skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Learned this the hard way while setting up OpenVPN a few years ago. In the configuration file, there's an option to use TCP as the transport protocol, and being young and naïve, I figured that it was best to have a reliable protocol underpinning my VPN.

What I didn't stop to consider, was that all of the traffic going over the VPN was also TCP, and as such was reliable enough on its own.

Took me a week to figure out why connections would drop randomly, transfers would magically slow down and speed up, and all other forms of network-based mayhem.
I was surprised Che was outside of South America. Here's the list of places he been to: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:CheGueva... (Including being in Congo during the war)
I mostly agree with this, although I don't think classically trained programmers fare much better on average. I've had many university educated programmers that I've had to teach basic parsing, data structures, and algorithms such as tree traversal.
One of our awesome devs made a campfire bot too. It spits out a pivotal tracker ticket status, the weather, does a google image search among a few other things. I don't want to give away everything since I didn't build it.

One hack we're talking about is adding a bathroom occupied red light so we know not to get up and check if there's someone using it. Side projects are great.

We're pretty cool with it and most of the time if a dev spends the day working on a side project, they will stay a little late to do the other work they have.
The Julian Assange Nobody Knows (2007) [0]

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/
The list they've put together it long enough that I would expect nearly everyone to be missing a few.

Compilers and Machine learning are probably the two that you don't see in self-taught people much. The ones you do see it in generally go to university shortly after having been self-taught anyway.

Most of the other things on the list you learn if you deal with particular programming languages. And a university degree doesn't really supply breadth much more than being self-taught does. But someone who was self-taught and then did a degree will be much broader in skill, which is why those people seem to have such diverse skills.

The actual answer is that the self-taught programmer needs to keep learning and broadening into other languages etc. Which is exactly the same thing any other programmer needs to do.
Why would it be in Fox's interest to offer it for cheaper if it's shown six months late?
87 percent of Android developers worried about fragmentation, survey says
NJ Startup Needs .Net Developers
Spammers target Facebook
I'm a huge fan of it. Even though my wife probably throws off my true sleep score, I still love having the data and seeing what affects my sleep.
Interpersonal relationship skills.

Even universities don't teach social skills for life.
Self taught programmer here. I would like to think I have at least a bit of knowledge about each of these topics (though definitely not an expertise in most) I would say the one I know the least about is Machine learning, but i'm actively working on changing that :) I just bought this book (and enjoying it!) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262013193
Maybe I'm an outlier, but the self-taught people I know fare particularly well on compilers and machine-learning among my peers. Maybe it's the circles I travel in, though. :)

FWIW, I'm a self-taught information-retrieval / compiler / linguistics geek, currently studying machine learning. I've been programming since I was 5, and I always wanted to be a super-librarian, whatever that meant.
Yeah, according to my dad, apparently clearing your cookies works just as well (which incognito mode does whenever you close the window). They should have used that perma-cookie JS library that uses like 10 different methods of fingerprinting a computer.
I spent this morning porting my Firefox add-on to Google Chrome. Chrome's API isn't as powerful but so much easier to pick up, I think this article illustrates the difference perfectly!
I do understand that argument; that much is clear (and I was not!). However, I think one would have to be dishonest with oneself if one didn't think the valuation was overinflated.
That just looks like the table of contents to an introductory Comp Sci textbook.
He is trying to say Gandhi is flawed and trying desperately to prove it.

I celebrate any man with many flaws who goes on to create wonderful impact in the world.

I don't think I learned much from the original post.
I already knew Gandhi was flawed. That is why he was wonderful. Being a man with many flaws, he achieved what was thought impossible.

This reaffirms that we each can change the world despite our own deep flaws.

Critics like to find flaws in each detail and strip us all naked. Thats what the original post seemed to me.
Ask HN: Should I Put A Sign Up Form Right On The Pricing Page?
As I'm working on launching my app here in the next week; I have a question that I hope someone can answer.<p>Which has better conversions?
A funnel that looks like this..
Homepage > Pricing > Sign Up Form<p>or.. putting a Sign Up Form (granted you only have a 4-5 fields) right on the Pricing page somewhere?
Homepage > Pricing/Sign Up Form<p>I'm thinking putting the Sign Up Form on the Pricing page will make a huge difference in sign up conversions, but before I tested this; wanted to know if anyone has done it? It seems that all the most popular web apps are using the traditional funnel like: freshbooks, basecamp, campaignmonitor, mailchimp, wufoo, etc..
Yeah, their "You might like" on the front page is pretty terrible. It seems to just pick random items from shops you've favorited/favorited an item in - to the point where it quite frequently recommends me items I've already marked as a favorite!

