skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm thinking Thunderbolt will be a niche player going forward, similar to Firewire:

- Requires extra chip on the logic board (like firewire)

- Only a single vendor at this point (TI is the only reliably good Firewire chip vendor, similar to how NEC's USB chips are the best)

- Doesn't have economies of scale (like firewire)

- Meets most of the same needs that other competing, cheaper products also meet (like firewire)

That said, I think firewire is great stuff, and thunderbolt is too. If some of these things change (say Intel integrates it into their next core logic chipset, expansion cards are very cheap [less than $50] or a killer 3rd party use for it comes up) I could see it becoming as standard as Firewire is.
All I can say is you should dig into it. Your gut is thoroughly misinformed.
Steve Jobs Hid iPad Development From Eric Schmidt
At the other end of the spectrum, CEO's salary aren't that much a secret, which I read somewhere that is precisely the reason why their salaries are inflated. If CEOs know that other CEOs are paid that much, they are likely to request the same amount of remuneration, or even more.
Using R and clinical heuristics to explore the Heritage Health Prize
Just about the same talk was discussed before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1566546
Final Cut Pro X to be $299 via App Store (vs. $999 today)
I'm using LessCSS, not Sass. And I wouldn't consider Sass life changing.

CSS looks like Assembly code ... you could
write it... but you'd need a damn good reason to

I think LessCSS is better because it keeps syntax compatibility, and you can take an existing CSS file and then gradually improve it. It's also, well, simpler.

That said, I can live without the improved CSS features. When I'm working on design-stuff, what really gets in my way is the lack of talent.

As for CoffeeScript, the language looks really interesting, but IMHO, it's just another tool that you need to add to an already HEAVY stack, another tool that breaks and needs special care from time to time, another tool to be learned.

And I'm not sure that CS is so life-changing. Does it fix browser incompatibilities for you? Does it optimize Javascript to run faster? Is it easier to debug? Does it have a kick-ass library that's optimized for it?

IMHO, syntactic sugar (without new paradigms) doesn't get you further than changing your text-editor / adding some newer snippets to it for the boilerplate.
I'm actually more OK with this as simply because SCSS is a superset of CSS--you can continue to write plain CSS in an SCSS file and it will work exactly as expected. My understanding is that the same is not true of CoffeScript.
I disagree. If someone is starting Ruby for the first time, the last thing they want is to be forced to learn another new language on top of learning Ruby. Then mix in Sass and Haml, and you're giving them a good reason not to even bother.
"IMHO, neither of these other developments is as intuitive as the Lagrange multipler one; but because Hamilton's original formulation obscures it, no one in physics learns it that way."

I'm pretty sure learning a bit about Lagrange multipliers is standard for a grad classical mechanics class. Granted, I've forgotten all I learned back then, b/c it has never come up in anything else I do, but it was definitely part of the course.
My tactic interviewing people for a sysadmin position was to allow them to use any language they knew. For the most part it went well. Even someone who doesn't know a thing about programming can generally pick up how the interview is going from the candidate's reactions. But occasionally someone would quite confidently assert some code would do something I didn't think it did, but I didn't really have the powershell chops to call them on it. For a sysadmin position, there was no one language we could standardize on, and the interview was designed more to test ability to use one's tools, not to program, so it was the best we could do. We weren't going to make every candidate learn perl/python/ruby just to apply.

A dev candidate who solves a problem in clojure may be impressive, but since I'm less qualified to judge, I will be less confident hiring them. Your best chance to get hired is to convince me that you are better than everyone else, and the best way to do that is to do something impressive that I can compare to everyone else.

