skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's an interesting idea, but I went and took a look at the course on Web Programming and found it somewhat lacking. For instance, the section on HTTP links to the W3C documentation on POST/GET/etc... which is ok, but very dry reading and, IMHO, possibly too abstract and confusing to someone who didn't already have some experience writing webapps. I feel that the course needs more overall "glue" binding some of the concepts together. For example, there's a tutorial about PHP/Ruby, but it seems to reference materials from some other college course (that I couldn't locate).

Overall, it just didn't seem to hang together well.
Napster boss set to buy Metallica’s record label
wow, exactly how i never want/will think like. i didn't know what to expect with that subject line, but it really lived up.

outside of the joys of the startup adventure, i think bootstrapping teaches you some valuable life lessons. it really allows you to put things into perspective. you develop great habits. you figure out what actually matters. more than anything, i've learned how to not spend money...
"And it seems like the smarter the employees, the less likely they are to actually be providing any real services to people"

I would call this a negotiation that they are winning. Just like startup founders win in their negotiation with employees for equity.

"People generally won't use your site unless it helps them in some way."

And people generally won't trade with you unless it helps them in some way. Again, how is this different?
This post is a tech post. Facebook is a web social network, a free speech platform. not my problem if ISraeli government is political by it self. you trust the ISraeli government so much how can you be sure that it is right their is call for violence in that page? did you browse the page? it calls for peaceful protests
you dont wait for things to become web standards before shipping, you make them standards by shipping them
Not bad considering that you get JSON back with it. For another RESTful API framework using PHP I would recommend the RECESS framework - http://www.recessframework.org/

It takes the cake because it has a graphical interface to help you do a quick mockup. One drawback, however, is that the community is new and the lead developer not-too-active, but the documentation isn't bad. It's a good starting point, none-the-less.
Common Lisp macros allow the programmer to capture variables if they desire and/or are ignorant of the semantics of the language. Sometimes this is nice, like in the anaphora package. Defining hygienic macros is not hard though.
Scalable Parallel Programming with CUDA
I honestly wish captial gains taxes were greatly raised and taxes on dividends greatly lowered.

Price speculation in the stock market feels to much like gambling.
Before the world wide web's significance became apparent that's how it looked with Microsoft and Windows.

IBM -> MS -> Google -> Facebook -> ?
Linus is a patch shepherd. It's his job to see the bigger picture.
I'm surprised this many people upvoted the parent and downvoted me. The Web is about a secure platform for rapid application development and world-wide distribution. It is not about distributed computing. Fallacies of Distributed Computing is about building a scalable server architecture, not developing/distributing client applications. Even if Fallacies of Distributed Computing was relevant, it would be equally applicable to "native" apps as webapps.
I'd add the LRB to that list. Many articles available online: http://www.lrb.co.uk

3 quarks daily is a good online collection (more science than LRB): http://www.3quarksdaily.com/
I think you have it backwards. It's not about max_a U(E(a)), but of max_a E[U(a)]. Otherwise insurance wouldn't work.

Let's illustrate with an example. Suppose you buy theft-insurance, there's 10% chance of being robbed and the cost of robbery is $100000. Then, E[a] = 0.1 * -100000 = -10,000. So you'd be maximizing U(-10000). This is different from maximizing E[U(a)] because in this case it's 0.1 * U(-100000) + 0.9 * U(0).

It's different if you are not completely neutral.
im born n bred manchester but currently living in Japan. Are there any North West HN meetups? Be good to know about for those times i return.
It's all relative. Airplanes are more expensive than servers, but the revenues of airlines are gigantic. United Airlines turned $23 billion revenue in 2010. Southwest did $12 billion. What's Twitter's revenue compared to what they've sunk in servers, development costs, etc.?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hockhafcdegocajmjh...
at what stage was your startup when you moved and how easy/difficult is the visa process for British going to America?
Leeds here, Ive been thinking about a Leeds HN meet up if that would intrest anyone?
Great news. Thanks, MacRuby.

