skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wouldn't that be a deterrent for anyone who wants to establish a business in Norway?

Look at the quotes : "Actress and director Liv Ullmann, for instance, earned $17k ... Pioneering women's long-distance runner Grete Waitz, a nine-time New York City Marathon champion, earned $13k"

Either their best and brightest are dirt poor or they prefer earning and keeping their money abroad.

If that was the objective of the law, it's a success.
Yes of course schools should offer students a choice, with CS focused on theory and SE focused on practice. In addition to those I like Richard Gabriel's proposal for a "Master of Fine Arts in Software".
http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html
We need all kinds.
Do you have a circular saw, a drill, some screws, and access to 2x4s?
Use 99designs for the logo and mimic the aesthetics of a well designed site yourself.
You could make it so that as comments get more votes, the time that they were written becomes less important in ranking them.

What I recommended would encourage more voting, so you could just read the most highly ranked comments with some confidence about quality -- poor comments would probably be downvoted quickly.
This looks really really bad. I don't understand why a company that size would not have a designer on board.
No love for Opera, Flock people?
They're grade based, and moving up a grade can depend on both merit and tenure, although I think it's mostly about tenure.
But it's not how Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is usually taught. Yeah, people may not do any live rolling their first few classes, but they usually get to it after several. While people are often encouraged to focus on one aspect of their game, free live rolling is there from the beginning.
Google In Trouble Over Lying About Security Of Apps To The Government
The New RFP: Don't Suck
Flip Founder: People Still Want Single Purpose Devices
I learned about distributed computing in the '80s by writing a lot of small client server applications, tearing apart early chat systems, looking at the internals of NFS, etc.

Pick some current distributed system you find interesting and write a simple version of it. You probably can hack together a lightweight dropbox clone pretty easily.

Pick up a good book on network internals. You should find a lot of good information on fundamentals as well as example problems for you to work on.
So for some definition of "expert", it's fair to say that ten thousand hours will make you an expert.

I've just been using Google to find a crisp definition of "expert" that I can cite to one of Ericsson's papers. Some of those are in nonsearchable .PDF documents. The short answer is that the formal scientific literature on acquisition of expertise does not bless anyone who desires the title "expert" with that title, but rather uses objective performance measures to identify persons with statistically reliably superior performance. I'll post this now, and look for more definitions and references, and try to edit this post during the edit time limit if I find something more on-point for you to look up. Ericsson's seminal paper on the issue

http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/course/6/6.055/readings/eric...

has already been linked to by at least two participants in this thread.

From

http://web.me.com/pw70/ACE_lab/Publications_files/2007%20Eri...

we can find this extensive discussion of the definition of expertise:

"Since [Bedard's and Chi's (1992)] review, researchers have become increasingly dissatisfied with studies that define experts by social criteria (e.g., peer nominations), by extended domain experience, or by (high) education. When scientists measured the level of real-world performance of so-called experts they found that many were not reliably better than their less-experienced colleagues. For example, reviews (Ericsson, 2006) have described studies showing that a psychotherapist’s level of education and clinical experience is unrelated to their treatment outcomes. Recent reviews of performance in health-related fields show that extended experience of doctors and nurses (beyond the first couple of years of practice) is not associated with continued improvements, as most people had thought. In fact, performance has frequently been found to decrease without continued training (Choudhry, Fletcher, & Soumerai, 2005; Ericsson 2004).

"There are numerous domains of expertise in which some performers are reproducibly superior to most others engaging in the domain.For example, chess masters, bridge experts, and experts in other games consistently beat less-skilled individuals. More generally, in the arts and the sciences some individuals reliably generate superior products that are selected for presentation in journals, conferences, and competitions. Some individuals are able to perform at a reproducibly higher level in professional domains too. Our framework focuses on understanding the mechanisms that mediate consistently superior performance, and to distinguish this approach from the traditional study of expertise we will refer to it as the expert-performance approach (see Feltovich, Prietula, & Ericsson, 2006, for a description of the historical development of several approaches to the study of expertise using psychological methods)."
The "challenge" isn't to become a PGA golfer or anything like that. There isn't any predetermined mark of how "good" he needs to become in order to succeed. It's an open-ended experiment into how far 10,000 hours can take you.

Setting one milestone as your "goal" hinders your ability to reach the thousands of other possible milestones.
I've seen the video on the blogpost, I didn't see it there.