I've also had people go from passing to failing because they overreached. More than one candidate successfully produced a correct C solution and then sunk their own battleship by volunteering a completely wrong soliloquy on heap vs stack memory. "Noone knows you're stupid until you open your mouth." Do NOT use clojure if you're betting the interviewer won't catch your mistakes.
To this excellent list, I'd also like to add for each position posted:
- The position's challenge of the week
- The position's challenge of the month

This is one of the questions I ask every interviewer who interviews me.
I'd really enjoy seeing a follow up post on this with more detail on the process. This article describes the general feeling I've had, even outside of start ups. I do feel like the "actually coming through" part of scrappiness is the most important, especially when it comes down to coming up with solutions that are elegant and not just hack work. There has to be some middle ground that mixes this approach with a set of skill/intelligence factors in the interview.
Freshbooks API Add-Ons, Billing, and Webhooks
Robert Hodgin's Kinect Fat Suit (video)
I still believe my original comment stands; allowing it to be disabled is the wrong choice. Allowing to be enabled easily is a far better option, imo.
CoffeeScript "fixes" javascript in many very essential ways. The most important fix is the lack of global variables. It's all too easy to accidentally forget a var on an assignment and all of a sudden you get a global variable that can cause havok. CoffeeScript handles variable scoping extremely well, and if you need a global, you can use the more explicit: window.var = ....

Also it's class system and function binding (=>) is something I feel I can no longer live without.
Should work soon, thanks.
Very cool - I'm working on a similar project showing current trending content: http://trendn.com
That would be net income, not gross. Net income is salary/other income minus expenses. That's clearly not what people are entering here.
It's not easily ignored. If you don't want it to spit out .coffee templates and instead get .js templates, you can change that... but you have to find out how (I for one don't know how). It's an added inconvenience. The person who's an early adopter to a new language like coffeescript should be the ones inconvenienced.
> Picture/video of the team together outside the office

I'm surprised at how much I like this idea. We're starting to see it more and more, and it really can give you a glimpse into the culture.

There's a level of authenticity that it needs though. Anything too shiny or produced looks it, and immediately raises my bullshit meter.
Paste this line into your files:

# vim: ts=2 sw=2 et :
> In telco networks, once a message is accepted into a system, it is expected to be processed. You should throw away any messages you can't handle (because of overload) at the edge of the system.

That's attractive in general, but is it necessarily possible?

Assume a planar grid with O(N2) nodes of which O(N) edge nodes that can accept a message for a given node somewhere near the center. In other words, that "given node" is O(N) steps away from any edge node.

Suppose that said given node has limited capacity. How can it keep those edge nodes aware of its capacity without wasting capacity or requiring O(N2) queuing at said given node? Remember - it takes O(N) time to get a message from the given node to any edge node and during that time and there are O(N2) places for a message to be in the network at any moment in time.

Now repeat for the other O(N2) interior nodes.
IBM's Watson goes to work in Hospital
CoffeeScript isn't interpreted; it's not its own language. You write CoffeeScript code, which resembles simplified and cleaned-up Javascript, and then run a parser over it which converts it to standard Javascript.

You'll need CoffeeScript (gem) installed in this situation, but that's just another Rails dependency.

EDIT: I should point out that Rails will use CoffeeScript for client-side (browser) code, not server-side code. That remains Ruby and associated DSLs.
I hate to be that guy, but it's "too old" not "to old".
I think a side effect of kids growing up with computers is that CS doesn't carry the same social stigma it carried 10 or 15 years ago.

It's much less common to see a programmer portrayed as a fat, slovenly nerd as it used to be.
One of the core strengths of Rails is that it is highly opinionated. That's why people talk about doing things "the Rails way". You can always change things if you like (a lot of people change the views to Haml, UJS library to jQuery, and test framework to Rspec), but it assumes sensible, working defaults.
Scss also provides pretty good syntax compatibility with CSS. All it's features are a superset on top of CSS.
No. Coffeescript is not going to be run inside the rails stack. That would be controversial.

All that's happening is by default the scaffolding generator scripts will spit out boilerplate coffeescript rather then boilerplate javascript.

