skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On Angry Birds’ pigs - searching a reason why it is so addictive
this looks awesome, really excited to check it.
Hmm. I did a quick poll of the programmers I know personally & would consider successful (for a reasonable value of success). One has a firm grasp of assembly (which makes sense because he uses it a lot), a handful have a firm grasp of C (most claim to have a "little" C but from experience with them they couldn't build anything w/o a book for guidance :P).

So I don't agree with the hypothesis.
I wrote a tool, git-number[1], that allows me to use numbers when specifying file or directory names to any git operation.

I never have to resort to tab-completion ever since.

[1] https://github.com/holygeek/git-number
If you sell your three bitcoins on an exchange, at the current price of 63 cents each they'll cover a grande coffee.

https://mtgox.com/
Lush 2.0.1 has specific bug fixes for issues with OS X 10.6.
What is a startup? Who qualifies for invites?
This is not a Commodore 64.

It is a cruel mockery.

The main appeal of the Commodore was simplicity and understandability. This is a PC, that is to say, a piece of junk overgrown with cancerous accidental complexity.
Higher-Order Javascript (CoffeeScript) [video from Øredev 2010]
I thought it was pretty well-known that standard system timers (except the High Performance ones) could/would be inaccurate. I'm actually surprised by how reliable the OS X timers are.

Normally, if you do any kind of benchmarking, you would run the test N times and average the times out.
As far as I know it sets up firewall rules (ipfw/iptables) to redirect certain outgoing TCP connections to a local socket, where they are picked up by the sshuttle service and multiplexed over the ssh connection. at the other end, the stream is demultiplexed into connections again. Definitely no individual packets.
Cheers, will look into that.
Development Complexity vs Operational Complexity
LuaJIT is awesome but it doesn't run on as many architectures as the original Lua VM. The nice thing about a framework in C is that you can install it anywhere it compiles, and if you stick to ANSI C like Lua does then it compiles pretty much anywhere, like Lua itself.
That's not really what I'm looking for. If I design a t-shirt, and I find 10 people who would buy it, then that's no guarantee it's going to be sold on Threadless.
a more recent study of getTime() here: http://mivankovic.blogspot.com/2011/03/research-results-can-... ("Can JavaScipt getTime() be used for measuring performance of JavaScript code?")
Mobile App Development off
now a day's mobile application are being handy with all many small scale industries which makes free users happy for free application
You will have to choose two from:

A) Written in less than ten man-years without being a Unix clone and/or using existing C drivers

B) Displays modern video

C) Runs on a neighbor's PC

I speak as a frustrated OS developer.
yikes! thought I pushed that fix before submitting. thanks for pointing it out - fixed =]
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Mixed Chicks has a curl defining system for all those who want a bounce and shine in their hair. The products of Mixed Chicks makes your hair non sticky and light. It makes it so attractive that the hair enhances the whole personality of an individual
So, as a self-taught programmer I know a smattering of those things (admittedly compilers, FSM's and functional programming came from my engineering degree).

The problem I have with that question (as already pointed out) is that it is phrased as if those things are crucial aspects of "being a programmer", or being good at it.

Meh.

I use bits and pieces of the skillset; but I realised a while ago that the bits I use are things I knew (and made use of) way before knowing the topic in depth. Large parts of those topics are theoretical underpinning which is undeniably useful, but something you can get along without if necessary.

And that, I think, is the main difference between self-taught and taught programmers; the latter have a lot more theoretical understanding of programming concepts. In most cases it doesn't set them apart, but in the case of hard problems, or unique solutions having the theory is required for a solution.

I argue that the problem is classifying these things as "skills" rather than theory/concepts.
I'm a part of this and love the concept.
Hyundai unveils green energy muscle car of the future
Great job, looks great.
Is prioritisation based on business value right?
i like this topic very well and i will enter the counter
The SSH connection is inherently a reliable stream, so you need to be careful - it should work if you drop UDP packets if the ssh stream's send buffer is full, but there might be severe performance traps down that route. Maybe an expert can elaborate. The other issue is you'd need to do manual NAT-like connection tracking to match up sources and destinations. I could imagine many UDP-based protocols not taking kindly to that sort of treatment.

By the way, (open-)ssh itself supports a tun/tap VPN mode (-w I believe) that creates actual network interfaces on the two endpoints, and thus can transport any IP traffic. It needs to be explicitly enabled on the server, and needs kernel tun/tap support, which is usually missing on VPSes that don't let you run your own kernel (modules).
I am also from Europe and I have a pretty hackerish feeling about macs.

