skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And I wonder if often better. There is value to having the motivation to learn something before being formally trained in it. I was not too impressed with some of my peers in CS, especially those who could not figure out how to open a file in C in their senior year.

I was self-taught, then formally trained, and since self-taught. I would have to say that both have value and that you are missing something without the formal education. "Confidence" is a good reason, but exposure is important, too. I am sometimes surprised when the college math pops up in my work, spanning anywhere from programming drivers PCI cards to web interfaces. Work with a large enough dataset, and maybe you will need to make use of a different sort from the language-included "quicksort" algorithms.

I thought I could my way out of a paper sack before getting the CS degree. I ended up learning a few things, some trivial, some useful and connecting. You could probably pick it all up up in a couple decades, but four years is a nice jumpstart.

Simultaneously, the learning of approaches and techniques does not end there. For example, I sometimes wish my university had made mention of MOP instead of presenting OOP only the C++, Java, and Ada way.

I think there is a difference between people who can accomplish tasks and people who can accomplish those tasks in a way that they can be easily extended and maintained in the future; in one respect, we can call that experience, and in another, we can call that an exposure to enough approaches/patterns that it is easier to select the best for the job. Any jumpstart is a huge help and can aid in removing the bad habits learned from solo experimentation.
Just curious, how many HN'ers have joined companies like Amazon,Google, after being rejected in the interview process the first time, and what's your story?
On my blog fan page (visible from the site), I post funny pictures several times a day -- it's a habit I got into months ago.

I've found lately that if I pick up a funny pic from the web, sometimes FB recognizes it and won't take it. But if I shave it some -- change the dimensions -- then it goes through okay.

So yes, there is something going on there.
UK's Reaper flying hunter-killer fleet 'to double'
This is a good point, but the condescension really doesn't help.
Or, like every religious book, we could round them up and stone them to death. I could go with either option, so lead the way!
"Piracy isn't theft" is not an argument for or against piracy. No one is arguing that piracy is problematic because and only because it is theft.

Piracy is problematic because it is parasitic. Pirates derive value from a system to which they contribute nothing.

Lost sales are not the point. Lost compensation for distribution is the point. Piracy is not a lost sale, it's a forced sale at the forced price of $0.00.

The point about piracy not being theft deals only with the marginal cost of copies, which is entirely irrelevant to the discussion. Somehow or another, artists expect to be paid for what they do by those who derive value from their art, whether that payment is based on distribution (like the music industry) or prepayment (like Kickstarter).

If it's right for artists to expect, even demand, payment for the value they provide, then piracy is wrong.

If it's alright to extract value from people's work without compensating them as long as they aren't directly impacted, piracy is OK.

That is the debate in a nutshell.
4 Billionaires Buying Stock in Dendreon
Good on you for getting things up and running.

But what's the use case?

Isn't there a danger of amateur entrepreneurs giving bad advice? Why wouldn't I use Sprouter.com? It's Quora for Entrepreneurs and they have some of the best web entrepreneurs on there waiting to answer questions.

Sorry if I'm seeming harsh. As an entrepreneur, I'd genuinely like to know how I can leverage this tool to my benefit, before I sign up.
just noticed that I said craigslist...I was talking about Facebook
I would love to buy a computer that is a modern upgrade of the Commodore 64, as if the machine had continued to evolve. In other words, the CPU would be a say 32 bit evolution of the original CPU with obvious changes to the instruction set as found in the C64.

The memory space would be flat 32 bit addressable up to a gigabyte.

The sound and video hardware would work in a similarly simplistic way as the original C64 did.

But the CPU would have similar performance to a modern CPU.

It would also have a modern (size) hard drive.

The whole thing could be done as an emulator. But the important thing would be performance. The virtual machine would have to convert one assembly language to the other by compiling it on the fly, e.g. to say x86 code, and not by interpreting it slowly!

And of course the thing would have ROM BASIC built in and/or a simple Amiga style classic look and feel OS.

At the very least I'd buy one of these machines, especially if you put it in a C64 keyboard style box.
What are the missing features in App Engine?
i think fulltext search is very fundamental and essential thing for a web application . i put a lot of effort to bring fulltext search to my site.

what are things which are essential for a web application is not present in App Engine?
busybox httpd
Very nice comments in the first article from September 2005:

"If Google is just a house of cards, what's he so worried about??"

