skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think some of the commenters are missing the underlying message here.

The point is that if you start out by using a really high-level language like Java or Ruby or, going even higher, JavaScript then overall you won't be a very good engineer. To give an extreme example, JavaScript is Turing-complete, so you can re-implement anything in it, but I still wouldn't hire somebody who's only ever used JavaScript, even if he wrote an "OS" in it.

The reason is simple: sometimes you have to go down to the C/C++ level, sometimes you have to go down to the TCP/IP level, and so on. If you can't do that, you're not as valuable as someone who can, and you'll be outsourced.

I can even give an example from my own life: For 3 years I worked as a C/C++ programmer, where the work involved lots of debugging, dealing with memory managers, all kinds of fairly low-level crap. It wasn't rocket science, but it required a different mindset then working at higher levels. I hated it, because I wanted to do more interesting, more modern stuff. So I quit. The company desperately tried to keep me on, but I wouldn't. I went to work for a smaller company, like a startup, where I was given a small project to design and implement on my own, since I was hired as a senior programmer. Now, I'm not a particular fan of Java, but this project just cried out for it. 1 year later I was basically layed off (among other reasons) because the company realized that since the work I'm doing is not low-level, they can hire any "PHP-monkey" for 1/3 of what I make. I've basically been "outsourced", although not geographically.

So the lesson to engineers is: don't go work for small webby startups unless you're a co-founder, because most of the stuff they do requires moderate skills and thus they don't need to pay good engineers, plus they're always short on cash =)
How does having a son affect it all? I barely have time as it is...
SISC - Scheme Interpreter Written in Java
If sites stopped coddling users with outdated software they would upgrade on their own right away.
> I consider deal documents to be object code, and my lawyers' explanation of what's in them to be source code.

PG, whenever you're ready to open-source some of the startup documents you've talked about, I hope you include this sort of "source-code" along with the "compiled" version.
Retro DHH: compile-time error catching lets you "fail fast"; runtime errors "expensive"
Bill who? :)
You're supposed to be able to get an online REPL on this page: http://sisc-scheme.org/sisc-online.php, but it didn't work for me (Firefox 3).
Lol... Since you've got some years, I would strongly advise against starting a family until you've scratched your startup itch. Having the little guy around removes all your free time, friend time, movie time and couple time and leaves you with kid time.

That's not a bad thing for sure, but it makes things a hell of a lot more difficult.
Somewhat unrelated, but I realized that Facebook has tons of face/name data from all the tagged photos. Not only do they have photos tagged with names, but they also know who your friends are, thus who is most likely to be in your photos. I imagine Facebook + Riya could be pretty accurate.

So... when are they going to roll out an (optional) auto-tagging feature?
Give phones to the masses and they'll fight your enemies for you
Developerlife - Tutorials » Android TableLayout
I had some problems when compiling faac/faad on my machine (Macbook Pro, Leopard, Xcode 3.1). Could just be my luck, but here's what was wrong / the fixes incase it happened to someone else.

On faac, I had errors like

../libtool: line 792: X--tag=CC: command not found
../libtool: line 792: X--mode=compile: command not found"

After googling around, turns out it was a problem with ltmain.sh - which ./bootstrap creates. It checks to see if the OS is Darwin, and then runs glibtoolize instead of libtoolize (Apple includes glibtoolize it seems, its in my /usr/bin). However glibtoolize isn't generating the correct file for some reason. Not sure why this is. I've got autoconf/automake/libtool installed from a past project so I used those instead of figuring out exactly what was wrong.

To get FAAC to compile, I ran "aclocal -I .; autoheader; libtoolize --automake; automake --add-missing; autoconf" manually instead. This one worked properly and was able to install.