In the 90s, we developed a large science application in our lab for the Atari ST. When our last ST broke down, we used a Macintosh Performa instead that came with an Atari Emulator.

Everything worked fine and the old ST application, that ran a complex atomic physics experiment, was even faster on the Mac. It also did a job sharing with an eltec lab computer, like the Atari did before.

Although this was by far not a hacker job, we felt pretty cool with the good old Mac.
It also saved a phd thesis that could not have been finished without that program.

In science, Macs always were a (strong) minority in the labs, even in Europe. Today they are in the process of becoming a majority and replace linux (there are only a few windows machines that could be replaced ;o).
swombat, if you actually cared to read the article you'd find plenty of suggestions as to what StartUp Britain could have done to make this scheme worth-while. Unfortunately at the moment it's nothing more than a coupon site.
The major cost of the data is gathering it not distributing it. But I agree this is something that needs to be archived.
There's the Hacker Newsletter ( http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ ) , which is weekly, and the Hacker Monthly ( http://hackermonthly.com/ ) which is monthly and paid.
Innovative Framework for Creating RIA Apps
The docs have lots of spelling mistakes, can't find any now though, but I noticed about 3 while glancing through them earlier. The signup page is up now.

Also, and I understand it's not a priority, the docs are a little wordy.

For example: "you will need to make sure you comply with the following requirements". Why not write: "You'll need these:". Much friendlier.

Or "In order to deploy an application on the Orchestra platform, one is required to login at https://my.orchestra.io/login. Once you've logged in, click on the Deploy A New App from your Dashboard. You will be taken to the Deployment interface where a few new terms might appear strange to you. Allow us to describe the fields you will see:".

You can replace that entire paragraph with this sentence: "To deploy an application, login at http://my.orchestra.io/login, and click Deploy A New App."

Another one: "Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.
Memcached is trivial to use and a very important part of any serious platform infrastructure. We are currently on an addon that will enable application deployers and Orchestra users to use Memcached. We will keep you updated with our progress."

Instead write: "Memcached support is coming soon". That has the same amount of informational value and is easier to read.

Just nitpicking on the writing now :) It does sound like a great product.
At roughly $30/month minimum for the "basic" service (that doesn't auto-scale), plus costs for add-ons, you really have to not know what you're doing when it comes to deployment (or just have money to burn), because PHP/MySQL is just about the easiest thing to deploy in the world.

But having auto-scaling on your app, I could see this being worth the value if you want that kind of stuff to be managed for you.
If only they were 'just' all in one secure basket, instead they're all duplicated in dozens of very large baskets with dubious levels of security and varying levels of attached personal information.
Thanks, I'm loving it. It is a bit biased for aesthetic but well still an improvement over the default HN css.
Why don't browsers on Windows implement QueryPerformanceCounter (a microsecond precision timer)? In fact, I thought Firefox 4 had done this.
Looks good, I'll try that for a while.
Damn you, science! I’ve read so many studies saying there’s absolutely no way you can get by without at least 7 hours sleep and now you tell me that that completely doesn’t apply to 1-3% of the population?! That’s actually not that small of a percentage. How big were the sample sizes of all the other studies? Did nobody encounter at least one of these low-sleep requiring people? Maybe they were just eliminated as being an anomaly.

I’ve met some of these people who insisted they didn’t need much sleep before and now I seem like an idiot for telling them that it they would probably feel better if they got more.

This is fantastic research, I just wish it had been around 10 years ago.
My Google Rejection Letter
I would like to see a security page. It is not clear if your app is isolated in its own microinstance or shared in some way that should be specified.
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What Does Obama Have Up His Sleeve For This Election...
- Tweets made by @tweetlast show up as "via node-tweasy", which links to http://127.0.0.1/. Obviously that would look better if it linked back to tweetlast.com. Also, it'd be nice to see which tweet is being replied to (eg. http://twitter.com/tweetlast/status/55169333579620352 is in reply to http://twitter.com/katrinacamerote/status/54695871744446464).

- I found the landing page confusing. The last.fm link is barely noticeable, the "wait there's more" bit appears too soon. I spent the first few seconds gawping at the large text, and then the additional text appeared and I was confused, as if there was something I might have missed before that text showed up. I'd just leave it there from the start.

- Speaking of links on the landing page, please reformat the link to @tweetlast. It's currently pointing to http://twitter.com/#!/tweetlast - remove the #! bit.

- I'd have liked a link that opens a new window from which you can tweet directly inside the landing page, the same way you have on the commands page. Otherwise you're just driving me away from your website.

