skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great. I'm working on learning objective-c in pursuit of making ios stuff as well and i can relate to many of the hurdles you've faced since I'm going through them now. It's frustrating but it's good to see someone come out the other side.
I know it's in vogue to throw the word bubble around, but I'd be interested to see the CS enrollment stats worldwide. The first generation of kids that spend more time in front of their computer than the TV are starting to hit college. More screen time is bound to create more people interested in how they can program the thing they sit in front of all day.
looking forward to the post ... seems like a great direction for LaunchRock to go.
Risk of getting caught is so vastly different online that it's a difference not just of degree, but of kind. The old formula makes no sense in this context. The purpose of a single person's fine in this context should never be full restitution of all the damage done by all the people.
Let's Prefill the Public Domain
Comparing salaries of different currencies can be trickier, so this takes a burden off the pool creator by specifying a standard.
sorry, that was my point. I use dropbox, and I knew they hashed files, but I didn't think through the implications.
Definitely not true. I think the kids excuse is a common one, and often times quite valid. It's a change of mindset really though that's needed.

And as you said, mortgage, kids, etc. are just different variables in the equation. Just because it might be harder doesn't mean it still can't be done.

I'm launching a new community in May for parent entrepreneurs called Naptime Entrepreneurs (http://www.naptimeentrepreneurs.com).
I'd agree - it's merely the risk-return equation that needs to be considered at a higher level once your over the "tween" period. There is absolutely nothing stopping you go forth and conquer - however, the probability that you have an inordinate number of external commitments [social and financial] are where the ability to be nimbal become more apparent.

Stopping work and having what ajg1977 states - "Mortgage, day care, insurance, kid commitments etc" - is the battle. Many successful startups have an average "age" of around 26 which seem to be [from some Y-Combinator article I read] the age when startups succeed for a whole raft of factors [age, martial status, flexibility, financial security, maturity etc etc] - there's always an exception to the rule however.

If you >30 - nothing's stopping you but yourself. The question often answers itself however - most >30 stop themselves due to externalities.

*but best of luck :P
That's a great point. In my experience, this is what makes bootstrapping your own startup the most practical option if you are older and have more commitments, because who wants to give money to someone who can only commit 10 or less hours a week to something?

Maybe I'm wrong about this because I've never actually tried to get funding for anything, but the ycombinator program definitely seems that way. My wife certainly isn't going to agree to move to SF and live on that kind of money. I'd have to have another income stream or a lot of money in the bank.

I'd be curious to know how people have gotten around this.
Kiip: Welcome to your ad-driven future
Indeed. In fact I'd say 40s or 50s was probably more normal in many industries. In most non-IT industries to start a business you need capital, connections, market experience etc etc - resources not available to the average 20yo.
Couldn't agree more with you. Good points.
So you, like the OP, are assuming everyone posting in this thread about getting more money are petty losers who just go "waaaah! He get's $500 more a year than I do! THAT'S NOT FAIR!". Does that sound reasonable to you? Does it sound fair? Why would you assume that instead of assuming they understand the market and that salary is simply the market value of your time?
If Apple had any interest in doing so, perhaps. But let's make a huge assumption and agree with Scoble that Windows doesn't matter and Apple is it, could they even produce enough devices even theoretically to make Airplay anything more than another feature Apple accessories businesses check off?

Protocols live and die off ubiquity, and I am not convinced Apple will get that outside of the shrinking dedicated mp3 player industry. And for better or worse, Apple will not let any other company put Airplay in their devices.
(damage to society) <= (fine) * (risk of getting caught)

This is nuts. If say a kid spray paints a tiny bit on an abandoned building at night, and then gets caught, by your logic we should ruin his life. We must treat something like that like murder because the chances of getting caught are so low.
The same thing happened ~10 years ago and you're still programming. Just because there's an uptick in the number of people majoring in a field, it does not mean there will be an uptick in the number of professionals in that field.
Excellent article about the core necessities of an agile process. See the forest not the trees!
Seems like there is a missing component: Frowning. When the lowest mood available is "calm," it feel like it's missing half the picture...
Is Rails 3.1 going to depend on having both a ruby interpreter and a JS interpreter (presumably node?) capable of running coffeescript installed?
This is a great write up on the experience! Truly inspirational.

I especially like the following quote:

It truly is amazing how much practice helps. Every time I write a new program, I run into a ton of unforeseen problems and bugs. While frustrating at the time, I usually plan around them the next time I program. This makes me feel like I’m in my very own while loop:

while (stillPrettyBadAtProgramming) {
programmingPracticeTime++;
Program *newProgram = [Program programWithType:ProgramTypeGame];
if (
newProgram.isReallyGood == YES && programmingPracticeTime >= A_HUGE_AMOUNT
){
stillPrettyBadAtProgramming = NO;
}
}
Play Framework (full stack Java framework with Scala) v1.2 released
OK, then after taxes, rent, food, utilities, entertainment, savings, and everything else, my salary is also $0.