And now, in the interests of looking a Git horse in the mouth: it's a shame about the CamelCase in the organisation and repository names. Not many people do this on GitHub; for example, GitHub's own organisation name is "github", not "GitHub", even though the company name is ordinarily written in camel case.

Stretching out before me is a grim meathook future of repeatedly typing "macruby/macruby", then seeing "ERROR: macruby/macruby.git doesn't exist", then saying GOD DAMMIT, then retyping it with the caps.
The recent UI changes in Ubuntu (getting rid of X11, now this?) seem just crazy. I use Ubuntu on my machine, because I want a developer friendly OS. Recently, however, it just has not been the case: for example, OCaml 3.12 is still unavailable in apt repos (even on "unstable" branches), despite it being available in Fedora/CentOS yum repos or in macports. Same for Scala 2.8.x, Erlang R14, etc...

Has the Ubuntu team completely forgotten its original constituency in pursuit of "Linux that your grandparents can use on their netbook?"? Looks like back to debian-unstable (or Fedora rawhide?) for me.
Nor does every entrepreneur.

I think a lot of entrepreneurial engineers just want to be CTO or VP of Engineering or Product. There's a lot of selling and all that goes around that I think many entrepreneurial engineers are not predisposed to even when they can be good at it.

I know a lot of startup execs and enterprise execs step back after a while to rejoin the ranks of individual contributors for a while to catch their breathe. It was worse during the IPO dotcom boom where I had friends that really felt that as execs they were forced into ethical compromise in handling the finances and misleading analysts when they were running public companies.
To me the most interesting thing about his life is the fact that the bulk of his life/spending decisions are based on the needs or perceived needs of others (his wife, kids, other partners at his firm). The guy has basically been enslaved by other people's perceptions of him. I wonder what would happen if he lost his job...
It's from the Old Spice commercials.
Law firm Morrison Foerester has the best URL
The worst part is that the change is only a win on Core i* processors. It makes things slower on Atom.
I haven't had a chance to look at Recess but have heard of it. I've been using this for 4 years now and it's evolved to the point where others are using it as well.
How many customers do you know? How close are you to potential customers? How much time can get your potential customers to spend helping you with the product? Now, take the ratio of the amount of time you can get potential customers to help with your product to the amount of time it will take your technical co-founder to develop the product.
The war on margarine
How does shutting of ssh for developers mitigate exposure to hackers? Require everyone to use an ssh key with a (strong) pass phrase, require strong passwords and two factor authentication. You already should do so for the operations staff (who needs ssh access), same should happen to developers.

Ironically, if you treat production as an alien land developers aren't allowed into (and have no transparency about), you're going to create an environment where developers completely ignore operational concerns like security (e.g., having no authentication mechanism on their own services, as it's presumed production is a "magically secured" environments where no one may connect to in any way).
I was under the impression that Valgrind didn't play nice with virtual machines.
The fix IS that simple. Stop using non-sanitizing APIs. Your equated that with saying "stop making mistakes," which is what I objected to. The original poster was right: people need to simply stop using frameworks that do not sanitize their data by default.
Having played my fair share of COD, MW2 and Black Ops I would unfortunately say that the 'Make a friend outside of the US' vs. 'Screw you towel-head' ratio in general does NOT provide a base for improved foreign relations or 'bridge building'.

Glad that it does happen though.
Someone else had already linked to the google cache, but thanks for playing.
I read Linus' response as directed at people in the thread in general in addition to the previous poster. The "not my problem" attitude is pretty common in the world. In OSS, it seems even more important to be flexible in order to achieve something good for an end user.

How should Linus have addressed the other guy?
"They note that the finance sector today produces a greater percentage of GDP than at any time in history."