- The biggest issue I have with this, though, is that it recommends artists and not albums. I know the last.fm API doesn't do album recommended albums but I'd still prefer if the service recommended the band's most popular album, over forcing me to choose one (logic is that if I've never heard them before I'll just choose their #1 album on last.fm anyway). I'm working on something similar to this, but emailed based, I'll post it on HN when I have something a bit more functional to show.
I think that anyone currently launching a company with a descent, fresh idea would qualify there.
Start-Up 100: the final list by category
yes. I do realize it is ambiguous. Other people have complained too. They see the point but they can quite get hold of what it looks, behaves like.

industries where speed and CR matters is what I am looking at as well.. export businesses, the hospitality and travel industry for example.
Thanks :-)
It would be nice if anyone had an option for deploying with mercurial. Purely anecdotal of course, but most of my PHP chums run hg as well. I know there's hg-git but for all the hassle it took to set up, I may as well have just used git itself.

(Incidentally, I was quite interested in this originally, but while waiting for an invite I ended up bodging together something on Amazon myself. Amusingly enough, my invites for phpfog, orchestra and dotcloud all came within 2 days of deploying!)
I had to choose, and though in retrospect it would've never worked long-term, I still regret that I told her that my work is more important than her. The relationship was never the same after that, and I wish I had the wits to hold my tongue. Ah, some things, you learn the hard way :). My advice would be this: let them choose. If you still like that person, just maintain that stance.
Thanks. I have signed up :-)
Creating a truly European [start-up] ecosystem
Lightcycle?
If echolibre happens to be reading this, I'm seeing a stylesheet issue on your activation form where the two input boxes for email address and password are extending beyond the login containment box. Screenshot below.

http://tinypic.com/r/30mwjrl/7

I'm running FF 4.0 on Fedora 13. Hope this helps =)
Agreed, anyone can deploy PHP -- it's not rocket science. Scaling is what Orchestra is all about, but obviously you need to deploy before you can get to that point.

A note on pricing -- we're trying to find the right price point / service level offering, that the market will respond to. We've a "grandfathering" policy in place, which we've detailed at the bottom of our pricing page: https://orchestra.tenderapp.com/kb/about-orchestra/pricing-b...
I would have named this plug-in JApan.

What? To soon?
I made it so you can click the speed icon in the top right to change the speed. Still not 100% happy with that.

I'll look at #2.

Based on the original tutorial, the feedback was positive with respect to making people think about the answers. help always tells you exactly what to type to move on though.
I think it's obvious what we must do next. According to every science fiction film or book I've ever read, we must capture them, confine them and study them in an attempt to learn their secrets and duplicate it in everyone else.
Thanks for the heads up! We'll get that fixed :)
Why Fred Wilson Is Wrong On Android vs. iPhone
While this is very true that there is a steep initial payment curve, many companies can afford to fit this minimal bill considering the cost of running their own dedicated machines. I think it's quite beneficial that there is OOB support for MongoDB, CouchDB, Amazon RDS, ZeroMQ, Gearman, Memcache & Memcached. Assuming some of these queues scale out automatically, there's a huge benefit in reducing the complexity of your application layer if you're trying to do some rapid prototyping for a minimal viable product that still has the balls to scale out if necessary.
The article is mostly content-free.
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Look, as far as I'm concerned, unless you had nothing but other peoples' source code and API documentation, you are not 'self-taught.'

I used to cobble together VBA macros for Excel at work, based on code snippets and the built-in help files. At first, although I got things done, I really had not a blinking clue what I was doing. Then after a few weeks I bought Excel VBA for Dummies - which taught me how to do things properly and understand the essence of all the constructs I was using.

I read more books, and I read web tutorials and watched video lectures. They taught me a lot. Then I left work to get a post-graduate-conversion certification in IT. I always said I was doing it for the cert, not the teaching. The course was good but only because it instilled discipline. Really attending a lecture is no different than watching one on YouTube or iTunesU. The teachers don't have time to give you personal tuition. Their notes are not more instructive than the classic CS/software books in publication. The learning materials available elsewhere are decent rivals to professional education courses. The only thing I can see being a huge benefit is doing pair-programming with an expert for a few years, but how many courses offer that? Not to mention, the learning that's supposed to go on at universities is hardly automatic.