FAAD was had more wrong then just glibtoolize generating a wrong file. It would generate a configure file, however it wasn't complete. The README here didn't help install for OS X, and the only INSTALL file i could find was for the xmms plugin. So I read the *nix README. Which said to run autoreconf -vif first. That brought up:

/usr/local/share/automake-1.10/am/depend2.am: am__fastdepCXX does not appear in AM_CONDITIONAL
/usr/local/share/automake-1.10/am/depend2.am: The usual way to define `am__fastdepCXX' is to add `AC_PROG_CXX'
/usr/local/share/automake-1.10/am/depend2.am: to `configure.in' and run `aclocal' and `autoconf' again.

To fix this, open up configure.in and find the only mention of AC_PROG_CXX. Change that line from "dnl AC_PROG_CXX" to just "AC_PROG_CXX" Then rerun "aclocal -I .; autoheader; libtoolize --automake; automake --add-missing; autoconf" instead of relying on ./boostrap. Then it compiled correctly for me.

If anyone wants, I could just toss together a quick .pkg that would install faac 1.26 and faad 2.61. lame (3.98) and ffmpeg's (latest svn, 14469) installs were straightforward enough and didn't have issues so those shouldn't need a pkg. Though ffmpeg was missing a ton of libraries. Suppose thats what I get (along with fixing problems like the one above) for not using fink or macports.
From banks of Godavari to Google on wheelchair
Y Combinator Challenge #7 - Something your company needs that doesn’t exist
Somehow I imagine him thinking Google is a "simple web app."
Good Rainmakers Need To Create Clouds
I think trying to resist the monoculture is a mistake.

Your stated aim for the constituency of the news.yc community is "the 10,000 best hackers and nobody else". If you achieved that aim, you'd have a monoculture. It would be a slightly different monoculture than the current one and less in your image, but a monoculture nonetheless. If it's even possible to move away from monoculture without moving toward Digg, I don't think it's worth the risk of trying.
I was in fact a student who took his compiler class 12 years ago in NYU. A lot of students didn't like his classroom presentation because he would rather talk topics that was not covered inside textbooks (books are for reading at home for homeworks and project). And his class is a project based so in fact the only factor for the grade is the project. I had to write a code generator for GCC AST tree to x86 assembly in the subset of Ada that I chose. In fact, the only exciting part is to write this backend, which is beyond descriptions unless you did that.

He just belongs to a very old school in this discipline that holds the belief that you need to know what are you building from the lowest level components. You don't need to be an expert unless you work in that domain. But at least you are not clueless.

My recollection may be wrong. But I thought his Ph.D. was in fact in Chemistry. And he built and sold Cobol compilers before he worked on SETL language and Ada.
I dont think Yahoo has packed its bags. It outsourced only its sponsored search(not in full). This could make them understand which queries competition is doing better. If they were not serious, they could have outsourced web search. They could save tons of cash on development and servers.

The whole outsourcing thing is to make MS want them more, just inorder to prevent Yahoo from sleeping with Google
'Furthermore, Java is mainly used in Web applications that are mostly fairly trivial,'

I'll add an Nth comment to how ludicrous this article is. Is building a highly scalable server really so trivial as all that?

Higher levels of abstraction are good. Using libraries and avoiding low level recoding of basic functionality is good. Get serious this is so obviously trash it's not worth commenting further.
it centers around not finding a use for it ourselves - how did you guys get the inspiration/motivation to work on pojectwedding.com? Either/both of you got married and found such a service lacking?
cuil thinks pg is a caged orangutan!
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=paul%20graham&sl=long
Very good primer for people without a heavy finance background.
How long did it take you? How did you approach the list?
China to keep rain at bay on Aug 8
Our app uses ffmpeg. It was a total pain in the arse getting it to build on Mac/Win/Linux w/ h.264. I have scripts that build it on each platform. If anyone needs them email me.
I don't know if Dell wins, but they are certainly in the game. I think the biggest difference is that these Dells are designed to be seen where the minis are designed to be invisible.

The Dells are quite a bit larger than a mini, about twice the volume. The Dell has better specs, but the current mini is late in its product cycle, so that is to be expected.

Bluray is a real win if you are the sort of person that uses physical media and plans to use Bluray.

Windows is a win if you are the sort of person that uses Windows.

The hard drive size is a big win if you need disk space.

