skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably want to start with a few amateur tournaments like club championships, city championships and state championships before moving onto national championships (US Public Links, US Amateur, etc.) If you can't beat the 13 year olds at these tournaments who are breaking par, you probably aren't going to do very well against the adults who use to win those tournaments as kids.

The next argument I hear from a lot of my golfing buddies is that they'll practice hard and play the Senior Tour (Champions Tour). Beating Bubba Watson, for example, in 20 years when he's eligible for the Champions tour is like beating Usain Bolt in a 100 yard dash after giving him a 3 second head start. Won't make good television.

A few books have been written on the subject where reporters try to qualify for the tour.

That being said, it's actually doable, highly unlikely, but doable. I like his chances at becoming a pro golfer (not on the PGA Tour, but maybe the Hooters or Tar Heel Tour) better than his chances of becoming a starting pitcher, running back, point guard, goalie or professional driver in other pro sports. Golf, the game is tremendously "fair".
Well, it proves Flock _didn't_ solve a pain-point. I still would like a tool that manages all my social crap nicely.
Dropbox has responded to this: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=36365
I can see the point you're trying to make, but humanistically and morally speaking, this isn't true.

A person with $10 million who puts $3 million into a business isn't taking that much of a risk. There's some risk there and, yes, it should be rewarded. But a person with no net worth is taking a huge risk every time he takes a new job: career risk.

This dynamic exists in startups as well. The people who are taking the real risks are the founders, not the venture capitalists.
Would you say that the Federal Government is a hotbed of competence and hard work, though?
It's easier than you'd think.
Marx had a labor theory of value, just like adam smith which is entirely wrong. The cost of a good is determined by the value it provides to the consumer. The consumer will not pay more than the value it provides the to them. In Marx's view the cost of a good is determined by how much it cost to produce.
A minor correction: it's not as bad as 15.3%. The self-employment tax is really just the company share of FICA withholding (6.2%) plus Medicare withholding (1.45%) If you're an employee you pay 6.2%+1.45%=7.65% and your employer pays the same. If someone else (employer) is not paying the 7.65% then you do.

However, for 2011 the FICA rate for employees is 4.2% instead of 6.2%, so the self-employment tax remains effectively 7.65%. But that's only for the first $106,800 in earnings - everything above that is not subject to FICA and Medicare for employer and employee.
The problems with higher education don’t solely rest on the universities; the consumers are equally to blame. I’m sick of people talking about going in dept 200k to get a bachelors degree. If you paid 40k or even 15k a year on liberal arts you’re a fool who deserves to be saddled with dept. Honestly, the liberal arts education the average student gets pales in comparison to what an intellectually curious person would get by visiting the library regularly, searching the web, and watching documentaries. There are plenty of ways people can drastically reduce the cost of education such as testing out of classes, going to community college (hell a reasonably ambitious student can take college classes in high school), etc. As for the meat of your bachelor’s degree, well that’s where university choice comes in.

Perspective students need to research colleges more. A lot of kids think that just because they did well in school and were told they were smart their whole life that they have to go to an Ivy League school or some other very expensive prestigious school. There are many universities that offer an as good or better education for a much better value. Sure Harvard may employ people who are titans in their field, Nobel Prize winners and the like, but unless you are going to Grad school there it won’t affect you any. They won’t be teaching you, TAs will. And even if they did, they would be teaching you out of the same text books as the adjunct professors at your local community college uses. Do people think that if they go to undergrad at Princeton a Nobel Prize winning professor will personally mentor them or something?

I’m currently a senior taking a break from cramming for finals, and when I graduate I will graduate with a degree from a school that has high job placement in my field (CS) and that I feel has prepared me very well. And I will do it without going in to dept at all. Not a dime. I’m going to be able to do this because I went to community college for my liberal arts, tested out of classes, lived off campus, worked part time, took advantage of transfer scholarships for high GPA, grants, tax rebates, etc. In short I PLANNED things out and worked hard in all aspects of my life not just school. I know countless students who will be graduating with ridiculous debts because they didn’t plan at all. They got out of high school and just hopped in to college never thinking about the dept for a minute. What’s really sad is that many of them will have degrees that aren’t worth shit unless they go to grad school, or they will get jobs that pay horribly for the amount of initial investment. I’m not as pessimistic about higher education as a lot of people on here, but I definitely have my issues with it. I just think that people are diverting a lot of the blame from the students/parents/mentors to the colleges.
I don't understand, is it a small difference in pay or not? If it's not, why not hire the guy? If it is, why do you think it's so strange that that would make his decision for him?