I'll take a look.
I still like Gabriel's idea of an MFA in programming.

http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html

If anybody ever made this happen I'd come running.
I'm skeptical of this in the long term (10+ years). A good number of people simply have flawed feet, resulting in pronation, supination, and any number of other pain-inducing mechanical oddities.
This really isn't an issue for legitimate users backing up or syncing original data. If you are paranoid about privacy, then you are probably doing something wrong. If for some reason some other user produces the same file that I have, then whats the big deal? They already arrived at that information themselves, so there is still no compromise of data. Of course the government can seize your data whether it is online or not. Don't sync copyrighted material. How many different ways do they have to tell you it's illegal?
And one of two things will be true at the end of his experiment; He'll be playing in the PGA, or he won't. In both cases he has learned a number of valuable things

Though one could argue that "learning an important lesson" isn't enough payoff for six whole years of your life. "Well," he can say, "I spent six years of my life, and fuck-knows-how-many hundred thousand dollars in lost earning potential, and I still didn't get good enough to be anything other than a children's golf instructor at a suburban course in Ohio, but... hey, I learned that I'm actually not all that good at golf."
i've been using my standing desk setup for 2 weeks. it's amazing. all of the energy that used to go into shaking legs and fidgeting and not focussing is now gone. i'm a little more tired at the end of the day (probably a good thing), and my knees, ankles and feet are sore at the end of the day as well. i'm not positive that's going to go away, but it makes sense that it would, and everything i've read confirms that.

my back doesn't hurt from sitting anymore and my arms and wrists are in much better ergonomic positions as well (i used to do some ergo design as a manufacturing engineer).

i think there are tremendous psychological and physiological benefits. i'm more focussed, i'm more satisfied, and i feel like i'm getting more done (obviously all subjective). i haven't found my attention drifting at all in the last few weeks, and have not once thought to myself, "damnit, just get back to work." if i get distracted, or need to think about something, i just walk around a little. i'm not stuck in a chair-jail. i also keep a soccer ball nearby, and find i'm often dancing a little when music is on. wonderful.

just got an ergo mat to go under my feet. should make a big difference as well. i'm still not done setting it up. i've been stacking boxes at different heights to test locations for the keyboard and mouse. i'm close.

once you take your desk apart and setup a standing desk, you are forced to use it. this is much different than an exercise ball which you can easily ditch for your chair-jail.
Thanks. I look forward to that update when you get round to it ;-)
I have a sit-stand. I found that over about a month I went from 1/2 to 95% standing. I still sit occasionally (if I overdid it at the gym say), but if I had to have a fixed station, it would definitely be a standing one.
Removing placeholders in url with python + regexp
Flock was open source, so presumably they prefer open source browsers.
This seems like it's interesting but could really use some audio. This definitely comes off as a slide deck that someone used in a presentation and wasn't meant to just be read. Does anyone have a video version of this by any chance?
Not to be offensive or discredit your efforts in any way, but i personally think the layout used by Paper.li is much easier on the eye
Gina Trapani's CodeConf Talk: Your Community Is Your Best Feature
This is why NetFlix with Hulu+ is a godsend. NetFlix generally has the back catalogue and Hulu+ has the latest season that NetFlix doesn't have yet.

I stream all of my TV from NetFlix and Hulu, I technically pay for cable because I pay for cable internet, but it is only the basic package. I don't have a TV hooked up to Coax at all...
How many hours of golf practice do you estimate you have under your belt, out of curiosity?
I think the primary difference between athletics and entrepreneurship is the natural talent/experience equation. In a sport like basketball, a certain level of inborn talent and physical prowess is required. No amount of practice and experience will get you into the pros if you don't have the talent to begin with. There are also strongly diminishing returns for experience because as you get smarter about the game, physical aging reduces your abilities in other ways.

Entrepreneurship is extremely different because experience holds much more weight and can easily overcome a lack of natural talent (in a skill like programming, for instance), or open up a new role. Someone who drops out of school to join the NBA and then gets laughed at by recruiters is basically screwed. Someone who drops out of school to build a prototype and gets laughed at by VCs or customers now has much more practical experience than his friends who are still in school and is in a good position to either try again or look for a job with the valuable skills he's gained through his failed attempt.

All this talk of 'superstars' and 'lottery winners' completely misses the point. If you want to be an entrepreneur, trying to be an entrepreneur, regardless of how badly you fail, is guaranteed to teach you relevant skills. Expensive colleges are not.
If you knew a target file's hash, it might be possible to modify the dropbox client to report that file as added, then dropbox would download that file onto your computer. Of course, 10^77 possible hashes makes it unlikely.
Interesting; it turns out I make right around MV$100,000. Never realized that.

But given two roughly equal-valued salaries, I think the higher absolute salary is still superior. Savings, for instance, don't scale with cost of living; saving 20% of $100,000 is much different from saving 25% of $40,000.
Bad. It proves RockMelt doesn't solve a pain-point.
Not to mention it barely even works
I think its bad news.
If Zynga, the biggest maker of social games do not want a social browser, maybe this means something.
Or not... See when Zynga aquired the Flock team, the rumors where that they want to get the senior team of flock, and make them work for zynga. http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/05/zynga-flock/
So now is just the annoucement of something that was already dead.
Language specifics mean that this might not always be the case. i.e.