HDMI is nice, but that is more about supporting the DRM of the blue-ray drive since the mini has the non-crippling DVI port (as does the Dell).

I wonder about the fan noise. On the back port picture you can see a lot of heat sink behind the fan.
Microsoft: still a business of threats?
I haven't pursued an MBA, but know lots of people that have, including my siblings. All of them seem to have had great experiences with their programs; they learned a lot, met great people, experienced many things during the program that they probably wouldn't experience otherwise, and gotten a broader perspective than they had before.

Many of them have had lucrative career opportunities after their programs and these opportunities probably would not have come by or similar opportunities would come by only much later in their careers. This seems to be a great value of an MBA program, especially one at a top school.
Not really, but they certainly outspecced them. It looks good, but not as good as Apple designs...Apple has an almost magical approach to subtle design (doesn't make up for the other negatives that come with Apple products, IMHO, but they certainly do look pretty).

I checked out the Apple TV thing and the Mac Mini, and when I found they couldn't drive my girlfriends 1080p TV at full resolution (the lack of a BluRay drive was also a factor) I built a Windows Vista based box (cost a couple hundred bucks more, admittedly, due to the BluRay drive). If this had existed at the time, I would probably have bought from Dell, instead. It's a solid effort, though I'm not actually sure if it'll play 1080p. It seems right on the borderline with regard to graphics horsepower. But it certainly looks nicer than the HTPC I built (it's in a nice case that looks like a high end HiFi from the 70's, but it's kinda huge--quiet, though, which is the primary concern). And as a bonus, it can play pretty much all of the latest PC games at nice high resolutions (maybe not full 1080p, but pretty close to it).
What is the future of the OS?
What do you think the future OS will be like? Will it be abolished?

Here are some (admittedly clueless) suggestions:

* The WebOS was first invented 7-8 years ago or so and now there are several.

No big success so far but who knows what will come?

* The browser will be the OS. More and more applications are moving to the web and are almost as good as their desktop equivalence.

But the browser in its current form doesn't seem enough.

* We will always need a basic OS? It might do less than now and the browser will be what we use mostly?

* OSers are unnecessary and will be killed. Instead we have webapps that can run directly on the hardware?
A Chat with a Google Street View Driver
Greenfoot: Further Examination
It could be that in order to get the 10,000 best hackers, he has to resist the monoculture.

Good hackers usually get that way because they're curious and like to learn new things. It gets boring when the same few dozen people submit the same thousand articles.
The Passionates vs. The Non-Passionates
Bluray is a real win if you are the sort of person that uses physical media and plans to use Bluray.

I want to not use physical media, but it's the only way to get most HD content. We have a NetFlix account, and watch a lot of the instant content, but even on fat cable broadband (36Mbits, I think) we get far less than HD resolution. Hulu only serves up 480p in HD mode. I've been trying to make use of Amazon Unbox, but the client is broken...and the one thing we did buy wasn't HD. Likewise iTunes. I guess in another six months or a year, we'll be able to stop getting movies via the mail.
Live Mesh For Mac Is Here
Apparently I'm quite taken with this paper based on the number of comments I've been adding.

An interesting note that the discovery.com story left out:
Page 11: "This energy requirement would drop dramatically if we assumed a thin-shell of modified
spacetime instead of bubble encompassing the volume of the craft."

The Jupiter-size calculation is based on generating a warp bubble to fill the volume of space of a 10m x 10m x 10m ship. If we only need to produce a warp bubble as a thin shell around the outside of that volume, but not to fill it, then the energy requirements drop dramatically.

If my Star Trek lore is remembered right, the warp fields are only produced around the starships, but do not fill the volume.
Alright, that's what I expected. Thanks!
I'd think debugging those kinds of mistakes is part of learning. I've worked with too many programmers that can't debug because they don't really know what a pointer is. Even in Java understanding what the JVM is doing ON TOP of the hardware help you understand how to write good code and debug slow code.