I feel like you're just the other side of the coin, thinking your company is "exciting", while the guy thinks he's worth more than you're offering.
Opening the Kimono to 200 People and Baring It All
Good call. One of commenters is Tony Wasserman at CMU who is one of the fathers of Software Engineering who tells why he worked to separate SW from CS.
As an academic, this thread makes me feel bad.
Over the next 10 years I see us leaving the age of the spammer and entering the age of the bot. By that I mean that bots will become so useful to us that even when we know they are bots we'll still welcome their company.

Turing should see us now. Cool stuff.
Re: "If he's going to turn the job down over $5,000, do you really want him?"

Couldn't the same be said from the applicant's perspective? If a prospective employer is going to nickel and dime you over 5k, do you really want to work for them?
Here's a good example of a place where it would be extremely helpful to be able to see comment scores.

#meta
Cisco kills its Apple competitors Flip, Eos, Umi to focus on networking
Its not just about "Top Schools"(TM)

Have you ever even read the gamut of knowledge they send you to prepare for one of those interviews?

These are some of the best coders alive. And the people are Google are not stupid so they know they need to defray people from poaching as best they can.
> If you're getting the $165k, you're not going to be very enthusiastic about this exercise.

Why not? I'd be completely fine being the odd one out, especially if it helped to encourage my lower-paid co-workers to renegotiate their salaries.

The whole point of this exercise, IMO, is to determine if there's inequity, and how much. I'd want to know the full salary range, not just the average. Companies rely on you knowing very little about your peers' salaries; more information can only help you, even if it might make you feel a little bad.
I recently had something VERY similar.

I billed it as a 'Woot for Mobile Apps'. You give me your email address, I send you a daily email with a highly discounted app or an app that is free.

It's probably not anything that couldn't have been overcome with a massive marketing effort, or with a sizeable marketing budget, but after split-testing a variety of slogans, taglines etc., our cost-per-acquisition proved to be too high to be sustainable, so we shuttered the service.

My guess is that the acquisition cost goes down after you've reached a tipping point, but we weren't able to identify when that might be, and the acquisition rate was slow enough that we didn't deem it feasible enough to pursue.

Good luck though.
I'd be more comfortable with a real random (at least pseudorandom) number. Humans are terrible at generating random numbers and information could be given away on account of this. For example, people tend to favor 5s and 6s when generating "random" large numbers.
Automatic detection of bots and suspicious behavior is part of what we are trying to do with Truthy

http://truthy.indiana.edu
You need to buy insurance for your IT job? Please describe. I've never heard of this before. Are there different standards for employee fault in different states? Are there any notable court cases?

I did once work at a place where employees were financially liable for the cost to the company of any mistakes they made, but I assumed that was legally along the same lines as the company's policy of not sending employees 1099s until we threatened to report them to the IRS. We were all hourly, scheduled "independent contractors" too.

(And I hear you on the salaries since I'm making $0 a year and looking for one of those $32k a year jobs. I can understand kick-ass coders with experience making $80k and up, but to imply that I should expect that amount with my degree but no talent or experience? I'm not seeing it in the market.)
Virtualization isn't the only way to isolate apps. What happened to good old Unix user accounts? It seems ridiculous to me to allocate entire kernels and OS runtimes per user/app when they can just share all that stuff and have the kernel isolate access and divide resources.
She says we shouldn't blame the language, but how much of this is because CSS eschews Composition for (incomplete) Multiple Inheritance? And how much of the extra code is an effort to avoid bugs because layout properties are non-orthogonal?

At what point do we decide that it's not that "you're doing it wrong", but that there were actually some design choices that, in retrospect, maybe weren't such a good idea? I'd say that when we have other languages that compile into the language just to overcome these issues (CoffeeScript,Less,SASS,etc.), we've about reached that point.
WHAT DO I DO?

Read all of this:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/
I actually debated on including the word "social" in the title and ultimately decided against it. It doesn't matter if you're building productivity software (spreadsheets, databases, etc…) or social software, you're going to learn exponentially more about the pain points your users experience once your app is in the wild.

At the end of the day users decide how they are going to use your product.
My main rule is: Never write a class that you can't use again.
I've other rules too, such as "padding is top, margin is bottom".
CSS must be modular, not exception-based.
While I completely agree that in theory a 100% open policy would be ideal, practically there is no way the US could accommodate the sudden influx of immigrants that would result if we were to completely open our borders.

100% open immigration from Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and similar countries... could possibly work.

100% open immigration to anybody who speaks fluent English... could possibly work.

But opening up our borders completely to Eastern Europe, Asia, South America, Africa would create complete chaos.

As an immigrant to the US from the former Soviet Union I know how hard it is to really learn the language, the culture, and assimilate to the point where you're actually leading a decent life and being a productive member of society.

