skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the hardest things to ask about: The physical work environment. Are you going to throw me into a "bullpen" where I spend more time and effort tuning things out than working?

Which leads to a question I can ask: Can I work remotely?

(And lest you think I'm anti-social: I worked just fine with a team spread all over the world. One of the most effective teams in that organization. I was more social because I was relaxed and not fighting to maintain my concentration. Plus, we all enjoyed actually getting shit done, instead of talking endlessly about the weekend. I found this to be a much more effective bond.
The word "while" implies thinking about a range of time from beginning to end. In contrast, the non-"while" version lets you stay in the moment.

I disagree. The word "while" does connote time, but it's just the word chosen by early programmers to describe a process of performing an action immediately depending on current conditions, with no knowledge of history. Recursion amounts to the same thing -- after you make the mental leap of a tail-recursive optimization. When you climb the next step, you're climbing it because it's part of the definition of climbing the rest of the steps, which was part of the definition of climbing the rest of the steps when you were on the previous step. As I pointed out in another comment, when you're climbing the last step of a twelve-step staircase, you're actually performing twelve "climb up the steps" operations that are nested like Russian dolls. Thinking recursively is only simple when you learn to mentally simplify all of that, basically to think in terms of the "same machine code" you mention in your comment. I don't think we arrive at that "machine code" starting from a recursive definition of climbing the stairs. It seems much more likely that we figure out the implementation (the while loop) long before we figure out (if we ever do) that we can derive that implementation from a recursive definition of the task.
I just wanted to share my standing "desk" and experiences too. A picture of my home setup: http://i.imgur.com/BUUTP.jpg

The furniture is a piece of IKEA MALM. http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70053924

The keyboard height isn't 100% optimal for my height though and it would be nice to have the monitor 1-2dm further back. Other than that, feels great when you have adjusted to standing up.

+ You can really feel your back muscles growing and getting stronger after a few weaks (at least if unexcercised before).

+ Now I can walk around from when I wake up to when I go to sleep without getting any aches. (Good for when you're shopping, touristing, hiking, going to conventions, conferences etc.)

+ My body posture is now way better, standing or sitting down.

- When I sit down and need to think a bit and look away from the computer that's what I do. When I'm standing up I find myself walking around aimlessly instead, and suddenly I'm in the kitchen grabbing something to eat. I would say my concentration is better when sitting down.
Lessons Learned: From Weekend Project to Seven Month Upstart
1. Picture/video of the founder's workspace/desk.

2. Picture/video of the team together outside the office

3. Information on technology policies (pick out your own hardware, air card provided, technologies in place, etc)

4. Tell me one brief anecdotal story that best describes team dynamic
Anyone giving "wizards" as an example of good UI design instantly loses all credibility with me.
Working on a Kindle and Nook ebook lending site in my spare time: http://www.booklends.com

Unfortunately nobody can log in today, as I'm making a few changes following a sternly worded letter from Amazon ;-)
Does that mean I can sue microsoft because I feel they are evil and they implement JSON?
http://www.mailchimp.com/pricing/
I believe that the National party in NZ believe that by implementing ACTA (that's essentially what this is) that they will curry favor in terms of a potential US free trade agreement. It's basically the US dictating intellectual property law to the world.

The reason to do it under urgency is that it's so incredibly flawed and unpopular, it probably wouldn't stand up to a normal democratic process. So by sidestepping the democratic process, it makes it much easier to get things done.
Rather than "you're never to old! follow your heart!" cheerleading, it would be a lot more useful to hear HOW the author deals with the the array of commitments the average 30-40 year old person has. Mortgage, day care, insurance, kid commitments etc.
This stigma had not even crossed my mind until I read that post, is that what people really think?

I'm closing on 30 now (in 2 years) and I feel now like this ceiling of 30 or under makes me an old man! I would like to start a start-up but in that breath I need to launch now!

Although I do not believe that 30 is too old, or 40 or 50 for that matter but I would seriously be calming it down on my 65th birthday, I hope to have made it by then and relaxing.
It's sometimes amazing to me how presumptuous customers (or potential customers) can be. Anyone have good advice for dealing with the crazies, or even just the crankies, in a reasonable manner?
Top and bottom of the box, or top and bottom in the source? Margin and padding are both useful on all sides of the box.
Don't forget an IPO would also require Facebook to disclose numbers they'd rather not while they still have liquidity. That's another major reason.
The Official Steve Jobs Biography is Coming
I was at one of Douglas Crockford's presentations on JSON. He mentioned that IBM had expressed concerns about the license, so he sent them an official authorization allowing them to use JSON for evil.
By the way, just to prove I'm not such a stiff, I rememberd and quickly found this: http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions

It genuinely made me laugh :)
He kind of addressed the difference between what's happening now and what happened in '99. ~10% who wanted to get rich doing it back then, versus people actually getting interested in the stuff now.
Oh wow, that is strange. Bundling CoffeeScript support is an great idea. Setting it as the default seems very non-user friendly to me. I love CoffeeScript, but if I was just picking up Rails and felt like I had to learn it I'd be pretty discouraged.

