skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I may not agree with it, but the heart of his criticism is (harshly put) that you're polluting HN with your opinion because it isn't valid past you, nor does it reveal anything deeper about the subject at hand.

He can correct me if I'm putting words into his mouth.
Whitelisting: Keeping the Guys in Black Hats at Bay
When I first saw Code Bubbles I thought it was fantastic. I'm looking forward to trying this and hoping this is a first step towards wider-spread adoption for it.
Don’t Be Perfect: Why sometimes "find every bug" is the wrong approach
I expect that there are a lot of other factors that would predict future earnings better than major. Plenty of people get degrees in philosophy or English with the intention of following it with law school. On the other hand, plenty of people major in English because they don't know what they want to do, or because they're actually majoring in football. How many people just fall into engineering or CS? Probably not as many as fall into anthro.

My guess is, the people who value making a lot of money and who major in English do just fine for themselves, the people who lack drive and ambition who major in English work at McDonald's, and the people who major in humanities because they value things besides money live in an artists' commune in Brooklyn making art and music and not really caring that they're not making as much money as you are.
I think that Windows Phone 8 will require a new generation of hardware to run properly. Mango will be supported on current handsets according to the webcast.
Google's C++ style guide discourages the use of references altogether.
Sorting algorithms ilustrated with folk dance.
The idea guy has its own place in the market. It is the reason why there're so many consulting firms in the first place(including mine)!

Some people genuinely believe in their ideas, enough to pay someone else to do it(not in equity ofcourse). And those are usually the people whose ideas work out in the end.
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This reminds me of Outliers when Gladwell talks about concert violinists.

"All of the violinists had started playing at around age five, and they all played about two or three hours a week during the first few years. However, around the age of eight, an important difference began to emerge in the amount of hours they each practiced. By age 20, the stars in the group had all totaled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives; the “good” students had totaled 8,000 hours; and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

What the research suggested was that once you have enough talent to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works."

Being in Silicon Valley, I meet smart entrepreneurs all the time. Many of them come from places like Stanford. I think many pass the basic threshold of intelligence. In fact, this is more than passing considering that it doesn't take an elite education to create a good company IMO.

Obviously, not all these people succeed and so the other factor behind success is likely to be what you said: determination.
In space, there's no interference from the atmosphere - no clouds, nothing blocking portions of the spectrum. You have constant sunlight whenever you're facing the sun. The difference between getting 12 hours of light unless it's cloudy and 24 hours of light is huge. Just that doubles the per-day output of a solar cell (you would have to get it into an orbit that keeps it facing the sun, but that's not especially hard).
Joe Armstrong is a really interesting guy. I think he was my favorite interview in Coders at Work.
7.1 is just an internal version number - it won't have anything to do with the consumer marketing
"No sign" is classic headline overstatement. I have a bachelor and a masters in non-CS subjects but have spent most of my time programming or doing security. When someone needs to talk to the "business" people, that's usually me and it's because of the skills that I picked up studying other things. I think I probably make more than I would have if I'd studied CS. Nonetheless, the plural of anecdote is not data.
> And those are usually the people whose ideas work out in the end.

I got the impression that in the tech world, those who succeed were those who did learn how to realize their ideas by themselves, or at least have an idea about how to realize them.

But then, i may be biased.
Or rather, they have a lot of opinions on politics or history, but also very uneducated ones.
Ideas are easy, yes, but executing on ideas is difficult. Very difficult. Often developers need to spend their time working on production and don't have the time to follow through with the other aspects of the business. That's why founding teams do the best and often those successful founding teams are made up of one "idea guy" to see the vision through.
It is incredible how common the fallacy is that stock price is all there is. You see people spouting numbers based on stock price changes and ignoring dividends and it's a pretty obvious sign they don't know what they are talking about. If you give return values without including dividends, you are giving junk numbers.
About Halmos, that is quite scary. I happened to be reading "Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces" the last few days and while the material is pretty elementary, Halmos is obviously very good, and the idea that there are people leagues ahead of him is amazing...
That is really great! Besides export options, what would it take to be able to modify the density over certain areas of the output image?
Strange that you feature a Vimeo video in your description, which has it's own "Watch Later" feature.
If I may be the lone dissenter...

Could it be that there are many business people, some of who have ideas but no ability to execute, some of who can execute but have no ideas, and a very few who have ideas and can execute on them?

And like wise could it be that there are many developers, some of whom have ideas but cannot build their dreams, some of whom can build but have no ideas, and a very select few that have ideas and can build them?

If these two suppositions are correct, then there are some pairings of business person and developer that can work, including a rare business person who has an idea and can execute on the idea, and who needs a developer who can build but doesn't have an idea?