"Ballmer is not worried about google. that's WHY he said he would burry them. granted google will be a strong contender against microsoft.but do you Really think the microsoft empire will lose?! doubt it."

"Like wow... that's amazing. I guess Google is really going to do an OS and a browser."

"I'm scared to say it, but Google doesn't actually have a stable, reliable income at this point. Their stock offering and Google Earth Pro isn't enough revenue to survive an all out war with M$."

"I find the Google brand advocates funny. Google is indeed a house of card. And the reason is simple - if Google ceases to exist tommorrow, it would not matter to me or the majority of the Internet. There are plenty of 'search' technology out there."

"Google is just a bunch of PhDs trying to screw some money and get laid. They have no product, no income, no long term strategy and no future. Google is possibly last but deffinitely biggest dot com baloon about to do the typical dotcom boooooom... I just imagine Booom logo in Google colour letters."

"As much as I adore Linux and hate Microsoft everybody here is wayy off. How can you say that a search engine is the next 'holy grail' of computing? Who actually believes that Google will come out with an OS?"

"As much as I've seen AJAX hyped it's not a desktop app replacement by any means. Ever had Google Earth time out and just go to la la land? Ever seen it be as quick and responsive as Open Office or Word?"

That's barely 6 years... oh how the world has changed...
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You are referring to the lowest OSI layer. It is easy to propose laying out new line (or network of birds), but the costs are huge.

http://img.tfd.com/cde/OSI.GIF
>I'm not really sure the premise of the article, that Intel and AMD would actually want to add an ARM side to their business, is actually that true.

To me the article was saying that although there may be pressure to develop ARM chips, they don't want to:

"It’s not that Intel can’t switch to ARM; it’s that it most likely won’t."

"Intel has ... a philosophical predisposition not to back an alternative."

I thought it was a pretty good analysis.
No sleep is a feat I could pull off regularly when I was younger. It was no problem to go 48-72 hours without more than just a catnap or two. That was a decade ago. In my early thirties, I struggle beyond the sixteenth hour, except for rare occasions.

Fortunately, I think it's a sort of bell curve. From what I understand, I'm only about fifteen or twenty years away only getting a couple hours of sleep per night. How productive sleepless nights full of trips to the bathroom will be, I have no idea. I guess I'll finally catch up on all that damn reading.
This would be a great recruiting tool.

Once a user finishes, provide a list of open jobs for shops that use MongoDB.
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We pit Osborne 1 against iPad 2 to see how far we went in last three decades of portable computing.
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Its' fixed :)
Hosting costs are very minimal these days.

I can provision and configure a dedicated Ubuntu machine at Rackspace Cloud with all those services in about an hour (and I am far from being a sysadmin guru, I just follow the wiki instructions and best practices for security/firewall etc), and it costs me $12/month.
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Also, StartupGuild.net. Over 300 members in 4 days. Hosted on Yammer. Growing.
FTC to investigate Google's search dominance?
First of all, thank you very much for the in depth feedback.
1 - changed the name and the url. appreciate the pointing-out
2 - it apears on rollover of the blackbox, thoguh I agree it is probably confusing. I just liked the idea of a "surprise" element to it. The links the top are mostly there for people who are unfamiliar with the service. Since it is really a product for people who are already using it, I didnt want to emphasize the links too much.
3 - done.
4 - the "tweet" link does just that. Though perhaps I could have a "try it now"?
5 - Excited to see it, feel free to pm me when it is posted =]
I did 4-hour nights of sleep for a year, mainly because I didn't like my job, so was trying to maximise my time outside of work. It's possible, but you lose the ability to think properly without realising it, and in my case, every few months I got intense headaches that only stopped when I was in darkness - presumably a migraine? Anyway, I really don't recommend it.
Hmmm.. Something I would think I could relate to, but we all know (a) how easy it is to convince yourself/diagnose yourself with something, and (b) how we would all love to consider ourselves from this group. So I'll just let this make me smile a little and leave it that :)
Why is the solution for Git completion in Zsh to just load the Bash completion? There is native Zsh completion for Git.
I know what you're saying and I agree; I just wanted to touch on the Napster point.
I don't think Facebook hate small advertisers, I think they do (1) Care about ad quality (2) Care about short term gain.

Facebook have really made a big drive to get rid of affiliate rebills, etc. as Facebook users view them as scams and they end up damaging Facebook's reputation.