I know that you could always change it back to regular JavaScript, but I think many people's experience is that it's almost always recommended to use the defaults when learning a new framework.
More importantly, RMS does not come across as a person with a sense of humor. (Has any Jacobin ever?) I would guess that the license is on the site because of RMS and not some lawyer.
feature request:

* "show results only" - I would like to see results of pools that people are posting links to (without having to "make up" something first)

* other currencies - there are also other countries then USA

* global public pool + allow to submit some more info
I believe your comment is spot on. The debates here is basically about what "professional level" careful training and hard work can bring this guy up to. The "nay-sayers" (including myself) agree on that he might become much more proficient than amateur golf players, maybe even "have a chance for a lesser tour" (as you put it), but he won't be able to make it into the top level games such as PGA tour tournaments. This is the case for almost all competitive sports.
Oops, I was in the process of writing a comment about that (with a link) and only saw yours after I sent mine...
I recall colleges complaining that not enough people were majoring in CS just a few years back. All of our jobs were going to be done in India soon, anyway.

This sort of thing goes in cycles, just like startups and the economy. Jobs in the Bay Area for CS majors are in high demand now, so that's where people are majoring. The situation will change and then there will be newly minted CS grads wishing they had majored in something else.

And then there's this counterpoint:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/campus-overload/2011/03/why...

Maybe the Stanford situation isn't going on all over?
I really wish the author had excluded the $5 issue altogether, because for me, it's completely irrelevant. It's all the other factors that drive me nuts.

* Download a large 4.5GB file

* Spend a decent amount of time installing XCode

* Sacrifice 15GB of disk space to an app they likely won't use

I upgraded to a 256 GB SSD in January. This means that every GB counts on my disk. I never launch XCode. There are a couple of utilities included that are useful, but I literally never use any of the XCode tools, and I have no intention of developing an iOS application.

Running DaisyDisk against my /Developer folder shows that 8.4 GB of the space is occupied by "Platforms", which contains iOS related platform and simulator files.

For developers who don't develop specifically for OS X/iOS, there is a lot of baggage here. I'd still happily pay the $5 if I could get a trimmed down "XCode Express" install that didn't include any of the platform target stuff. As it stands now, I'm afraid to delete it because I don't want to go through the hassle of downloading and reinstalling (however you do that) such a large package.
Why so few computer science majors?
Sprint most definitely marketed the Instinct as an "iPhone killer", those were the words that appeared in the commercial. ARM chips are sometimes referred to as x86 killers.

Outselling implies that you are simply different. Killing implies that you have redefined the market by your awesomeness.
SQL Performance checklist: Avoid index filter predicates.
Well, the entire Green party opposed it. It was just Hughes that spoke.

The sad part is that he proposed an amendment to remove the disconnection provision, and it was voted down by Labour and National. What happened to having an opposition?
Second that. Coffeescript is really life changing. A very DSL friendly language, where beautiful code can rival python's[1]

[1] http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/354/
Seriously? Why is this crappy article on the front page? Because it has the word "Startup" in the title?
"word processors are probably the easiest" hahahaha.

Microsoft has been working on Word longer than it has been working on calendaring, and it still sucks too. I think the problem is the underlying assumption that Microsoft is the world's greatest software company.

Apple pulled Pages out of its ass in nothing flat, and it's a better word processor than Word. (Framemaker is also a better word-processor than Word, but it's kind of expensive.)
Put your bugs on this thread.

Submit button does not work in IE7
Please include the link.
Diving into open source communities: Students' need to knows
Standups have a common failure mode where they become about justifying yesterday's time instead of serving their most important functions- distributing knowledge and highlighting blocking factors.
At my high school, Calc was only offered as an AP course. If I so wanted, I could stop taking math after Algebra 2 and still graduate.
If the users create the context themselves, which makes sense, then why do you ask for 'US dollars only please'? Because you want to use this data yourself?
You can use MailChimp, an email–marketing service.

http://www.mailchimp.com
And just like some people don't have an aptitude for poetry, reading 16th century literature, doing differential equations or memorizing lists of dates and events.

Doesn't mean it shouldn't be taught as a part of the core curriculum.
Assign authority to expert opinions --> Suspect expert opinions until demonstrated to my satisfaction. Almost never accept anything as "proven".
I believe this specific application can be rewritten in a week or so. If we factor in all the resources that had been dedicated to making small changes and the disproportionate amount of effort dedicated to make sure those small changes didn't break everything else, I'd go with a rewrite even if we kept the whole damn thing in Java, just with a saner architecture.
I was expecting to find out that he's 70. Starting a company in your 30s is the rule, not the exception.
This seems a little premature. It's the first build.