Once qualified, sure don't reinvent the wheel, but when you are learning it's a vital experience.
I do wonder how many upvotes this got because people wanted to see a good discussion/ rebuttal.
Dude I totally agree! For fun, I searched for "Richard Dawkins" and got a hit on a site pertaining to Dawkins, but the picture next to the site was NOT Dawkins, rather it was a picture of theologian William Lane Craig. Maybe these two had debated at some point or other, I don't know, but mixing up photos is not "cuil" dude! :-)
I agree. I don't have a problem with using Java for an intro to data structures and algorithms course, provided that it isn't the last stop in the curriculum. I had to learn data structures using C++, which meant I had to figure out pointers and segmentation faults at the same time I was learning the algorithms behind lists, tree traversal, etc.

A curriculum shouldn't be dumbed down, for sure, but if you can make the learning curve easier, increase retention, and keep exit standards high, why not?
Hey, great paper -- can't wait for the demo.
I think so too, but it shouldn't. Chernobyl was deemed unsafe by the US before it was even built, and Three Mile Island didn't hurt a single citizen, and I believe killed no one.
The only thing that Apple has done that successfully prevented competition from clones was to sue them. Their proprietary architecture has been cloned more than once in the past.
No, because normal transactions shouldn't be taxed either. At least not as heavily as they are now. Electronic transactions happen to be one of the few parts of the system that actually work.
Ask YC: Cliff Notes For Blogs
Thinking of starting a blog, which has a simple goal: Cliff Notes For Blogs (or a blog for the ADD). Two simple updates a day that condenses all the information you would need on the most important topics into short 2-3 sentence summaries.

Found the need to do this after a) I wanted to get back into blogging b) I needed a service that would let me not have to spend hours a day reading blogs.

Targeted towards two types of readers:

a) Those with information overload and could use a good summary of everything, so time frees up.

b) Those who want to be up to date and in the know, but dont have time or the know how to read all the important tech blogs.

Thoughts? Anything I can clarify?

This is not a company, but literally a blog itself. Also planning on linking back to one good analysis on each topic and one good long post (ie techcrunch, webware,etc.)
Ask HN: "found a hardware firm with the same low investment as for software?"
"Can you found a hardware firm with the same low investment as for software?"

If you were to say, build a <b>crude</b> prototype with the hopes of selling it for mass production would you have a hope of getting this done, or is this one of those areas that <i>need</i> big money VC funding to even get off the ground?
That's what it sounded like the author was trying to say, but I think you're right, it's very unlikely.

If Apple is doing anything with PA Semi's technology, I'd expect a mobile device with more horsepower than we're accustomed to seeing.

It could be possible however to use PA Semi's technology as an extra processor to service things like video encode/decode, physics, etc. Or even a TV tuner, for that matter.

And there are of course other possibilities as well, but I don't have all day to type this :)
I think its a great idea... when you get users.

Will there be a Digg-like link that forum masters can add to posts? That way people could just, gahBoo it while they're on a forum. That'll add tons of content to your site and bring curious eyes.
Is building libx264 really that difficult? As one of the developers I like to take pride in the fact that we have so many fewer dependencies than nearly everything I else I have to compile these days; we require yasm or nasm, and that's about it. Not to mention that it makes development a lot easier...

The biggest issues I've seen people have are mostly because their distribution includes a really old x264 which they didn't update, or because they're mixing apps compiled with PIC with those compiled without.

The former issue, fortunately, was resolved by getting ffmpeg to include an option for our most powerful motion search mode--which was added only about 6 months ago. This meant ffmpeg wouldn't build unless you updated x264, which forced everyone to start actually using builds from this century ;)
I was in a skyscraper in downtown LA. Not fun to see the floor at an angle. Not fun. Twitter was the last thing on my mind.
We shall call it "Mazy".
And the Times editorial board publishing it?
(Response to 'YC is a Cult') A Note on Cults & Productivity
What a Difference a Cert Makes
or get really, really good at skim reading.
I'm talking about a monoculture of values, not of abilities or interests. "Curious and like to learn new things" is one aspect of the monoculture that I'm referring to. It's a relatively uncommon attribute.
It's about time Dell made something you won't be embarrassed to have sitting around
Publicity and large scale funding are related, aren't they? Buzz about your company will help you get funding.
An interesting thing happened on the way to the magic quadrant...
the more complex the product and/or mass-market target the solution, the more big money is required.

