skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, I'm sure there are differences between companies. However, your measure of "people love working there" might be misleading. All of my ex-colleagues loved working on games, and almost all were pretty happy at the company, because, you know, the previous company they worked for had worse death marches - 7 days a week, not 6! and from the start of the project, not just the last year of development! - and wow, our company paid up to GBP 7.50 for takeaway dinners when you worked more than 11 hours that day! Plus, the previous company went out of business and didn't pay the last 3 months of salary, whereas this one was still hanging on.

I don't know exactly how it happens, either that people talk themselves into being grateful for their situation, or they just drink enough game industry Kool-Aid to not see how it's completely broken.

Don't get me wrong, I don't regret working in games for a year - I'd almost certainly be wondering what professional game development was really like if I hadn't. I also don't know if the leap into self-employment had come so soon or at all if my quality of life had been better at some other job. In any case, I'm glad to have left that behind, and glad to have done it when I did.

Plus, I discovered I like programming more than I like game development, which means that I'm actually working on more fun and interesting stuff now - although my job at the time was tech/engine programming, most of it wasn't actually that challenging; I wasn't solving interesting problems. There's a lot of reinventing the wheel (and the bugfixing that goes with it) in the game industry...

Oh, and by the way: getting into game development as a competent programmer isn't nearly as hard as they like to make it out to be. (I was also involved with recruitment) I'm guessing they have to maintain that air of elitism to keep people interested. If you're itching to work on games, I'm not going to try and talk you out of it; you'll have to decide for yourself if that kind of life is for you. If you have a wife or girlfriend you'd like to hang on to, I'd make sure your notice period is short, though...
> so the quality is high all the way to the end, and then the toner shuts down.

I think most people are aware that the ink is a finite resource, and are happy to change it when they see the level is getting low and not producing good results. Let them judge when that is.
I learned BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80 "Color Computer" that I got 2 weeks after I turned 5.

How many out there have been programming since they were kids?
I modded you up for that, but someone else modded you down....

Self confidence is one of the largest indicators of entrepreneurial success.
For grad schools, probably (keeping in mind that engineering/cs grad students almost never pay a dime to go to grad school).

For undergrad, no. I went to my state school (UF) instead of several ivy-caliber schools (Carnegie Mellon) because of financial situations. I got such a superior all-around college experience. I wouldn't have traded those 4 years for anything in the world.

Big name schools have big name people because of the research they do, not the classes they teach. That means unless you are doing research, you aren't benefiting. The only benefit is that, on average, you'll be around smarter people. You only need to find a small group of really smart people to make that part of college work for you, and you can find those at any good school.
"the fact that they necessitate a special form (yield) and cannot be bound to a variable, and are not passed as standard function parameters just makes them inconsistent and gross."

Which brings us to another point - when exactly do you actually need them? I have for every 1000 lines of ruby code maybe one line of "yield" code, and this is only to further extend classes for flexibility. Other languages dont allow you to choose what you want to have, ruby does.

You simply have to make decisions when to use what.

For me it is simplicity, elegance and beauty. These are my biggest design criterias.
Unless I misunderstand your use of 'confidence', that's exactly wrong.

Confidence is necessary for anyone who wishes to achieve anything extraordinary. It'll come in handy when you're working on a dinky little idea that no one else understands or respects. It'll come in handy when you're quitting your day job, driving a crummier car than your neighbors, and working late into the evening for $0/hr. It'll come in handy when you're asking investors for money. Need I go on?

If you make important decisions solely on a rational level, how in the name of all that is holy could you ever start a company? What if your rational decisions never lead you to a 'positive expected return'?
Do I sound bitter?
Try FriendFeed. It is definitely a work in progress but it can really help if you subscribe to a limited number of people.
Everybody gets so mad about this because a lot of printer vendors go out of their way to force you to not use materials or resources that you purchased, and presumably the only reason is for them to make more profit.

It would be one thing if the printer had a red flashing button that you had to push to override the forced stop (i.e. an explicit, vendor-approved method of opting out of quality in favor of using up something you paid for). Some product owners are fortunate enough to have (generally accidentally) selected products that can be overridden via vendor-unapproved hacks.

While it's quite benevolent that companies like Brother choose to give us "great printers for less than $100", I don't feel that they're beyond reproach for selling me a container of liquid or powder at an exceptionally high price and telling me i can't have the last 5-10% of it for any reason.

