skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally random data point that is way out of date now. On March 17th, 2009, it took about 1,750 sales per day (at $2.99 price point = $5,232 that one day) to reach #64 in the paid store. This post shows a bit more about the trajectory and the above information can help you understand where the peak was.

http://enjoymentland.com/2009/04/21/locavores-first-month-in...

Hope that helps!
No it doesn't. Ranking is completely based off of # of units downloaded.
That's fair -- perhaps most of the sentiments regarding "diluted brand" probably come from younger grads or current students who are less sure of themselves and have fewer real-world accomplishments to rest on.
Thank you for the explanation. I didn't know about the racial bias issue.

I agree that it would be a stupid thing to do. I was just interested in the idea that companies might be intentionally exploiting the college degree as a sort of IQ-test-by-proxy because colleges are somehow legally permitted to test for "intelligence" (via the SAT) but companies aren't.
We actually did exactly what you're asking here a few weeks ago and applied to YC this round with it.

http://www.exipe.com

We built it in node.js and MongoDB. While node and mongo are young projects we have found them very stable and extremely fast. (we noticed a lot of problems reddit had with scaling and we were interested in the stack)

Our decision to build Exipe in node/mongo has been a bit controversial but we've found no problems thus far with it ... ~2 weeks out with slowly growing traffic. Check out a few of my latest blog posts here about the experience:

http://www.travisglines.com
Why Gumroad is the next billion dollar startup – The developer interview
Algorithms would be interesting if we actually studied algorithms. Algorithms classes are nothing but thinly veiled math courses and an exercise in writing proofs. I have absolutely zero interest in mathematical aspects of CS and at this point in my education these courses which are being forced on me are just preventing me from taking the more interesting classes that I want to take like Compilers and Networks. There is nothing more annoying that being upper level student and being forced by university to take courses which you have zero interest in and as a result not getting a chance to be in interesting courses that you actually want to take.

I'm not trying to sound bitter but as I mentioned a vast majority of students barely tolerate these courses and only take it because they are being forced to and once they pass they don't think about such dry material and end up at the same level as "self taught programmers". In that sense I don't think self taught programmers are missing anything. If you are interested in this stuff than more power to you. It's just that from my experience I highly doubt that many self taught programmers would want to or enjoy learning these topics anyways.
They make the Unreal game engine. It's been powering dozens of console and PC games for years.
Better Facebook (http://betterfacebook.net/) changes a lot of of the look and feel of Facebook, allowing to add, remove or move elements and apply themes.
Ouch.

Still, my overall point stands - eyeball first, formal tests later. This has saved me from much statistical foolishness in my time.
Taking your web apps offline with Web Storage + HTML5 Cache + WebSQL
I picked up the original link on Google alert when Zdenek's Youtube video was at 90k views, posted on HN, day later it is at 267k and all over the web. The demo has the strongest wow factor I've seen since Thrun's talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDqzyd7fDRc

I especially loved the excitement of Czechs: http://twitter.com/#search?q=Algoritmus%20%C4%8Desk%C3%A9ho%... Respekt!

And the source.. the source can be made better.
Erm, the VC should come to you.
The actual text to the decree states that the data must include the information required to validate user identity, worded in a way that allows storing plain text passwords, password hashes, OpenID identifiers, or whatever else you use.

I have no idea why they would need the password hashes, though. I suspect they originally asked for plain text passwords, until a more technical expert came along and told them they were idiots.
What is different? Your tour is just pitch speak.
what about US college graduates with poor writing skills and maths?

just go through greenspun's blog on US college graduates and you'd see what I meant---he seemed to have a beef with US college graduates
Hmm, okay, but doesn't that sound kind of strange too? Why would FaceTime use an image from the camera roll instead of one from its own cache?
Why we don't use controllers in "MVC" JavaScript
I thought the reason for keeping graduating colleges as a recruitment criterion was because large organizations just don't have the time to wade through thousands of applications. The HR departments can't really tell the difference between someone who can is super creative and someone who can just get the job done. They look at CV, referrals, past experience.

Though I agree that creativity cannot be attributed to ivy-league alone. Reminds me how Howard Roark got hired by Henry Cameron in the book Fountainhead. Inspite of being a dropout, Cameron hires him based on Roark's design work.

Current education system were primarily designed during the industrial revolution. Focus was to give people enough training so that they can operate the machines. Though US education system has changed quite a bit, most other countries (for example, India..) are lagging far behind. Hopefully, this will change soon.
Yes.

The Huffington Post, Business Insider, GigaOM, The Bleacher Report and many more have.

You have almost 0 chance of raising money until you have a serious sized audience though, unless you have a rockstar background like being Editor in Chief at Engadget. There really is no excuse not to be able to organically grow a blog.