All that's needed to change back is to comment out a single, clearly marked line of code.
I get "Fatal error: The user ID must be numeric in /home/markness/column80-sofu/phpstack.class.php on line 419" when trying to read anything
Video Games, Junk Reading => After work home development

Video Games, Junk Reading => Selfhero: sailing, diving, etc

Wishing/Wanting => Doing. Immediate scheduling

Unmotivated Friends => Adventurous Friends

That's hard/difficult => That's worthwhile

I'm over thirty, but like many of my friends, I still enjoyed video games way too much. Claiming they were a way to "relax" or "blow off steam" after a hard day at work, I finally admitted to myself that they had lost their original value and were now solely a time sink and addiction.

This nagging thought kept troubling me until I gave it my full attention, and dealt with the reality of the answer: "If I spent this many hours a week practicing <insert game heroic skill> instead of playing a character with it, how heroic could I become?"

I suddenly lost all desire to play video games, watch most TV, and read books (entertainment, not literature). Instead I have spent the last couple of years cultivating interesting and useful skills, and participating in my own adventures. I went from playing CoD and TotalWar to scuba diving with sharks, motorcycling, traveling and practicing/training my sailing skills with the goal of circumnavigating.

Never looked back.
The author has a good point in "Many high schools don't know how to teach CS", but that seems a truism based on what we read in "The Camel Has Two Humps" (http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf).

The author totally misses the point with respect to the value that society (and potential employers) place on computer science. It's like any other form of engineering - you probably can't have a career in it, due to hire-and-fire project staffing, and the offshoring of every possible job that can be sent to some place without minimum wage, and a health care system.
Tracing the compilation of Hello Factorial in GHC
His reason for why people are "getting interested" now seemed very weak to me:

Most have majors in other areas but recognize, probably correctly, that having programming skills will likely increase their chances of gaining employment in their own field.

I would say this was just as true in the 90s as it is today.
Of course you can pursue a startup or a business or an idea at any age. Just don't necessarily expect the same attention or opportunities to be thrown your way in your thirties as you would get if you just had a good idea and nothing else in your twenties. Expect to assume much more of the responsibility and fight up steeper hills much of the time.

The exception being, of course, if you are enough of a known-quantity that someone reading a site like this would usually know who you are or if you have enough cash and business experience that putting an idea into action (and especially hiring people) would be trivial.
Good article. Here're the ten mistakes:

#10: Failing to incorporate early enough.

#9: Issuing founder shares without vesting.

#8: Hiring a lawyer not experienced in dealing with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

#7: Failing to make a timely Section 83 (b) election.

#6: Negotiating venture capital financing based solely on the valuation.

#5: Waiting to consider international intellectual property protection.

#4: Disclosing inventions without a nondisclosure agreement, or before the patent application is filed.

#3: Starting a business while employed by a potential competitor, or hiring employees without first checking their agreements with the current employer and their knowledge of trade secrets.

#2: Promising more in the business plan than can be delivered and failing to comply with state and federal securities laws.

#1: Thinking any legal problems can be solved later.
Excellent point. Not being a Rails guy I sometimes forget that being opinionated is considered one of its strengths.

If any framework can get away with doing something like this, it'd be Rails.

At any rate, I'm excited about anything that increases CoffeeScript adoption.
Who are we kidding. This is a symptom of the economy. There is money in software.

What does the economy of the future look like? Millions and millions of programmers. Manipulating technology is where value comes from and software is the most efficient way to manipulate technology.

I just hope we have enough robotics and computer engineering people to improve the platforms all these programmers are going to work on.

The web browser is pretty limited in its ability to improve human life. We need other platforms to target.
Demos are better than screenshots. Let me play with it, without signing up.
Calm down boys and girls, its opinionated software, remember? That's kinda rails' raison d'être.

I'm just disappointed they didn't have the balls to make HAML the default templating engine.
Your 'More Features' coming soon on the home page is missing a translation and it's a broken link

Tasskr is actively being developed. Check out the _Roadmap Link Text_ of planned features.