I already know I like that item. That's why I favorited it. I want to see things I didn't already know existed.
My hypothesis is that a CS education would be most useful after you have already spent 5-10 years in industry. Unfortunately for most people life just isn't structured in a way to allow for full time education later in life.
15 minutes? Are you kidding? It takes that long to get your oil changed and most people can't even be bothered to do that every 3 months / 3000 miles.
Was just about to post this. Great work!
Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders
I grew up on computers, and am exclusively self-taught, yet I have an in-depth knowledge of how computers actually work from spending time learning how to crack programs. A decent understanding of some fairly complex algorithms from writing RTS, Chess and other games and working on some awesome ML applications professionally. And a good understanding of FP from playing with langs like Haskell and implementing a lisp interpreter.

I have also never learned a single thing from sitting in a lecture hall (though I did do a two year CS diploma, the hardest thing we ever had to do was an Address Book in VB), the most important things I have learned with regard to programming have all come from tutorials on the net and the few books I have bought over the years. In a sense, I have been taught by some of the best people in their fields including K&R, Abelson and Sussman, Denthor, CLRS, _why and too many others to mention.

Since I am self-taught, I can't really give a good answer to the question, but imho, our biggest problem, is that we don't know what we don't know... And that we usually don't a solid understanding of the maths behind what we are doing, something I recently realised the importance of, and am trying to remedy in myself.

Aside: What is really meant by "self-taught programmer" anyway? I have managed and worked with people who came out of university and couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.
"They should have used that perma-cookie JS library that uses like 10 different methods of fingerprinting a computer."

Yeah, but give them a break, they only had $40M to build the paywall with so they made do with what they had.
Google bids for Nortel Patents
The idea is you charge a high price for other channels to show it immediately, but drop the price later on so that you can still get some revenue from channels that can't afford the initial price.
Expect Your Company to DIE, When You Sell It.
Save The Data: A petition to save Data.gov
Rumbles, Vibrates, Shakes & Rotates any Element with jRumble jQuery Plugin
Ask HN: What hours would you work on a side business?
Assume you have a "normal" full-time job, and you are trying to get a startup together in your spare time. How would you structure your time to avoid burnout?

Would you spend several hours every week night, then have weekends all free? Or would you rather keep your nights free, and treat weekends like more two weekdays, only you work on your project rather than your normal day job?
Thing is, the way to tear down the walled facebook-style walled gardens around social media is probably by making it a seamless part of the web.

Ultimately everything you do on facebook, twitter, and the like boils down to just a few verbs. Someone posts a link or content, and then folk repost and comment on it. Ways to organise and gate the content are provided, and it is all tied together with individual identities.

All this stuff is pretty amenable to abstraction, and could be applied to any sort of content on the web. But that requires protocols and an idea of identity that is built into the browser itself.
Download Video Polisi Gorontalo Menggila
Fair enough.

"[From the magazine, "Commentary," March 1983, published monthly by the American
Jewish Committee, New York, NY.]"

But this was a very 'robust' critique. Am I an "anti-semite" if I ask if the Commentary magazine would focus their sharp critical lens on Talmud ("dung") and "Saint Einstein"?
Nice to see something of my own show up on HN.

For the curious:

The site is a very simple Dancer app running in Starman on an EC2 instance. The data comes from ProximoBus (http://proximobus.appspot.com/), a lightweight JSON-format wrapper for NextMuni's API.

Three things contribute to a route being "fucked":
- Percentage of vehicles on the route marked as delayed by NextBus
- Size of the smallest gap between vehicles running in the same direction ('bunching')
- Size of the largest gap between vehicles running in the same direction (the other effect of bunching)

Code is up on github: https://github.com/skimbrel/how-fucked-is-muni
Enjoy!
Sorry about the popovers!
Reading News Online Better Than News in Print
Why aren't there greater anti-trust concerns over this?
Keep an eye out for user shykes, he's a founder. He was handing out beta invites like candy not too long ago so, if you catch him posting again, it could happen... maybe.
Aside: What is really meant by "self-taught programmer" anyway? I have managed and worked with people who came out of university and couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.

This one always makes me raise an eyebrow too. My experience at university was that students who didn't teach themselves anything didn't really succeed in class either.
There's a much wider range of ability among self-proclaimed self-taught programmers. Some may be "self-taught" to the level that they have completed and understood the entire Art of Computer Programming (those released already, anyway). Some may be "self-taught" to the level that they can write a couple for loops in PHP and Javascript.

It's a hard question to answer because "self-taught" spans too wide a range of skill.
The majority of people I've come across started by doing web stuff or Basic way back in the day. I think in general that's the largest population. The best self-taught people I know have by now read everything that would be in a university reading list anyway.