This is not an effective argument. The computer software industry is also producing a larger than ever percentage of GDP. In other news, the building wooden ships sector is not responsible for much of the GDP in recent years. Is that a problem?
I asked something similar a few weeks ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2289974 Take a look at the comment I got, some good suggestions in there.

We are in similar boats, I am a structural engineer by day and have a tad of programming experience, mostly with Matlab and some VBA stuff. I wanted to start basic and proceed as necessary, skipping if I felt the material was too rudimentary.

Per the comments I got, I started with Zed Shaw's Learning Python the hard way (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index). It's great so far. As wyclif mentions elsewhere here, the first half is incredibly simple, to the point that its nearly ridiculous. I've found myself performing the exercises quickly and moving on, if nothing else it's just plain good practice of the simple mechanics of writing code, even if the code I'm writing is rudimentary.

Also per the comments from that post, I registered and started a personal weblog using a wordpress template. It's given me my fair share of HTML work, which has also been helpful.

Good luck, enjoy the ride!
Could be more of a corporate culture statement than compensation...

I remember one of the promises my manager made me at IBM in the early 90s crisis was that he couldn't necessary be competitive in compensation but I would always have access to the coolest equipment and people... Yes he actually kept that promise, I managed to get one of almost every RS/6000 before they were publicly released in my lab...
The bees become a bit less impressive when you consider how many years of evolution it took to get their code written.
Gladwell wrote a piece last year that suggested the most successful entrepreneurs come out ahead by finding clever ways to avoid risk. Forgive the long excerpt, but it really is good.

"In a recent study, "From Predators to Icons," the French scholars Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot set out to discover what successful entrepreneurs have in common. They present case histories of businessmen who built their own empires—ranging from Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, to Bernard Arnault, of the luxury-goods conglomerate L.V.M.H.—and chart what they consider the typical course of a successful entrepreneur's career. There is almost always, they conclude, a moment of great capital accumulation—a particular transaction that catapults him into prominence. The entrepreneur has access to that deal by virtue of occupying a "structural hole," a niche that gives him a unique perspective on a particular market. Villette and Vuillermot go on, "The businessman looks for partners to a transaction who do not have the same definition as he of the value of the goods exchanged, that is, who undervalue what they sell to him or overvalue what they buy from him in comparison to his own evaluation." He moves decisively. He repeats the good deal over and over again, until the opportunity closes, and—most crucially—his focus throughout that sequence is on hedging his bets and minimizing his chances of failure. The truly successful businessman, in Villette and Vuillermot's telling, is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting. "

http://www.gladwell.com/2010/2010_01_18_a_surething.html
people generally won't trade with you unless it helps them in some way

Not necessarily. People engaged in real trade set up financial institutions, but once these institutions are set up, a game is in place. That game may be beneficial overall to the businesses, but individual players aren't necessarily beneficial... even if they are participating according to the agreed upon rules.

It's like cashing in a Groupon deal and then never returning to that business. The company loses money on you and they only agree to serve you because it works for them at scale. But at the micro scale you are hurting them.

People who do so have every right to, but they are not contributing to the economy. They are just making a lot of money by making other peoples' lives more difficult.
I'd be interested in knowing which of the companies he sold were from "motivated sellers". But in the meantime: distressed shareholders are not the same thing as a distressed business. Also: every business is capitalization-troubled compared to BRK. :)
And I guess I'm showing my age: RPG for me means Report Program Generator, and was what we used to program in (alongside COBOL) back in the pre-PC days. (Cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG_II)

(It was a trip of a programming language-- OpCodes had different meanings, depending on which column they were placed in. Take a look at the sample code in the Wikipedia article.)
I think Slide was acquired more for the talent than for the product itself - although that's an expensive talent buy.

And who knows, maybe in some capacity it works out - I believe the Slide team at Google is responsible for the launch of Disco.
>System 7 had special code in the memory manager for Microsoft applications to make them work with the 32-bit memory manager and virtual memory.