It took my family about 4 years to really get situated and both of my parents are highly educated with a very strong work ethic and we had previous family living here.

And we had to be supported by welfare and other government programs for 3 of those years.

Although obviously a net gain over time, it takes a lot of resources to bring an immigrant into the American fold and we don't have enough of those resources to open our doors to everybody right now.

And it wouldn't even be good for the immigrants. With a large influx of people from their country coming in, most would probably just settle somewhere together, assimilate much slower and possibly even turn to semi-criminal activity like many Russian immigrants I knew in New York.

No, we need to change our immigration policy, but not just by opening up the doors.
The title is misleading - has the blog article been renamed since? It's now titled "Amazon's App Store Makes Me Feel Like an iOS Developer", more appropriately.
Looks like the trailing slash breaks the link (at least it does for me). I used http://briancray.com/2011/04/12/time-on-site-bounce-rate-get... and it loaded correctly.
Three.js - Javascript 3D Engine
In some state schools it might not even be possible. I remember discussing this with one of my profs who told me that he was prohibited by state law from using the word "engineering" in a course title or description, as the charter for engineering curricula was with a different state university. The research school had the CS department, the engineering school had the SE program.
Great point and spot-on, I think. Also, you mentioning that music theory book reminds me of what SICP is for programming.

I haven't read "Outliers" yet, but from what I've gathered about it I think the biggest thing Gladwell fails to mention is the single-minded drive and zealous mission that's inherent in true outliers. Read the biography of any extraordinary performer (Buffett, Steve Jobs, Rockefeller, Ted Williams, Michael Jackson...) and you get the sense that they were willing to die for it. They didn't do it to test theories or even test their potential. Their craft defined their entire existence. It was their all and everything, it was their life.
Guys who are upvoting, could you please explain to the rest of us what we're supposed to be experiencing here?

I click on the link, I get a slide-deck. No text, no audio, just a bunch of slides with various numbers on them.

Am I missing something? Is this something where a bunch of people saw the presentation live and are now upvoting it here? If so, is there a video link to the live presentation?
Microsoft's April Patch Arrives, Targeting 64 Security Flaws
... not like the present, where technology is largely seen as irrelevant and specifically as bad

I don't have the feeling this is actually true, but of course I might just have managed to surround myself with others who don't believe it either. I wonder how much of the general population really shares this view. People certainly seem to like the products of technology, like new smartphones and such.
NCAA : college :: Pro sports : real life.
Thiel is saying, "Think outside the box. The best way to prepare for real life may not be to go to college." His 20 under 20 program is seeking to demonstrate this by starting at the top. He's seeking to demonstrate what happens if very exceptional kids, who could go to the very best colleges, elect instead to do something else. The analogy to sports would be someone offering a non-college sports program for the very best high school athletes, who if they went to a college would have a excellent chance of being accepted by a pro team.
And you must be in the class of "money isn't that important to me" programmer who will work 100 hours a week for $40,000 a year and years down the road wonder why you feel so slighted.

Its not about entitlement its about worth. If a company makes billions of dollars(or generates that much value for the pedantic) off of a fraction of that many people its stands to reason that at least some of those people are worth a substantial amount more than $50,000
Well, don't we already have to do that for "open", "closed", "evil", "chrome" (multi-definition), "app" (web, native), "social", and so on?

and BTW, Microsoft didn't start this. Remember Native Client?
I have the impression that the standard economic doctrine was that the cost of a good was determined by where the supply curve intersects the demand curve — which is to say, the point at which the amount it costs to produce it is equal to how much value it provides to the consumer.

This in itself doesn't contradict Marx's point (and what Marx thought the real value of things was is irrelevant). The point where he got it wrong was apparently in equating the cost of keeping a laborer alive with the cost of their labor.

To elaborate, if you're not familiar with these ideas of supply and demand curves, the idea is that as you produce more and more of something, the cost to produce it eventually starts to go up forever.

For example, working 20 hours a week might have a negative cost, working 40 hours a week means you don't have a lot of socializing time, working 80 hours a week means you have no leisure time unless you have someone else to cook and clean for you, working 100 hours a week means you're sleep-deprived and have time for neither leisure nor cooking and cleaning, working 168 hours a week is invariably fatal within a few months, and working more than that is impossible.

On the other side, the incremental value to the consumer diminishes after some point, ultimately reaching zero. A single fork per person is useful every day, six forks per person is useful only when they invite friends over or want to postpone doing the dishes, thirty forks per person is useful only if you're doing funky art projects by bending forks, and 300 forks per person would be valuable only as scrap metal, i.e. the labor that went into making them produced zero or even negative value.

The theory is that these two curves must intersect in at least one point, and that's the market equilibrium. It's commonly assumed that they intersect in only one point because they're monotonic, but that's probably not true.
Interesting this appears in the National Review. I wrote this a couple of months ago:

The conservative right has started a grassroots movement to make traditional measures of intellect and achievement worthy of less distinction. A PhD? Who cares? Nobel Prize in Chemistry? Chemistry isn't that big of a deal, anyone can do it. Plain talkin' people who struggle with things like math and science -- those are the real intellects. Because being an intellect is being someone who can just relate to the every day man. Everything else is just a "hobby" that is no more worthy of distinction than being good at Call of Duty.

Over 2011 expect a full court press on this. Academia, scholarship, science, math, etc... will all be attacked as not particularly interesting. Plain spoken populism will be the new metric for brilliance and the best this country has to offer.

Peter Thiel is more subtle, but the subtext is there. Fully expect that this debate ends up being very partisan. The conservatives pushing the banner that college is a bubble. Small business is where real America is.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2135539
Keep in mind that there are many tax tricks you can play here too, like paying yourself dividends and writing off a lot of expenses (speak to an accountant before doing so).

Also the overhead of running a corporation (including lawyer, accountant, payroll, and general insurance) is not much if you're making over $100/hr. It is certainly less than 26.7% (ie, $75 of every $175 minus 15.3%) worth. Most of these costs are fixed, not variable.
Hiring him for $55k is, in all likelihood, going to result in him quitting when he realizes that he's been unfairly exploited. It's just a matter of time until he discovers his true worth.
A convicted felon can also be a reformed felon (is he really a convicted felon or is this demonization or a setup http://www.businessinsider.com/self-proclaimed-facebook-owne... ?).. anyhow to me this whole thing is unimportant, but it'd make a good poll http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Time-based vesting implies full-time participation. In my case (and probably a lot of other cases), we are both part-time until the product gets traction. Then we will take the risk of going all-in.

If I tie the vesting to milestones instead of time, I should be able to fairly compensate the other person's part-time efforts without walking down the 'you aren't working enough, your shares aren't fully vested' path if/when we divorce.
I've had fantastic luck freelancing at odesk. They guarantee you get paid for hourly work. Use my refcode. ;) (https://www.odesk.com/referrals/track/jmoses)
and his bonus nearly matched the new guy's salary, which was an insulting $60K

Is it common to get ~$60k yearly bonus as a programmer? Was this for a finance-industry job? All I've seen (either myself or others) so far is a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.
Sure, if you don't mind living in a United States with a population of one billion, composed largely of poverty-stricken shanty towns.

It's just plain osmosis. Open the borders, and people flow into the US until it reaches the point where living in the US is no longer any better than living... in whatever the current worst country in the world is.
I avoid all of the fuss.* I work for a State agency in a low population state. There's a published ceiling and floor on salaries (based on pay band). All salaries are public record.

* Tongue firmly in cheek.
I learned by founding a startup that productized a distributed system. One of the other cofounders had experience in the area, so, I guess I did it "old school" with a mentor. Highly recommended. There's nothing quite like a trial by fire when there is a fire fighter sitting next to you at the same folding table.
If Thiel's actions cause smart students to drop out of school and fail at starting their own companies, that will be great because then the companies that hire the failed dropouts will have to develop non-school-related methods for discriminating between the good ones and the bad ones. If those non-school-related methods become good enough, they'll start using them on graduates as well, and then there will be actual pressure on schools to educate students effectively (along with the option of teaching yourself instead of going to school if that fits your style better).
Not a native tip, but using hyperdock has made window management on OSX so much nicer thanks to it's smart porting of win 7 features like dock window previews, dragging and window to the top and having it fill the screen. Can't rave about that little app enough!
I disagree with you; Fox also agrees with me on this point:

If the company can overuse its employees, it will regardless of what they are paying for salary.

If you are going for money (which if you have no other choice) than maximize! You will be abused so at least get the moola for. There is a reason why they call work work and have to pay people for it.

In the above scenario, where the job is just a job go for the money and kiss up to the boss. Less work and you are well insulated in crisis as others have mentioned.

There are plenty of people at work who do nothing more than be friends with the execs. They add little value in a company. This oddly considered acceptable. It is almost as if work is daycare for your not so bright but very happy friends. It reminds me of the cliques in high school.

Sadly this true in even in startups. So-so went to high school with the founder. Great but the nice guy is incompetent. Basically you soon realize that the startup is an adult daycare center as well.
Jonathan Abrams (Friendster Founder) live on Namesake
Some schools have been doing it for years. IU's freshman CSCI courses have used Scheme for decades. http://www.soic.indiana.edu/undergraduate/courses/computer-s...