skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting post, though I don't agree with the last point. A good rails developer will present himself as a rails developer, even if he does other things. A typical rails app includes html, javascript, maybe even xml or some other fancy stuff, so a real rails developer is always a bit of an jack-of-all-trades.

Btw, outside US, it seems like it is the other way round. I develop rails apps and have trouble finding work at the moment.
If you're implying that age and genetics do play a big role you're right, but what other "proper" sport is comparable? Most sports nowadays are dominated by folks who are clearly genetic freaks.
Not so much moderated - some links are occasionally killed, usually as spam. How is setting out on a new venture to both succeed technically and profesionally - and test a hypothesis that has been bandied about HN quite a bit - not hacking related?
Which would mean that Clojure apps would qualify as well - now that might be interesting. We're running our apps on Amazon EC2 right now, managing Redis ourselves.
It is interesting. I'm contemplating writing a book on beginning programming, and am tempted to do such a "depth first" approach, but the problem is indeed how to do so without losing most who want to start at Hello World and get to writing applications in 16 weeks flat with minimal effort. When the student and teacher are moving at right angles, what to do? This guy, if he follows through will be a guide and inspiration to many. If.
How CodeIgniter Works
I agree. I've kind of stopped reading comments and voting because I don't have the time to filter through them all. There are always comments that get downvoted to hell due to complete inaccuracies and I don't want to waste my time on them.
RawCap - A Windows network sniffer that does not require Winpcap
Right now consumers who watch regular TV have to either set aside time to watch the shows they want or DVR them. They get to pay for and watch a lot of commercials for this privilege. Meanwhile consumers who watch TV shows on Hulu can watch current episodes, and often previous ones they may have missed for free, with only a few minutes of commercials per episode. They have the option of paying(a lot less) for more previous episodes and even whole series. There will always be the people who don't want to/wont pay for anything.

To me it seems like the best deal for consumers is Hulu. If Cable networks focused more on making shows people really like to watch, plus things that require live viewing and also invested more into infrastructure to deliver content to consumers in more than one convenient way, everyone wins. The networks may even be able to get some of the people who generally only download content to use their legitimate channels of distribution if they make it easier.

On top of all of that, if they would offer this service in non US areas, the amount of eyes on their shows, ads and even people willing to pay would be enormous.
The way I read it, SHE (Ms. Lukas, a woman and the author of the post) certainly is. See:

"Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries." (comparing without demographic isolation)

"The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap." (comparing with demographic isolation, with no mention of wage differences between men with children and women with children)

Again, my point is that saying "men and women make X money for Y jobs" doesn't make much sense, and doesn't illustrate whether or not the wage gap is closed or not and more importantly, any subset of data can be compared with another subset of data to illustrate that it is or is not closed. The author here uses really simplistic arguments to make a case that isn't true.

The fact is, that if you leave out women with children and women who've only negotiated their salary once, then the wage gap doesn't look so bad. But throw in their first jobs and women with children, and it's significant.
How to be Ingenious... And why starting out with little is best?
My alma mater has the same type of program [1]. It's a mix of CS, business, communications and finance. It's also a liberal arts school so you end up taking another ~60 credits outside of your major. You take the classes plus 3 semesters of the capstone project. For the projects, you start as a "grunt" and work your way into complete control of a project.

I was a Math/CS graduate, but ended up being part of the pilot for the program. I spent a semester plus a summer internship working for a local company dealing with integrating GPS tracking of public transportation systems. It was a cool hands on experience for what was then (2000) an emerging tech area.

[1] http://www.juniata.edu/departments/itcs/i4i.html
The Mass Social Good Effect: Urban Web Incubators
Amazon to sell Ads for $25
That would be difficult. You need the ability to be able to recover from errors.

Moreover, you need to be able to redefine things. For example, suppose you defined a type or a function and changed your mind and later decided to redefine them.

I doubt the Clang front-end is designed with this sort of thing in mind.
I got the Kodak video cameras:

Playsport - waterproof
Playtouch - for non waterproof and editing video

Love them both - I have two smartphones and do take pics and record video too - but for taking video or pics of my babu, recreation, or just fun - the dedicated device is actually really useful. Sure, when I'm out and about I record on my smartphone and send the video up to Facebook, but for anything business related or just seriously good video quality and long recording times, I'm back to my Kodaks.

The Kodak's are far better than my Flip by the way, for quality and reliability. So I'll keep my Kodak cameras for those purposes and it's nice not having an incoming call interrupt my recording.