Yea, MultiFinder had special code to load old MS applications like Excel 1.5 below the 1MB line because they were only 20-bit clean.
Lancaster area here.
Actually Autodesk has just launched AutoCAD in the cloud. https://www.autocadws.com/
I wonder what he thinks 5 years later? It seems like Gnome is the default on most distros. Are the attitudes he describes still influencing Gnome?
Breaking down the vision:

This website will serve as a zero-cost alternative to those that lack the resources to attend traditional brick-and-mortar institutions

I completely agree with the observation that the duct-taping of a few, loosely connected resources to construct an authoritative syllabus / disrupt the existing education system through an online network of autodidacts and mentors is flawed in its very premise. I'm inclined to believe, though, that we're looking at an an early iteration and that the Saylor Foundation's initiative will evolve as feedback pours in.

and, if they are willing, a complement to mainstream education providers.

This seems to be the more practical component of the vision. My personal take: education will not be disrupted by applications that seek to uproot the brick and mortar educational establishment. Rather, platforms will emerge to augment the existing teaching / learning process and help students seek guidance when they need it.

I think the Khan Academy has pretty much set the bar for what an online 'education augmentation platform', if you were, should start out looking like, and the Saylor Foundation would do well to emulate them.

That said, the world really needs a central, well maintained repository for educational content at the college level, so I hope this initiative succeeds.
I will definitely be willing to trow 5 bucks a month for a PRO account that will let me read other people private messages.
I agree that your gross income (or revenue if you want to apply this story to your business) doesn't mean much. To get ahead in life, (thinking medium-term here) you have to augment your income (earn more) while reducing your spending - basically that's a cash flow story and you can apply the same concept to your startup, or to your personal life. Feel a bit sorry for the guy though, and never thought I would be saying that - thanks for the article!
I have been highly anticipating this, and it's better than I thought it would be. A bit awkward at times, but that's what makes it so endearing.

We can see how genuine he is.

Good job Patrick!
Yes - the fact that it keeps happening does provide support for the grim outlook.
The report was produced by the Kauffman foundation, a foundation dedicate to improve entrepreneurship. It's not exactly an unbiased piece of research.

Attacking finance is the popular theme of the days, but finance has done a huge amount in supporting global economic growth. From providing debt and capital financing to reducing foreign exchange costs.
When did we start signing our names to authenticate documents?
Here's a Google Tech Talk by Charles on Mirah as an expressive JVM language from last year http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWM2iVgeQKM
We're thinking of dropping the plinth clause. It does discriminate against fields of endeavor, such as the plinth industry. Right now in the drafting repo, it has been changed to a word made up by Garfield, but now we're effectively discriminating against Jim Davis. I wouldn't think it to be a problem, but we do actually want to meet OSD.
Looks like its fixed already. Swift!

http://jilliancyork.com/2011/03/26/microsoft-fixes-bug-re-en...
How did you get a visa?
Using the Social Graph for Polls
Its amazing how a simple idea can be generated in a few hours with the right tools and know how.
I wanted to do something with Node.js because, well I love javascript, and love the concepts behind Node.js, plus its the new hotness. After fiddling around with it for days (long polling server :)) I felt it was too low level for the kind of things I wanted to use it for.

Anyway I wanted to make a simple app that would take advantage of the social graph, utilizing it for other things than I like this, I like that. How about content that really matters. So I thought of the poll idea about 11pm at night...not a good time because you start to think, maybe I can do this in an hour.

After refactoring my long polling server code in Node.js I did some searching for something (don't remember what) and came across Express.js. What a nice wrapper MVC wrapper around Node.js. It looks very promising. For templating it suggested EJS as on option. So with little Node.js experience, no Express.js or EJS experience I was able to create this prototype in about 3 hours. Yeah I'm tired but thought it was cool enough to share it with the fellow hackers.

