skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Games suggestions for hacker kids?
My friend, a self described English major type, has a son (age ~8) who has a very logical, analytical bent, as well as some subtle autistic symptoms. He struggles to know how to nurture his son's strengths. I would guess that many hackers here, like me, would relate to this kid from having similar strengths and interests at his age.

Do you have any suggestions for games and ways to engage kids like this and foster their inherent abilities and interests?
A system upgrade borked the server, sorry (i.e. libev got upgraded from libev.so.3 -> .4 and I had to relink the server).
Reminds me of a proverb from Nassim Taleb: "Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don't: school, games, sports, laboratory - what's reduced and organized."
That's my problem with academia and university culture. They don't show how their degree can translate to real jobs. So they graduate only to find out they're only qualified to work in universities as a researcher! For example, in biology you only have two options outside of research: law or medicine.
Mondragon has annual revenues of €174/employee. I have trouble viewing that as a proven model.
Self taught is a little difficult to define. I was a math major and took a few CS courses: intro, data structures and algorithms, and then math classes with a programming component (that often counted for elective credit toward CS): graph theory, numerical analysis, linear programming.

That said, I pretty much consider myself a "self taught" programmer, because I didn't take most of what I would consider the core of CS.

Can we define "self taught" as someone who didn't take a formal course in:

algorithms and data structures
compilers
operating systems ()

() must include a low enough level language that you are manipulating memory

By that standard, I'm self taught, as I'm missing the second two. I promise myself I'll get the book and read them carefully, but I still haven't done it.

That said, I suspect that someone who did take the entire full "core" would be pretty much as "self taught" where it comes to most professional programming. However, I still think they'd be better prepared than I was for a programming career, as compilers and operating systems is more relevant to professional programming than real analysis and abstract algebra.
Google +1: Reviews when You Need Them?
Sorry but your apostrophe is stopping me parsing the sentence, Template View's what?
Dealing with startup culture
Seattle startup, King Of Web, features a post on Pursuit.me
--
#1. Reason: Most of the folks joining (CS in) Engineering do so due to parental/societal pressure.
--

I've seen a number of people who enter CS here in the states do so for this same reason. They get weeded out in interviews quickly because they have no desire to better themselves, no curiosity about the topic, and really give the impression they would rather be elsewhere.

On the educational side, even with 2nd tier schooling, if you want to learn, are curious, and want to put the time in, you can make yourself shine above peers around you.
I would gladly pay more for a thinner, more concise book.
Wow, I jailbroke my iPhone and always wondered what that was. It was top most on the screen, I thought it was a bug. This is way cooler.
I have the same exact issue here:

http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper

How to convince the developer that the solution provided is ahead of what he/she can just put together...

It really is, but conveying that is difficult.

I imagine the questions are "Why would I buy what I can get for free?" and "I can probably do better myself?"

Both of the questions are false (other solutions are free only if your time is worthless + the solution is a product of 7+ years of improvements/iterations) but try to tell that to someone (who right at that moment thinks they know better).

Perhaps I should look into other market segments.
You're welcome! I'm always glad to help.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=node.js+chat+site%3Aycombinator.com
In the last 30 years, has the president of any university introduced significant changes that the faculty supported?
I especially liked the Ruby Hoedown, and Magic Ruby conferences because they were free admission. All you had to do was convince your company to pay for travel and lodging. The quality of talks and technical skills of people who went to those conferences were definitely not lacking
You clearly didn't read the link I directed you at. If you had you'd have seen that you only need MD5(username:realm:password), and would have been pointed at JBoss's DIGESTAuth implementation as an example of an implementation that does this.
Maximizing Business Conferences / Meetups
Some useful tips and discussion questions on how to get the most out of business conferences and meetups.
That's an interesting idea, but I don't know what you're protecting against. You're still providing the plaintext to the remote end eventually, so I assume you trust them. You're assuming the communication is encrypted.

What does this scheme protect you against, compared to the normal technique (part #2 in your example)?
That's a good point. We're trying to disrupt the existing API platform market by being leaner and faster. Putting some Windsoc code on Github hasn't been ruled out, either. I think that assuming that for-profit vendors would never consider supporting and leveraging the open source movement would be just as dangerous as an assumption about open source being unreliable.
Doing that worked well for me in my first company, which lasted 10 years. But I didn't get to that point on the second one and I burnt out working on it completely on my own. It was working, but still too early to hire and a cofounder would have definitely helped push on.

Had the wrong cofounder on the third one though, and I can't stress enough how important having the right cofounder is after that experience. It wasn't all bad, and could have been much worse, but enough to know how important a choice that is.
RedBull Creation, hardware hacking contest
Are these kind of structures buckling critical? I mean classic, Euler buckling of the whole column. If not, what physical factor determines the maximum height? Foundations? Motion from elastic vibrations, driven by vortex shedding? I can think of a bunch of potential things, but I just can't find a good reference.

