skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "what's the role of the future manager?"

Personally I've always seen the organizational structure of film and TV units as being a natural model for software development [1]. They've been doing the somewhat-controlled production of fundamentally creative product by small, focused and often-times transient teams for quite some time.

And in that model, the current manager type is less like the director [2] and more like a producer.

That is: a person who primarily manages logistics and external requirements.

e.g. arranging the times to get the necessary people together to review builds and such. keeping statuses up-to-date. keeping an eye on tasks and deadlines. keeping their finger on consultants. etc.

[1] Far more natural than the manufacturing model that corporate America is trying to fit things into.

[2] I'm sure managers would like to imagine themselves as directors. But they're typically ill-suited due their not understanding the creative nor technical sides.
@oniTony: For sure. I was thinking more along the lines of the time, effort and resources used in the pursuit of a Ph.D that make it unattainable for most people.
I honestly don't care. That's not why I posted this.
If you insist on classifying into those two categories, sure, but when you bring up grad school, there's a lot more to formal education than sitting in lectures.
>As stated above, most colleges in India do not allow you to pick subjects and customize your course. Thus, all you chose is a 'major' (the degree) and the rest (the subjects and curriculum) has been chosen for you by the college.

>Children here make the first choice of their courses to study in High School when they are 16. That's almost too young to decide what you want to be.

This is exactly the same as in britain. India inherited most of it's bureaucracy from britain.
Books are good. That's how self-taught programmers learn.
iAd Gallery
I think Oracle had a CIA contract from nearly day one. So CIA was pretty much an investor. If In-Q-Tel had existed then they probably would have funded Oracle from that.
This is such a good move! It gives Google the nimbleness, hunger, and guerilla mentality of a start-up in new areas it wants to explore through these small mostly-autonomous teams, while simultaneously allowing it to defend the already captured beachheads (search, gmail etc.) - all funded by the deep, deep, Google pockets.

In any innovation-oriented org, curious engineers and inventors need to be able to play and push the boundaries, but even large organizations with strong financial backs are so defensive when it comes to innovation, so afraid to fail, or waste resources on experimenting. Google has always been okay with this "waste". If you go back before year 2k and try pitching to a goliath sw company to let 20% of dev time be spent on employees’ projects of choice you'd get assaulted by the CFO. Google was okay with this "waste", because they knew if you let the right players roll the dice, every now and then you’d hit jackpot. And they did! Many of their most successful products came out of the 20% project.

Organizations today have split the vision and execution aspects of building something. The vision comes from management and the execution from engineers – this is straight from the defensive playbook - ‘engineers can execute with minimum risk, and managers are close to the customer therefore know what will sell for sure’. This kind of thinking will work when you want to improve marginally (like Henry Ford said something along the lines of 'If I asked my customers what they wanted they’d say a faster horse'), or if you are the market leader, but it will never cause disruption or let you make headway in uncharted territory. It is very important to know when to play offence and when to play defense.
The fun part is converting all the Matlab functions that call LAPACK/BLAS into direct bindings to said libraries. That stuff is so dense (although I guess if you're used to it, it's not so bad).
Agreed.

Apple lets you choose between Non-Consumable (feature unlocks, pay once, can redownload, etc. The one you are probably expecting), or Consumable (pay each time, like virtual currency / smurf berries).

Yet, there is NO WAY for the end user to know what it is until he tries to buy it a second time. (I actually could be wrong on this, since I haven't tried buying a Consumable IAP)

Apple should really not be approving apps that have Consumable IAP that looks like Non-Consumable.

My apps only use the Non-Consumable.
"All I Do Is Win"--Charlie Sheen
Some people actually believe it isn't possible to learn sufficiently complex things without instruction. I suspect this is because they themselves are unable, unwilling, or have not tried to learn without instruction. I had a professor that insisted I was cheating because I was able to get A's on projects and tests in a C course, but did not attend any classes or discussions. He insisted that it was absolutely impossible to learn C without taking a course and attending the lectures.
How To Bridge Cash Flow Gaps
Yes, indeed. And even disregarding the mass of the destination and of the ferrying craft, the mass of life support systems and consumables for each individual on the way up and down are likely at least double this anyway.

But, longer term, consider what happens if/when there is existing infrastructure in LEO and highly productive and profitable work for an individual to do there. The cost of actually getting to LEO will be a relatively minor relocation cost, even at these numbers.
Any specific field?

CS is quite broad and it might be wise to choose a university that has a strong research tradition in the field(s) that you're interested in.
As an Indian student who tried to get through the "system", I can relate to this. I was really into computers and programming in high school, so I decided to go into the engineering stream in the "+2" years (basically, 11th and 12th grades, as opposed to the biology stream, which supposedly preps you for medical school). I remember the parental and peer pressure particularly well: my dad was pretty much opposed to it because he felt taking biology would "lead to more options later", but I was not convinced. Most of my friends suffered through the biology classes, and yet ended up in engineering degrees at college (and for the most part, are working at either Infosys or Wipro now. No one is doing anything even remotely related to medicine.)