With blogging do you not find that you have to have the determination and dedication to wanting to get your words out there (and thus you find time to write one blog post a day) or maybe you shouldn't be doing a blog - perhaps reach out to the startup foundry or the next web as a contributor?
If you want to move things fast - you can spawn off a new social news site in slinkset.com and you get a basic social voting site similar to http://help.slinkset.com

But if your intention is to learn how such a site work, I would recommend you to write one from scratch, and there are many open source reddit clones floating around, that can help you
Any celebrity is an outlier. Looking at one subset of that

That you recognise celebrities - subset or otherwise - as an outlier means that you shouldn't be using them to describe normal behaviour, full stop.

I don't really care that you apparently choose the latter.

I'm choosing not to define the world by visible outliers, and instead try and look at how the world is. I may be wrong in my conclusions, but at least I'm not starting from a known faulty premise.

Anyway, what I said stands - shaved bald is sexy, not pattern baldness. The celebrities you pointed out are men who shave their heads or crop them very close. They don't keep their hair at more normal lengths or shoulder length plus.
No need to keep them on land. Arthur C Clarke's novel 'The Deep Range' had whales being kept in herds, like dairy cows, for their milk. Not implausible at all!
Movie Jack Falls download free
The Fall of Jack Movie Download After surviving an attack in Amsterdam, the former secret agent Jack Adleth download The Fall of Jack + download Legend returns to London to carry out his revenge against those who tried to kill it and heal the hatred old
I would imagine that by chocolate you mean some 70% cocoa chocolate with minimal sugar, not a king size snickers or similar?
Wholesale Column Wedding Dresses, Cheap Column Wedding Dresses on Sale
Are you supporting, or planning to support, the decentralized protocols used by appleseed/diaspora etc?
Solid, grounded advice. Thanks! You're right especially on you're last point, I gotta be willing to take the risk if I expect someone else to.
Sometimes, I wonder if we should even be discussing this.

I'd hate to see the copyright industries manage to kill 3D printing research with crazy laws before it gets very far.
This article combined with your commend tangentially brings up an interesting point in my mind. What does it mean to be a computer scientist? Are you just a programmer with more background? When/where does deep math and CS knowledge really become important?

I honestly think "programmer" and "computer scientist" are slowly being conflated, and the distinction is important to understanding this sort of issue. Is this Granny Smith vs. Fuji, or Fuji vs. Florida Navel?
I've heard from Indian students at my university that grade screening in ridiculous in India, is that true? When applying coop employment here in North America many of them are shocked that so many companies don't have a minimum gpa cutoff and even the companies that require a minimum GPA to consider you have a reasonably bar 3-3.3 at worst. I've heard stories about people needing to get straight As or some ridiculous benchmark like that in India. Sounds like a toxic environment for the student, no wonder there are so few startups coming out of there despite a booming IT industry. What college kid would spend their time on a side project when they are being held to such ridiculously high academic standard.
Kindle supplementing school libraries in small districts.
whats your masters in? if you're a software engineer my buddy is hiring in cambridge.
I've definitely got the drive and determination to push this blog to the forefront. I've been kicking my own butt to make sure that there's always a new post M-F. I've also been asking for advice/feedback and looking at analytics to see what's working and what's not.

As for Paul at The Foundry, we're chatting on the phone tomorrow. I hope he'd consider contributing :)
We're being needlessly cheeky here. It isn't on every page and it isn't on the pdf. I propose it's an accident which happend when the document was moved from Word to the web. Notice the comma makes sense in How to Write Clear, Concise, and Direct Sentences. They just removed and Direct to shorten the title and someone, not necessarily the authors, mistakenly left the comma.
It does (works amazingly), why don't you download the compiled demo and see for yourself? =) -- http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html
Interesting read. It reminds me that projects like monkeysphere (http://web.monkeysphere.info) are out there, which tries to address some of this.
Swedish physicists on the E-cat: “It’s a nuclear reaction”
IPv6 MITM via fake router advertisements
Until then, there's always https://github.com/futuretap/InAppSettingsKit
Are there any provable real-world languages?
That is a moronic dictum. I've always followed Fowler's Modern.
Firefox Add-ons with the Slowest Start-up
Qdro  services and forms
Online QDRO preparation for spouses dividing pensions or retirement account upon divorce. Your Trusted Source for QDRO Preparation Services on this web site are intended to provide information (not advice) on QDRO issues and QDRO Attorney for more details, please visit our website.
the moment Google has several product teams each having all their own resources built in - like Launch, Site Reliability, UX, Product Management, etc - there would start to appear smart people with great ideas of combining similar functions from different products group into separate function groups to increase synergy and efficiency.
HR datastore looks much better
Paul Ryan's Budget Arithmetic Makes no Sense
What about version controlling system in appengine?
John Maeda, Former MIT Media Lab Director, At Odds With RISD Faculty
Reverse 99Designs
This is what life is about...
This is what life is about...
In practical terms for those interested: in cPanel, for instance you can set forwarding for info@example.com to example.com@gmail.com. Then, when you want to switch providers, change the forwarding rule in cPanel.

