tip #1 - Java Strings
Odd this was modded down. I think there are no Dale Carnegie fans around that understand the reference.
Java is a specification, the Oracle JRE/JDK is not open source. The OpenJDK uses Hg. When they talk about Python they are talking about the cpython or main implementation. Pypy, another Python implementation uses Hg as well
This, like the old "freeciv"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeciv

...is targeted to people who already know civilization ii.
what work do your "fuck"s and "shit"s do?
re: links, have you heard of Mint.com? Check out their infographics as and example of aggressive, but high quality and legit link building. The one they did about 'how big is a trillion?' got hundreds of links. Here's another peice of brilliant link bait: http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator.

If you think only black hat link builders can move the needle, you aren't meeting the right people.

Also, why can't startups just raise money to buy an existing site with inbound links? A domain is just a pointer, and handled properly, there is little downside.
Gadzooks, I wrote my first programs before he was born, possibly even before he was conceived.
I did detailed evaluation of bzr, git, hg and svn. And found bzr to be good too (at least equally good). Most comparisons I found online have been too old to be using older version of bzr which was very slow in comparison.

I am still unclear on the impact of a "branch" being the key concept in bzr as opposed to "repository" in git/hg.

Git's support on Windows has improved considerably (although I could not find a good GUI). So I rather find not much reason to use Hg!
Btw, thanks for putting yourself out there. Seriously. You've taken a really important step in fixing your situation - putting yourself in situations that are unlike what you've been doing in the past (which hasn't been working for whatever reason), and seeing what happens. Experimentation will get you everywhere.

Secondly, I think you should put your work online. If you've really done website work, why not throw some of that work online for us to see or play with? After spending some time in design school, I see just how more powerful a portfolio can be than a resume. Pictures say a thousand words, and a good code sample or open source contribution says at least as many. :)

To those skeptical of this post, remember we're talking about someone without any job experience. Not even an internship, it sounds like. Being able to code is one thing, but it's often hard to show experience in the "soft skills" of programming without having said you've done it before - from good code commenting practice and source control, to dealing with working for a boss. Hiring someone for their first job requires takes some risk on the part of the employer.

Come to think of it, maybe if this HN post doesn't help, you can consider applying to paid internships? While many internships are just for students, some (especially smaller companies or startups) are happy just for the short-term help - and you might just turn it into a full time gig.
Show HN: Check out TripStat.us Request an invite
keep Inc.com in the payroll !!
The strange horizon made my neck hurt.
I was hoping you would use it as a lead-in to discuss why you're so angry about a man who died 65 years ago and who devoted his life to doing things that he thought would have no impact on the world.
From http://twitter.com/dickc/status/44221580028547072

If an alerting mechanism is in your face all the time, it's not a good alerting function.

Doesn't the iPhone still pop-up a modal dialog that you have to dismiss (and may accidentally interact with) for SMS alerts? (I personally can't believe anyone puts up with that -- you have to jailbreak your phone to get a better interface on that?) People stopped complaining about that a while ago, they'll stop complaining about this functionality of the twitter app soon enough.

Although, I like the suggestion in the OP to "[give] users a way to pay for the app to make it go away." That's a valid solution, and acknowledges that what shows up in the #dickbar is income related.
A college graduate who has been jobless for six years is probably pushing thirty. It's harder to get hired with "no" experience at 30 than at 20 (or even younger) a lot of the time, especially for fast-moving "dynamic" technology jobs.
Command+x is cut, same as ctrl+x on windows. Might be application specific as I only tried in Chrome and Textedit but I'm fairly certain it is OS wide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Execution_Prevention#Windo...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomizat...

Backward compatibility prevents most of these from being utilized fully, a shame.
I will cry the day that a closed ecosystem device becomes peoples' primary computing device.
It's there: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojdnkfmlponpahkgad... :)
That doesn't work for me, as I wish to transfer files to my ipod that are hundreds of megabytes.

I can copy files off of the ipod via the USB, but not on.
I was just about to comment and say the same thing, using Bingo Card Creator as an example, then I noticed who made this comment :)

Thanks for blogging Patrick, it's a great resource for the rest of us.
Also http://reddit.com/r/longtext
Terribly hard to aim.
In my experience, the problem is the investors. Most investors in startups can't stomach the unpredictability, in timing OR payoff of investments in SEO.

In my case, it took 5 years of bootstrapping to hit 1M uniques per month from organic and 7 years to exit for 8 figures. If I'd had investors to contend with, my head would have likely been on a platter well before that.
http://mobile.twitter.com ... better than the client IMO.
apple has search and mass market ads in their crosshairs...?
I make starting a startup look easy?

"Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it."

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup."

http://paulgraham.com/die.html

"As you go into a startup, you'll be thinking "everyone says it's really extreme." Your next thought will probably be "but I can't believe it will be that bad." If you want to avoid being surprised, the next thought after that should be: "and the reason I can't believe it will be that bad is that my model of work is a job.""

http://paulgraham.com/really.html
BeeWi Bluetooth car controllable by Android and Nokia phones
Changed it! thanks for the input.
Nexenta - the fastest growing storage startup
I started my start-up 4 years ago at 31 and ran out of cash at 34, where I got my first coding job. I had 3 years of hobbyist experience and was able to find a gig. I dont think age has anything to do with it.