I think it reinforces the point that self-taught people become very knowledgeable about the things they're interested in. The average self-taught programmer is likely to be more motivated than the average new CS grad. Although this may be becoming less true as more of the less purely interested people move to the more "practical" software related degrees that exist.
As far as I can tell, "self-taught programmer" is a left-handed compliment of sorts, referring somebody who actually gives a shit about programming, rather than someone who passively received some sort of education (however long ago), and has since methodically applied it (exactly as it was). Others went to school, but realized graduation wasn't the end of exploration.

Some of us never had a formal programming education, we've just spent years (perhaps decades) chasing things that have interested us and learned plenty of useful skills along the way.
Oh, I know none of that proves anything -- neither does the original poster's experience at parties, or my personal read as a woman that it's a slight positive. I'd be more curious about the data.

Though, another data point -- I've never heard a woman say, "eew, he's bald," the way they might talk about someone being fat, dirty, or excessively old. I've never heard it come up as a negative, and I have heard it come up as a positive many times before.

I don't really have any hard data to contribute to the discussion. I guess I just wanted to make sure you weren't getting your opinion on what "most women" find attractive from Rogaine commercials. ;)
short answer: talent
long answer: skills
Everything I ever learned about marketing I learned from D&D
Agreed.

At the vast majority of even quite decent research universities, CS majors are there to get in, get out, and get a job writing very basic plumbing/form-handling/gluing-stuff-together-code. Or they get an ops job where configuring stuff and keeping it running is important. It works for most of them, too, as that's probably what most programmer-related work is. And most of it doesn't need to scale, so it doesn't hurt too badly that they don't understand algorithmic complexity.
Discount Water Filters, Refrigerator Filters, RO Filters
self taught programmers lack talent and the ability to get accepted into a good CS program
Wozniak: Tablet is the PC for 'normal people'
Perhaps a question equally worth asking, is "what skills do programmers who AREN'T self-taught commonly lack?"
It's interesting that this question implied the negative -- not what's the difference between, not even what are the strengths and weaknesses of, but:

> What pieces of the whole are missing?

The implication being that without a formal CS education, it is an impossibility to obtain a whole. As if whole matters; how does one obtain whole, anyway?

This is a very loaded question and perspective that betrays a serious bias, in my opinion. That we're making a generalization out of humanity's life experiences is futile in itself, but alas, the application of said generalization here is far more interesting to me.
>don't know what we don't know

I feel that way about everything I've tried to learn on my own. The process of becoming an expert in a field I think is largely learning what you don't know.

So long as there isn't a deficit in the total volume of knowledge, maybe it's a good thing that there be more variety in which subset everyone picks up.
You created an account just to spew that, good work.
A retrospective on Transactional Memory
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
This is a most frustrating and poignant question.

I am a self-taught programmer. That being said, I'm not lacking in any desire or ability to teach myself. In fact I am quite active about it and not just in programming. Sitting on my bookshelf is a current set of AoCP and the companion, Concrete Mathematics. I keep journals of my thoughts, progress, and notes about excercises. I converse with knowledgable people on usenet and irc. I build things to know how they work.

On the other hand, I can understand why such a question is important. Someone new to programming might simply not know what questions to ask or where to go once they've finished the tutorials. Or perhaps they just reach the limits of their knowledge and hit a road block.

However, there are lots of people who load this question with a lot of FUD about self-taught programmers. I just want to let them all in on a little secret: hardly anyone cares about your degree. It's an investment in an institution and doesn't grant you any knowledge that you couldn't gain on your own with a little work and self-discipline. That being said, such an investment does have its advantages. Automatic knowledge and the intuition to apply it is not one of them.
If it looks correct and doesn't cause a gaping maintenance problem, I wouldn't knock it. It's a promotional site, not a web app.
“Yehudon” Open Letter to Justice Goldstone
I thought "category theory" was a very strange thing to include in the list, so I searched down and found this equally strange comment: "I wish I had time to spend a year learning category theory to better understand how to structure things to be compositional". This is akin to saying, "I wish I had time to spend a year studying fluid dynamics so I can learn how to fly a plane".
I think the most interesting piece of the paywall is that you are connected with the actual value you find from the site. If you never hit the paywall, it's not worth much to you. If you hit it within a week, it lets you know that you care about it much more than you thought.

I found myself thinking, "do I really care about this enough to take a hit on the paywall?" today. Perhaps that means I'm more interested in the journalism than I thought.
Nokia in university training deal
This is actually a great way to teach someone about mouse states.
Also, check out http://aws.amazon.com/datasets
I work almost every "free" hour I can, on my startup project, excepting the occassional "night off" to go to the movies or something, and the rare social outing with friends. I typically leave my day job by 6:00pm, head home, possibly stopping at Barnes & Noble for a coffee and to browse / unwind for a little while, and am home by 7:00pm. If needed, I walk across the street to Food Lion, get groceries, come home, and cook, and eat. Typically by 8pm I'm back working... on a night where I don't stop at B&N or need groceries, I'm working by 7:00 or so. I usually go until near midnight, except Friday night when I work until the wee hours of the morning. Weekend schedule is more chaotic, but I treat both days as full-fledged work-days, committed to the startup.