As you say - we are tech geeks. Krschultz is wrong, nobody but the small community of us geeks care about these cameras. It's the smartphone that killed the pocket video market.
Same here. Even if you have something bad to say about my submission, better to share it with the rest of HN than simply tell me on my blog. Helps everybody. Keeps somebody else from submitting stuff like it. And if you have something interesting to add, more people see it on HN than on my blog.

As long as you're not explicitly trying to game the system, I never saw a downside to it.
Nonhispanic whites are 44% of CA. That's a minority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority-majority_state

Nonhispanic whites make up only 32% of UC Berkeley. That's underrepresented.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/04/racial-breakdown-of...
Try http://forrst.com
Agreed that rss is no longer the only source for what I read. But the concept of feeds lives on. Friends' blogs, techmeme, hn, twitter, facebook, and personalization services can all be consumed as feeds. What has passed is the ability to consume all information available. We are all faced with increasing information overload and must seek out tools and techniques to help filter down and consume information more effectively.

As an example, some news readers offer curated top stories, as well as twitter, hackernews, reddit and facebook feeds in a single interface which is designed for easy visual scanning and efficient consumption. By customizing a news aggregator that offers more than just traditional rss feeds, it is relatively easy to stay on top of a manageable stream of information. Disclosure: I'm a developer at Pulse. http://pulsene.ws
The "10,000 hours" concept is a popular meme among hackers & entrepreneurs. Many of us are excited to see someone studying/testing it with such deliberation.
In software development, in the mainland US, my experience is that Oriental and Indian women are disproportionately over-represented, and black women are almost non-existant statistically (I've known of a grand total of 1 black female programmer in 25+ years, for example.) Some white women, but a disproportionate number of them are Russian or Eastern European immigrants rather than natural born citizens.
One of the stupidest restrictions on streaming that I've seen comes courtesy of HBO Go. Here's a service I would gladly pay $5 a month for unlimited access to, and yet hbo won't let me buy it outside a cable subscription. So they've left me with a choice, pay $65 for comcast + hbo, or grab their content from bittorrent.
A more thoroughly thought-out (easy to implement) architecture would be for voting to be disabled on all threads after x days, with vote tallies being displayed at that point.

If you guys want to fancy it up, you could implement the feature where users could indicate they're done voting on the thread and see the tallies early, and you'd only have to keep track of x days worth of user thread status flags before you can purge the data.
Send a text message to honk and lock your Zipcar
Anyone tried one of these? I've been curious:

http://www.anthro.com/computer-furniture.aspx?desk=elevate-a...

http://www.anthro.com/computer-furniture.aspx?desk=fit-adjus...
This experiment doesn't prove that education is worthless, but that there's other ways to gain it. Personally, I could do without the tuition fees and snobby tenured professors preaching the State's religion.
Qubes Beta 1 has been released (strong desktop security OS)
You just have to get good enough within the first few hundred (or first thousand, if you've got quite a bankroll) hours to convince someone else to subsidize you.
inlineCallback overhead can certainly become significant. Saying that it is not an issue because it is nothing compared to IO only works if you are not CPU bound in the first place - but for many applications in python, you are CPU bound.

Using deferred lists is a fair point, but then you are kind of back to using deferred directly.

As for tracebacks, I used the ticket as an example: if you have to use failure.printTraceback, it means you caught the exception, which means you need to catch them everywhere. But the problem is when there is a big in your application because you forget to handle an exception - debugging those is a PITA because you don't get the right traceback.

So yeah, async code is hard, inlineCallback sometimes helps, but all this really feel like a big kludge to me - I would rather use a framework where async is abstracted away. Doing all this by hand does not work very well for complex applications.
When does the class start? No mention on the start date on codelesson.com. Thanks.
I like to call this trope 'John Galt Wears a Beret'
Thank you! I am happy to hear that. We're hoping these stories can be interesting and informative not only to founders, but for a general audience. And who knows, maybe you will be a founder someday?
Infographic: The Price of Bad Customer Service
One of my earliest "useful" programs was a gambling game I wrote on my TI-80. I think this kind of thing is fantastic, and will breed a new generation of programmers.
Jason,
Your insightful comments fully illustrate the 10,000 hour expertise challenge. I speculate that each of the issues you mention can be addressed by comprehensive coaching and incremental practice.

Dan had no bad golf habits to break and has been coached from the very first stroke. Suppose Dan can be coached not to lose his temper? Suppose Dan can be coached to recover mentally from a poor shot? Furthermore, with an exercise coach hopefully Dan can avoid the injuries that plague golf pros.

Update in response to your update: Coaching is what makes hours of practice productive. Bad days reinforce bad habits. Dan is already playing a variety of geographically dispersed golf courses and is accustomed to bad weather. According to his blog posts, his recent bad days result in better scores than his good days just a few weeks earlier.