From my experience if you have a legitimate business it's unlikely that FB are going to reject your ads. Facebook want your money, the only reason they'll not want your money is if the ads will cost them more reputational damage then the money they bring in.

I think their drive for short term gains has led them to some decisions which are damaging to small businesses (CPC pricing, no frequency capping), but thinking "they're out to get you" is just simple paranoia in my opinion.
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I may do that, but perhaps focused on a particular niche. Thanks.
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I guess it's a copyright detection thing then.
Jealous of people being able to have good simple ideas, not specifically his particular implementation.
Maybe there should be a poll: Would you actually pay for an android app from the marketplace? I get the impression, from most of my android-wielding friends, that the answer is no. [yes, i know, there is an element of selection bias involved].
KnowAbout.it quietly earns client trust
Cyberpunk is dead?
Ack seems a bit resentful - I genuinely think understanding algorithms matters in any case
, and it's well known that google do too. Sounds more like lack of preparation to me.
Stop Panhandling your Ideas
Your tasks, managed and tracked
StrongVPN looks pretty good. Also easier to support other VPN connections out of the box (i.e. through Win standard VPN and not have to install OpenVPN, as well as via iPhone). Thanks for the suggestion.
Hey, you guys really doing damn GOOD WORK! For a Flash developer want to use javascript, jQuery I think is the best thing for us, I really enjoy doing interactive coding with jQuery, this really speed up our Web 2.0 implementation, although comparing to Flash, javascript got its native limitation, but I do believe on one day, you guys work will benefit a next generation of the Web, may be we will then call it Web 3.0.
If you hang out on github, and do your social coding over there (or simply prefer git over Mercurial), here is a github fork of the repository: https://github.com/dbarros/dapper-dot-net
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If they cannot find any "actual" short sleepers, how do they it's 1-3% of population...Oh science you are scary...
Thanks I didn't know all that about Gelernter and his work.
Yes, rather quite bitter. You busted a job interview, get over it.
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LizaMoon Pay-Up Scareware Spreads To 500,000 Sites
Unfortunately, security through obscurity isn't going to work. Someone will always find a way to grab large collections of email addresses. We need a better solution to help verify senders and highlight fake content/links.
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I've always wondered if this was mostly a psychological issue.

There are two circumstances in which I get less than 7 hours of sleep a night: if I'm really stressed about getting something done, or if I'm really excited about getting something done.

In the first place the lack of sleep exacerbates the stress and really starts to weigh on me. But in the second case it doesn't seem to have much negative effect.

Now if only I could continuously keep my motivation up...
Very nice, i'll be keeping this installed
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P.S. on seeing them implement their 'interactors' in Java,
one could also quote Virding's Rule:

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule#Erlang...

Mik
I’ve met some of these people who insisted they didn’t need much sleep before and now I seem like an idiot for telling them that it they would probably feel better if they got more.

Don't. If you insist on only giving advice that applies to 100% of the world you'll never say anything useful at all.

I'm sure the studies do encounter these people. But studies use statistics. These people are on the far edge of the bell curve. The mean [1] is probably around 7-9 hours. But just because the far edge of the bell curve has very few samples in it doesn't mean that those samples don't exist, nor that someone is "hiding" them.

Which reminds me: What this article does not talk about is the other side of the bell curve: The folks who need considerably more than 7-9 hours of sleep to attain peak performance and happiness. Or maybe those people don't exist, because the "bell curve" is actually a bimodal distribution, or cliff-shaped, or something. We could tell if there was any actual data here, or a link to the actual data and published science -- we could look at the shape of the distribution. But this is an article by a science journalist, so naturally it is nigh-useless.

I wonder why the article doesn't talk about the "long sleepers"? Probably because the sleep researcher quoted herein is correct: There are more people who like to believe that they only need four hours' sleep than there are actual people who thrive on less sleep. And I'm sure that no Wall Street Journal wants to learn that they might really need twelve hours sleep.

---

[1] I actually have no idea if the "7-9 hour" rule of thumb is based on a mean, a median, or a mode. Pity that nobody ever links to the original research.
History of Cypress Semiconductor's Internal Startups
looks awesome - thanks !

I suppose we will sign up sooner or later - 10 Euro isnt too expensive.
OK, so once you have launched a company, and survived past those scary first couple years, you no longer qualify?