Salary is what your employer pays you, not what you don't spend out of that.
A social bookmarking site, with Twitter's follow model and auto-tagging search: http://imi-imi.appspot.com/

An Omegle / Chat Roulette clone, but that works over Google Talk: http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
The JSON Saga by Douglas Crockford - See slides 58-61.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=www.crockford.com%2Fcodeca...
Anybots Has An Army of Telepresence Robots Ready to Send Your Way
And this is why I setup all my firewalled machines like they were outside my router. Just In Case.
That sounds pretty sad; I wonder why that class isn't in the MIS department or something.
1. Flexibility, typical hours
2. Time-off/vacation days
3. Salary
4. Benefits
5. Funding
No. He knew exactly what the question was about, and what it was regarding. Their was no misunderstanding there. He didn't appreciate the word choice because characterizing it as a security issue implies certain things. But no, he knew exactly what he was being asked.

Sure, the initial question was poorly worded, but he's not a stupid man.
Does that decrease net freedom?

Edit: you added the comment about SQLite after I replied. The problem with public domain is that it's messy. It has a specific legal definition which is not the same across jurisdictions (and in some places it's not recognized at all). It's cleaner and more succinct to say, "use this for whatever you want, including commercial purposes, but don't blame me for any problems".
It's not really that shocking. Most people don't program in a language with manual memory allocation anymore.

I would guess that people might know 1 when they think about it some, but really don't know anything about the rest.
googling "rim india" while give you a pretty broad range of stories covering the topic -- here's a sample: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-31/rim-s-agreement-wit...

basically some middle eastern governments want easier access to BB users emails.
Just my feedback:

I've never seen tasskr before. It looks simple and I like that and I particularly like the progress bars--this seems to be begging for a phone client. However, I didn't sign up even for a free account because I don't see how to use this with my smartphone. You may or may not support phone, but it was pretty easy for me to conclude that you don't and also don't plan to, either.

I've been slowly moving through the various online task managers looking for one that "fits" and most don't work out, but some sort of phone support effort has become requisite before I will even bother because that's what I'm looking for. Frankly, I'm also sort of burned out looking for task managers and hunting for something that works well in the desktop and on the phone--there are so many half-there implementations that I just don't chase them all anymore.
You can affect it, but that's not what the bonus system is about. It it were you would "deserve" a bonus for simply not destroying the place, since this is the only thing really somewhat under your control.

Everyone, down to the cleaning service, has some effect on the company. Otherwise they wouldn't be there. Should a big chunk of everyone's compensation be based on company performance? If you do that then we're all suddenly big risk takers, and therefor vastly underpaid.
sure. pick one and make people use it
Have you ever head of Bob Mankoff? He's the cartoon editor of the New Yorker. He created a program to generate simple 1-grams and bi-grams of the weekly comic caption contest to get a general idea of what submissions are looking like, and what's popular. Right away he can get a good idea of what most people are thinking about it, and it has an effect on the caption they publish.
Negative salary is an oxymoron. How can you consider debt a form of compensation?
Labelled branches: why mercurial is better than git
I'm going to build a bulk Whois service that responds in well structured JSON to privately license to people. I'm working on another project that needs access to that data so I need to build it anyways, and I'm sure a dozen or two people would like access as well.

I'm planning on using Sinatra and Redis for it too, so yay.
Don't you feel it would have been more prudent to start by bundling CoffeeScript support and then changing the default in a later version?

It seems like an overly aggressive goal to do both things at once.
> I have a hard time understanding this line of argument.

It's not a line of argument. It's a line of inquiry. You've given anecdotal evidence that cross-user deduplication benefits you and people you know, but what about some actual numbers from Dropbox?

Producing actual numbers -- "eg cross-user deduplication saves our users 30% of their upload time and bandwidth, on average" -- seems like a great way for Dropbox to counter this issue.

> I imagine this feature saves users tons of bandwidth, as most of the people I know use Dropbox for backing up important software, rare music and videos.

We don't have to imagine! Let there be numbers!

Also -- "rare" music and videos that everyone's uploading duplicates of? ;)
I thought the way the first question was worded was intentionally misleading. The interviewers second try was better, but at that point, I think they had already soured the interview.

I also think that the issue was dealt with, and the countries who had threatened to shutdown RIM, are no longer posturing, so it is kind of like bringing up old bad news for no reason, when the company is really there to promote the Playbook and show of their tech, not delve into an old issue that has been resolved, and answer questions that have been answered already.

