skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we can demonstrate that with enough practice, anyone can get good at anything (with a large delta of good), then I think that's meaningful.

I'd agree with that, which is a very different claim than "there's no such thing as innate talent".

I've talked to other CS majors who think that most people just don't have the right "mind" for programming

I'd also agree with that, and I don't think it's contradictory. Have you really not observed that some people pick up programming far easier than others? I believe that almost anyone can get to the point where they can write basic software, but not that everyone is capable of becoming the next Dennis Ritchie.
I haven't used this myself, but it looks like it might be something up your alley:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2004254

http://proxlet.com/

My understanding is that it's basically a proxy for Twitter that allows you to filter based on criteria you specify.
Earthquake information in Ruby
Do keep in mind that "most" programming jobs are in areas with high costs of living: San Francisco, San Jose, and New York.

That said, take a look at this:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Location=Portland-OR/Sal...
The median salary for an SE in Portland is $67k.

So, yeah, it's negotiating time.
Very nice idea, but wouldn't the handwriting give away who owns what? Maybe everyone should print their salary in Arial 12 Bold on a 1" by 2" piece of paper, so that there will be no clues to who made what note. OTOH, this might be a bit complicated in a pub setting ('over beers').
Also note that all these numbers really depend on location. 80-100K out of college in Minnesota (where I am) would be insane. I know people with 15 years experience making 100-120k.

Now if you are in the Bay area making 32K, that sounds weird, otherwise, start investigating salaries in your area.
How is your experience in the US? Is it mostly NYC, New England, and California (or big cities in other places)? From what I hear rural america (which controls a disproportionate share of the voting power) tends to be more xenophobic, specially around the border with mexico.
App Blocking, Block Rogue apps from spamming your walls
The idea behind it, is to compile everything that you don't work right now, and interpret just what you are actually working. At the end of the day you can run the whole code compiled.

Also you lose certain features that are available to the interpretter - but that's okay - that was the point...
Most startups do fail. Most new businesses fail though unfortunately. That doesn't mean the team wasn't any good. There are so many dynamics involved. One of course is the quality of the product being developed by the team. Another being the marketing strategy, including pricing. And another being market acceptance.

I'm curious how you're defining YC's success compared to other angel groups. YC is a pretty amazing group, no doubt, but being great at publicizing and helping storm up investor interest in a startup can't be the only measure. Not that I'm trying to insinuate that's all YC is good at because I'm not.
I've been standing for about 3 hours right now for the first time ever since reading this article and I haven't skipped a beat actually. It's been a nice change.
You've made an extremely weak argument.

You're saying:

Golf is mostly mental. That certainly isn't a problem: you can train mentality. In fact what you've just argued is that golf is well-suited to be conquered purely through training (among sports). Dan would have a much harder time becoming effective in basketball, where normal-size people are at a huge disadvantage off the bat.

Golf requires feel. Where do you think feel comes from? (Training!) Again, you've actually argued that golf is well-suited to Dan's approach, not the opposite.

You've seen this before. No you haven't. Come on.

Golf is hard. That's tautological. Anything that can reasonably be called an endeavor is in some sense infinitely hard. (Also: how do you know that shaving off those last few strokes is impossible once you've achieved your potential? Did you dedicate your life to golf?)

Sometimes you'll have a day of training that won't contribute to your progress. Anybody trying to learn anything will experience days like that.

This is a cool and ballsy experiment and you're being a bit of a hater. Do I think Dan will become a PGA golfer? No, but I'm looking forward to seeing him try.
I support the decision to downplay karma within comments; I would even experiment with removing that data from the article listings view. This is a data driven group of people who are simultaneously very competitive. It's likely that the majority of readers aren't maliciously competitive regarding karma, but this competitive, data driven nature likely has a contributing factor to some of the referenced issues.

If you notice, many of the comments themselves are about the external of the karma system, such as justification for downvotes, using karma as a currency, etc. The current iteration, using karma on the back end for page ranking purposes, will likely be the best long term solution. I will know the community's response to my own comments, but I won't be able to notice that a HN "super member" received 20+ votes and try to emulate their content. Over time, comment and article rank, the original idea behind a voting article/comment system, will become the goal, rather than earning 2 upvotes.

To put this in perspective, do a Ctrl+F for "karma" and "vote", then do the same for "quality."
Out of curiosity, aside from Friendster which companies has Jonathan built? Also, didn't Friendster falter greatly, enough to make it second-fiddle, due to its inability to scale? Finally, wasn't socializer a flop -- I haven't been back in a really really long time - but, jsut checked it and the site looks like its from '99.
I don't know. I have encountered people who frankly I find to be quite racist/ethnically biased against Hispanics, for instance.
Cint, Root were mentioned, there is also UnderC

http://home.mweb.co.za/sd/sdonovan/underc.html

and Ch - (but C only) http://www.softintegration.com/ (commercial)
I used to be very good at salary negotiation and being confident in my skills... until I discovered HN.
I think you could be right about golf being a bad choice for 10000 hours, but I don't think you're looking at the challenge the right way.

