skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Steve Yegge says every programmer should be a fast, accurate, touch-typist:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html

I couldn't find his minimum-speed prescription, just now,
but he does say 70 words a minute is easily obtainable for anyone with two hands.
Out of curiosity, who is India's "India" for even cheaper outsourcing?

I know some US corporations are using US prison labor @ pennies per hour for phone support, surprised that abuse hasn't been pushed further, unless maybe it has.
If you could build this for movies (and it works) I would pay 5 usd/year for it.
I think the degree of special treatment Twitter is seeking from SF is disproportionate to the number of jobs they actually provide.
Compare: "Khan Academy is hiring full-time profs". Who needs those? Everybody can teach, apparently.
Would be helpful to know how you got BridgeBasher up in numbers as well, as this success seems predicated on the prior success.
It's not on every page. It is ok in the title of this one
http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/CCS_wordyphrases.html
for example
Well yes it should have been

response_set_status(handle, 200);

My point was that the syntax in the example was C++.
Radioactive Material Found in Fish Near Japanese Nuclear Plant
Like I've stated before, this would be the perfect time for Microsoft to take Gundotra back and make him CEO.
They desperately need the same type of change at the executive level.
Twitter & MediaSift announce partnership Data2.0 Conference
Startups: How to Communicate Traction to Investors
I question whether or not you read the article...

Still, there’s a lot of groups in the city lobbying against
any change in taxes, confusing the issue with “corporate
welfare.” I’ve read through some of the materials they are
sending out, and while a lot of this is politics, there seems
to be a lot of genuine confusion between the nature of the
way big companies, small businesses and startups work.

This isn't a handout; it's an attempt to fix one of San Francisco's competitive disadvantages. I can't blame Twitter for lobbying against an abusive tax code literally found no where else.
Live a Vagrant Lifestyle
This article makes me think of a previous article discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406328

There were quite a few comments supporting working for free/on spec. I have to wonder if we'll hear any talk about "your existing business model is disappearing" or "you're being disrupted" or "This is a huge opportunity for anyone trying to break into the business - college kids, amateur designers, the unestablished."
WordPress display different menus for logged-in users
Can you actually address any of the points in the article?
Richard Muller's climate change testimony to U.S. Congress [pdf]
As J K Rowling puts it brilliantly, there is an expiry date on how long you can keep blaming your parents for everything that goes wrong. http://www.ted.com/talks/jk_rowling_the_fringe_benefits_of_f...

We lack a culture where hacking and playing around with things is encouraged.
I would have gone with "Ten Lines or Fewer," but it's a neat design constraint. Some cool examples, too.
In your case, you had a user base you could pry at to push the next app up the chart. Knowing the method by which you did this is valuable for developers in a similar position, for sure. However, what advice might you give to developers that haven't yet reached that point? How did you establish the base that allowed you to do this?
I'm glad to hear that, and I'm sorry for misinterpreting you. I wasn't able to connect your quotation with the video.
AOL Way 101: "link bait".
I can't help but wonder if his "having a life" is based on having cashed out with Conde Nast. Not that it's a bad thing (or that he hasn't become more productive, I'm sure he has), but I feel like part of the scrappy frenzy of being young is that you have no money to fall back on...every hour is precious. I just feel like this isn't necessarily transferable advice to a young guy who wants to follow in his footsteps.
I think the public version of the conversation is that it was a request from Apple. What the real conversation was... we'll never know.
They actually have a hard stance that you cannot use in-app payments to pay for real goods.
hmmm ... i thought of giving some personal examples but was worried some people might take it as too much self promotion. Will think about that more for a future post.
They're not seeking to modify the code for everyone, only to get a special exemption for themselves.
Show HN: Insights from Gary Vaynerchuk - "Get off the bitch train"
This is a small weekend project I created. It's a playlist of my favorite Gary Vaynerchuk insights. It uses the youtube api and has a php and mysql backend to define the start and end times of clips.

I'm new to web development, so I'm proud of myself for this.
Oh wow you're right. "Less" is grammatically incorrect but it has a nice ring to it.
There really is no argument here. Either SF wants to keep Twitter, or they don't. They aren't going to guilt trip Twitter into staying, so there is absolutely no chain of events that ends in Twitter paying the SF payroll tax. Case closed?
This is surprisingly well written. Indeed, it persuaded me that this SF stock option tax is probably a bad thing.

But the article is wrong in one point: a move to Brisbane would be a painful quality-of-life sacrifice. True, in most major US cities, eight miles doesn't count as a commute, but as a transplant from the suburbs to San Francisco, I can assure you that I appreciate a city where I can walk or take transit most places. Most of my friends and I would take San Francisco over "most major US cities" in a heartbeat. Exorbitant rents and all.