I ask, as I'm only familiar with stressed-skin aerospace structures, which are often locally buckling critical, or even in some cases (webs of wing beams, for example) actually allowed to buckle in what's called "diagonal tension".
You're right about bioinformatics/biostatistics. That's my advice to anyone that wants to major in biology and actually get a decent job out of it. You can always fall back on being a code monkey if biology doesn't pan out...
How to create small final PDF files for the Internet
The site itself:

"A history of silicon valley failure written in t-shirts"
Plug: One such small regional conference with a security bent happening in Raleigh, NC is http://www.carolinacon.org/ at the end of April.
I'm amazed the basic underlying idea (which I believe the designer has been working on for some time) has taken so long to get real traction. In essence, the submarine is an underwater "airplane" that uses the principle of "lift" to go down (so if its engine fails it "falls" to the surface). This means no ballast tanks and a very simple, robust design (mechanical stuff outside the bubble; life support and people inside).

Oddly enough the only reason I know anything about this subject is that back in 1997 I was working as a game designer working on a "Tomb Raider"-like game but with the emphasis on the underwater gameplay (I thought Tomb Raider's underwater stuff was a huge missed opportunity, since I found the few underwater bits the most scary and tense).

Researching the back story I looked into what was happening in submarine design (a field that doesn't get a huge amount of coverage, even among geeks) and found out about these underwater "planes" and some stuff the US Navy was experimenting with (i.e. a modified Los Angeles class submarine that could launch armed drone subs, which is a brilliant idea since the most dangerous thing an attack sub can do in combat is launch a torpedo).

Again -- funny how slow progress seems to be in subs compared to everything else.
Designing for Touch Devices
If GoDaddy had a command line interface
I wonder which files will be tried on the search box. Personally I tried "grep.c".

Too bad the page ends truncated with "Similarities between files are found using the"
Easy IP Geotargeting with Geokit and MongoMapper
The Peter Principle is less cynical, but probably more realistic. It's that you get promoted for doing a good job, but eventually you get promoted into a job you're not good at -- at which point you stop being promoted and you stay in a role that you're not suited for.

Note, there's nothing malicious that happens here. No one is trying to promote a bad developer. People are largely doing what they think makes sense -- promoting top performers.
37Signals is ubiquitous in a certain way on the internet - we are smiling! We are about our products! No look over here we are about education! Come to our conference and learn how to run a small business! It is like Martin Fowler and Joel Spoelsky had a child and it was nurtured by Saatchi and Saatchi.
Riddle me this batman: how does one get MD5(username:realm:password) onto the server?
I took on online file of the Dvorak keyboard layout and modded it so the parens would be where the tags in Dvorak are (shift-W and shift-E on Qwerty). I made other mods too. It's really comfy.
The Bank of Facebook: How will Facebook interact in the global economy?
Ask HN: Selling House Ads for Mobile App
We have developed a couple of iPhone apps. We want to release an ad supported free version, but want to retain control over what advertisers are allowed in our app.

We want to accept payment directly from the advertisers, and give them information on impressions and CTRs.

Is there an ad serving solution out there that will let me sell mobile ads and put them in my apps?
> I also find the opposite very annoying: when fans rate something as 5* before it's even released.

I've received early copies of books with the hope that I would review it early.

But I don't often look at Amazon reviews so I don't know if this would fully account for what you're talking about.
Thanks. The link in the article was edited after my submission. When I posted the link was only to arxiv.org.
This sums it up in my mind - this is just smart business. Having such a core need of a business being wrapped up in a "Marketing Department" contributes to a lot of corporate BS in many corporations.
Paying It Forward: Interview w/ Matt Lauzon, Founder & CEO of Gemvara
I'm pretty sure the revenues on Wikipedia are off, and I can't find what reference they're using to get that number.

This study from around 2002/2003 puts their revenues at $8 billion annually with 60,000 employees. That puts their per-employee revenues at around $133k.

http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/p...

This puts their revenues at $24.2 billion in 2008, which is almost $300k per employee, if you use the ~85,000 employees figure.

http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/0...
Jay Is Games (http://jayisgames.com/) maybe, they're pretty popular in casual gaming though I've no idea if that translates to sales or not.
I for one appreciate the insight into how you run things. I especially liked the point you made about encouraging mastery (horizontal) instead of managerial (vertical) promotion. So, thank you for sharing.
fortune 500 companies will eat your soul.
TweetDeck Launches #NewTwitter Rival
I have nothing to prove it, but I heard many times at least from former version that Firebug was quite memory hungry, thus slowing Firefox after many hours of use. I may be wrong.
SD Venture Group hires VC David Titus to get startup capital flowing
Semco SA, the Brazilian conglomerate, would probably be a more relevant example of corporate re-engineering.
The Facebook Ads discussion is one which I believe will last a great deal amongst us. Is it really working? Why isn't it working for me? Why would anybody try to trick me, since the money I pay go to Facebook and not that person? These are most of the question I hear most every day.