It absolutely is infuriating to have a printer that is fully capable of printing a sheet of paper, except that it has been programmed not to.
Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages" of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In". http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html

From the article... "As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don't."
Rather than cherry picking failed predictions (btw, the million dollar home page is _still_ retarded) you should try to explain what it is that a 3D digital environment offers that makes it so superior to a 2D environment. I guess the difference between us is that I have actually worked for a failed virtual worlds company back in the day (Electric Communities) and so I know both how hard it is to pull this off from a technical side as well as how many of the things you think people might want to do in 3D are really things they will happily do using regular web and internet services.
I think the "can't be bound to a variable" thing is a bit of a red herring too, especially if you're OK with Lisp and Javascript's syntax --- you can create a full-fledged Proc object with "lambda" any time you want.

The inconsistency is annoying, but 99.999% of the time, Ruby is actually giving you what you want.
I've got a LaserJet 5 with a duplex unit. The thing weighs a ton, will happily break your back if you try to transport it, and will occasionally get itself into paper jam when you need something printed NOW (mine has thus earned the print queue name of 'satan'), but I still love it. Just gotta keep a parallel port around to plug it into...
The domain name is a nice Futurama reference.
The irony in the reporter's statement is that Bowdoin and Northwestern are probably more similar to each other than Northwestern is to any of the other Big Ten schools.
This is why it's important to have good UED (user experience design) people.

It can be very frustrating for a programmers to work with them because they just don't seem to care how hard it is to create some design they've come up with. They keep warbling on about some people called "users", who are the most important apparently... funny that.
Barack Obama's Million-Dollar Text Message?
As much as I like the WSJ, I can't stand the form-factor of newspapers. They're so awkwardly large that you can't read them on a bus/train or almost anywhere else comfortably... not to mention the ink smudging on fingers and anything else it rubs up against. I'd go for an online or Kindle (do they have that?) subscription.
You can but you shouldn't need to. Sometimes I want to do something like:

dict['item'] = def _(var1, var2):
fn_var = 1
do_some_magic(fn_var, var1, var2)

There's no good reason why I should instead have to do:

def fn(var1, var2):
blah
dict['item'] = fn

.. or write a decorator.

I'm frequently tempted to write a python-like scheme syntax to sit in my python programs so I can just do this stuff and to hell with the excuses used to prevent my first code block from above from working.
I go to a major chain bookstore, the bigger the better. I look around for something really good, when I find something I like I then take the laptop out of my bag and I look up the book at Amazon. Quite often one of Amazons recommendations ends up being more interesting to me, so at that point I'll use my mobile to call a smaller, independent bookstore and special order the book. In the several days it takes to arrive I usually just read the same blogs you guys already mentioned.
Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source; Wants to be the WordPress of Social Bookmarking
I'd like to point out no-one is cheating them out of their business models, they aren't updating their business models to the market.

Printers are getting cheaper to make. They keep lowering their prices to stay competitive. In order to keep making increasing profits they have adopted the Razor blade model.

Rather than innovating they are lying to customers to try and keep them spending. I don't mind a printer that warns me I might be about to run low, if it's off by weeks or a month I can live with that. I do mind a printer that forces me to waste.
what's your app?
And unpleasantly reactionary.
Somehow Cuil vanished at the end of Week 1. My biggest concern is those 25 millions that came from Teachers' pension funds.
Thanks for the heads up. Been searching all the news articles for a mention on what technology its built on and couldnt find any references.

Doing some digging on the actual site:
- The server is litespeed
- The actual html on ma.gnolia sort of gives indications of Rails. The CSS and Javascript includes display the Rails pattern of postfixing the file timestamp on the url path.

Anyways, I'm excited. OpenSourceRails.com is in need of a good social bookmarking app.
It's a kind of spreadsheet.

Edit: I realized my reference to Resig might be misleading. It's a post from Feb 2008 about browser optimization in general, not FF3. The point is that he talks about how browser optimization has to include rendering and DOM operations.
Has Couple Found Formula To Win Lottery?
Where's a link to the report from UNICEF? This is the stupidest thing I have read on the internet for a long time (like, 28 minutes and counting)
and cannot be bound to a variable

&block ?
Yes, but he manages to find 3rd party applications that work nicely. For example, in the case of the web browser, he raves about opera mini.

Perhaps the key for Nokia is to just ship those apps natively instead of rolling their own.
I'm incredibly biased but I recommend Socialbrowse! Send me an email if you would like an invite

dave at socialbrowse
The iPhone validates another company's product+market. Most of the whiz-bang features cited are not really that remarkable these days, even in feature-phones, let alone smartphones.

That said, I'm not sure why you'd pick this phone over a Blackberry 8300:

- The Blackberry is the reference standard for corporate mail integration.