The problem with these grids or "tests" (like the Acid3) is that they are being used to prove a point - but they fall short of the real goal - showing what is agreed to be implemented and has been implemented (the Acid3 test written by Google's Ian Hickson hasn't removed the W3C non-recommended SVG fonts).

- The W3C chose IndexedDB over Web SQL so it's no wonder IE10 doesn't support it.

- Mozilla has been working on WebGL for years now (piece by piece?), and Chrome just got it very recently (is it complete?).

- Web Sockets, wasn't that disabled for security reasons until a fix is found?

- Chrome is considered the pinnacle in this blog post and yet there's no mention of ECMAScript 5.

Chrome's development started in secret and took some Mozilla engineers in the process and even though Chrome is mostly developed out in the open, Crankshaft (new V8 engine) and WebM were not. I'm not going to say IE hasn't been marketed a little bit unfairly, but I think a little transparency should be welcomed no matter who it is. Remember all businesses present incorrect facts to benefit (I'm merely stating, not excusing), an example being Chrome never actually downloading the web page in the promotional video a while back, it rendered from a local file.

You're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.
The ironical part about that entire page is that BSD-style licenses are the most free of all.
Volunteer for the Founder Conference (and get in for free)
Creative Inventionland Offices
Theres another one in the stata center. Seeing it alone made me smile :)
fta: "How do you handle exceptions to recurring meetings?"

If the user says "No meeting this Thursday," don't show the meeting on Thursday? Did I miss something? /cocky youngster, question stands
Agreed. I find talking about exactly what story you're working on and how you moved it forward helps, since people can get bogged down in things outside the scope of the story/feature.
Now I have to put on my fruity hippie developer hat. I feel like it makes a big difference when a language implementor values beauty in code. CoffeeScript was created by someone who values the aesthetics of code, and it shows.

The CoffeeScript documentation is a fantastic exposition of that: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
Good luck, and please keep us posted on your success!

I don't have the time to invest. But I wanted to say this -- to a programmer, someone saying the MVP is "50-75% done" really sounds like, "you are going to do way more work than you think. And we will think you only did 25-50% of the work, so you will get screwed on equity."

All programmers are bad at project estimation. Asserting that you are that far along sounds like you're starting the negotiations with, "we have done over half the work, so don't expect tons of equity."

Just my thoughts. Best of luck to you guys.
Sounds like the not-entirely-apocryphal "You can't get a PM job at Google without a CS degree" has been around long enough to sink in.
"... suspicious foreign person Arianna Huffington". I know that he's not a big fan of Arianna's but that statement makes him sound like a Xenophobe.
Indeed, and I would say it's a good starting point for a discussion on how startups of all types can better interface with followers and better market themselves.

Found out a friend's starting a startup, he's gonna get this link.
It being a default is not mutually exclusive with it being a choice.

I like the move, defaults should be used to push forward positive change and very few if anyone seems to have said they would rather not use CoffeeScript.
http://i.imgur.com/wqka8.png

That's what I see on mine (FF4 on Linux as well), so I really have no clue why it's exploding like that for you. Sorry =(
What Price Design?
CS (intro to programming, really) courses were an elective at my high school long before I got there, and were standard in the county. (Graduated in '99, went to high school in Fairfax County, VA.)

I think that as we depend on computers more, it's more important for people to have a basic understanding of what it even means to program. Demystifying technology is important. They may not even program, but I think it is becoming an important part of being educated for our society.
That is absolutely not true. There's no bigger fan of jokes and jabs w/in constraints than lawyers, and judges in particular. I know of several law schools which have competitions amongst their classes to find the weirdest, funniest, or most bizarre citation or footnote w/in legal briefs/case law.

There is some weird stuff in our legal system, however they (typically) are asides amongst the core arguments, or in support of the core arguments of a legal case.

Remember that good lawyers are hackers. They're trying to find edge cases and tease at the margins of the representation of the world that has been encoded in law.
UK's Daily Mail Calls Google a 'parasitic monster'
Experiment with your revenue model while you experiment with your product
If so, that might mark a first.
Flip Founder Sad to See Cisco Kill the Brand
>Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel?

Intro, non-technical course? These are more common than you think. CS105(https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus) at UIUC is a course that covers exactly that(it was 101 when I went there). It's meant for non-engineering or science students to cover a general education credit. CS101(which was 105) is in C and matlab, and that covers some more techincally difficult stuff. This is meant for technical non-CS majors.