Re: 1) I think the idea is that 10000 hours of practice include all aspects of the game. There is no reason why his plan can't include playing his way up through all grades of tournaments and working on his mental game.

2) That sounds exactly like the kind of experience turned into intuition that the human brain is good at. I don't think there is any reason to think that aspect is inbuilt (though of course it might be).

3) But 10000 hours? Thats 6 days a week for 6 years.

4) I think this guy would be very happy being a mediocre pro.

5) Yeah I'm not sure I get that point at all. You don't have to get a good score to practice attentively.
"Are you fucking serious? Probably HR persons do not know what a compiler is"

This is actually common. You're right, the HR person wouldn't know what a compiler is, she is following a script with admissible answers to the problems and just listening for keywords that show you have the bare knowledge to pass the screening interview.

From the tone of your comments about the interview, it sounds like you seemed shocked at some questions, thought they were simplistic, etc. and probably let this show. This, I think, was the biggest factor why you didn't get it. Many interviewers have no idea how to interview, and they ask pet questions culled from online sources and friends. If they get the idea that you find some question simple or "beneath you" they take it personally.

So, lesson for next time: React to all interviewer questions equally and control your frustration.
Future storage technologies and Linux
The state of California releases salary info for all kinds of state employees (which has shown up on HN before : http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/). When I first found out, I spent 30 minutes looking up the salaries of all my old UC Berkeley professors, and comparing them to prison doctors and state troopers. I was saddened to see that salaries and talent/research output/prestige are often very unrelated, even in the presence of total transparency. George Smoot, who's a Nobel laureate only around 150k!

I also wondered whether (for example) Martin Wainwright and Michael I. Jordan, who've collaborated on papers, classes and a book on my to-read list, ever experience friction as a consequence of salary, given that Jordan appears to earn roughly 85% more than Wainwright.

I know that state employees and academic salaries are subject to a lot of forces that aren't present in tech companies -- but this makes me doubt that transparency is enough to bring about reasonable, equitable salaries.
Recently in an AR hotel the tv was broadcasting the story of Yuri Milner buying a house in CA for $100 million, and mentioned it had a pool. One of the people in the room said, quite loudly, "they should have drowned him in the pool before they showed it." I'm pretty sure that was related to him being a foreigner.
AS3 is based on ECMAScript 4, which was expected to become the new standard many years ago but became a dead-end after the ECMAScript committee abandoned it. That's why there's no "4" anymore between ES3.5 and ES5... ActionScript is it.
It's slow because C++ compilers are slow. Python isn't so slow as to be the bottleneck here.
Excellent presentation - she knows how to present well. I still have about ten minutes left, but what surprises me is how unsurprising what she has to say sounds to my ears.

So, I'm not a web designer. I've used CSS before, but just in very small amounts to get basic "here I am" pages up. I'm a systems programmer. That means I spend my days in languages like C, C++ and Python for scripting. I sometimes drop down to assembly. It sounds like she's describing basic good programming practices.
Should we be drawing more or less attention to newcomers? The green is more obvious than the default gray.
"The Maqetta application is currently at preview level. By engaging with the community with Maqetta at an early stage, IBM hopes to collaborate both on product requirements and on open source development, with the goal that future releases of Maqetta will deliver strong tools for UI design and an efficient workflow between UI design and production development."
This is from CodeConf 2011, and unfortunately the talks were not recorded.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439818

Posted about ten minutes before you.
Is there any major, including CS, which reliably imparts upon its students a proper understanding of the innards of a compiler? It probably depends on the school.
I've seen plenty of xenophobia coming from the US media. How you've managed to never see any is a miracle.
Hi all, Arash from Dropbox here. We understand the concern that the government could try to guess whether a particular file has been uploaded to Dropbox based on processing times and then request that Dropbox identify a user who has access to that file. However, to seek user content information, the government needs to comply with the provisions of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act by obtaining a warrant supported by probable cause (or in some cases a court order from a judge). Those safeguards protect user privacy. De-duplication does not make users any more vulnerable to intrusive government actions. Today, a government agency could ask any online service to provide the names of all users who have a particular file, whether or not the service employs de-duplication. And in that case, the government would also need to support its request with a warrant or court order. The rules that provide a check against unwarranted government snooping apply to online services equally, regardless of their back-end architecture.
Mexico, Central America, and large parts of South America would be empty in a matter of weeks.
Development Wisdom from Terence Parr (creator of ANTLR parser generator)
Early optimization is the root of all evil, so I understand that an up-and-coming company might do this, but Dropbox has the traction and userbase to make this a very relevant concern.