>>> s = "%03d"
>>> f = lambda x: s % x # Identical behavior for a regular function closure
>>> map(f, range(10))
['000', '001', '002', '003', '004', '005', '006', '007', '008', '009']
>>> s = "%04d"
>>> map(f, range(10))
['0000', '0001', '0002', '0003', '0004', '0005', '0006', '0007', '0008', '0009']

I would try and think of it as more of a function parameter that you pre-fill, and never have to provide again for that instance of the function.
If you are using laptop, put http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40104270 on top of your desk.

it is only $9.99
> On that note. Where is the best online community for entrepreneurs then?

That's easy. Check out Hacker News. Oh wait...
I don't think this accomplishes that goal, however. I think this experiment demonstrates that connections and money are a good way to get ahead in life, and if someone is willing to hand that to you on a silver platter, it's a smart choice to take it.

I'm not sure that needed demonstration.
Interesting how they list Google Chrome before Mozilla Firefox (left to right). Did Mozilla do anything to piss off Flock?

Edit: Nevermind. I didn't realize that Flock 3.0 moved to webkit.
It was fun working on flock. I still work with many of the guys I met there.

"Wanted to destroy something beautiful" - http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2005/12/29/wanted-to-destroy-some...
I tried Cherokee 1 year ago trying to setup a wordpress blog on a vanilla Ubuntu install. It just didn't work so I gave up and haven't looked back.
I agree slightly with your point, but I most adults have hundreds hours of time spent doing new activities that they didn't get to do as a child. So if someone "discovers" painting in their 20s or 30s maybe it is feasible to be a great painter 10 years later.
Another (long) weekend project for review
The 20% efficiency is, as stated in the other comment, about correct for a plant without thermal storage. See far example [1]. What happens with the higher efficiency ratings is that they put more mirrors on the tower, or have a smaller turbine. That is, the ratio between thermal input and electric output increases. They can do this because any heat that isn't used by the turbine right at that moment can be stored temporarily and then used later on when the incoming heat isn't enough to power the turbine at 100%.

Which means that with an efficiency rating of 73%, you still need many more mirrors than with the capacity factor of 25%, but you just don't upgrade your turbine, and instead rely on thermal storage. Which one is preferred (bigger turbine or thermal storage) depends on the cost of turbines and thermal storage, and on whether you want to have baseload power or higher output during the day.

As a note, the 72.9% and 56.2% you quoted were estimates made in 2003 for the year 2020, so I wouldn't put to much trust into them.

As for Ivanpah itself, it appears to not have any thermal storage planned (which would have to be the biggest thermal storage ever created to be useful), according to [2], so it would be limited to about a 25% capacity factor.

[1] http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/49303.pdf

[2] http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/IvanpahFSA-reliability.htm...
If you play 50 hours a week you would still need almost 400 years to have played 1,000,000 hours...
The rules for hiring minimums are divorced from and can go up much faster than the rules for raises. I know at least one employer where the standard way to get a decent raise is to quit and come back a year later, because they are locked in to certain % raises but that rule doesn't apply to a new hire.
Higher Taxes. Quebec has generally higher taxes vs. the rest of canada, and places like washington have no state income tax. Also the locations it could be comparing could be downtown metro area's and their costs. 3km away from the downtown core and you get a huge drop in price.
I just bought the book, but really dislike the formatting. Some suggestions:

- use portrait instead of landscape format

- use typical US Letter (8.5 x 11) or A4 size.

- typeset with nice fonts

- remove the "customize", "free license", and advertising for your conversion software

I'd love an upgrade if you get around to doing this.

Thanks,
No improvement.
I graduated with a CS degree and am making about $32k a year, before paying for insurance, at an IT job.

Where can I sign up for one of these horribly low paying $45-75k/year programming jobs?
I'd be shocked if Tiger Woods has spent more than 30-40,000 hours golfing. Do the math.
Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, not the Winklevoss twins. Get over it.
Cost of living is very complicated. Most software engineers making $100,000 are young, single, don't have kids, and are comfortable with renting. Most software engineers making $200,000 are older and have kids, which means they need larger living spaces and have a strong preference for owning rather than renting. On this alone, you need different conversion factors. Also, the distance/price curve is different for different cities. Manhattan is very expensive but there are affordable neighborhoods 30 minutes away; the Bay Area isn't as expensive at its core but the catastrophic prices cover a larger area.
Having done degrees in both electrical engineering and computer science, it seems to me that EE schools on the whole manage the theory vs. practice a bit better than CS schools do.

Just as in CS/SE, EE has a wide range of topics, from the very practical ("how do we organize a team to build this") to the very theoretical (quantum mechanics, nonlinear control systems, signal processing). Yet somehow, no one in the EE industry is lobbying for two separate majors (I know; I work in it).