The last few years of high school was basically hell for me: the government subsidies OP's article mentions are limited just for the biggies (IITs and RECs), and the chances of getting into them are very slim. You have to get through series of examinations that over the years have gotten very _very_ tough: they basically expect you to know things in Physics, Chemistry and Math that - atleast in the US - are not taught till the third year of college. Forget about high school - I went to IIT coaching centers, and was very miserable because I had no real interest in any of the subjects - I wanted to learn CS, dammit - why was I mugging up organic chem formulae?

Its not even worth it to consider joining other colleges. Job options are limited, but the worst part is they all require huge "donations" upfront for a laughable experience (both in terms of the teaching talent and curriculum).

Long story short, I didn't end up getting a sufficiently high ranking in the entrance exams (my choices in the placement, if I remember right, were either metallurgy in IIT or mechanical engineering in REC: the top 400 had basically grabbed up all the CS degrees. Remember: over 400,000 students write the exam every year, so almost everyone ends up in a field they're not interested in.) so I decided to take a huge student loan and come study in the US. I don't regret the decision: I'm now doing what I love, and have gotten _so_ much more exposure than my peers back home it's not even funny.

When I went back to India to do an internship (and enjoy the vacation) a couple of years back, I was appalled by how little enthusiasm most people have about the work they'd end up doing.

Horrible stuff.
Facebook Continually Plagued with Malware and Scams
Sun went through major re-orgs pretty frequently.
Why wouldn't you classify PostScript as a programming language?

From its page on Wikipedia:

"PostScript (PS) is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language"

Just because it's mainly been used as a page description language for printers doesn't mean that people haven't written applications in it - Arthur van Hoff even wrote a C to PostScript compiler in PostScript (pdb - allegedly standing for "Pure Dead Brilliant" - it was written in Glasgow).
New York: Show Me The Money
As a PhD student myself, I've realized that working through the program is only half "reading research papers and arriving at some unique insight," which you could say is self-teaching. The other half is presenting your ideas to your advisor, peers, faculty, etc. and handling significant criticism. This occurs in higher-level classes, as well, in which the feedback from the prof. is a very important part of the experience. That, of course, is not "self-teaching," far from it.

On a more general note, I think people should not make claims about what happens in situations (e.g. PhD programs) that one has not experienced herself. Claims like "whatever that person learned in college could have been learned outside college" is too often false simply because no one person can experience both sides of the debate.
Barbarians at the Moat: Google's Struggle Against the Government
Missing Air France Jet Found In Ocean
I question how much "work" someone that fits this really gets accomplished. I can run on limited sleep for weeks at a time and am more energized, but throw me at something mentally challenging like Quantum Physics or Solving some Linear Systems model, and it's like my brain says it needs time to process everything, so I end up sleeping absurd amounts. (I also find I make significant headway the next day after that kind of sleep)
I have an idea that I suspect has a low probability of making any money (basically Chatroulette The Way it Should Have Been). I'm considering pursuing it anyway because it would give me the chance to get some hands-on experience with running a high-bandwidth web app (that probably will need clustering support) and it's interesting enough to look cool on my resume.

Unless some VC lands on my doorstep, I don't see any way to cover the server costs without holding on to my day job. (I hope advertising will offset some of the costs, but I won't count on that completely covering the costs, let alone keeping me fed.)

Does that answer your concern?
The majority of my math education came from my sister who was a few years ahead of me in school. She'd learn w/e they were teaching, then would teach it to me at night. I'm forever in debt for this early education as it'd helped me in so many aspects of my life.
With all their partnerships and contracts, SpaceX is now a viable alternative in the industry. Clearly they can compete on price. What remains to be determined however is if they can compete on mission success and reliability. You can bet their competitors are playing the fear card to their customers.
When i first attempt a cyrptoquote I stick with familiar terms, vowels in particular and repeating letter such as "RCNNBSE" could be "tallest" because of the repeating NN...then work off of that. Put enough familiar words and letters for "RCNNBSE" together and try to decipher. It sounds like he(she) is describing a location. either but landmarks or directional bearing
71 NCBE, 74 NCBE, 75 NCBE...
71 west (east perhaps)
74 west (east perhaps)
75 west (east perhaps)

194 WLD'S NCBE
194 west
Speed Dating for Co-founders
Oh man. If I weren't in school I'd jump on this so fast. KA has helped tremendously in my self-study. Part of the reason I chose Python as my current learning language instead of Ruby was so I can contribute exercises to their stats lectures. Could you use a (non-remote) intern this spring/summer?
This looks like just what i need. Has anyone tried ordering it in EU (Scandinavia). What cost should i expect with shipping?
The problem here is that you can't group all of one type together. There will always be brilliant self-taught programmers. From my experience in the field, however, is that self-taught will often take the first solution over the best solution, or will pick the best solution to their particular problem without thinking enough about coding standards or clean integration into the code base. There are plenty of tools out there to ensure this kind of thing in other languages, but I don't often work with those.