i'm considering developing some hardware for a niche market. i won't need VC because i'll be able to hand assemble and produce most everything involved, and its not so complex that i'd need to quit my day job or hire help or take forever doing it.

which is not totally dissimilar from software. the big difference is overhead. hardware has tons of it, software doesn't.
I suppose it depends entirely on the execution but for me, sites like Hacker News, Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, et al have this space pretty well covered.

The core problem I see arising: If you're doing this manually (and solo) and you don't want to "have to spend hours a day reading blogs," the odds of coming up with good content from varying sources is a bit unlikely, no?
Sure that works to some degree, but it still takes a ton more time and organization.

Think of this as a blog reading hack.
You can do it on the web. You just cannot do it better.
If you're good at summarizing stuff, I'm running a little contest on Squeezed Books:-)
I think that most people underestimate the skill and effort required for good photography to begin with, even without the stress and pressure of being for a wedding.
Programming drains you in innumerable nickel and dime increments. Each tidbit that you "just have to know" is a tiny bit of cognitive load you have to tow. This not only applies to languages, but libraries.

A few trivialities are meaningless. Thousands of trivialities will drain you, and a few of those will slip through and become bugs.
Hacker news + Digg sum up what you "should" be reading, but you still have to read a ton to get all of it taken care of. Techmeme, sums up what you should read and the 20 articles like it. Think of cuili. Big takeaways were:

- Former google employees
- Bigger index by x amount
- 33 mil in venture funding.
- Search results arent that accurate for reasons xyz
I'm using Expression Web. I recommend it. Of course, I'm also the sort of person who would use a nailgun when possible rather than a regular hammer, even though I can get what I need to done with a regular hammer and a bit more work.
interesting idea. i think it would work just fine outside the tech industry, though.
Okay, the scrolling and flashing is now serial instead of parallel. And I sped up the scrolling speed as well. Thanks again.
Not that I don't agree with you, but are the universities meant to be that vocational? Are they there for specific job skills or more for general knowledge rather then specific skill sets?
Very interesting site. Reminds me of the book summary clubs id see on flights.
The price boom in Spain was mostly due to British and German expats buying up coastal condos and villas. Many of the Spaniards I know in Andalucia (a southern coastal province) complain that housing prices are outlandishly high, to the point of unaffordability. Because of this (and the traditionally higher unemployment rate in the south), it's often customary for kids to live with their parents into their 30s before they can afford a house (and a family) of their own.

A comparable house in Ronda, Spain to those in my native Kansas is roughly twice as expensive, but to a Londoner accustomed to things costing four times that (eight times Kansas prices), Spanish houses look like a great deal.
id start it inside the tech industry to start. this is just a blog, no huge plans for it. Just something i see a need for and would enjoy writing.
Startup Hacks: Seven Ideas for Building Your Team
Panda Baby-Boom 4 Cubs Born Within 14 Hours
A long long long time ago (my first out of uni job) I used to do machine control systems (thankfully, not for aircraft) but there were often safety issues (so you didn't burn/crush/soak people with acid etc). We never used a turing complete programming language, as it was seen as too risky, was always something primitive like ladder logic (which seemed intuitively easy to reason over and forced simplicity and fail safe behaviour).

I am not sure what has changed, but I wouldn't want to be doing stuff that different now with a general purpose programming language (be that Ada, Java or for reasons I would never understand, C).
Why can't they teach both - the high level reality of today, but also down to the metal (its how I did it, although the "high level" back then was miranda and pascal !).
After a while it's pretty easy to see past the boilerplate. Has anyone ever made the analogy literal by creating a language that 1) describes contracts (like this: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html), and 2) a compiler that turns it into something you could upload to the SEC, print and sign, or whatever?