I ask because I founded a startup in '96, and we still try to "think like a startup". Just because we've been profitable for years doesn't mean we're done innovating.
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I use my domains very specifically as far as email is concerned. Some years ago I registered a domain for registering for shopping, online accounts etc. and created a catch-all address, so I could sign up with slord-news.ycombinator.com@<domain> and I'd know if it had been leaked as the address would start getting mail from elsewhere.

I don't publish the domain anywhere online (hence <domain>) earlier, I also did this after I signed up for HN, but you get the point.
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I think it's fair to say that Apple's renaissance is built on the back of music piracy.
You might well be right. As you can see from the chart in the blog post, income seems lower for Android owners. Which would imply that, even if the same proportion of users where ready to pay for an app, the market would still be smaller nonetheless...
I agree, far too much white space.
Hi. We used to ship to Russia, but we've recently had to cancel service there because the country's customs authorities no longer accept personal import shipments. We apologize for the interruption and we're currently trying to find a solution to help you and other members access products like WakeMate.
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So anyway - if you wanna work there, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, or accomplished, or how you work with people, or how creative you are. If you know binary searches, you’re in.

That's not the logical conclusion. The only evidence is that if you don't know binary searches, you're not in.
Why doesn't he know binary search? If he had three phone screens and they all involved binary search, why didn't he learn more about binary searches after the first time?
It may sometimes be the right question, it all depends on what the enquirer wants to with the data. This comment is just an exercise in answering a question that no one asked, I fail to see why it merited any upvotes.
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Or you could just use http://twitter.com/newsyc100 .
" If you know binary searches, you’re in. "

No you are not in. I know 'binary searches' but I have been rejected after the phone interviews when I applied one year ago.

The asked problems were certainly harder than 'binary search', but these were not that DEEP problems. (I've solved much deeper problems in my life.) I don't know the reason of my rejection. My final solution was correct, I checked that afterwards. I was probably just not fast enough, and I made mistakes because of stress (which I corrected later). Also, when they asked 'how would you test it', I might answered incorrectly.

IMHO they use a boolean formula when evaluating you:

A and B and C and D

rather than

A or B or C or D

If you fail in one aspect (or at least they perceive that you fail in that aspect) they reject you, because they can find people who dont't fail in any aspects (or at least they perceive that).

This was the first time in my life that I've been rejected by a company. I was a bit angry for a day, but eventually I realized that it is not a big deal: they have plenty of people to choose from. Maybe I will try it once again if the startup that I am working on now fails. But I will practice more before the interview.
Assuming they work those hours. I spend the spare hours when I can't sleep watching films.
During the .com days I worked day and night. I worked through christmas, thanksgiving, new years and valentines day of 99 and 2000. I was engaged, but between that and all the travel I had to do, my relationship didnt last. At that time I made an explicit decision to sacrifice everything for work. These days I wouldn't make that tradeoff but my wife also knows I can easily work 18 hour days for weeks (or travel) and is willing to deal with it because we have a nice life (she doesn't have to work). Even when I don't work that much I'm usually reading from the time I get home until I go to sleep so she is used to not getting attention all the time.
Is this few-hours sleep business feasible when you need to think deeply about abstract things during the day, eg. programming? I can see it working if your success is tied to being energetic, on the ball, constantly negotiating, acting on information or leading lots of people. But what if you need to do the analysis yourself?
it actually looks like your ad is doing decent - despite the low click through rate. if you look at the price of the 1 ad you purchased & average out what it's costing you per click it's not bad at all. I'd be surprised if you were able to get the same results from AdSense... & I'm happy to dig into this more with you and also help you find other sites in the network that would be a good fit for your product (todd@buysellads.com).
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> Those that have only PhD's or Masters in CS have been especially had in my experience.

When all you have is a PhD, everything looks like a nail.

Seconding your view on reality. I've only met one programmer with a masters / doctorate that knew what he was doing. The rest -- close to a dozen of 'em -- spent all their time trying to shoe-horn any project they were working on into their thesis.
Not sure I'd call them essential but my 3 biggest pet peeves:

1) No threading. I feel they could find a way to sandbox these without hurting performance.

2) No support for the WebSocket API.

3) No support for Go. This one is a bigger mystery to me; seems like a win-win for the community and for Google.
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