This would still leave you with the problem of your history of emails being stuck within Gmail.
Looked interesting but was the writing was horrible.
Vatican publication rehabilitates hackers
>Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees.

Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?
I have my doubts about the quality of computer education imparted by the likes of NIIT. Years ago, one of my non technical friends wanted to join a C/C++ course at one of their centers. Their claim was they'd teach him both in 6 months, part time. I tagged along with him on the first day and was generally trolling around, asking their faculty if they teach Assembly language. As expected, not one of them had heard of it. One of the more ludicrous responses was something like "What's assembly, is it something like pseudo-code ?".
If you're interested in this, you might also be interested in his high-scale-lib library: lock free maps and other data structures for the JVM.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-scale-lib/
more and more people using facebook sounds like a reason and an opportunity to fix email. why is it easier to send messages via facebook?

email has a few huge disadvantages: you need to keep your address book up to date and your inbox is full of email from machines - notifications and bulk.

make an email provider that has a twist - maybe automatically sync it with your facebook friends as the address book and limit lenght of your replies.
Yes it is.

Effectively for an undergrad 2 things matter - Your grades and your pedigree (IIT, Engineering students are the most valuable, and this combines with the reputation of institution. Commerce students are next in line, and arts students last.)

Basically these are proxies for ability discovery. Its pretty brutal.
Re: 36K downloads of the 55K total were from France

Is there some gift-giving holiday in France coming up? Was this traceable to some specific site/list/opinion-leader endorsing the app?

Does the app have a french interface option?
I was speaking with a potential client concerning their current outsourcing in India. Not happy with their outsourcing in India, that potential client said "I need people who can think".

I've been working in enterprise IT (and small business) for about 5 years now. I've never had a good experience in India. There are the few who do come over to the US (on visas) that are exceptional (and possibly in a relative sense) but again don't represent the whole, and nor does my bad experience represent the whole for that matter. The fact is that in more than one occasion (it's actually countless) I've had to hand-hold Indian colleagues on how to fix an issue. It astounds me that this price difference can ever achieve it's value and more importantly do it sustainably over time (re: difficulty keeping an engineer for six months).

Our company has outsourcing in Romania and it's by far better than any other outsourcing I've worked with. I think we've found that "tiniest sliver of folk" in Romania, but it doesn't mean the streets are filled with these type of people, nor do I think we can expand to create a managed service hub of thousands of Romania techies.

At the end of the day I always have to fall back on "you pay for what you get".
I hardly start up Firefox unless for upgrades. A list of add-ons that reduce loading / rendering performance would be even more interesting. I know by experience that the Skype one is very bad (and Firebug also slows down, but that's expected and luckily you can disable that when not debugging).
Life Path : $10 for an invite.
Can we add that you shouldn't downmod someone simply because you don't agree with someone has to say? Downmods should be used when breaking a rule in the Guidelines.
Here's a question. Love the app, but can I login to my account? I don't have a normal YC-account, but rather one through Open-ID with my Google Id.
I only wish I could up-vote this more. See also this earlier Language Log essay (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.h...), in which Pullum points out that passives occur in "Politics and the English Language" at a considerably higher rate than was typical in contemporary periodicals - Orwell couldn't follow his own advice, even as he was dispensing it.

The same goes for Strunk and White, who in the very passage instructing writers to abjure the passive, say:

"Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can _be made_ lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as /there is/ or /could be heard/."

Still, at least the guide linked in the OP has picked actual examples of the passive voice as illustrations, and concedes that there are times when it can be reasonably used (sorry, "writers can reasonably use it"). This makes it something of a rarity, even if the advice is still poor.
Very good points, put concisely & effectively. Outsourcing and it's impact on technical education in India is a topic that requires a post on it's own.
At the risk of replying seriously to a flippant comment, it is a stretch to say that the IQ test is a rock solid method to identify intelligence.

It's already common knowledge that African Americans, as a group, score poorly on IQ tests as opposed to other groups.