Of course there's some symmetry here, there are going to be developers with ideas and who can build. They will be looking for business people who don't have an idea of their own but who can execute.
Since word on it is getting out to a group that needs hyping, it might be a good idea to have started openly calling it "8", then. Build some excitement.
Cloud Computing: The Greatest Story Ever Sold
If I were her, I would have sacked you too.
What point are you trying to make?

That generally, a large market for a sequel (of any kind of media) is people who enjoyed the first one. And that they have left it a bit late in this case. A sequel to a popular teen rom-com movie would lose a lot of impact if it came 14 years late.
Armstrong doesn't seem to be saying anything about one of the more damning problems he points out - encapsulation. All functions in a module are available to each other, but hidden from code not in that module.

His solution of simply storing all code in a key-value DB only makes this worse in exchange for the dubious benefit of removing the ? "where do I put this new function?". Since he makes a big deal of encapsulation, his solution seems questionable.

EDIT - Please don't upvote this. I'm wrong in an incredibly silly way, and my wrongness doesn't need to be rewarded. If you feel generous, upvote ericflo instead for pointing out just how badly I missed the point.
I love the quality of the image when you set the character quantity to max, but I notice the speed of the rendering gets progressively slower with each pass.

And now I start pondering the scalability of the algorithm.
The Guide to the App Galaxy by Google
In a morally-flexible environment, it's easy to confuse the two.

For example
- Zynga selling offers (for credits) with very fine print that signs you up for paid services. And the fine print is so convoluted/tiny most people don't read it. Helping or hurting consumers?

- Facebook hiring a PR firm to highlight questionable privacy practices by Google. Helping users or hurting Google?

- Subprime mortgages. Helping or hurting homeowners?
Even if you can't perfectly execute on your idea, the fact that you've built something yourself probably means that a) you care enough about the idea that you want to see it built one way or another, and b) you've thought through how the product will work sufficiently to build something. I would guess that most people who come to developers with ideas haven't actually thought the product though very much.

If you make a prototype that shows promise and show it to me, I'm more likely to start thinking "this is really cool, how can I make this awesome?" than "this person wants me to build something for them for free".
What papers should everyone read? - Theoretical Computer Science
>realize their ideas by themselves

Agreed. But "realize" could mean developing it themselves, or finding another way. Here i was assuming the idea guy can't code himself out of a hole, and realizes that shortcoming.
You're saying it like faith is involved. Success is a combination of many factors, including but not limited to talent, luck, education, environment, persistence, social skills and ability to adapt.

Some people are born with some of these factors, but the truth of the matter is that persistence matters most and if you are persistent most other things can fall into place or be balanced by other factors.

Lots of people are as smart as the Google founders, lots of people have similar educational background. Superstar co-founders, much as athletes, are people too. The major difference between them and you is that they continuously try to do the best they can do and do not quit when the going gets tough.
Microsoft's biggest 'Mango' challenge
I wonder to what extent studies like this have things backwards to a certain extent? It's not that an engineering degree is more lucrative than an English degree, exactly; it's that if you want to be an engineer, you major in engineering, and then you go into a more lucrative field. Does that make sense? It's not that the degree that has some major predicative power -- it's that some fields are more lucrative than others, and people who want to go into those fields choose particular majors.

I do also think that the survey is flawed in that it doesn't track post-bachelors degrees. Psychology degree holders came in at the bottom of the list, but anyone who knows even a little bit about the mental health field knows that virtually all practioners have masters degrees or PHDs. So, yeah, if you just get a BA in psychology, you probably aren't making very much, not least because you probably aren't working in the mental health field as anything other than an entry level person.
Is the sandals with socks thing some sort of deliberate middle-finger? In NYC on a stage, no less.
I'd really like to see a longitudinal study that models something like:

log(mean_realized_income) ~ log(mean_expected_future_income)

People who go into humanities don't expect to make a million dollars. Research like this verifies common assumptions, but to me they always have a sunspot study feel to them.
Wow, congratulations to both companies. That was quick!
So excited about this. We're thrilled to be involved (and really happy this is now public so we can start talking about it!). I'm going to be writing more on the Distilled site about the whole experience and why we're getting involved / how we plan to help.

It's a crazy-smart team at SD and I'm very excited about what's coming next. It's our first investment and I'm also really looking forward to learning loads from our co-investors over the coming months and years.
How about Philosophy?

Here is a huge list of notable people who studied philosophy who have done quite well for themselves.

http://healthcareethicscanada.blogspot.com/2008/12/philosoph...

George Soros, Cartleton S. Fiorina, Ricky Gervais, Ethan Coen, the list goes on and on.

Also, Peter Thiel, Paul Buchheit, and Paul Graham all studied philosophy if I recall correctly.
Not again ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2458572

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445963

... just to name two. There are more, but I can't be bothered going to find them. http://searchyc.com is your friend.
You hope the iPhone or iPad doing the payment processing with the Square device is connected via network cable? I'm afraid I have some disturbing news for you.
"Idea Guys" make me laugh. Theres the old sayings about "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration", "the devil is in the details", etc are usually ignored by the idea guy, they think they get away with just spouting a few ideas and be done.

Ideas are cheap, theres a billion of them and 99% of them have major problems. Theres basically no such thing as a successful idea guy; theres project managers, business development people, developers, money people, etc and lots of them have ideas. Start working on business plan, raising money, building relationships, get in and figure out the subtle details of those ideas.
Intelligence and strong entitlement don't match. Show me a real genius who has strong sense of entitlement. Salesmen have it. Certainly PG doesn't have it.
But can it play files over DAAP?
That is the (my) holy grail for Mac music.

Songbird sort-of can, in a buggy crashy way.
Nothing else U have
These charts just don't feel right without Hans Rosling jumping up and down in front of them like a little kid.

For the baffled: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI
To put it slightly more succinctly, it's not that some majors are more lucrative than others; it's that some industries are more lucrative than others. You should really figure out what kind of work you want to go into, and part of your calculus for that should be how much money you'll make, if that's important to you, and then figure out an academic path that prepares you for that. If you think of college as a black box that spits out a high-paying job at the end, then you're frankly in trouble.
But can it play files over DAAP?
That is the (my) holy grail for Mac music.

Songbird sort-of can, in a buggy crashy way.
Nothing else I have tried (Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox, firefly player jar) compiles and loads and runs an plays on Mac.
Everyone want to hack Facebook accounts
Collect Your Favorite Quotes Online with Quotica
You are referring to Entrapment: If the authorities did not entice you to commit the crime, would you have? The point is in some cases the answer is yes, pedophilia is one of those cases. This sort of legal issue has to be dealt with with police-prostitutes picking up johns and then arresting them after payment.

The problem is that most people don't realize that you cannot solve complex problems with oversimplified solutions. The people are presented with "its safer if you give up this liberty because we can catch an extra pedophile" when the implications to the lost liberty is far greater than originally thought.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Ben Franklin

The same quote keeps coming up over and over and over by one of our founding fathers. And for damn good reason. Because people ignore this, and don't realize what they are doing.
Doctors and dentists tell patients, "all your review are belong to us"
I showed the Square reader to my hippie friend who sells hand-made jewelry in an outdoor booth at a beach resort. He thought it looked pretty cool, and was seriously considering buying an iPhone and service plan just to use it. At his usual transaction size and volume, traditional credit-card payment systems weren't that great a prospect. That's what a disruptive technology does.
Haha. I remember joking about the name of this game at the Naughty Dog offices when it was like 3 years late -- I swear it was in the 90s! Perhaps during the development of Crash Bandicoot Warped. Never ever pick a title with the word "forever" in it.
Here it is:

http://corkboard.me/Ix1gsxLPuz

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2486982
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962554
Last Edit: 5/06/09

So, it's even worse than that list implies.

Off the top of my head, two additional games in the main Final Fantasy series have been released, as well as The Sims 3 and The Sims Medieval, the Nintendo 3DS was released, it goes on and on.
We're both long time members, with almost exactly the same karma. We know the ground rules about as well as each other. sometimes making the point is worth the attitude.

I lost 8 points for that comment. That comment cost me 4, so that means pg fanboys have gone looking for other comments and submissions of mine to downvote. Which adds some quantitative evidence to support your assertion that my point was good.

Last I checked, fanboyism is also discouraged. Which was my point.

[Edit since I can't reply to comment below]: last I dug through the arc code, there was no points multiplier for downvotes. Sure, it could have been done better. Meh.
Does it run on EBS?
> Microsoft is no longer a growth company

Because they failed to gain a foothold on any growing market. Or even find them before they exploded.

And the few they did (mobile - they took Palm's crown in the early 2000s) they fumbled completely.
Google is at least a little naughty. Remember, at the dawn of the Internet, there was quite a bit of ambiguity with regards to IP rights. Many newspapers sent out Cease and Desists just for deep-linking to their articles. There was still quite a bit of presumption about how much control of use copyright gave you.

Google walks into this minefield and says "You know, we're going to crawl and cache everything, then exploit the data in it for our own selfish commercial purposes." And it worked!
In a morally-flexible environment

You're assuming your conclusion. Punctiliously following convention doesn't make you good. It just safely ensconces you near the mean. Not a promising place for startup founders to reside.

Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes is naughty. He's not evil or even "morally-flexible".
To be more precise, there are routes from the internet but not always back to it; not that I expect anthropomorphic Stuxnet to understand, it wasn't programmed with a brain.
People in charge of the BofA mortgage signature fraud should go to prison too.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-20049744-10391709.htm...

But I guess it's a lot easier to prosecute people who can't afford expensive lawyers.
Your response belies your adherence to the cult of pg.
Man, I was JUST going to quote that. Well done.
Birkenstocks with socks is okay: http://www.gq.com/style/style-guy/shoes/200309/birkenstocks
I wonder how they'd have felt about it making phantom lines of credit instead. (Of course, with interest.)

"Oh, it's Programmer D! How's it goin', D? You want $1,000? OK! And since you don't have enough money just now, I'll just jot this down for you to pay back later."

And magically, when I deposit $5,000, it pays back a few hundred on my, er, his loan. :-)
>> turns evil and sells out the brand

Doesn't seem like in his best interest. His present model has been incredibly successful, and what he is selling is a pre-screened class.

I imagine that his applicant pool is becoming more and more qualified over time, giving him a graduating 'class' that is constantly improving.
Meh... Y Combinator is a potential source of start-up funding. Just as important, Y Combinator is not exclusive of any other source of funding. The difference between YC and other sources of funding is that YC funds a lot of companies twice a year rather than on an as-needed basis so the whole process is very eventful.

As YC funds more companies, the value of the "We're a YC company" branding diminishes faster. Whatsmore, there's some curious economics in how YC companies do business with other YC companies. If the bulk of customers of YC companies are other YC companies, then you what you have is basically just a pyramid scheme. It's also kinda lame to hear Paul Graham play favorites and talk about how great Sam Altman is all the time.
Wow, my CS degree (at an engineering school) required 23 or 25 credits in the humanities.
I disagree with the OP. When you're actually reading newspapers, books, and magazines, they're open and are wider than they are tall. All other media, TV, movies, etc are also wider than tall, and tablets are not about consuming totally static content.
Tablets already seem to be hurting home PC sales if recent numbers from the likes of HP is any indication.
I majored in Comparative Literature. I made that choice under two working assumptions:

1. Higher education isn't about learning how to perform in a vocation; it's about learning how to learn. It's not about taking the next step in a career path; it's about being exposed to the wisdom of history, about making one's inner world more expansive, about learning to think in radically different ways.

2. An undergraduate degree is an indication to a prospective employer that you have the intelligence and discipline to stay with a four-year program. You can learn most truly valuable working skills in training or on the job.

The problem with both of these assumptions is that even if I believe them, not many others (esp. prospective employers) seem to.

Which is ok because I'm constitutionally not a particularly materialistic person and I did find my education to be very enriching, valuable, and, well, educational.

Also, I'm still sort of trying to prove the second one by learning to program in my free time (from my boring, low-level bureacratic government job).
How to make a data race out of a single atomic instruction
DHH has been added.
Should the government be allowed to stop you in the middle of the street and ask you to strip naked and cavity search you on the spot to ensure you don't have a bomb somewhere on you or in your body so that you don't walk into times square and blow the place up along with you.

Ponder that. I doubt 99% of the pop will agree to this.

Sure its maybe 1 step up from email. However some people would agree with what I just said because of fear. Fear is powerful. We must not let it control us.
To some degree both ideas and developers have become commodities. One doesn't need an MBA to come up with an idea and most people can learn some basic levels of programming.

I think the real value in both lines of expertise is execution.

In the MBAs case, it's not about how many different ideas they can come up with. It's whether they can distinguish which 1-3 ideas that a company must execute on in order to be successful before they run out of money, the competition beats them and/or reach the greatest market potential. Time and money is finite.. very finite.

In the developers case, can they execute quickly and still architect a scalable system, build for flexibility, pick the right technologies/platforms to use.
and how different from akamai dynamic site accelerator :

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/dsa.html
> You don't need both modules and files. Decades of Smalltalk development experience backs this up.

While decades of elisp development shows us that without modules, nobody will want to use your language to write programs spanning more than one file. =\
Perhaps I misunderstand, but couldn't one just as easily provide package scoping in a name/value store if the key was a hierarchical dotted-identifier?

Edit: I think I just answered my own question...the question of what exactly that dotted-identifier should be has just as much burden as the current "where do I put this" question.