Indeed, although I own a car, many of my friends don't, and I wouldn't be surprised if more than a few Twitter employees are now happily doing without. You can't reasonably get to Brisbane without a car.
I agree with you on several points - too much emphasis on engineering/medicine, very tough competition and superfluous subjects but I disagree with your conclusion.
a) There are colleges beyond IIT and REC and no they are not all bad.
b) A case can be made that at least through high school people be aware of what different fields have to offer before choosing to specialize.
c) Donations are limited only to management seats. Say what you may - admissions in India through centralized processes are very transparent, actually more so than here in the US.
d) Most people everywhere have little enthusiasm for the jobs that they do.
e) It is not all bad.
How so? Based on the way the payroll tax works there (assuming the article is accurate), I can't see why any startup or rapidly growing business would want to be in San Francisco.

It doesn't seem to offer any real advantages over, say, Palo Alto or Sunnyvale or Cupertino or San Jose, and the tax situation sure seems like a significant disadvantage.
PopCap launches small games label
Pretty tempted too. Having one of those Jobs & Sculley "sugar water" moments.
That may be, but the quality of the jobs they provide is also extremely high compared to one of those sweatshops filled with old Asian ladies, with which the SF I came to know and (cough) love was well stocked.

High quality jobs improve the tax base, lessen the demands on social services, indirectly increase property values, and create fewer negative externalities (waste, pollution, noise, crime). They also have lower turnover, are less seasonal, and are more likely to result in SF homeowners as opposed to itinerant renters.

There's a balance to be struck, to be sure; "hedge fund manager" is a very, very high-quality job, but having 1 hedge fund manager isn't better than having 100 software developers, no matter what the numbers might say.
I don't know, the simple building blocks it provides can be combined in a bunch of ways that are really pretty cool. I think apenwarr would might call it a "simplifying assumption". It's hardly ever the complex things that are game-changing, right?
Google books iOS app refreshed
Fat is incredibly calorie dense. Nuts have tons of fat. If you're trying to lose weight (which is the primary reason people look at calories), chocolate is often a better addition from a pure calorie standpoint.

Nuts have the added advantage of helping with curbing hunger, but if hunger is already under control chocolate can do quite nicely.
The larger goal, however, is to set a precedent for other high-growth pre-IPO's within the city.
I thought the same thing actually. Then I thought about the wealth of open scientific databases, some of which are already loaded into S3 (ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/blast/db/nr*), and figured that the criteria for learning, in the context of programming, was satisfied.
Some communities seem to act like magnets for trolls and abusive behavior. I use evercookies on one of my websites to keep the trolls out. Works tremendously well. It has allowed the community there to really flourish, absent petty personal attacks and troublemakers.
One of the most cited books for better writing: Elements of Style: http://www.bartleby.com/141/. It's available for free.

There are many "manuals of style" available as well like: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html.
The build rocket ships, who cares about their website?
noted, i'll wordmerge the word "movies" and see if i can come up with any cool names for this ;?j
The power of aligned incentives
It would be wise to refer to these guidelines while filling out an application for YC.
Any time someone advocates barriers/moats/etc in a market, I immediate ask myself, does the redistribution of profits this causes outweigh the efficiencies gained?

The small town vendor story is instructive:

Walmart destroys downtowns, but it also saves the (oftentimes poor) locals hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. In some communities, this has been a huge boon to standards of living, even though it closed the local hardware shop. In other towns, it has turned them into a wasteland of low wage jobs in strip-malls and broken a big chunk of the local economy.

The same question can be put to the web markets: Going with one or two big providers will almost certainly add to efficiency gains, and thus lower prices. Is trading away the competition worth it?

Edit: Sometimes equilibria is two or three providers, or one dominant and a few smaller (think search). In my mind the best case market is probably US coffee, where you have one dominating chain (Starbucks) that opens up the market for lots of smaller one-offs.
Indonesia has a cheaper cost of living the last time I checked.
Fragmentation isn't really the main issue. Someone will come along and snatch a lot of market share when it's meant to happen. So far, no one site offers a local experience that meets anyone's expectation of how broad a local community's interests or behaviors should be.

Facebook tends to be a closed circle. Patch has been plagued by both abusive, anonymous commenters and astroturf. Yelp seems focused on reviews and not on giving people their own voice and creativity. Groupon shows hardly any community interaction.

We still don't see many well-known sites that come close to offering the authentic experience of living in a mostly caring and helpful town with myriad subject matter experts. Some of these sites are more like the lunatics running the asylum. It's the same problem the editorial page has had for ages-- it acts like flypaper! The business model that can afford to carefully curate so much hyperlocal content really does not exist yet, so we find ourselves settling for something less until then.
Any decent Intel/AMD-based competition to Macbook Air coming up?
Doesn't have to be equally small, but preferrably cheaper with 7h battery life, reasonable weight, no DVD, non-Atom based with a decent size trackpad? I just can't stand buying a Macbook Air to install Linux on it (yes, I tried OSX but it just does not cut it for my usage).
Intel Unveils New 10-Core Xeon Processors For Mission Critical Servers
The alliteration is nice, but to me it really sticks out as an error. It's a pretty common one, though, so I wouldn't feel too bad about it.