So therefore the question is meaningless, unless you mean actually self-taught people, who would probably (if they managed to develop into competent professionals) have some strange quirks. Like self-taught musicians who never learnt common techniques I guess.
I've worked with a few and some of the things I've noticed:
No understanding of regular expressions / state machines / automata. Not understanding O() and algorithm complexity. Building kludged together language parsers. Not understanding parallel execution, threading, starvation, deadlock, etc. Generally not knowing about well-known algorithms and data structures and how to apply them.
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The site you were advertising looks like a health scam site (not saying that it is; just that's what it looks like on first impression), did Facebook specifically reject your ad on the basis of your image or due to the nature of your site? (i.e were other ads with the exact same details approved)
To me, what is a bit disheartening about all of this is that if you want to advertise to Facebook's massive user base, you have to play by Facebook's inconsistent rules and enforcement; there's not much of a way around it. And the system is not set up to help you succeed. It is instead set up to bend and morph in whatever way helps Facebook, no matter how positively/negatively it affects those actually purchasing the advertising and fueling the growth.

Of course it is within Facebook's rights to structure their platform as they see fit. It is just a bit sad that those services and brands with the largest power bases seem to throw their weight around in the most antagonistic ways imaginable.
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Thanks for the comment. Security important for everyone.

"Free" is multi-tenant. "Basic" and "Elastic" are isolated.

Some of the restrictions we have in place on "Free" are documented here. https://orchestra.tenderapp.com/kb/system-constraints/system...

I agree, a dedicated security page would be helpful, and is something we'll be creating soon.

Thanks again for your feedback!
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It was specifically rejected because of the image. "...The image included in your ad is not suitable to appear on Facebook..."
Sadly, the most important one is nowhere to be found: good software development practices. I've met a lot of brilliant self- taught programmers, who could read up on parsers and systems programming, but not one read up on how to keep software maintainable or how to manage project risk.

Of course, they default to waterfall. (!!!)
Lucky buggers. Technically since time is money, that could make them 16% richer than most of us (assuming they sleep 2 hours less).
As someone whose blanket feels like its made out of lead every morning after 7 hours sleep i have to say: unfair. :(
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We have support for mercurial that we are in the process of test at the moment. When it's available, we'll announce on our blog: http://blog.orchestra.io/

If you'd tweeted us, we would have bumped you up the list :(
It's such a pity that he doesn't dig into why this is. He makes this funny statement:

Internet Explorer 8 (I also tested 6, for good measure,
with the same results), Opera, Safari, and WebKit Nightly
all bin their results. There is no 'normal distribution'
whatsoever. Effectively these browsers are only updating
their internal getTime representations every 15
milliseconds.

He can't really think that all those browsers have implemented a binning algorithm. Underlying this is the GetTickCount (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724408.aspx) Windows API function: "The resolution of the GetTickCount function is limited to the resolution of the system timer, which is typically in the range of 10 milliseconds to 16 milliseconds." That goes all the way down into the bowels of the PC where there's an interrupt occurring that is used to update the tick count. Depending on the machine/operating system that you are using the system timer updates at varying frequencies (the original IBM PC had an 18.2Hz timer giving updates about every 54ms).

Related to this is how Windows' GetSystemTime is implemented and how often it updates.

He goes on to say:

It's pretty obvious that the Wine layer is tapping into some
higher-quality timer mechanism and is providing it to IE - giving
us a result that is even more accurate than what the browser normally
provides

Use the source, John! Wine is calling gettimeofday(). GetTickCount is defined here: http://source.winehq.org/source/dlls/kernel32/kernel_main.c#..., it calls GetTickCount64 which is here http://source.winehq.org/source/dlls/kernel32/kernel_main.c#... which calls NtQuerySystemTime which is here http://source.winehq.org/source/dlls/ntdll/time.c#L447 which calls gettimeofday.

Wine's GetSystemTime implementation is going the same thing: http://source.winehq.org/source/dlls/kernel32/time.c#L933

In Chrome this is quite well documented, see comments here for Windows: http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#W9JxUuHYyMg/trunk/s...
Interesting. A lot of advertisers have been complaining about ad cloning for a while, where companies clone the adverts from their competitors. I wonder if Facebook have introduced some sort of automated filter to reject clone images, etc. or if they're just manually rejecting the ones that have been vastly overused.
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Really appreciate the feedback on the documentation, Peter. Docs are a type of UI, I guess, and the same rules should apply.

Consider them a work-in-progress! :)
In my experience they often lack the curiosity to find background information and possess an adequate overview. Like they'll be able to write quite decent code in C++, but in an interview they'll fail at an easy question like 'what are the differences between C, C++, and C#.' (like they'll have no idea about different paradigms)

It's a complacent sort of attitude, like 'I did a degree, so obviously they taught me everything worth knowing.'