CS125 is the true intro CS course, which covers data structures, recursion, etc.
You are absolutely right, that was more what I was thinking about when I wrote that.
I just edited it to match with your proposal.
Then perhaps there's ambiguity in the phrase "included in a high school curriculum." I consider calculus to have been included in my high school curriculum, but I chose to take it.
Excellent point. Competitive intelligence goes both ways. The skills and attitudes I had learned in the computer security field were very useful doing competitive strategy as well.
Choices are kind of antithetical to rails's core philosophy of convention over configuration.
Rails is a pretty huge learning curve in and of itself, as most developers need to learn MVC, unit testing, migrations, activerecord, callbacks, filter chains, routing, erb, view helpers, partials, layouts, etc.

Of course, all of this stuff makes your life easier once you learn it. I would even be down with making Haml and Sass the default, since most Rails developers seem to use them anyway. Scaffolds would give newbies a good starting point to work with.
Credit Card Processing - Is it a Good Deal For Your Small Business?
UberMedia said to be planning Twitter competitor
Indeed. Newcomers usually describe CS as "Pythonesque" (because of significant whitespace) or "Rubyish" (because of optional parentheses) depending where they're coming from. I find that a little funny.

Truth is, it's borrowed from both, and other languages besides, to synthesize a gorgeous syntax which is really its own.
I'd have to agree. Our tiny startup is interested in adding some HTML5 structure using Modenizer etc but the main problem is the associated effort for not much return yet. It's really a balancing act for time - unfortunately IE7 and IE8 [and gasp IE6] are still hugely prevelant - so it's still 'the same old same old' by having to detect browsers and support multiple scenarios for HTML4 or HTML5. At this stage, until IE7 and IE8 die out "more" - which we certainly hope is in Q4 by end of this year - we will seriously look at integrating HTML5.

It's a real - "improve existing server-side code / optimisation and feature bundle" vs. "add HTML5 support where needed". For us, and this is only IMHO, the former is currently winning. By Q4 or even Q1-Q2 2012 - we'll look at this.

Thoughts?
Sounds to me like he misunderstood the question and assumed the Beeb were implying there's a serous security issue with the Blackberry device itself, when the question was actually about the "security" concerns of certain countries in which Blackberrys are sold.
Evidence points toward Apple releasing HDTV this year
Way too early to tell, but I figured I might as well get the idea out there early.

And pg & friends probably have some different goals than what some hn users are used to a online forum having. HN doesn't need to be monetized or have huge page views for it to be a success. All pg needs hn to do is attract the right people and scare off the wrong people. And I imagine that creates some metrics that are more quality based than what most hn users are user to.
CodeConf Recap
Really? Everyone seems to be freaking out as if Rails will no longer serve your standard JavaScript files again. Rather, by default, the generator spits out CoffeeScript templates. If you don't want to use CoffeeScript, don't use CoffeeScript and write regular JavaScript instead.

Will this confuse new users? Probably not, since the template file is going to include instructions and an explanation. Will the change break any existing sites? I really doubt it.

In the end, encouraging a better default language is a great change. New users are already required to learn to write ERB/Haml to make a Rails app; this is no different, and easily ignored if you're not interested.
They have a proprietary, pure-evil implementation. Since they don't use the original one, but their own, they are free to use it for their evil purposes, mwahaha included.
Are we putting in total comp (salary + bonus) or just base?
Heh, it might be true, but I'm sure that lawyers that work in software companies screening the project BigCorp wants to use for potential licensing problems will share a laugh amongst them, but will then write to the boss saying: "It's risky, don't use that code".
Nokia Friends, generative characters
That's something I should have specified. I think it's a good elective as any, but I don't think it should be required.
My suggestion would be to specialize in a particular direction. A generic task organizer doesn't get people too excited. However, if you offer something like a "collaborative task manager for small development teams," you have my attention.
I strangely want to give kudos to both sides. The phrasing of 'the problems you've had in terms of security' is seriously misleading and very poorly worded. I guess I've never seen the behind the scenes legal voices jump in before, but clearly, that question is baiting (unless RIM has some security issues I'm unaware of).

On the other side, cool that the BBC posts this for all to see, rather than just hiding it away somewhere.

Though for the general public who don't know if RIM has a security flaw or not, what effect does something like this have??
Ironically for Lazaridis, this is the first I'd heard of RIM's "security problems in India and the Middle East" - anyone have a link to the original story?
Yes, or put it in quotes.
BSD licenses defend only the freedoms of the developers. GNU-style licenses defend the freedom of the users by taking away some freedoms from developers.

If you really believe there can be a license that's "most free of all", that would be public domain (like SQLite).
Why doesn't it fit with the mindset? Is a program written in C less "native" because you didn't write it in bare machine language?
The "server" doesn't necessarily need to be the target in an attack. The attacker would be in control of the server in this scenario, and the "client" is a machine within the targeted network. The "client" and "server" labels are only representative of who is initiating the tcp connection.
Well since I've written that other comment before seeing this, the link is there, but what the hell, I can repeat it: http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions