skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably you'll find that the majority of hackers started with computers before they were 18. It's not so much that this is a requirement as it is a fact that unless a person starts in fairly early with computers they won't have developed that great an interest in programming them.
I'll go.
I'm not exactly sure what age I started programming at, but I think it was around 12. I was very angry of all the guys that had had the chance to have contact with computers earlier and didn't do anything worth with that, and I started programming as if I had to recover the time that I had lost (it sounds pretty funny in retrospective). I didn't have a computer for myself for about two years after that anyway, so I was programming games in lent computers or typing around at stores (or even programming in paper notepads, that's the sad story of a young maniac hacker). At an earlier age I was happy enough writing stories, drawing comics and trying to invent strange stuff.
Ask YC: Feedback on dezidr.com
Well, athletics are a sort of "apex activity". That is, a lot of resources are devoted to them as a goal, rather than they themselves producing resources.

I don't like sports, but usually watch the Olympics if I can. Humans have a 1000 or so physical characteristics, and it's interesting to see their upper limits approached.
I wonder if this would have any disruption on implanted devices like pacemakers?

And I'm kind of surprised there's no mention of Tesla's legacy on his wireless power transfer experiments.

http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_colspr.html
Ask HN: Quick. . . What's the best book on entrepreneurship you've ever read?
I'm a young entrepeneur just getting my feet wet in business. I realize at this stage that I'm probably very naive in various aspects of business, but I figure that there's many a seasoned entrepreneur out there that has plenty of wisdom to share with others less experienced. Basically I would just like to read something from someone who has made mistakes so I won't have to repeat them.

Any recommendations from anyone in hacker-land?
It's surely not a requirement, but I suspect many people who are seriously into anything begin developing their interest at a young age.

With hacking, unlike medicine or nuclear physics, it's reasonably easy to not only develop interest, but actually starting doing it.
1 Super Happy Dev House + 1 asshole = Freehackers Union

Or am I missing the point?
Disqus: comments can now be blog posts
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I've found that a good practice for building systems is not to rely on the software that comes with the OS for the specific task the system is being built for. When I can I always build task specific software from source, not because the software with the OS is bad always, but because building from source gives you a lot more control over the software (compile time features, paths, etc). And you can also typically get a more recent release of the software when building from source since it doesn't have to go through the OS vendor.
I touched my first computer at 19, but that was just one mandatory college class in programming, after which I never touched a computer for several years. I didn't become a programmer until I was 26 and even then, it was a chore I had to do as part of my regular job - it took me a while to actually like it. I had no interest in software until I was 28-29.

I am 40 now, and have had a fair bit of success in software (enough to be an occasional angel).

So don't worry - there are lots of slow learners like me!
Outdoor Uses of the Multi Functional Lattice Around the Home - Associated Content
4 hour work week.

its not exactly a book on being an entrepreneur, but its a book about setting goals, increasing efficiency and doing what you want to do. more of a motivational book than an informational book.

it was more of a driving force for me to do entrepreneurial work than any book actually on the topic of entrepreneurship.
Without spending the time to test out the algorithm, I can tell you this is sorely needed in the world of blogging. I'm appalled by the atrocious grammar often found at places like TechCrunch. I can't imagine how the big blogs don't all outsource copy-editing.

Perhaps an awesome feature would be the ability for them to use your site and then have the copy-edited stuff published directly to the blog, maybe via xml-rpc or something.
sweet stuff, looking forward to meeting you.
I know dynamic languages are all the rage these days, and that Haskell is on the rise, but Scala is really sexy to me right now.

All of my large-ish projects have been in either Java or Python (I've done smaller things in Ruby, Haskell, CL, Erlang, C, C++ - I enjoy playing around with different languages). I love the conciseness of Python, but I always find myself either spending way too much time writing tests or hunting down bugs after simple refactorings. Java, on the other hand, is, as a language, misery incarnate, but there's something intensely satisfying about being able to just delete large chunks of code and have the compiler tell me exactly where the functionality those chunks provided needs to be replaced.

I had looked at Scala in the past, but always from the POV of learning functional programming. For the last week, though, I've just been treating it as a Java replacement, and I'm in love. It has the same feeling of liberation as the first time I really dug into Python (and is actually more expressive than Python in several cases I've come across), but I can use my slash-and-burn refactoring style without any hiccups.

It inherits the huge number of Java libraries out there, and it has a fantastic web framework (liftweb), an Erlang-style concurrency library that feels like a built-in part of the language, pattern-matching, etc. etc. People evaluating languages for new projects should really take a serious look into this one.
Why does this link have a high proportion of incoherent comments? I'm not even to blame this time!
The Russell Executive Mesh Chair @ Office Depot for $230 received a good review on cooltools as a inexpensive alternative to the Aeron:

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000891.php

I would take a trip to Office Depot and Staples to see if you can find anything comfortable that meets your needs.
see you guys there.
the same way i would negotiate a salary anywhere else.

figure out what the minimum salary you would need to work for them. interview at other companies. get other job offers. tell them that you want to work for them, but you have other offers elsewhere and the minimum you'd accept is $xyz.

you must be prepared to walk out if you're going to negotiate. if they balk, tell them they have a week to reconsider or you'll accept a position elsewhere.

also, don't forget that google does have a lot of intangibles and perks that other companies don't. in addition, working at google is CV gold. they're probably trying to lowball people and get the people who just want to work for them in their offices, posisbly weeding out the people in it for the money.
I'm not familiar with Erlang - can you give an example?
I'd suggest either Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

Or Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Manifesto

Both books have ideas which helped to bootstrap economic revolutions whose effects are felt to this day.

But in seriousness, I don't think there is one best book. But reading a bunch of books by/about very successful people, such as (but not limiting to) Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, Oprah Winfrey, and Warren Buffett will help you gain insights and different perspectives.

What I see is that the most successful people are well rounded. They have the ability to approach problems from many different angles.

Entrepreneurship is so much about personal interactions. One book which really helped me in learning to get along with people is Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
I read this article some time ago, and while it makes some sense, I find its utility dubious. It seems to just provide an excuse for depression, and probably helps shove people into the "bad" direction rather than the light one. That's a shame, no?
I like Joel, and have subscribed to his blog for years, and what he say often seems to make a lot of sense. However, I know a lot of people in this industry, and I don't know a single one who uses a Fog Creek product. That, to me, speaks volumes.
Founders at Work is great. It will be especially helpful in arena of rights and wrongs from the experience of others.
But the 21st century should give rise to a new middle class in China and India who will become a part of the global market.
Art of the Start if you want to start your own business.
you should post them at comicwonder.com, i would like to hear you tell those cheesy jokes.
Coq.

Yes that's right. I regard it a programming language.
Cloud computing: A catchphrase in puberty
Shift-B then wait for 24 turns.
I guess I should have been clearer in my post. I'm not looking to save money here, I have no problem spending one to two hundred dollars on a hotel. But in my experience it's been a lot more fun in the past to meet random people and hang out for the night. I figured this would be a good opportunity to meet interesting members of the community, particularly around San Jose (met several cool people in SF already).
i second these remarks. this guy seems to be explaining ME, and the more social i am, the harder it is to concentrate on code.
I see. There definitely seems to be a connection between coming to Ruby and coming to Python, so this is a fair argument for their association.

I think that them being listed together does however muddle the value of the poll because you cannot tell how many Python and how many Ruby votes there are.

But again, I understand the logic behind their their association as I was someone who was first drawn to Ruby and then later to Python because of its proximity - I have since stuck with Python...
I'd read that a long time ago before writing the post. It's even more scary now that I have some more "data points" in focus and on the table....
"Yeah", he replied using his pencil-thin infrared flashlight input device.
Thanks. I've been a member of CS for a while although I've never actually looked for a host. I was more interested in offering others a place to stay if they happen to be in my area. I've been considering looking on CS but decided against it since I really wanted to try and meet members of this site more than I cared about finding a place to stay.
This seems like a good idea on the surface, but it has some pretty serious negative consequences.

When you need to replicate your environment, you now have to build all of the custom bits exactly as they are on the production system, rather than simply running "yum install perl foo bar baz". Depending on the length of your dependency chain, and the dependency chain of all of those components, this could be incredibly time consuming, even if you don't make any mistakes in the building process. Building a binary tarball of all the stuff you need is an option, but then compatibility issues with existing system libs and such are bound to happen, and that's pretty ugly from a paths and upgrades perspective.

You also make your environment less standard. A new hire is going to have to learn not only your application, but also all the crazy town details about your particular and very specific deployment (and setup their own copy of it on their own system). If everything except your app comes from OS-standard packages, you can expect someone familiar with RHEL/CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu or whatever OS you use to know where most things are right off the bat.