In EE, it is just accepted that you just need a theoretical background to be a top circuit designer. This isn't really open to argument: the best ideas and the best designs are almost always the result of careful analysis and deep understanding of the underlying phenomena. When I interview someone, I'd much rather know how well they understand control theory than how well they can throw together yet another folded cascode. (I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, but frankly I have yet to meet one.)

Most good EE departments naturally have a few separate tracks that you can follow as an EE. For example, at MIT, the EE headers are circuits (6.012), signal processing (6.011), E&M (6.013/6.014), and bioelectrical (6.021). You had to do some work in each, but everyone generally gravitated towards one or two of them. As a result, people who want to do hard core device physics can take a very different set of classes from those who want to design microprocessors.

At MIT, the same model applies in the CS department. There, the headers are 6.033 (computer systems engineering), 6.034 (AI), and 6.046 (algorithms), and under each there are vastly different topics offered, from compilers to classes basically indistinguishable from pure mathematics :). As a result, I don't feel at all like my CS education was too theoretical: I was able to choose a somewhat more practical path.

Given my experience, I hold with those who favor the ability to diversify in accordance with one's interests. It has served me well, anyhow.
Waiting for FB to be worth something before pushing the lawsuit makes sense. Why would he bother if it wasn't worth anything?
Ask HN: How do I write a website that uses the Facebook API or whatever?
I want to write a toy app that isn't actually a "Facebook app" (which I have never done, by the way). I want it to be a standalone website with its own URL but users log in with FB and it uses their data.

I need to learn the Facebook API or whatever, obviously

However, I am out of the web dev loop. I need someone to tell me what's what. What is jQuery? Am I... Node.js? Sinatra? Ruby on Rails? Which of this is important to me?

I can do like HTML and CSS.

WHAT DO I DO?
How does your conclusion follow from the first sentence? It sounds like you're using your own individual experience to draw conclusions about how Nginx took off across the entire world, without any actual evidence to prove that the two are related.
They're keeping it simple. No mention of microscopes, dental tools, hot air guns, flux pens, or solder paste either. But yeah, I'm not sure I'd try his desoldering method either.
To be absolutely fair, SF/NY have much higher starting rates than other places.
Wait, there was another browser based on Mozilla that then moved to Webkit that then died? Who knew?
VMware Disrupts PaaS Space With Cloud Foundry
I always liked the idea behind Flock but the UI was too cluttered and confusing every time I used it. Definitely too confusing for any regular user to be able to use it effectively (and therefore near impossible for it to ever gain as much traction as the 'big' browsers - even now when social is huge).
I looked up the New York City marathon prize. Apparently the winner (men's and women's) gets $130K for winning the first time, or $200K if a repeat winner. So she should have amassed something approaching two million dollars in marathon prize money alone by now. Sounds like she's keeping it somewhere other than Norway.
I like RockMelt - I tried Flock but it did nothing for me...

Does RockMelt have a business model? dunno. But RockMelt solves the pain of twitter/facebook/linkedin fire hoses (for me)
You pay your own taxes now.
I just moved from Oklahoma to Tennessee and CNN's housing estimate is way off. It says TN is 20% cheaper and it is actually just the opposite.
While I think there's something to be said for Wadhwa's point in the context of the engineering field, in the larger context it seems pretty clear we've peaked in an education market bubble. Think about all those kids with liberal arts degrees. Heck, even law schools have seen a sudden drop in applications.

Along those lines, I can't be the only one who was surprised that one of his closing examples was Steve Jobs, the famous Reed College dropout. After all, Jobs has stated the importance of his dropping in to calligraphy classes and how it exposed him to the issues of typography, etc. I don't think I've ever heard Jobs talk about the importance of a visual arts degree from a prestigious university, however.

As for the argument that Microsoft or Apple won't look at applications that don't have degrees, well, yes. But in this forum how often have we read of startups choosing their original teams based on prestigious degrees? If you can make something new and useful, are you really worried about HR liking your resume or are you more concerned with finding ways to make your own company happen?
I wish she'd write a book.
Another method I've heard: person 1 picks a large random number, adds their salary to it, writes down the resulting number, and passes it on to person 2. Person 2 adds their salary to the number, writes down the new sum, and passes it on to person 3. This continues until the result gets back to person 1. You end up with the large random number plus the sum of everyone's salary. Person 1 then subtracts the large random number and reports the sum of all the salaries.

This depends on people being able to do arithmetic after a few beers, though.
I believe new user accounts are now green.
Hmmm... when I graduate I'd definitely take a £18000 p/a job. I mean it seems at this age getting your foot in the door, getting started and putting some 'commercial experience' on your CV is far more important than the actual salary.

On the other hand, if I could make a living doing freelance web development, then I could build that up until I have an income that employers would need to match (rather than just throwing me the low end of the offered salary-range).