To land my first gig I found job postings on craiglists or wherever then searched company on facebook to see if any of my friends was connected to an employee at X company. This landed me a few interviews pretty quickly. Now I indeed I did start at a low level salary, but it has quickly increased. IF this is indeed true ... good luck; think outside the box like this post to help you get your 1st gig!
I strongly disagree with this, and should probably blow up that disagreement into a blog post:

1) SEO is harder today than it was in, say, 2000, just like the App Store is more competitive than it was at launch. That is a long way from non-viable, though. There are recent, high profile, successful startups like Mint or OKCupid where SEO was a core traffic acquisition strategy. (OK, you will not be as good at SEO as OKCupid, but you can be as good at SEO as Mint is. They're in an uber-competitive market and found a spin on it such that the skeeziness in the space worked in their favor, because most people in consumer finance are trying to sell you a credit card and Mint was trying to save you money by, ahem, selling you a credit card.)

2) Links >>>> everything else, with regards to ranking for head keywords. Happily, startups are in a great position to get links. BCC has a couple of hundred in five years -- a YC startup can pick up a couple of hundred by launching. AirBNB practically has a hundred from PR coverage in the NYT. A single well-executed link bait or viral sensation seeded with your hundreds of linkerati friends can really, really move the needle.

3) You can still dominate large portions the tail of the keyword distribution through superior execution on your content strategy. Is this the tactic for all seasons? No, if you're just doing brand arbitrage against the same 400 New York hotels that every other person with a phonebook has access to, this will not lead to dethroning established competitors. If, on the other hand, you're finding unconquered frontier and settling it, you win by default. Can I give yet another plug for services which do not target twenty-something white and Asian males and, instead, which target the need of underserved demographics? If your primary competition is Demand Media you should ROFLstomp them for most of the keywords you actively target. (And learn from their model for scaling content creation up.)
Is it just me, or are you Box.net employees the only ones who call it "Box"?
Wouldn't it be a little scary finding such a device in your car? At first, you might wonder if it's linked to a a bomb. Then if you consider it's a tracking device, who is actually following you? I'm sure it's enough to give some people at least moderate anxiety and others possible severe. Who knows what else.
Teradata to Acquire Aster Data
It depends on the context of the problem:

* If it's being framed as being applied to a small number of items on one machine, I'd mark down for premature optimization. Normally such assignments have a specific point, and going off the deep end with efficiency measuring often misses it.

* If it's being framed as being applied to huge data sets, asymptotic complexity is the metric to go off of.

* If it's being framed as a latency-dependent (UI, servers) then actual timing is the metric to grade off of.

I'd say that if you have an algo that is faster for small numbers, it usually doesn't really matter that it's faster. Small numbers go fast no matter what. Unless it's latency dependent, it's encouraging students to work on things that don't matter at all.

EDIT: spacing EDIT2: spelling
Managing a Mobile Workforce
Here's another one:

http://www.aldaily.com/
Working from home is so nice, but it does make IT help a challenge. And I know I've thought about my information security! What about you?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinat...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinat...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinat...
It's not a mistake except insofar as it's impossible to any significant degree. It's only self-deception (encouraged by consulting cheques and/or ideological blinders) that says otherwise. At least that's been my experience through careful observation.

I'm not speaking of software (only) as a hobby but of the startup community of hackers building and running their own companies. Look around you here. There are many people practicing what the word "agile" actually means, as opposed to these process doctrines. If the Agile processes are really a better way to build software, why don't most startups bother with them?
I got a pod up and running a day or so after the initial code drop, as a test to see where things were at (which I toyed with briefly, then removed; I haven't poked at it much since then).

Please trust me when I say, the instructions available today are vastly better then the state of play when they initially released; if you didn't have some Rails experience going into it at the time, you were probably not the target audience. ;)
Seriously, this is just baffling. If there wasn't a clear time-separation, I would go so far as to think that it reeked of personal grudge.
This feature bloat is exactly my issue with a lot of commercial software - especially Photoshop. With each release, it includes a load of junk most people don't want, but new ways to make files incompatible with old ones so that people have to upgrade, as well as bug fixes that should in reality have got patches.
I thought it was Canvas2D and not WebGL... ?
Here's the million song dataset: http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/

Last night I downloaded the SQLite db 'track_metadata.db' and ran some simple queries like sorting for the hottest artists (Kanye West, Daft Punk, Black Eyed Peas), most prolific artists (Ike and Tina Turner: 208, Michael Jackson: 204, Johnny Cash: 201), higher average song-length by year (1975: 258s, 1976: 255s, 2001: 254s).

I wish the SQLite db contained more fields like beats, loudness, song_hotness etc. as rickrolled here: http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/pages/example-tra.... I don't think everyone needs the full waveform-analysis data present in the 280GB download.

I'd rather download a 2GB metadata file for multi-variable analysis like the Netflix prize instead of the entire 280GB dataset just to get the additional fields.