Popularity is also proportional to chance of being targeted by hackers and approached by government or corporation representing intellectual property owners.
"Paul Ceglia may just be a con man, or he may turn out to be the greatest tech investor who ever lived."

vs

"Don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, Paul Ceglia could be the greatest early investor of all time, at least in terms of returns."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437351

Nice one Erick!

One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just recycled HN comments.
It sounds like they may have thought you struggled more on the reverse list of strings question than you thought you did. I think its something they expected you to just crank out.

With that said, implementing a heap with two stacks seems pretty good. That's something that certainly doesn't just jump to the front of my mind at all.

You'll do fine. You seem like a bright kid.
Oh, fabulous. An opportunity to pay ten thousand dollars to hear Tim Ferriss talking about how awesome he thinks he is.
This may be an outlier, but Google's 10% raise last year + adjustments to base salary, in my case anyway, made them way more competitive and would easily match what switching a job would be.
Perhaps a better staring place, with more context: http://oocss.org/
Exactly the way I see things, I bet that most of people also think about it the same way... but it feels good to listen that from likeminded people :)
Working on the mozilla source code....worst decision ever. They made chrome from scratch and its already got large number of users without any special feature.
Berners-Lee: Web access is a 'human right'
Well, then at least we should increase the number of immigrants by upwards of 10% per year until a point where nobody is turned away.

The more immigrants we get, the more channels will exist for assimilation. Many colleges and universities are having a tough time staying in business, and major cities like Detroit are falling into decay b/c nobody wants to live there.

When you consider how hard people have to work elsewhere even to get by, pretty much anyone with enough gumption to come to the US would eventually attain a middle class lifestyle, then many would exceed it.

And even if some remained very poor, it's probably better to be very poor in the US than in many developing nations.
Beggars can't be choosers, but a cursory look at some of those jobs are awful. You can choose between doing some college student's cs100 homework for $15, or building a replica of match.com for $300.

Off topic, but how do people determine how much a project costs? Even at a conservative $50 an hour, that's 6 hours to build an entire website. I can see start a rails project with mysql, building the schema and writing some simple controllers that display some markup for viewing profiles, but really - how could you create a complete website from scratch for $300?
I think it's ironic to draw attention to newcomers' submissions - and it might be something that malefactors would look into gaming.

On the other hand, the point of such features has always been to emulate the "I'm new in traffic - cut me some slack and keep an extra eye out for me" bumper sticker. And this outweighs the con, to me.

But it's something that's only been done on forums - bulletin boards if you will. As old as it seems, it looks like a novel approach by pg in the comments site medium.
Maybe it's not the same for everyone, but I can see my own comment scores. It could be argued that mcritz could get a truer idea of interest since voters won't be influenced by any kind of "herd mentality."
From what I hear rural america

Should I take this in the natural way that a native speaker of English would take it, to mean that you have never personally been to rural America? Where else have you been, and what other countries' attitudes toward immigrants are you comparing to the United States, which has one of the highest rates of legal immigration in the world?

I should explain that I have spent much of my life in rural America (where my mother grew up, and where most of my aunts and uncles and cousins live). The rural Americans I know have been very accepting of my wife, a first-generation immigrant, and generally accepting of immigrants to the degree of often hiring immigrants as their various business ventures scale up.

I have also lived outside the United States, although only on one other continent, and in my years overseas I have met quite a few people from a variety of countries who report that their countries of course also limit immigration. Is there any country in the world today with no restrictions at all on immigration? Where is it? Who emigrates to settle there?
How does having poor people living and working in the same country as you make you poorer? Your ideology looks to me like socialism except in reverse: you want to restrict free capitalism in order to keep the poor segregated and in poverty.
A good work place environment is easily worth $10k in salary. If a manager were up front with me - "Hey we pay everyone the same rate, and everyone else makes this much. Still interested?" - I would consider that to be a good sign.
Eset Nod32 Username And Password [ 13 April 2011 ]
Sad but I am not surprised. Its incremental value was always questionable and I never understood why they thought they could build a successful browser based on niche features that only a tiny segment of the online population would want. It would be interesting to see what happens to RockMelt.
Mozilla is now going full-steam ahead with a plan to support Native HTML5 in Firefox. :)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=nativehtml5

http://arewenativeyet.com/
It's not clear to me why Dropbox would need your keys to de-dupe. He says so in the article, but doesn't say why.

Why not compute the file hash on your local machine before encryption, and check that hash against a master dupe list (hash, dupe_count) of all hashes from all users' pre-encrypted local files?