Jason, think back over your golf career - wonder how much better you could have been with no bad habits to unlearn, and constant comprehensive coaching.

Nike is wise to back Dan. What a story!
IRS Pre Crime Division Proposals. Philip K Dick anyone?
This is a common sentiment, but not really sensible. If you want to store (for example) another 64 bits worth of information, you would always be better off with 64 more bits of some strong hash than 64 bits of filesize.
how long do you guys work ? This works for a couple of hours, but I can't imagine how it feels after coding 14 hours. Best could be to change after several hours between a standing and sitting position.
Because of Tor's design there's no need for trust at the exit node. Plus, you hop between exit nodes at 10 minute intervals, giving any one node at best a scrappy picture of your activities. You can also blacklist exit nodes that you consider suspicious.

Even if an exit node's logs are compromised an adversary wouldn't know your identity if you haven't given it up in the compromised traffic.

What better solutions are available? As far as I know Tor is still the most resilient option out there.
I had a bunch of thoughts about architects vs home builders, and nurses / doctors, but when I thought about it, I realized that I can't think of any directly analogous splits to the CS / Engineering ideas here in other disciplines.

Well, one does come to mind. I've been told to get an Architect's stamp in Germany you need to have done a significant body of work in an area related to architecture, say bricklaying, or some other such trade. If this is true, I think this would show a similar sensibility as I hold, and the comment at the link mentions -- academic pursuit of algorithms is aimed at and motivated by totally different things than software engineers who need to push and release code NOW.

It would be nice to have them talk more, though. If I were king of CS programs worldwide, I think I'd implement a multi-year practicum requirement as the master's equivalent -- no serious academic work can be taken without going out and building some real world software in your area(s) of interest.

Then you can go play with algorithms and stuff, THEN you can go back out as a PhD/Certified Software Engineer and crush everyone you see..
No. While there's lot of value of offering more courses that teach the key aspects of software engineering, I can't see it ever being better than the experience at an internship at a real company, which an any serious industry-bound CS student at a top school should be able to find.
Launch Black Calling Card: Record all your calls
I would like to see the karma after (a) voting or (b) 24 hours. I understand wanting to cloak it on a hot thread, at least until a person makes up his or her mind, but I think it should become visible eventually.
Sorry I even checked and still misread the "Ms."

But isn't "men and women make X money for Y jobs" the only legitimate way to look at the wage gap? What other comparison makes sense at all? If not the above, then what wage gap are people complaining about?

Why bring women with children up? Is it not expected (in the statistical sense, not in the duty sense) that women with children will tend to have sacrificed some amount of career? Are you saying that a woman software developer makes more money for the same role as a woman software developer with a child?
It's at about 2:03:48 in the Mix stream. There is no Chrome or FF logo in the taskbar. Its the machine they use to do the last demo. It's not the machine used in the picture on the website linked to from this story.
Not to mention stupidity like this:
"hoice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics."

On one side, there's a long history of studies/research showing coercion of women into certain job sectors. On the other hand, this author says, "most women know something else is often at work". So yeah, about par for the wsj.
Try getting a job at Microsoft, Facebook, or Apple if you don’t have a degree. There is almost no chance that you will make it past HR.

Bullshit. There are plenty of people at those companies that never got a degree but proved themselves in other ways (open source, made popular apps ... etc).
Great talk with Matt--love Xobni and really interesting to see the direct story behind it from the founder!
...for sending money to countries that still use them, yes.

Where I am, noone's been using checks for that past 20-30 years. In the rare case you get one and wants to cash it in, there are exorbitant fees for doing so, since it's so unusual.
Yeah, but I don't think many people check the comments for what can be read from the story. It's mostly a way of seeing what other people think about the article before going to read it. The more sensationalist the headline, the more important the comments are to checking for bullshit before investing the time to read it.
Certainly he's very good, but there's still a huge gulf between him and the best marathon runners.

And that's why this ten thousand hours thing is pretty random, yet pretty unfalsifiable. In any specialised activity, the first hundred hours of dedicated practice is good enough to make you better than most people. Keep practicing and you'll be better than 80% of the world. Keep it up for a bunch more time and you'll be better than 90% of the world. By the time the irrelevant ten thousand hours milestone pops by, you'll certainly be impressive at your activity, but whether you're in the top 5% or the top 0.001% depends on which activity you've chosen (plus your natural talent in that field).