There are other examples on the page with the same issue
I think it is requiring the user to make a choice that is antithetical. You can change pretty much all of the defaults in Rails.
Am I the only one who thinks they are propping up their successor? If you're going to learn Coffeescript, why bother with Rails at all? Just write cs both server and client side. When some one builds a mature node.js MVC framework, Rails is going to be in trouble.
Actually those commitments helping me to make better decisions on when/how/whom/what start a new startup. In my twenties(I am 33 now) I used to jump right in because the idea was interesting and I had an excuse to stay up all night to code on something.
Now I make sure the idea or the project is worth to cut into family time.
Does this affect the OpenBSD packet filter (PF) at all? Should I be concerned if I am using PF as my firewall of choice?
It will remain a choice. Rails doesn't obliterate choices, just makes it easier if you're willing to take defaults. On the other hand, replacements for default components (e.g. Rspec vs. default Test::Unit) are generally simple to drop in.
And if at 65 you find relaxing is what you want to do, then by all means go for it. I feel "retirement" isn't about no longer working, it's about no longer doing what you have to do and doing what you want to do instead. People that have no reason to get up out of bed each morning other than to turn on the TV don't last very long.
Neo4j Graph Database re-licensed under GPLv3
A lot of fun to you as well!

I am sure you will collect a lot of wonderful memories on that bike tour.
Cloud9 IDE, an browser based IDE for NodeJS apps
The new, main syntax of Sass is now "SCSS", and is a superset of CSS3’s syntax, so every valid CSS3 stylesheet is valid SCSS as well.
I find this argument totally bogus (at least, currently). 30 years ago; there were often very good reasons to write assembly over C when working on performance sensitive code. Before that, there were good reasons to write native binary for performance sensitive areas. As assemblers (and subsequently C-compilers) matured, they are often able to generate more efficient code than the vast majority of people could write by hand.

I'm not at all convinced that CoffeeScript has yet matured to the point where it can generate better javascript than any qualified JS developer. Now, it may get there some day--but I don't believe it's there yet.

Moreover, in this case, you're introducing an additional layer of complexity and source of errors--the compile time of CoffeeScript. Maybe it doesn't compile. Maybe it compiles such that the Javascript doesn't do what you intended the javascript to do. Maybe the javascript breaks in some browser environments and there's no way to cleanly work around that problem in CoffeeScript.

Again, it's not that I'm against CS--I'm simply against it being the default. It's an additional can of worms that I don't think the majority of Rails developers are ready and / or willing to open.
Ok... care to explain?
I saw one of these vending machines a while ago in SF about half a block east from Dolores and 18th, I think near the Bi-Rite.
Thats almost the same as someone claiming Python is a huge fail - because he didn't know how to configure his editor properly.

Alas, poor error messages are a big -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka

http://www.onestrawrevolution.net

Great book, and definitely a "guerrilla gardener" and Permaculture technique.
I guess, but at that point, what's the point of bundling support at all? Support is as easy as adding "gem 'coffee-script'" to the Gemfile.

[edit] And with SCSS also slated to be the default, it seems consistent with "the Rails way" moving forward.
Keep in mind that neither 101 or 105 actually count towards a CS degree in any capacity(either major or minor), so those aren't courses that anyone getting a CS degree would take anyway.
I'm not worrying. The fact that the market is being flooded with lots of (likely less skilled, because let's face it, fad majors attract fad-following types that aren't really as much interested in the subject matter as much as making money) programmers means I can charge a premium for my skills.

Edit: Of course, you better damn well be sure that your differentiation from the rookies is fairly obvious to the casual viewer of your resume.
Because you have to actually work with those other people?

Of course other employees should aim angst about unfairness at management. But they won't. Not entirely. And that overflow can be enough to nudge relationships from friendly to strained/tense-professional, or not-particularly-friendly-but-professional relationships straight into unproductive-leaning-towards-toxic territory.