Secondly, I cannot see how this requires there to be an index of users hashes. Surely one could store hashes with reference count, increment when a user adds, decrement when a user deletes. The user ID isn't necessary for a reference counter.

Not saying Dropbox isn't doing what he says. But he says de-duping proves they can decrypt and proves they have a list of who has the same files. I don't see it from de-dupe alone.
Yep, just a slide deck. But it's a very good slide deck presenting something interesting and worth thinking about - that the specificity of css has some fundamental issues, and that we currently work around them in a destined-to-break-and-be-broken manner by moving towards inline CSS declarations and !important.

It would be better as a web page, but the content is still worthwhile.
I also walk around, or play table tennis.
To further elaborate, his choice of in-app advertiser was breaking some rules and Amazon caught it in his app, so his app was rejected.

Yes, that seems unfair, but in the end, there's something in his app that's breaking the rules.
and it isn't about the endless mainstream culture wars

Given that this interview takes place in a publication that is largely focused on the mainstream culture wars, you're going to have to do a much better job convincing me. Especially since everything he says in his interview reads like a conservative culture war advocate. He evokes Milton Friedman for heavens sake!

I think the fact that you agree with his position, which is fine, may cloud you to why the National Review wants to run an interview with him.

And couple this with the fact that I've seen this coming from various people on the right, makes me all the more skeptical. Even the person who posted the story is YummyFajitas - an extremely conservative HN member.
Phasing it in at 10% increase in total immigrants per year would be fine as well.

Many of the people living in shanty towns are victims of failed institutions, corrupt leaders, and oppression. With this removed their resulting standard of living would likely be at least middle class. The lazy and unmotivated from those nations would stay there, and the motivated would arrive on US shores ready to improve things for themselves.
What's interesting here is that the Amazon TOS says that you have to have all your apps in their store - so now that you've been rejected, are you breaking your agreement with them by still having it in the Android Market?
Wharton Business School Launches Digital Press
> And stop calling people who question your ineffectual and pointless public masochism "trolls", "cowards" and "stalkers".

You made a HN account just to throw personal attacks at Jacob and think it's unfair to be called a troll or a stalker?
That's exactly what you are.
If someone is motivated enough to drop everything and take a big risk immigrating to the US to start a new life, I welcome them.
IE in a nutshell: http://i56.tinypic.com/311s410.jpg

The damage has been done. The legacy of IE won't be fixed with a new version number.
I found it a frustrating experience too...happy to share more insights directly at dusanb [at] devicemagic dot com.
Case in point: the American tax payer has payed for about 4.5 years of my graduate CS education, which, according to my visa documents, exceeds $200,000 in total cost. I'd like to stay, (re-)pay taxes, and I already had a six-digit job offer from a well-known American company. Further, my home country's embassy submitted, in writing, that they have no objection to me staying in the US, even permanently. Nonetheless, I'm getting "kicked out" this summer within 30 days after I graduate.

I trust there must be good reasons on a global scale... but in my local view this makes only limited sense.

(Btw., this is the J-1 visa home residency rule, for those who care. I need to live in my home country for at least two years before I can apply for an H-1b. Two years at home is just long enough to settle in and make moving _again_ not very attractive.)
I couldn't tell it worked at all. Dragging and dropping objects from the palette had no effect, nor can you draw them on if selected. You might think you need a "pane" but those don't work, either. This was in Chrome. A friend had the same result in firefox. I can't even get maquetta.org to open in IE9, but that may be stupid McAfee Web Gateway/Barrier. Why on earth would they "preview" an app that doesn't work at all?
Psychological Problem: People Are Largely Subject to the Fears
Career risk in startups?

There's job risk in startups, yes, but not career risk. Working for startups serves you very well.
In some countries I am pretty sure it is illegal to laugh at work as much I did while I was reading it. Was it just me or did anybody else hear the voice of the nerdy kid from Inbetweeners while reading this?

But really really well thought out and well written.
That explanation is surely more difficult to understand than the game :)
> (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run

The only games with which this will work is games that support DX9 explicitly and, for some reason, disable it. The D3D9 and 10 APIs are completely different. Having worked on an implementation of DX10 for XP, I can say for sure that this is 100% incorrect.
per the slideshow, 3 "best practice myths":

- don't add any extra elements

- don't add classes

- use descendent selectors exclusively

the second two i've never heard in my life, and i'm quite sure the first is not a myth.
I've found that the newer no-clean and water-based fluxes give off some fairly nasty fumes. Rosin flux unless it's a very heavily activated type doesn't really bother me, although if I had a job that exposed me to it regularly I might start to worry about long term issues.
RWW Hacker Poll: Is OSX Still Developer Friendly?