I personally find it strange that people feel it is all that important. After all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information actionable?
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/09/hacker-says-sec/
Clojure Cheat Sheets
Ah! This is good. I've been looking for this. Feels good to see that just one web developer addon (Firebug) features on the top 10.
Ah, okay, I misunderstood you. Yes, I think your perception of the code will change. In particular, the operators from Control.Applicative (the ones that look especially like line noise) are critical to making heads or tails of it. When I posted that link, I momentarily forgot that they're not obvious. They make sense after you've used them for a little while, though.
Unfortunately, for me its a catch22 situation. I hate firefox because its slow, and love/depend on firefox, because of firebug (which apparently makes firefox slow.)
Would be more interesting and useful to see the overall impact of the addons on loading pages.
The weekly maintenance window you define for Amazon RDS is just a place holder.It does not mean that maintenance happens every week. It only happens when there are specific security or MyQL patches that need to be applied and is pre-announced in the forums.The maintenance window could also be used to schedule instance scaling events, during which, like you pointed out, there would be downtime. However, the downtime would be limited to the instance fail over time (typically less than 3 minutes) if you use a Multi-AZ deployment.
The weird thing is that there was a case in New Hampshire a few years ago where firefighters had a test, and the city threw out the results of the test in making hiring decisions because...they thought the test would be unfairly biased against minorities. The Supreme Court heard this case and ruled that the test should have been applied, which at least to me seems to be the opposite of the Griggs case.
Kudos to you. Very aptly put.
planned for precaution:

http://www.weblab.dlr.de/rbrt/OOS/DEOS/DEOS.html
My Firefox 4 often became unresponsive for 3-4 seconds. Just today I finally nailed the cause - Mozilla's own Open Web Apps addon. After disabling it everything flies again :-)

So it's not only about startup time. My desktop computers (and so Firefox) usually run without restarts. I really hope that Electrolysis (out-of-process stuff, now implemented only for plugins like Flash) for addons will make finding bottlenecks far easier.

EDIT: It seems the Mozilla plan is not to have each addon in a separate process: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Jetpack_Processes
Karl Seguin FTW! :D
Ha. Funny that this showed up here. But, after all, it was a hack-ish experiment...

So far, 24 invitations have been purchased. Which is amazing, considering that I just put the form up there as an experiment (and a joke) to test a new client-side javascript payments thingy.

Turns out, apparently, that people are willing to pay for things!
Yes, datastore backup and restore using bulkloader is not comfortable. For getting backup in local machine i am using bulkloader. However, i am doing online backup using backup(dummy) appengine project. I am coping data back and forth between production and backup projects for backup and restore purpose. Its comparatively easier.
What is the windows variation to those/Instruments.app? (generally speaking, I am aware that it might not apply to debugging node apps running on top of cygwin)
The primary difference is the emphasis on groups. We think of the user experience as almost 9 mini-social networks in 1. In addition to our group focus, we also combine groups together into organizations, something that has not yet been done, as far as I can tell.

The reason I say "change everything" is the fact that the naming scheme is completely different, the design has many original aspects, in addition to the new focus of the site: groups.

The tour is, admittedly, pitch speak, but feel free to sign up and check out the site if you're curious to know more!
Have you tried Chrome's inspect element?
Chrome and Opera have a Firebug alternative built into them.
Kudos! Looks like sometimes you just gotta ask.
Amazing page transitions! They ran perfectly on Chrome Dev.
Use multiple profiles, one for everyday browsing and one for Firebug.
I thought that's what the 'flag' button was for. How is a downmod different?
Memolane : $0 for an invite.
I've noticed this habit in personal emails about startup-related chitchat. It could be unique to the tech scene that we all unconsciously reuse in order to self-identify. I'd be curious to see if data can back this up as a trend.

What about 'touch base'? For me, base seems to get touched several times a week.
Currently, we don't support decentralization, though this is a trend I would like to see take hold in the future. If this website gains traction, it would be neat to perhaps allow for integration with home servers, so that people can host their information themselves, if they choose.
I just went through some of the interactive tut. Was really good.
LoL what IS this thing?
Thank you! Eventually, we plan to make money through ads and a "Freemium" model, in which users can upgrade to receive access to, say, 15 groups instead of 9, unique color schemes, and certain other bells and whistles that would not leave the Free users feeling left out in the dark.

I hope you enjoy the site.
http://lifepath.me/will here's mine, if you want to see an example.
Thanks for the feedback, I will definitely look into making the tour link more visible.
Here is a question for the Indian readers:

Is there a cultural issue here? Perhaps the employers are looking for forthright people, while (the limited number of) young Indian grads I've met are usually soft-spoken and more circumspect. Could this be the issue.

I find what zwischenzug said to be true, that most graduates are trained by their employers, not by the universities.
I'm also looking into porting it (probably to c++)
The sheer venom in the comments directed towards this guy is astounding.
Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers
In light of past discusion about Self-Taught Programmers vs CS-Educated Programmers:

What are must read CS books (or other resources) that help you in your daily work? (so I don't mean code complete or head first design patterns)

I'm a Self-taught programmer and I think I'm missing some knowledge of algoritmes and discrete math. but perhaps there are other great subjects/books (compilers etc)

EDIT: Thanks everybody for the great suggestions

EDIT 2: The list so far (unsorted)

http://sharetext.org/YUE