- The camera in the 8100 at least is absolutely rocking, judging from this picture on the front page of Reddit right now (Mosquito larvae, some people are weirded out by it -- http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/42132/IMG00056.jpg ).

- I believe the music player is comparably acceptable but unimpressive.

- Comments about browsing both seem to end with "but that's ok, you can run Opera Mini on it"
Funny, I asked a similar question on another forum recently, and the consensus was something like "don't turn on adsense, it looks spammy." I'm not sure if they were objecting to adsense or ads in general.

I have to say, I was a bit taken aback by this advice. Given the penetration of adsense in this day and age, I hardly think it looks "spammy" unless you throw giant ad units up on all sides of the page.

Anyway, I think you put it in right from the start if you're sure that's your revenue model. Most people are used to seeing ads, especially on content sites that clearly aren't going to charge money. As someone else mentioned, just don't make it obnoxious.
Great talk by Tony Wright on SEO/Marketing
http://del.icio.us/popular

del.icio.us/popular and HN are my absolutely required readings every day.

Try AideRSS for other blogs if you you want a better signal/noise ratio:

http://www.aiderss.com/

Besides this, websites I visit sometimes:

* iTulip (http://www.itulip.com) - alternative economic news

* Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net) - my favorite blog.

* Your Rights Online Slashdot (http://yro.slashdot.org) - about the coming orwellian state

* Pitchfork Media Best New Music (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/best_new_music)
They've actually done a study on the effect of colleges on success here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322.

They looked at students who got into Princeton about 30 years ago, and compared the success of those who went to Princeton versus those who got in but went somewhere else. Unless you came from a really poor background, it doesn't seem to make a significant difference.
One can commit to a plan while recognizing that it has a relatively small chance of success. The only other way to get past the startup phase of the business is to actively conceal the truth from yourself. To aim for "confidence"
like EliAndrewC said, __getattr__ is Python's version of method_missing: http://docs.python.org/ref/attribute-access.html

And no, that's not all method_missing. looks like method_missing plus a block.
Well, like PG says, it only has to increase your expectation by 6.4%. For some people, it probably would not. Early paypal employees, people with other successes, etc, have unlimited access to funding/capital.

I would say that for most first timer's though, it's a clear win. If nothing else, PG's guidance probably saves you from well more than 6% wasted equity later on.
I remember a quote from some movie i don't really remember which said " If you can't help yourself, Self-Help Books can't really Help you".

I have always felt, self-help books are a big sham. First the mainstream media convinces you that you are a loser by showing people younger and dumber than you having more money. Once you go into the loser phase, some smart idiot who has inherited millions of dollars, who has never seen poverty writes a book which teaches you how to get rich. Are we humans so naive now that we have started reading books which teach us how to become rich.

I don't know how you become rich and also i am pretty much sure Bill Gates or Warren Buffett can't you teach you that too(mainly because there was lot of chance or randomness involved in their richness). This is my view, if you have a contradictory view, i would like to hear.
We are witnessing the Graying of Europe.

You mean - people are moving around?

EDIT: I just foung the phrase "Graying of Europe" to be a bit Enoch Powell, perhaps it's just me. Apologies...
Office competitions here are typically

1. Football (NFL) pools. You pick the winner of each game, usually using the spread, and get points for each correct.

2. NCAA brackets.

3. Fantasy Sports, usually football but sometimes baseball. Often played online.

Other than that it's mostly just good old fashioned offline p2p wagering.
Who Needs Harvard?
Favorite Programming Quotes
How do you catch and transform method arguments with __getattr__? For instance:

mov ebx, [ebp+4]

needs to detect that ebx matches a Register class constant and that [ebp+4] is not an array, but rather a register indirection expression.
Good afternoon from Kiritimati, Christmas Islands, Kiribati!
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=274

(from the London Timezone)
from module import *

tada!

it's just considered bad python style to do that... because it tromples your global namespace!!
The block itself isn't being bound; it's being converted to an explicit Proc object named "block".
Props to Google for trying things outside their core competencies. It takes guts risk failure, especially when you're a big company.
The mission should be the other way around - it should be to create a company that creates, as its byproduct, an 'end' to oil.
> It absolutely is infuriating to have a printer that is fully capable of printing a sheet of paper, except that it has been programmed not to.

No, that is exactly the deal you agreed to when you bought the printer. That's the whole point of inexpensive printers. Buy high-end printers if you want lower per-page costs.

You, the customer, make the choice. There's no lying involved by anybody. The terms were perfectly clear up front.
If you end up with smarter friends, then yes.
__getattr__ needs to return a callable (usually a function, but you can 'call' other objects as well). And that callable will be called with the arguments to the method.

You can do all that stuff with python, though the syntax isn't as loose; you can't omit the () around method calls which is what I think you're doing here in Ruby. That restriction tends to improve readability and reduce bugs at the cost of making it harder to have a truly transparent DSL.
I'm 100% with you on simplicity, elegance and beauty. I just demand that as much from the design of the languages I use as from my own code.

I've tried to explain it like this. To me ruby feels Turtles all the way down with respect to Objects, but some kind of nightmare tunnel of interleaved beasts down with Functions.

I don't think I should have to make that compromise, so I'll happily go about writing my ruby when I have to, but I'm waiting for the language that is consistent all the way down.

If I could replace every yield I've ever written in ruby with a .call() I would be so much happier :)
Right, it just doesn't seem to be Ruby style, and it would be nice to be able to use the "pretty" block syntax to accomplish that.
The ink is not the expensive part. Brother could probably cut the price of toners in half and still make a profit. But by doing so, they'd get fewer recurring revenues, which means that the price of the printer itself would have to go up.

Either that, or they lose out on profits.

You wouldn't be angry if the toner contained less fuel. If you could print only 2000 pages instead of 3000, you would think you got a great deal. But if you can print 2000 pages, and the printer then refuses to print the last 1000, you're suddenly upset? Makes no sense. You're still getting essentially the same deal: 2000 pages for $60.
- a banner near logo, - a leaderboard under primary navigation - and two squares (300x250) can fit nicely along the right side

Take it easy. While I was going to chime in on the side of "start with ads, because adding them later just pisses people off". But I'm also of the opinion that early stage sites should have minimal ad clutter. Find out what you have to do to make the site pay before you decide to pile them on. One ad spot is probably a good starting point.

You may already be saying you're going to experiment rather than pile them all on at once--but I can't be sure from your comment, so I thought it worth adding.
And a single dvd can cost $30. I've seen DVD players for less.
A lot of my friends swear by Yahoo! mail, but they also pay for it.
I think people hated it because there was nothing there.

He promised that Infogami would revolutionize making webpages the way that the Macintosh revolutionized the computer industry.

What he delivered was another wiki. I can't believe PG thought this was worth investing in.
Wow. Who pissed in your cornflakes? I agree with you. That's exactly what I'm saying, what do you think these applications would be? I probably could list a bunch but I'd rather hear ideas from people who've had more than a couple of seconds to think about it.

EDIT: I should point out that there was no sarcasm or innuendo in my previous post.
I asked a similar question on another forum recently, and the consensus was something like "don't turn on adsense, it looks spammy."

This merely tells you that the audience at that particular forum are too young to have to pay their own bills, or too 1337 to be worth listening to. If you're building a business website with the only monetization option available being ads, then of course you're going to turn on ads. And AdSense pays better than many options for many sites, so it's the best choice more often than not.
Study predicts undecided voters with 70% accuracy
I have to say that "graduated from MIT" is far more impressive to potential employers, investors and co-founders than is warranted, IMO. And I say this as an MIT grad. :) Being no dummy, I dig through my nightstand to find and wear my brass rat (MIT class ring) approximately once every 5 years, when I need a better shot at one of those things. Otherwise, no one I know cares, though half of our top technical leaders are from MIT.

I also look at the recruiting efforts my current company (startup in early 200x, now decidedly not-startupy, public, and $500+K in annual revenue): we bias heavily towards "top" CS schools when doing college recruiting. We've gotten some absolutely fabulous candidates from "second tier" schools and we naturally recruit there every year, but if you come from MIT, you get a full 25% (estimated) better chance right from the start of the interview.

For my own account (plural of anecdote not being data notwithstanding), despite being a pretty strong candidate, I strongly suspect that my current lot in life is based more than 50% on my attending (and not even spectacular results at) MIT, and as a result, I give heartily every time they call for alumni donations.

Employers and founders: MIT isn't all that special. So called "second tier" schools also have some extremely capable potential employees, and individual talent, motivation and drive is FAR more important.

High-school students: If you have the choice between MIT and $200K in debt and a state school with a full ride, and you're pretty sure you're going to work in engineering for 20 years, definitely go to MIT. Right or wrong, that name opens doors, and I believe I've done a lot more interesting and lucrative work than I'd have been able to do from the full ride I had offered to me at UMCP.

As an MIT grad, I'm a lot less impressed with the brass rat than most people who are in a position to help shape your lot in life. If you're going to found 5 startups in the hopes that one will be a solid success, save the $200K and invest it in your startups. If you're going to go work for someone else, even just for a while, you'll have no problem paying off your student loans from MIT, or any other top school, IME.