So for some definition of "expert", it's fair to say that ten thousand hours will make you an expert.
This isn't really Microsoft- or IE-specific. Opera does this too:

http://www.opera.com/docs/browserjs/

Chrome also added special handling to work around poor browser sniffing in Hotmail, which is ironic because Opera had to do the same for Google Docs. Opera claims that most of what they have to deal with is actually improper browser sniffing on sites that didn't work in a previous version of Opera but work fine now. Looking at Microsoft's list of sites, it seems to be a similar story, many sites have IE-specific code that isn't necessary in IE9.
The first, and most important YC interview tactics, is to get accepted to be interviewed. So far, no success for me. Had a video, a kickass team, a neat project aaaand not a damn chance to explain it. Who cares thought, we don't need it, that would have just been a great experience.
I think us developers all tend to know this. But for some reason most employers still don't get this. Almost all job listings look for candidates with specific experience in technology X, rather than just all around smart and able people. When I am job hunting these types of employers are an immediate turn off for me, but they are by far the majority. I wish we could succeed in convincing employers to look at the bigger picture.
If Italy'd get their act together, some good things could happen here. The University of Padova is where Galileo spent the best years of his life, and also, more recently, educated this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin

The climate isn't spectacular here, but it sure beats the rainy Google-Europe centers.
After much drama and negotiations, they agreed to cut $37bn, or less than 1/40th of the deficit (>$1600bn). Try slicing a pizza into 40 parts and take out one of the bits in order to 'save weight'.
Isn't the 10,000 hour most commonly applied to things like playing the violin? I haven't seen many cases of it being applied to coding, nor language learning, in the academic papers I've read anyway...

I can recommend reading "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance", it paints a clear pictures of what Expertise actually is.
Fitting that Nginx hits 1.0 at the same time as the Yuri Gagarin 50th anniversary. Here's a toast to Russian ingenuity!
AOL and Huffington Post sued by unpaid bloggers
I'm delighted to see the end of comment scores, and if they are restored, I think i will hack HN for myself to remove them when I read comments.

I like having the community filter articles, but when it comes to a discussion, I like reading the arguments and deciding for myself. Scores do influence my expectations around what's important and what isn't.

Besides, there is already a filter in place for really bad comments. If something isn't at -5 or so, I really ought to give it the benefit of the doubts and read it.
Thats a lot of effort to put into getting a rails developer. Just imagine if you needed two or three.

I particularly like the last rule. Never hire anyone who claims to be a rails developer, hire an erlang dev and you are set!
Uh, iirc, the assumption here was that the proxy and the application server (and its resources) were not necessarily located on the same physical machine. Serving static content off the proxy is certainly another option, but it involves a different kind of deployment than having the application servers still provide the (initial) request for static content.
ActiveState would like to sell you protection from the risks of using FOSS
"Golf, beyond mental and physical, requires great feel. To be able to know that in 15 mile an hour wind, with your ball half buried by sand, and water in front of the green, how would one hit that shot? There are millions of variations of what you could end up with on the golf course, none that could be figured out in 10,000 hours."

10,000 hours is a long time, what makes you think it is not enough time to acquire a great feel for golf? How long did it take you to acquire your great feel?
An interesting response. This statement however is demonstrably incorrect:

"This guy is wasting his time."

Whether or not you believe his hypothesis, you cannot deny that he is not rigorously testing it. And one of two things will be true at the end of his experiment; He'll be playing in the PGA, or he won't. In both cases he has learned a number of valuable things, and he will have advanced the understanding of expertise in some small way, and perhaps he will have opened up some new avenues for exploration.

Personally I don't know if I could put 10K hours into something that I wasn't really enjoying, coding? sure, golfing? not so much. (even though I was employee #9 at GolfWeb :-)) So on that level I think his experiment is doubly valuable.
0.1mm thin transparent photovoltaic surface
I first started with long folders of bookmarks which I checked rather infrequently, thus missing lots of content. When Firefox first got Live Bookmarks, it was a huge step up. Now it redirects to my Google Reader account, which is another step up (nicer interface, and not dependent on where I am).

Any alternative to feeds will have to be a step up from that convenience for me to use it, especially since feeds are everywhere these days, thanks to standards, libraries, and better connected communities.

But then again, I don't put feeds in the same category as the other services the author mentions. They're just a transport medium for me. I use many of the same services, but often via feeds. I do, however, access most social media via other client software. But that's actually so people's pictures of cats don't fill up my reader. If I'm really interested in a person, I'll add their personal feed to my reader.
You don't have to. Highly voted comments are helpfully floated to the top of the thread or post. Just read a few at the top and you should be good to go.
Why bother re-encoding the whole file? Changing a bit or two would be sufficient.