I don't know if it's even a commonly recognized enough error to warrant changing, but you should take into consideration that at least some people will notice. It's that little bit of polish sometimes...
Since most venture-backed start-ups lose money, they pay little state and federal income tax. San Francisco taxes payroll expense, which is independent of operating profit and can easily become a burden especially since most web businesses have little capital costs and the largest business expense is employee salaries.

My 20 person company is financed through cash flow. We pay around $1.5 million in payroll each year and our after-tax profits are around 8% of revenue. San Francisco's payroll tax reduces our after-tax profits to around 6%, which is equivalent to the city charging a 20% income tax on top of the existing Federal and State taxes. This brings our total tax burden to well over 50%.
Apple Finally Figures Out A Way To Get An iAd In My Face: An iAd App
I think you may have accidentally left Working Software off the list. Easy mistake to make.
Great idea. I definitely see potential in what you're doing. Why did you only include YC companies?
yes, I agree. I understand why the JEE people decided to go that route, but all the same, it is completely unfair to the thousands of students and parents who are forced to go through this mess. The system of incentives is just so perverse.

This is not relevant to the discussion, but I was very interested in Mathematics: I would have loved to learn more (I even applied to the Indian Statistical Institute, but with all the effort required for the other exams, I simply didn't have the time to prepare well for its entrance test). But the whole experience turned me off. Seriously, how would you feel when your entire experience with geometry is limited to high school level, and suddenly someone comes up to you and asks you to prove Napoleon's Theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon%27s_theorem) in under four minutes? My Math tutor did that.) I was completely burned out at the end of it all. Goddamn shame it had to happen that way.

> Again, even in US, "most" people have very little enthusiasm towards work they are doing. But I believe, your story is little anecdotal too.

Again, true. I was just speaking from my experience and how my high school batch (also in Bangalore) turned out. It would be silly of me to claim that with a 1 billion+ population, none are genuinely interested in programming.
In case you were wondering about the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley#1983.E2.80.9393:_S...

"Steve Jobs successfully sealed the deal with his legendary pitch to Sculley, asking him whether he preferred to "sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"."
I believe system76 has an ultra-thin laptop that meets your specs. I do not have one, but I have been eyeballing one for a while and think it might be what you're looking for.

http://www.system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=28&produc...
The physics, linear algebra and calculus portions of my degree were less than 9 months of study, and I went to a very good school for computer science.

I think you're overvaluing those if you think someone cannot learn those topics if it's apropos to the thing they're doing.

Signal processing is a considerably bigger chunk of schooling though.

I don't disagree with your opinion, I prefer school credentialed programmers, however I don't think your line of reasoning works.
My impression (and I might be very wrong) is that both Indian and Chinese education is concentrated on memorization rather than understanding. That's why so few people from both countries can solve problems (at least in my work experience).

I've interviewed a lot of people in the last 2 years, and I never look at the education level. I only care about your ability to solve problems. We've had people with masters in CS from good schools who could not solve trivial programming problems. We've had completely self-taught guys with a high school diploma, who aced the interview. HR cares about your education level, but if we want to hire you, they can't really say "no" to us. So if you're into IT, you're already light years ahead of all the mindless drones who got a degree just because IT pays well.

Smart people are always in demand. Keep educating yourself, in whatever field you choose. Become a pro, and you will always find a job. Do some contracts, or some open-source work, get your name out, you will make more and more money every year.
I once read something to this effect from Oded Goldreich's book (his book on Computational Complexity): Knowledge is the result of hard computation on publicly available information. I think getting a formal education definitely aids the process of learning. Otherwise how do you get around Meno's paradox (i.e. how do you enquire about something if you don't know of its existence?) ? And self-taught programmers definitely would benefit from some structure in their education (again - the structure is decided by a formal CS curriculum). I have been trying to learn signal processing over the last couple of years and I found that OCW + Berkeley webcasts took me a lot farther than random googling about how to accomplish something.
MATLAB is both a computing environment AND a programming language. I assumed that people searching for "MATLAB" are rather looking for the environment. I may be wrong with that.
It depends on what you mean by "shouldn't". The Oxford comma is optional and considered syntactically correct if used. If you mean that it is more concise to leave it out, then thats another issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

EDIT: Ignore this. I thought he was referring to the first line of the post.
"Follow the principles below to write sentences that are clear, to the point, and easier to read."
I think it's just that Google has thousands and thousands of applicants and can essentially hand pick the top from MIT, Stanford, CMU, Princeton etc. The competition is intense and their interview system is intense because of it.
AWS April Fools 2012, I just know it.
Oops. Condé Nast accidentally pays alleged scammer $8 million
Generally speaking, it's not that it's impossible someone who doesn't go to school will learn things, it is just less likely.