I believe we firstly need to settle something out - and the article did that right from the title - you don't go on Facebook to sell, you go there to discuss, receive feedback, critics and nice words, you go there to create a community.

This being said, next thing to do is to establish what exactly you want to do there. Raise awareness, drive traffic, improve your communication skills, increase your community and so on.

Based on this analysis you can then determine if the money you invested were in vain or not.
The Sakawa Boys: Ghana's cyber-criminals combine email fraud & witchcraft
“Everything Should Be an API,” Says FCC
To me the Node.JS articles are becoming like Erlang as been, something that gets submitted to the site over and over again. Let me know when there's an extensive of a library like Java or Python :D I do like the concept of JavaScript everywhere. For instance, the porting of Toxiclibs to Processing.js is simply astounding.
Dish Network buys Blockbuster for $320 million
Though I am a dreaded project manager, I agree mostly to what you are saying. But in the field I work in, advertising, I do think that its necessary and that my value is additive.

My responsibility is mainly to be a shit umbrella, so my creative and developers can do work, especially when we're all working on multiple clients. I'm not doing my job when I have to have them in meetings, in fact we don't meet save for face-to-face discussions.

That and of course dealing with the rowdiness of clients, hammering out scope, keeping things to scope, and being the bad guy when necessary with the client. (This is actually harder then people realize, our default human reaction is to help people, and it requires taking abuse in the extremes that is simply part of your job)

This article sums up my views nicely: http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/project_managers_not_ca...
Rotating roles is great for a small company when the amount of managerial activity is very small. But creative work and manager work don't mix well. Being a manager requires responding to things that are happening at that moment (interruptive), which essentially destroys 'the zone' required for getting things done as a creative (developer, designer, etc). The other problem is that most people aren't cut out to be good managers, and learning to be a good manager is a skill - the more you practice the better you get. You start to see patterns and figure out how to deal with them. But rotating roles could help when you are first starting out to figure out who has the manager chops, and who sees it as a burden. Ideally the less time your company spends managing, the more time you can spend making cool stuff, so if the workload is small - go for it.
I mention Semco elsewhere in the thread, but Mondragon is 30x bigger than Semco, and yet still operates effectively as a horizontal organization.
PS3 Running Linux Serves Up LOIC in Sony DDoS Attack
On larger monitors, I usually Ctrl and + (Windows and Linux) or ⌘ and + (Mac) which increases the font sizes. Georgia looks awesome at 18-24px.
For me, there is way too much to do. I think networking is about 2/3rds of a full-time job in itself. Hiring is a pain, even with the empirical approach of trying people out with contracting. I definitely could use a cofounder.
The only way to solve management issues with a high degreee of confidence is to stay small enough to avoid management. The NASA analogies are problematic, however, because large organizations do indeed manage to manage themselves while completing critical projects. Which is more interesting? Large-scale management, or head-in-the-sand? I could personally never work in a large-scale organization, but how can we all avoid these issues and still create a highly functioning economy, which produces both critical and lifestyle goods and services?
This fits nicely with the study which shows that organizations are more efficient if people are promoted at random ;-)

http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455
Me too. But sadly the market at the moment doesn't seem to support it.
If traffic is the only thing that interests you, then it's fine. But if you are looking for a smaller Bounce Rate, a longer time spent on site, bigger sales, and so on, that is definitely not the answer.
"And that means more bookstores will be closing."

At the worst case they'll just have to change. Maybe they'll become cafes where you can borrow a kindle at the counter for browsing the selection.

Or they'll become like lists on Facebook.
Yay. Gruber has competition.
Well, they do sent root passwords over email.
It took me a while to figure out that Biomedical Engineering degree tracks were made in response to a need for grad students in this area and not a need in the industry.

Industry asks, why hire a biomed when I can hire a mechanical engineer and a electrical engineer. Separate those two parts of the project and have a manager that understands the biology of the problem.

The hope for one of these engineers is to get past the usual resume screens and convince the people hiring that they are as good at electrical as the EE and/or as good at mechanics as the ME.