My end-goal was to do some analysis of what makes an artist/song 'hot'. If anyone is interested, I could redo something like http://chir.ag/projects/preztags/ but with music data.
via Guido (http://twitter.com/#!/gvanrossum/status/44169137240551424)

For those asking "why not git", read http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/
MBAs really don't add that much value:

* Think twice
<http://www.economist.com/whichmba/think-twice>;

* Actually, 40 Years Of Data Show The MBA Effectively Does Nothing -- It Has No Impact
<http://www.businessinsider.com/the-mba-effectively-does-noth...;

* "If the MBA was wiped off the face of the earth, we'd live in a better world." - Tom Peters (MBA, Ph.D, Stanford) <http://post.ly/1CRCf>; From <http://garr.posterous.com/if-the-mba-was-wiped-off-the-face-...;
March 2011 Security Issue - Android Market Help
Their music recommendation database has more songs and attributes. But theres no service that streams all the music they have indexed like Pandora does.
An Update on Android Market Security
When you were in class, where you ever even introduced to the concept that sometimes it might be possible that O() notation might not tell the whole truth? I understand that for the most part you shouldn't have to worry about it, but shouldn't we still warn students about this?
The Boston market is hot right now. If you want, feel free to send me your web business / experience and I can give you an objective take on whether you are hirable (maybe you have something that is a "red flag"?). But if you know how to code--and especially if you have built your own web business--you shouldn't have a problem finding work here, so maybe you just need the connections.
Here a deal, there a deal, everywhere a deal, deal
As if we didn’t already have enough daily, weekly or even monthly deal sites, there was quick coverage in Xconomy Seattle regarding Bing‘s foray into the deal aggregation space:

Bing Tries to Make Sense of Rapidly Crowding Daily Deals Space
That's probably the best description about why I left NYC.
Is your GitHub repo a bit behind the live site? I'm noticing you can go to nodrr.com/some_username and view a user's messages, but I don't see anything in the code that provides that route.
It may be true that github focuses on the author (after all, projects are github.com/AUTHOR/project), but I'd say that focus is secondary to the code. Compare a project page on sourceforge (e.g. http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/) with one on github (like https://github.com/jquery/jquery). A sourceforge project page is just a vague arrangement of links, while github shows you the source and README right away. The author is given about the same amount of space on the page in both cases.
i do the same. generally if the project is even on GitHub, that's a great sign it's got life.
The Most Used Location Based Apps in Canada
Well, I feel for you. Being unemployed sucks ass, especially when you have skills but can't seem to get a job. At the risk that this some very bizarre sort of dumb troll, I'll propose this:

If you ever want to meet up for lunch at Union Square, I meet with random programmers from the SOMA area all the time. You're welcome to show up and hang out with us. They probably all know of jobs and people hiring, or at a minimum can give you advice.

I'll probably do it the first week after PyCon, but feel free to contact me at my email (if you're smart, you'll figure it out as it's really not that hard to find out how to email Zed Shaw when he has a domain at ZedShaw.com).
Meh. I've seen recommendations from The Echo Nest and they are absolute shit. I don't know what their algorithms are but they sure do need to change them. I am a huge fan of LabRosa though, so maybe their partnership will help them out.

If you want to see recommendations from a company that truly kick ass, check out BMat. Their technology works insanely well.
The ATUS measures hours worked "last week" (survey is repeated every week), not contracted hours.

The average American also doesn't get 12-15 weeks vacation.
Do you mean something like the case of quicksort mentioned in the post?[1] I was taught average- and best-case analysis along with worst-case analysis. Or do you mean some other fact not revealed by that analysis?

[1] "Quicksort is a magical algorithm that theory tells us runs in O(n^2)"
Could you explain what you mean a bit more by big O notation not telling the whole truth? Are you referring to the fact that algorithms that look the same in big O notation might have drastically different constants, which can affect real-world performance?
Great article, wish more developers thought like this. Our industry is so incredibly frustrating with its low barrier to entry. Most programmers won't even come close to appreciating the techniques discussed here.
In my experience, there's fairly little difference between programmers in lines of code per hour. The most I've seen is a factor of about 3, measured over a couple years, and it's largely because the slower programmers are working on harder problems (that require more thinking), or the faster ones work longer hours, or the faster ones do more copy & paste.

There is, however, a massive (orders of magnitude) difference on impact that the better programmers have. And that largely comes with being familiar with high-leverage development practices, being willing to apply them, and being alert to opportunities where a process can generalize to a large scale and investments in automation are worth it. So for example, one programmer might spend a couple hours tracking down a bug, while another programmer spends a week improving the compiler's diagnostics and then a couple days writing a script that applies that and automatically fixes several hundred occurrences of the bug across the codebase. One programmer might spend a month refactoring 30 or so source files, while another programmer spends that month writing a script that fixes 5000 source files. One programmer might waste 6 years of his life writing Web 2.0 startups that nobody uses, while another might spend 6 years of his life inventing Google.

These are all teachable skills, but they can take a while to teach, particularly the ones that rely upon judgment.
This is just the impression that I get. Seems like the number of people that expect to get rich quick on a startup has increased. I receive a number of emails from people wanting to build the next big thing.