Of course, there are also many schooled programmers which may be able to think critically but lack the ability to go from a program to a product.

But not all of course... you can't make these stereotypes without starting a flamewar.
The problem of "when hungry, eat. When tired, sleep" is:

In modern societies, our inner evolutionary traits still work, but the environment changed. For example, some food are more satisfying than others, and we feel less full when we indeed have enough (sugar/fat for example). The same is true for "tiredness". With TVs, iPads and mattresses, we may well be tired but we just cannot feel it strong enough. The distortion may be the single biggest problem for modern people IMHO.
Typo on http://ownlocal.com/products/web-builder/ : "wantt"
isn't that against some law?

can someone openly use market power to prevent you from selling at a particular store?

i know exclusivity contracts are common, but that's clearly not it.
Smooth things out in the event of engineers being on the verge of shooting at each other. That is, manage human beings to let them work at their best, not timelines and general process flow to achieve a financial goal.
Not sure why you're being voted down. Here's the theme in question:

http://modmyi.com/forums/iphone-news/757604-major-corporatio...

It's extremely tacky – why would you attach your brand to that?
Taking the sting out of load and performance testing
I haven't been invited yet, but it sounds like Startup Square, which has already shut down..
You *can* use 4+GB of RAM with a 32-bit OS
Nice! Impressed that this was written by a high sch student as well.
Am I the only person seing the iPhone UI on that Blue box?
A lot of this information is presented as a consistent methodology when in fact it is very subjective. For example, one of the suggestions is that "you should try to avoid using inflated diction if a simpler phrase works equally well." Unfortunately, it is not clear when a simpler phrase works equally well. I may want to 'use' a certain phrasing in one scenario, but feel it is more appropriate to 'utilize' another phrasing in a different scenario. There is no simple rule that can be applied to determine whether one is more appropriate than the other.
Unbounce Adds Industry Leaders to Advisory Team
Yeah, I have three little boys that care nothing but outdo each other (oldest will start 1st grade this year). Anything that is a competition to them gets their attention, so I'm going to try to find some content/ideas online.

I also became interested in math at a later age, and also thought it was boring at first. Most of anything, I'm pretty sure it was due to lack of direction from my parents... but can't blame them, they didn't know better.

..but I do.
I took a data structures class in which one of the students, due to work schedule or something, was unable to come to the lectures. She (the only woman in the class, by the way) got a better grade than the rest of us who sat through the lectures.
All that and I just racked our new gear too. I must admit I enjoy it more than I ought to.
It almost feels like we read two different articles. IMO it was a blog post arguing that "innovation comes from the bottom" and that a command-and-control company architecture was bad. The shopping cart thing was just the supporting anecdote.
That wasn't lost on me. Neither was the fact that you were neither discussing an event nor an idea. You posted it to have a go at everyone participating in this thread.

Edit: "Be the change you want to see in the world." — Mahatma Gandhi
Hey ddemchuk- alas, no real posts about the setup yet-- we have about 30 servers + amazon ec2 and some random VPSs - multiple languages, multiple backends, and many subsites all balanced with nginx at the front. One day I will write an actual post about this. Fire away if you're curious about anything in particular!
Ubuntu ShipIt comes to an end, funds being redirected to LoCos
From the post, the editor almost wants to yell out that money is not going to be the only solution. Parents need to keep the kids involved and motivated towards math.
Certainly, Rosenberg has been crucial to Google’s success, so his exit has come as a shock to pretty much everyone to whom I’ve spoken.

That said, its timing seems quite convenient, particularly in relationship to what looks very much like a significant reorg that is currently underway at Google, said sources familiar with the situation.

Note first that Rosenberg’s replacement wasn’t immediately named and it’s not clear whether Page even feels one is needed.

Maybe Rosenburg helped Google do great things. Maybe I'm about to over-simplify. But weren't the things that made Google a true powerhouse created long before guys like this were hired -- back when the company was more engineer-driven?

It seems to me that Larry Page's frustration has been growing as he watched MBAs take credit for the success the engineers had created years before. If that's the case then I wish him success in changing the company's structure.
Customers.