Its just a test. If it works out maybe I'll create a front page profiling the top polls. I think it would be a nice way to take advantage of the sometimes shallow social graph. In addition, it would be really nice how people really feel about topics that effect the world.

The recent poll I saw about the Lybia fiasco didn't even ask if people were against it. It just asked how you felt about Pres Obama's handling of it. Not a great poll since it didn't even ask if people were against it completely.
I see what this is doing, but I don't see why.

What's the common use-case for transplanting lists of gems from one box to another in a non project-specific way (which would be handled via gemcutter).
I really don't understand how current finder works, having used it a dozen times. Whatever it does, doesn't seem to involve separate folders. Seems Prima facie evidence of lack of usability since I have been able to reasonably easily understand Windows, Linux and the older Macintosh finder-thing.

And yes, iPhotos seem to be a problem. I watched a friend spend three hours trying to find some photos they'd previous loaded in iPhoto.
Yet, it's there. I'd understand the reaction completely if it was an "It's broken. Fix it." bug report.

But this one is "It's broken, this is how, this is data confirming it, this is a patch and that's how it's fixing the issue." The work is done - review, apply, release. Or if it's considered such a joke that it's not worth fixing, just remove it completely.
I pay Netflix $9 a month and I have no commercials to speak of. What is the marginal ad revenue of every user on Twitter? If it's <$1/mo then there should be a premium, ad-less Twitter available for purchase at $1.99/mo.
Its amazing how a simple idea can be generated in a few hours with the right tools and know how.
I wanted to do something with Node.js because, well I love javascript, and love the concepts behind Node.js, plus its the new hotness. After fiddling around with it for days (long polling server :)) I felt it was too low level for the kind of things I wanted to use it for.

Anyway I wanted to make a simple app that would take advantage of the social graph, utilizing it for other things than I like this, I like that. How about content that really matters. So I thought of the poll idea about 11pm at night...not a good time because you start to think, maybe I can do this in an hour.

After refactoring my long polling server code in Node.js I did some searching for something (don't remember what) and came across Express.js. What a nice wrapper around Node.js. It looks very promising. For templating it suggested EJS as on option. So with little Node.js experience, no Express.js or EJS experience I was able to create this prototype in about 3 hours. Yeah I'm tired but thought it was cool enough to share it with the fellow hackers.

Its just a test. If it works out maybe I'll create a front page profiling the top polls. I think it would be a nice way to take advantage of the sometimes shallow social graph. In addition, it would be really nice to see how people really feel about topics that effect the world.

The recent poll I saw about the Lybia fiasco didn't even ask if people were against it. It just asked how you felt about Pres Obama's handling of it. Not a great poll IMO.
Yea, I remember the joke about gcc #pragma once causing something like rogue to run.
Newark, Notts. So technically (East) Midlands, but North of London, which is what matters.
Out of curiosity what kind of turn around time would you expect for someone to build your app?
Generally no, out of the box it doesn't, things like JITs and GCs can confuse it, however it's got a bunch of flags and config options and what not to allow you to use it.
You might want to put "(2005)" in the title.

I'll pick a nit. He writes, "According to Church's thesis, all programming languages are computationally equivalent. They all do the same things, and only the syntactic sugar is different. In this case, the syntactic sugar is so different that people can end up using variable assignment without knowing they're doing it ....."

I think this is incorrect. Church's Thesis (and correct me if I'm wrong) says that all programming languages are "functionally" equivalent; as in, if you look at a program in a language as a black box, you can replace the contents of the box by another program in another language, and the results would be identical. Now, whether one language uses variable assignment and other doesn't, is irrelevant; and it doesn't flow from the claim.
-module(opine).
-export([opine/0]).

-import(io).
-import(random).

opine() ->
io:fwrite("I "),

X = random:uniform(),
if
X > 0.2 ->
io:fwrite("love");
true ->
io:fwrite("hate")
end,

io:fwrite(" the new website.\n").