You'll probably do more things wrong with your build than the OS vendor did with theirs. In my business, I see a lot of custom PHP builds, for example, and almost every single one of them is broken in more than minor ways (and we end up hearing about it, and trying to figure out what they did wrong in their build). Your OS vendor version has a lot of people banging on their builds and reporting bugs. I'd pretty much always bet that their build is better than yours from a reliability perspective.

It makes it harder to replicate your deployment, if something catastrophic happens to your production box. Packages are more resilient to library changes and such than a big ball of crud tarball of your binary builds. And you won't want to spend several hours rebuilding on the new target machine while you're offline. A complete system backup could be restored...I dunno if you've ever done that on a remote system before, I assure you it is non-trivial and stressful.

What I would instead recommend is to find out which components you need custom (I'm not denying that sometimes you really do need, for example, perl 5.10 and the OS has 5.8.8--it happens, and that's fine), and build new packages int he native format and dump them into a yum or apt repository. It takes an extra day or two, if you don't already know how to do it, but it'll save you many many times that amount of time in the future--and those hours in the future might be far more stressful hours than while you're first setting things up. Rebuilding a package from SRPM or a deb source bundle is usually pretty easy...bumping revisions in dramatic ways might not be trivial, but recompiling with specific options is no problem at all. And, one can usually find a source package of the latest and greatest in the devel branch of the OS, which makes even major revision bumps easy (though, because it is the devel branch, you're probably giving up some maturity in the package...far fewer testers on the devel versions).
Equity returns were pretty lousy during the height of the industrial revolution in the 19th century. Stock prices only loosely correlate to general growth. The 1950s were boom years with lousy returns, and stocks shut up during periods in the 80s and 90s when the economy wasn't fantastic by historical comparison.

Stocks just haven't been all that great a way to make money, historically.
In general, medals from team events are counted per team, not per individual.
I'll be there if I wake up in time.
1. PG's essays/ Hackers and Painters

2. Founders at Work

3. High Stakes, No Prisoners : A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars

The other way to look at it is, if you are not making mistakes, you are not pushing the boundary enough!
People keep thinking that Apple actually wants DRM or most of the restrictions that come with iTunes. I'm 99% sure it has more to do with the restrictions the music labels impose when licensing the music to them (that's for example why you can get Apps over 3G but not music).
Correct each team only counts as one medal.

You are right there is no correlation. Being insanely dominant in a sport like basketball yields two medals (men & womens). Being insanely dominant in swimming yields medals for men and womens, multiple positions on the podium, multiple events, etc. No matter how great of a volleyball player you are, you can only earn one medal. So countries that focus on certain areas (track/field, swimming, diving, gymnastics) get a lot more than those that focus on team sports.
So, what changed at 28-29? Was it the choice of programming language? The advent of the Internet?
This is an interesting view point for someone on Hacker News, considering the way we follow tech startups here...

I'm a lifelong sports fan. Only in my mid 20's did I start becoming interested in business. One of the first things I noticed is how similar the business page is to the sports page. People follow companies like they're sports teams, gathering detailed statistics (profit, market cap, etc), analyzing match-ups (Microsoft vs Yahoo), discussing all-stars (Steve Jobs), etc.

Techcrunch is our Sports Illustrated.
What is the obsession with learning loads of programming languages? If you pick well, you only need a couple and you can spend your time and mental energy building new things.

Note: This is not to say I do not appreciate the value of learning different languages. It just seems to be an obsession to tally up as many different languages as possible instead of building new stuff with the languages you know.
A lot of people that follow sports closely do it for the same reason that others do cross word puzzles and some are political pundits. Humans enjoy intellectual stimulation beyond their work.

If you think that watching SportsCenter everyday and debating sports with your friends is any different than us reading hacker news and enjoying debating about it, then you are just suffering a delusion of superiority. It has nothing to do taking credit for this or that, the debate is what interest people and the statistics are just the weapons.
Hmmm. From what I've read and heard, India seems to have an effective electronic voting system (Wiki page links to external sources).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines

Anyone have any experience or know more about it?
It's Monday August 25th, 2048. You are old. Kids around you are fed up of your stories with no point, your failed dreams of longevity, rejuvenation and mental uploading sound like all fifty year old future predictions have ever done. There is technology everywhere, but like I said, you're old and it's all Greek to you (and after the cheap nervous system splice, you can't stop your hands shaking enough to coherently access the menus and change it back). Your colleagues aren't phoning you to ask for a boat impeller design as magnetohydrodrives became popular after the rise of the room temperature semiconductor and your firm went under a dozen years ago. There is still no one-pill-meal and the first moon base plans (all autonomic) are only 3 to 5 years from approval by the Brazilian Government.