Luckily for any engineer, entrepreneurship is also an option.
3 books that I helped me tie my daily work back to more abstract computer science concepts are:

- Ruby Best Practices
- Javascript, the Good Parts
- Higher Order Perl

I recommend picking these up after you've done work in the languages they're about. They assume that you're already comfortable with the language, but then go back to show how that language uses CS concepts. They highlight how functional programming, and other classic introductory CS concepts, but stays practical. None of them are long reads, and there are clear take aways that make you better at programming.
I would presume they use the same technique that Brent Simmons suggests: treat customer support as an engineering constraint, and design solutions to minimize common support problems. The quick feedback loop of the web makes it much more possible than in other industries.
It appears that the strong bias against single founders (at least from the investment community) may be softening a bit. In a recent talk at DogPatch Labs, Mark Suster advised starting a company on your own and then hiring a cofounder: http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-suster-entrepreneur-advi...
"Why is $10 too much for an ebook ? - surely it depends on the value of the content inside it."

I think if we are talking about entertainment books (novels and such), there simply is too much competition. At the end of the day, a lot of those entertainment books could be exchanged for another entertainment book. I suppose for similar reasons cinema tickets tend to not vary too much with the content of the movie?
Lets say in 10 years he flips a company. The kid has college money, parents who are financially secure - and if the OP wanted, he could forget the office and spend what would be work-hours with his kid.
Looks like Sarah has started her own thing: http://cosupport.us/
Note that all of these keyboards except the Knight have a second pair of parens: the unshifted characters on the keys just right of P, where the PC/Windows layouts have square brackets. (In turn forcing square brackets into the shifted position, and curly braces onto other keys.) This helps to balance the wear on the keys. ;)
I've been in both situations. I've had cofounders, who weren't quite as motivated as me, at which point I felt, "I might as well have done this alone". Then I tried doing it myself and found myself overwhelmed and thinking "wouldn't it be nice to have some support". Wonder if there are any articles on how one could go about finding a good co-founder that you would "jive" with. BTW, which one is worse, going it alone or bad co-founder(s)?
Just to double down on one of their points about showing security around sensitive fields - one of the bread and butter things we do on optimization projects is test trust logos and trust logo placement.

Getting the best vs. worst positioning can drive as much as 15 - 20% on cart abandon - more details in article:

http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placement-of...
If your password is never stored in plaintext, it's less likely to be leaked, either maliciously or inadvertently. It's the same rational for not storing plaintext passwords on a Unix system.

Like on a Unix login, I have to provide the actual password to the service. But measures can be taken to ensure not only is the password itself never stored, but even that the memory that contains the password is appropriately zeroed after use. It's not a matter of the user trusting the service, it's a matter of the service being cautious with itself.
Have you seen xampp?

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

The page you linked to says to me "we're selling xampp!" If that isn't what you are doing, then you should look at your sell page.

If you are indeed just a paid version of xampp, then good luck with that.
Wasn't bioinformatics even one of the early adoptors of Python in 2001/2002? I could be wrong, but I seem to remember something like that.
37signals can do this because of their hiring practices. They need to be extremely picky with the type of employee they hire. Their hires need to be able to function within their unconventional structure.

This type of information doesn't translate well to most other companies. I hope 37signals' audience gets that. For software startups, many of their ideas are exceptional and it's fantastic to see real-world examples. For already-established companies and companies that can't be as picky as 37s, testing this type of structure seems unnecessarily risky. I believe 37s has addressed this in the past, and Jason has in his Inc. writings. I just hope people are paying attention.
I don't have as deep of a problem with the way reviewers use the star system, but I do take issue with how limited and, consequently, limiting it can be as a review metric.

This is especially apparent in certain categories, like Blu-rays, where people will arbitrarily use the star ratings to review either the content of the movie, the tech specs of the film print, the transfer from original stock to Blu-ray, the number of extras available, and so forth. It's gotten to the point where a star-based review of a movie, at a glance, is essentially meaningless. (Conversely, at least Netflix removes some of this problem due to its contextual purity).

The same thing applies, albeit to a different and lesser degree, with books. People use star ratings as referendums on the publisher, the author, the price, the cover design, the time of day, the weather, how many people showed up to their party last weekend, etc. There is no consistency in measurement. That's the nature of UGC, I suppose, for better or for worse.
Hm, sounds more likely to me that they got it backwards - if a book is "popular", not as in liked but as in featured in many pop contexts like TV and newspaper reviews, it will also receive more reviews, because more people will have bought it.
It can be pretty long-term absorbing if you get into tinkering and construction, especially in groups. My friend who was running a server on his own box for him, myself, and a couple of other people eventually broke down and rented a Minecraft server after a few months.

RPG-like elements? Oh dear, that would be disasterous.
45 Simple Yet Engaging Book Cover Designs
This might be too ancient, but how about Infocom games?
To me, $10 for an ebook is too much because of the significant restrictions that come with it. For your average ebook, you can't resell it, you can't lend it, it can arbitrarily be taken from you; you don't "own" the book. $10 for a license to read a book seems far too high.

On the flip side, the convenience of ebooks helps to defray some of these obvious cons.