I generally expect a greater degree of people who went to school (therefore COULD benefit from instruction) have a higher chance of foundational knowledge helpful in a computer based career.

At the same time, I met dozens of nitwits while at school who can't code their way out of a paper bag and misunderstood half their classes.

School increases their likelihood of being good, it doesn't guarantee it.
Agreed, and you're right - maybe the tone should be more properly metered. With that said, it is important to note that it is apparently difficult to get a clear idea of the truth.
It's more complex than that - TC's reporting isn't much better than that from the unions.

That part of SF Twitter is likely moving to (Market street between 6th & Van Ness) is really blighted, most business left the area some time ago except for 2-bit retailers, and it has become a skeevy dump over a 20 year period. The tax break is for companies over a certain size who lease space for a minimum of 5 years; Twitter would be one beneficiary, but behind them is SF property management company Shorenstein, who has much more to gain/lose depending on the outcome. Due to long-standing existing plans, several firms/organizations are set to move out of that area this year and next - Bank of America, the CA public utilities commission, SF county health commission. BofA is moving some operations out of town and others into vacant space in its financial district offices, the CPUC has been waiting for construction on its new HQ to be completed, SFCH is also moving into new premises.

The upshot of all this is that an already blighted area is anticipated to see the departure of ~8,000 employees to other parts of downtown and 3 million square feet of newly vacant office space - which means imminent death for other local businesses like coffee shops, convenience stores and drugstores which serve the needs of office workers. Besides office workers, the only other traffic in that area comes from the Warfield (a popular live music venue), two tired-looking strip clubs, and a few discount stores selling clothes, cellphones or DJ equipment. Not only is it desperately in need of new business, it's in need of a younger population with different standards and demands.

Anyone who's been thinking of opening an office in SF ought to look into it; besides the possible 1.5% stock option exemption for the next 5 years, right now prospective tenants have about as much negotiating power as they will ever have. Monthly rent in that area is under $3/sqft. and although it is tatty at street level, it has the same transit connections as the rest of downtown.
Be sure to notify me/us.
It was medicine and engineering 5-10 years ago, now it's MBA. Everyone wants to do whatever is currently hip or what their peers are doing. The society here is breeding passionless robots.
Involve your SO in your startup and then you don't have to choose. They don't have to be a co-founder, but maybe they brainstorm ideas with you or help with customer support.
"The empty seat problem in private cars is more of an issue with personal safety and the broad increase in crime over the past fifty years."

It's more of an issue of the American perception of danger, and the anti-hitchhiking laws passed as a result. Lots of people still hitchhike all across the US.
Chances are we can help you. Mind posting what you need from the API to the Yammer Developer Network or opening a support ticket?
Vaio X is a good device

any reason non-atom is on the list? Xmonad, Chromium and emacs are snappy
Looks like a nice machine, if you're in the US, Canada or UK. I'm in Norway. Maybe it's worth the hassle of importing one indirectly...
That huge jump in weekly sales starting in 2/14 seems to line-up with the iPhone 4 release on Verizon. If that launch was a main driver for Camera+ sales, the magnitude is impressive.
Keep these points in mind when generating error messages to your end users.
No, because that would involve visiting TechCrunch.
Fixed!

Less milk. Fewer crayons. (1st grade lesson)
It's probably just an ASUS; you should be able to find a local reseller that can get one.
Guys, lets all use the Google redirect when we provide massive value to large for profit companies.

this query will save lots of time
www.google.com/url?url=

HN sends thousands of high value users to these corporations each day, and linking to the full version saves us time and brings goodwill to an obtuse online publisher.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&v...
So what happens if this takes off and you get 10 / 100 / 1000 seekers for a job at X?

Is it on Hustlebee to pre-qualify? Are you now a technical recruiter taking some % of the annual salary for the first 6/12 months?

Why is hustlebee better than applying directly?

You only place designers/engineers? Even if the company has other openings?

Can you have a page that shows all the opening from that drop-down of companies in one place?
Tools to Improve Your Idea Before You Write a Line of Code
awesome work!!! love it...learning as we speak
Twitter benefits from having "San Francisco" on their letterhead. "Burlingame" and "Menlo Park" don't really have the same ring to them. Twitter wants to keep San Francisco just as much (if not more) than SF wants Twitter, but I doubt the BoS will call their bluff.
Larry Page's University of Michigan commencement address