[Edit: I worked at Amazon Web Services until recently. Now work at Google. Concern for customers drives everything that happens at Amazon, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.]
Yes, we have a couple internship spots still open. Same story, send resume/side-projects/etc to jobs@khanacademy.org
Looks to be specifically about itsnat.
How to Insert Values into a Table in SQL Server
10 Lines or Fewer: A CSS Design Challenge
I'm constantly thinking about ways to make something elegant, thoughtful, and simple using a minimal amount of code. I decided to set up a Tumblr page to help gather ideas. The goal is to add 10 lines (or fewer) of CSS to a few lines of HTML, and make something unique.

Let me know what you think, and if you have a few minutes go ahead and submit something.
That's a very bold point to make and not feel the need to qualify, doubly so as it's core to your entire post.
Four Missing Steps to Pricing Like a Pro
Show HN: weekend project, Find Similar Restaurants with the Hunch API
If you have less personal debt or no debt load, nothing should hold you back. I understand kids add to the burn rate. Ever more of a reason to do MVP and start building a team. Don't be greedy, build a big team, plan and delegate. You can MVP with a full-time job, just a couple hours extra, nothing drastic. Easier to do with a team.
not a reply but NCBE appears at least 11 times:
National Conference of Bar Examiners
A lot of the guidance I find in posts like this reminds me of the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. His analytical approach to identifying an excellent CEO is regularly confirmed by posts like this one. I highly recommend it for new CEOs and people looking to understand some of underlying nuances and necessities of running a business.
In Praise of Distraction
Part of me wants to go to a country where I am forced to speak another language and the culture is substantially different than here in the US, but I'm not sold on the idea. Thanks for this suggestion though, I've heard the name and it's now on my list. Thanks!
"self-taught will often ... pick the best solution to their particular problem without thinking enough about coding standards or clean integration into the code base."

I disagree that getting a CS degree has a positive effect on your ability to write clean code or adhere to coding standards. Those things come from work experience. I would argue from my own experience that self-taught programmers are better in this respect. The majority of code I see written by CS academics and students in my department is hideous.
Interesting how many of the suggestions for "improvement" sound very dry and artificial. I would rather use the "bad" language in some of these examples.
The ARPANET Dialogues
Show HN: SteadyCam. Real-time video stabilization on the iPhone 4
If anyone has questions of any sort (beginning with dispelling notions of how the lawyer parts work, remember we're in Canada for instance) please feel free to leave them here.
Good point ! Balance is key in everything. There is no one right way, and this is exactly why those in management should have a mature outlook in handling the allocated power.

A good example is how Kin was supposedly set back seriously due to infighting with Windows 7.
I'm only a sophomore, so I'm just now starting to try to figure out what direction I want to go in within CS. So the abroad experience would really be to experience teachings of computer science in a different fashion than is custom here. Whether that will actually happen... No idea.
"An important, but tangential point to note is that unlike the US, ...People join colleges already deciding (without taking a single course) what they plan to get a degree in."

Isn't that how it works in the US as well? Don't students join colleges already deciding what they plan to get a degree in? I'm from Canada. When we apply to university we have to apply to a specific degree. First year courses are already tailored to a particular degree path. If that's not the case in the US, when is it that you actually choose your degree? I always hated the notion that 18 year old people coming out of high school are expected to know what course they want to target for the next four years.
Twitter emphasizes Interest Graph with new homepage
The one difference I see is that CS Educated Programmers that went to good schools took a lot of math.

I have met very few self-taught programmers that also happen to be self-taught mathematicians. This limits the type of code you can write.

Linear algebra is required to deeply understand computer graphics.

Calculus is required anywhere you have signal processing. This means audio and video editing.

Physics is required for simulation software and video games.

Discrete and combinatorial math is required in systems software like databases.

You're just not going to hit these issues if what you do all day is glue Javascript and Ruby together.
When & How to Fire an Employee at a Small Startup
That's a cool idea of crowdsourcing peak times. You sign up to get texts when people are willing to pay for rides above a certain threshold and then just drive your car out to pick them up.

I'd use it (and possibly do it, although hard to say and it'd have to be for a ridiculous amount of money ~100+ range/trip).
Designing a flight search site
Things to Consider before You Begin Your SEO Process
I've heard it's people to make sure nothing goes wrong.
I'm going to include something that currently relates to them. For example, my two oldest are loosing teeth, and of course they're looking forward for the cash they'll be making from the tooth fairy. Maybe I'll start small... they gets $1 for every tooth. So I can start in the way of finances since they're already planning on purchasing toys. Maybe the problem could be, how many teeth they need to loose in order to purchase a particular toy. If it's a small toy, how much savings are they going to have left?. Will they share the cost? How much does each currently have, etc. Very basic at first, but that's pretty much the idea I think. Better than my education: 1) Go to school, 2) don't get in trouble, 3) Do you homework, without any involvement whatsoever.
My dad's high school students in Infotech have to get up to 30 wpm to qualify for (cross-applied) community college credits in IT 101.
La otra