The eleventy o'clock bell rings. Everyone stops what they are doing and switches to the two-minute-hate channel for a good rant and to diffuse a daysworth of anger. Today's figure was picked for raising hopes too high and contributing to the misery of millions. It's Ray Kurzweil. You vent your spleen all over (there's surgery that can fix that now, but you couldn't afford it if you sold your left kidney, assuming you hadn't already done so).

Amazingly, you do live in a dome-covered city. It's stiflingly hot and muggy year round.
I'm currently reading a book about Smalltalk - does that count?
Along with this, tell them the process behind figuring out how much your minimum is. Show them that you have an understanding of factors at play, and you aren't just grabbing upward frivolously.
Is it a bayesian filter on the linked page?
BBC iPlayer Goes H.264
What makes you think so? Red Hat, with RHEL, has committed to first being correct (where correct means: secure, binary compatible with all other 5.x versions, and reliable), and everything else (performance, latest and greatest, etc.) is less important or simply not on offer at all. That's what you're asking for, when you buy RHEL, and it's a good trade for production systems.

While this is a pretty serious problem in a pretty darned popular and important package (and I'm a Perl developer with well over half of our customers running RHEL or CentOS 5--so I'm a little more than distressed by it, since most of our customers may be seeing our software run slower than it should be), it is not apparent to me that there is a great solution to this problem--upstream has fixed it in the 5.9 and 5.10 branches, but not in 5.8. So, the only real solution is a binary incompatible change. RHEL guarantees no changes that effect binary compatibility across the lifecycle of a RHEL release (unless absolutely necessary for security or stability--and even then, I've seen them opt not to change something, because the stability issue only effected a small number of users and the binary incompatibility would have effected everyone).

It's a hard problem to solve--the implication that Red Hat are ignoring it isn't really fair.

That said, some of the folks managing tickets in the RH bug tracker are assholes. I've had very few positive experiences when filing bugs about RHEL (they did finally deal with my two tickets about how much up2date sucked, by deprecating up2date and replacing it with something awesome, so I'm feeling pretty good).
Economical Outdoor Lighting - Associated Content
The reason Bram sees next to no comments on the Fast Extension is because it is more or less accepted as a standard already. It does numerous good things, patches several holes in the original spec and is fairly easy to implement with a fallback to the old protocol.
The overlaying issue about that is more the hacker disposition than hacking on code specifically. Despite not working with code at a young age, chances are most hackers were pushing the limits of some system for the lot of their lives.
For a moment I was wondering if they were talking about me! Hits too close to home..
Interesting.

What's missing, here, though, is the techniques to deal with this - yourself, without needing to be in an environment that condones your habits.

I've got most of those traits. Yet I survived 4 years in a large business consulting corporation, which is very unforgiving of this type of personality. And I'm now running my own business. Both of those activities are highly incompatible with the ADHD programmer mind.

How to do it? Well, there are many components to it. I should probably write them up on my blog one of these days. In fact, I've been planning to, and I probably will soon.
an interesting factor to see might be whether they're communist or the pro-West before the end of cold war.
You're confusing individual purchasing power with measures of inflation, which is about the value of money.
The best way to negotiate is by not needing that job at Google/(substitute some other company name) i.e. always be prepared to walk away.
PHP cheat: ==, ===, empty(),is_null(),isSet()
If I read this correctly, does this article say that an Update statement is blocking selects? Does SQL Server really work like this?

My expertise is in Oracle - readers don't block writers and writers don't block readers. Infact writers don't block other writers unless they are updating the same row. I think MySQL works the same way as Oracle in this regard.

I find it hard to imagine building a performing web application on top on a database in which writers block readers!
What do you use to email your users?
We have thousands of users and want to email them - preferably with some software/service that can get the email addresses out of our database, without having to manually export. A few I have seen can connect to mysql, but not postgres :(

While I could use something like mailman I am hoping some of you have found a cost effective method for emailing a large number of users and getting statistics as well.
The best leaders are born with it, you can refine their talent but if you don't have the confidence to step up to the plate when the time comes, you will never be a leader. So kids need a framework that challenges them to accomplish things while there is a real risk of failure.
Check out the comment left by A.R.M. The INTP thing he's talking about is a scale on the Meyers Briggs Type Inventory, though I've never seen what he's referring to as 'extroverted intuition' exhibiting as ADD/ADHD symptoms, interesting...