I'd feel differently if this was an ongoing issue, but a google search shows that this was an issue last summer, and doesn't appear to really have come up since. That's just bringing back bad news which has no bearing on today.
Yes, good point. The OP should change it to be more generic to the users context.

Either allow configuration of currency, or a customised message or something like that.
I have no problem with Rails supporting CoffeeScript out of the box, as the abstraction is really good at showing the power of Javascript and not emphasizing its bad parts.

(And, come on, list comprehensions in Javascript? Awesome.)

No one is taking away your raw Javascript, it'll work just fine. This just makes it easy for people to use CoffeeScript when they first build an app. It's more of a statement than anything else.
Basically, these countries are requiring companies to provide backdoors so they can read encrypted emails.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=blackberry+india&tbs=nws:1
I've said before that CoffeeScript is not a "replacement" or "alternative' to JS since it "compiles" to javascript--but in this case you're talking about providing source that users will have to interact with in a language in which they may not be familiar. Yes, it ultimately becomes Javascript--but what about the javascript developer who wants to learn rails?

I'm sure coffeescript is a fine language in its own right--but the fact that it has to generate Javascript code rather than something lower-level is frustrating to me. I haven't dug into it enough to know; but my gut tells me that (like other examples of code attempting to "compile to another programming language") the output from the "compiler" is less than quality code. Maybe, in most cases, this is fine. In some environments though where performance is at a premium, I don't know that CS will output well optimized code.
Jose Valim commented on the commit:

This is going to be in your generated Gemfile only. It can still be swapped, removed or replaced as everyone is used to do when it comes to prototype/jquery.
Three Common Marketing Mistakes and How to Fix Them
It was handled in a Monthy Python's way, as per the opening credits of The Holy Grail:

> A Møøse once bit my sister ...

We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.

Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...

We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

Møøse trained by TUTTE HERMSGERVORDENBROTBORDA

(...)

The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.

The credits have been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.

(etc.)

- - -

It's unwise to fire the firers at the same time as the firees.
I believe there is a difference between knowing how memory and pointers work and being proficient at pointer manipulation in C.

If you enforce such kind of interviews in C, you will miss lots of great FP programmers. Maybe you don't care anyway.
For the record, SASS/SCSS is also slated to be the default CSS compiler.

http://twitter.com/joshpeek/status/58187372789104640
How We Built ShareCam In 3 Hours Per Week
It has a basic mobile site. http://tasskr.com/?mobile=1 And plans for more. I should add something to the front page mentioning it.
This is a commercialized version of a technique used by the "guerrilla gardeners" movement that has taken root in many blighted cities. The idea is that there are many vacant, ugly, fenced-off, lots that the owners/flippers have no plans to do anything about—so you might as well try to add some nature since local residents are the ones who have to look it at.

That's some background, I guess it's HN worthy if you are looking into various sub-cultures for ideas to mainstream in a popular marketplace.
#1 question: What kinds of seeds are in there?

Other questions: are the plants an invasive species? will they crowd out other plants? I imagine if they can be thrown "anywhere" they don't need much water/soil to survive. Like most of the weeds growing around my backyard.
Can't get a real girlfriend? Get a 'Cloud Girlfriend'
Tech's Top Women Under 30
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-07-29/india...

"The [Ministry of Home Affairs] has asked the [Department of Telecommunication] to tell [RIM] in no uncertain terms that its emails and other data services must comply with formats that can be monitored by security and intelligence agencies."

The Indian government has threatened to cut off Blackberry services if RIM doesn't comply. I don't think calling that a security issue is off the mark.
They recently added a bank reconciliation feature. You can upload a CSV statement from your bank which, sort of, automates it (still needs some manual input).

Unfortunately CSV statements from my bank (Barclays) aren't compatible with their importer. Hopefully they'll add support for more statement formats.
Here's what the distribution looks like so far, after trimming the ends off-

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/7461/21709307.jpg

Looks like $50-60K is coming up as the peak of this when you bucket the answers into $10k classes. For the record, "finding the mean" is not the appropriate way to look at this type of data.
Does anyone know why SXSW decided to kill their podcast feed this year? In years past, http://feeds2.feedburner.com/SXSWpodcasts delivered the majority of the panels as audio, spread out over the next six months or so. This year it is only a few text posts.
This article, one in a series of articles complaining about HN's decreasing quality, continues to reinforce two beliefs of mine:

(1) A new, better designed version of HN is needed, and
(2) A design that does not "water down" from the perspective of EVERY reader
MUST be based on reader's choices which will result in different users seeing different things (people don't have the same tastes, and these tastes evolve).