I was in a group of developers who had the hat method essentially performed for them [1]. Relationships changed [2]. Even after the discrepancies were largely corrected, the relationships remained strained.

[1] The short version goes: the comptroller's office was compiling stats on salary ranges for comparison to regional averages (back during the bubble, when management was paranoid about being behind the curve on pay and losing talent). Someone either needed help with a formula from, or just directly leaked the data to, a developer friend. That developer, upon seeing the wide variance, shared with the group.

And let's just say it was surprisingly trivial to map the outlying data points to names.

[2] Which is why I'd recommend the calculated average method over the hat method. It's better to see your position relative to the group, than to see the raw data that can impact interpersonal relationships.
I've written and edited books in a format called PseudoPOD for many years now. My company has several tools to validate and emit other formats, including XHTML, LaTeX, ePub, and PDF. This works very well for us.

Many of these tools are available from the Modern Perl repository on Github: http://github.com/chromatic/modern_perl_book
As technology becomes more ubiquitous, the people who understand technology will become more valuable. This is a symptom of more people knowing what the internet is than did 20 years ago.
I was thinking it. "Apparently you're 'to old' to know how to spell though."
Accountants do other things beyond filing paperwork for example they can tell you from experience what HMRC allows to filed in terms of expenses, tax optimizations such as using Flat Rate VAT, etc.

They can also provide references which can expedite things like opening bank accounts or getting travel visas.

IMO Unless you really can't afford it, paying the £1000/year for an accountant so you have one less set of things to worry about as a startup founder is really worth it.
Who's forcing? Javascript will work just fine.
Why should I pay for tasskr instead of using Workflowy for free?
tl;dr: There was a prize offerered in the 1950s-1960s for the first person to build a human-powered plane that could run a short course (call it the X-prize of human flight). Lots of people tried to win by building planes that looked like planes.

Paul MacCready was the first to realize the key to the spec: it had to fly, but didn't have to look like a plane. He rapidly prototyped things that flew but didn't look like planes, and used substitutes for normal safety procedures (flying low and slow rather than building a strong cockpit). He learned from many failures rather than spending months building to learn once.

Lesson: make sure you understand what the spec is really asking for, and prototype quickly around that.
The thing about quality is that China made investments on that regard, not only the companies, but the government with infrastructure and other things.

The price won't change to what you see today, it never changed and probably never will. Cars manufactured and assembled in Brazil still cost more than similar assembled abroad.
Your objective isn't to convince the VC to invest during the elevator pitch. It's not trying to breathlessly tell them your entire company's history. You just want to finish with them wanting to learn more.

Even better have enough traction and press that they call you first ;<).
I got it to work. You have to build against the latest svn of clang and llvm. I personally found parallel make didn't work for me and that I had to apply the two very small patches to the makefiles manually, though the latter may be fixed by now. It looks like a really excellent project, and I can't wait until they have it working the way they want it to!
And the HN crowd is an opinionated crowd--just because Rails is opinionated doesn't mean that we can't disagree with it's opinions. :)

Edit: Rails is also about "sensible defaults." I'm not sure that making CS the default is really the "sensible" choice.
I like the focus on people.

I'm wondering if salary is also selected according to this breakdown and not on skills (as it is usually done).
Great idea but you really need a dummy demo account or even a brief video to show what it does. I don't give out my email address lightly.
How Libyan Rebels Built Their Own Cellphone Network
Agreed, and that is indeed what I meant. Coffeescript has always been a choice in the sense that I could download the compiler and use the output in my rails project.
I find the title misleading. 'Is an incubator right for me?' leads me to believe this is going to discuss what types of people or characteristics are ideal or not for a person to join an incubator.

The article doesn't answer the question of 'me', it just points out the reasons incubators exist and what they can do for you.