When I start feeling to stressed, I allow myself a night off and walk across the street to the movie theater, take in a movie, or go out to eat or something, then come home and read some light fiction or something.
It's interesting — this study establishes what Apple guessed ten years ago: the only way to win against piracy is to compete with it in ease of acquisition.

I don't believe in the media industry enough to think this will have any impact but I'm glad to see the details laid out.

Meanwhile, the world moves on. I watch Starcraft casts by two Canadian guys recording in their bedrooms. I can watch their stuff instantly on my iPad when they upload it, anywhere in the world. I'd happily pay for more. Let's hope this leads the way to the future.
The Biggest Legal Danger for Open Source?
There is a lot of click fraud in Facebook ads. Have you ever checked your analytics logs to verify you are getting what you are paying for? In my case, around 40% of clicks I paid for never made it over. I emailed facebook ad support 6 times and the only response I ever received was from an auto responder. I'd never use their service again.
I think one should read the book 'My experiments with truth' before commenting on the Mahatma. The movie of course is bound to exaggerate things, which movie doesn't ? However, claiming that the Indian government and other 'national interests' twisted the movie's story in Gandhi's favor is quite ridiculous.

http://www.nalanda.nitc.ac.in/resources/english/etext-projec...
Mixergy, TWiST, TWiVC, Radiolab & 5by5 podcasts.
Boom. http://www.dotcloud.com/account/create

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Boom,

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and boom

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boom boom boom

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Because people with aspergers love to be nitpicking, soul-less jackasses.

edit: lol, multiple downvotes within minutes. Haven't you aspies got better things to do, like say playing minecraft, or relentlessly arguing on some obscure forum that Shakespeare didn't write his works?
You would think so, but Christ never thought of himself as Christ; Hindu is a name made up by outsiders; and Germany sounds nothing like Deutschland.

Anyway I was just seeking compromise.
The Most Difficult CEO Skill: Managing Your Own Psychology
Living Social v.s. Groupon warchest
Thanks for this! My dream Muni app would show the average time it's currently taking to get through the Market underground section (where I see most of the bottlenecks, esp. on the N). This is a good proxy in the meantime :)
I found that as well. Loading it into Instapaper worked quite nicely for readability.
I clicked around on seven lines or so, and got "0 out of 0 vehicles delayed, are you sure this line is even running?" several times.
One man's hero is another man's villain. Remember the "good stuff" about them, follow said "good stuff" and forget the not so "good stuff".

If you don't have anything "good" to say, shut up and go about doing "good stuff" yourself.
Also: http://www.dotcloud.com/account/create?invite_code=boom
take the risk after you get your first 10 million
Lets keep it real,

There is no perfect man! A man leaves behind his persona of what he believed or did. His karma is respected.

There is always a down side to everyone, as for Gandhi he failed as a father & many more things. Accept it, this should not affect your believe for what he did which no one else could.

I believe Steve Jobs for what he doing, I know he is not perfect.

lol my 2cents :P
Why don't they just charge businesses to use the site? And charge relative to their number of employees or revenue. All on the honor system - you get a badge by your company name when you pay.
So now that the WakeMate has been out for some time ... does this thing actually give you better sleep/rest, in practice?
I'm inclined to disagree. The converse -- what skills does a programmer who has never left academia lack? -- strikes me as perfectly valid. And surely there must be some benefit to taking four (or more) years out of your productive life to the study of programming?

But I say this as a self-taught programmer, so perhaps it's just that I'm envious of those who've had the benefit of a formal CS education.
Hmm, that's not a bad metric. Maybe I can write up a special function for the metro lines that computes headways in the Market Street Subway and incorporates those into the status calculations.

The main issue is that until I go through and rewrite the whole thing to do long-polling for every line, it's expensive to compute each route since I have to make several requests to ProximoBus to get all the necessary data. Caching for five minutes helps, but it's still less than ideal.
As a self-taught programmer myself, I confess this is exactly how I would frame the question. I'm constantly worried there's something crucial to which I'm oblivious.
I feel the same. Inferiority complexes for the self-taught?
Yeah, softpedia does this too. A shame.
This is interesting but should hardly be surprising if anyone knows how algorithmic trading works. The smart algorithms would also randomize the way they slice the orders exactly to throw off someone trying to look for a pattern
Wouldn't be close to a list of local businesses--only those that are customer-facing. Yelp has little coverage for B2B-focused businesses.
Or if they adopt a payment model that makes sense and readers will buy into. Reminds me of a recent HN submission - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2388064
There's also a rather longer discussion on the same event at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406681