I have a very concrete proposal of how this should be done:

http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1

What I don't know is this: If I were to implement the above news website, how
would it take off the ground at first. Give me a convincing story and I will do it.
I think it's an even better story how he "guessed wrong"
with Hamiltonian mechanics, also; the only difference is
that he never fixed the mistake and it wasn't really fixed
until the early 20th century with the development of
optimal control.

See "The Brachistochrone Problem and Modern Control Theory" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.26....)

The TL;DR is that classical mechanics can be formulated as finding a time history of position and velocity which minimizes a certain function of them both. Hamiltonian mechanics essentially optimizes the function over position and velocity as if position and velocity were independent, then adds the constraint that velocity be the time derivative of position via a Lagrange multiplier. This Lagrange multiplier is the momentum.

Of course, no one in a physics course actually learns it that way; undergraduates just memorize some equations and graduate students, if they are lucky, learn if from the Hamilton-Jacobi equation (which is how Hamilton developed it in the first place) where the momenta become the spatial gradient of the function to be minimized when evaluated at all positions. (It's exactly the same as the Bellman return function in dynamic programming; hence the name "Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.")

IMHO, neither of these other developments is as intuitive as the Lagrange multipler one; but because Hamilton's original formulation obscures it, no one in physics learns it that way.

A fun postscript: when you consider the equations of classical mechanics in terms of position and momenta (this combination is what physicists call "phase space") they form a manifold with a special property called "symplectic"; symplectic geometry can be formulated in terms of matrices over the field of quaternions. According to some people, this idea was a big breakthrough, but I don't believe Hamilton himself, despite having formulated both, ever noticed.
I was following until I got here:

It also offers 100% secure file deletion (disconnect both the external and the internal power!). Flash drives can't offer this. Hard disks suffer from magnetic remnance and so retain their data even after they have been overwritten several times! But the HyperDrive5 is forensically wiped every time the power is fully disconnected

Wait a minute, if the drive gets accessed quickly or if it's really cold, RAM actually retains its contents. You can't expect the charges to suddenly revert to randomness!

Plus, this presents a major issue if someone wanted to sabotage you... If it's really that easy to clear the contents, someone may just come and clear it for you while you aren't looking.
For example, if you upload a Rails 3 application that (as per the default) disables serving javascript and html files, CloudFoundry (and any PaaS that runs Rack basically) have to flip that switch for you. I believe that clause just makes sure such things are permitted. For Java apps, you have to generate XML files containing whatever the values turned out to be at runtime, etc.
It's hard to debug when you get compile errors though. I gave up on the language when I could not figure out why a script wouldn't compile; the errors given are basically worthless.

Later I opened the file on Windows (Notepad++) and saw that one line had not been indented, which wasn't showing up on Vim/Gedit. I never tested it to see if that was indeed the problem, I'd already moved on.
It's entirely possible I'm in the minority on this, but the following (theatrical, paraphrased, artistic-liberty-ized) conversation implies that there is a serious security issue with Blackberry devices:

India: Give us access to your secure messaging service.
RIM: Okay.
At the very end of the clip, Lazaridis says in closing the interview: "this [the topic being discussed] is a national security issue". He knew exactly what was being asked; and even if the phrasing was better, he'd have given the same reaction.
I'm pretty sure IE was hyped as a Netscape killer... which is what it ultimately, sadly, did.
Sometimes you discover things you love "late" in your life.

I always have loved dancing, but only did that in discos and partying, taking no classes. Then I started going to some classes (bollywood dancing) in 2008. That wasn't it yet.

September 2009 I started doing lindy hop, I love it. If I could devote even more time to it I would, but it's hard to do with a full-time job that pays for the dancing and some family debt. I was 34 then, and some time later I started keeping an approximate account of how much have I done, classes and social dancing, to have an idea of how much it would take to get to the 10k hours to be really good(yeah, I heard of it too).

Now I have about around 694 hours of lindy-related dances (287 classes, 309 social, 91 solo charleston and some tap, blues to the side) and I'm starting to be good enough to recognise most of my failings without help.

It's not as impressive as what he does, but it's about 11 hours of dancing a week this year, while keeping a full-time job, being a bit sleep-deprived because of night parties, and trying to live as frugal as I can in order to have money for classes, international workshops and parties almost every day of the week.

Yeah, this means that if this (10k hours) is true I'd need a bit more than 20 years to get to be exceptional. Well, at least I will get good at this thing I love.
fyi, http://tasskr.com works for me, but when I initially went to www.tasskr.com, it didn't
In which case if it was really a "non-issue" the RIM CEO should have said as much, and issued a quick reassurance for users.

Instead by getting so defensive he's guaranteed that the InterWebs will now be talking about this and not the PlayBook.