skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kudos for starting the path to self discovery, aka programming. However, it is tough to go from zero coding experience to being able to pick projects that are fulfilling and worth the money earned.

I would study the following day and night for 60 days straight if I were you:

- HTML (so you can come up with and create designs - even if very basic)
- PHP (it is widely available, has a large market, you can prototype other people's ideas easily with it, gives you a decent base to go to other languages with)
- CSS (so your designs are at least more efficient by separating presentation from content)
- JavaScript (read: jQuery)

Spend a solid two weeks of doing html/css/js, then add PHP into the mix. Add in MySQL after another couple of weeks and then iterate on the whole system for another month. That will give you the confidence to seek out the work that will be worth your time (after 2-3 months of really hard work).

Another point: Knowing how to program is a different job than getting side work/contracts and dealing with customers. Find someone to partner with you if you can - maybe give then 25% or 33% if they are dedicated to helping you manage customer relationships. Dealing with customers takes a lot of time away from actually programming and leads to burning out sooner if you are doing it all.

Lastly, network as much as you can. If you do so effectively, you will meet some people who want to hire you for your skills later down the line (from a few months to 6 months or more away) so its best to get them in the pipeline early and follow up every once in a while.
I'm in the same camp on this one.
I'd love to see something replace HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but how would this be different from Java? We already have Java.
I am not able to apprehend the kind of confusion of facts and ideas that could provoke your statements.

1. The function of the desktop, the browser, and the mobile is not the same thing.

2. Desktops have not failed, as you claim, in sandboxing/security/virtualization; (especially when compared to browsers).

3. Turning the browser into the desktop (low level APIs), is in turn re-implementation of the desktop.
No, it doesn't offer any confidence that the bitcoin remains valuable. It could collapse entirely; falling prices could scare people out of bitcoins, lowering prices further, until bitcoins become absolutely worthless. This can't happen with commodity money because it has intrinsic value -- e.g. if you have an iron ore currency (backed by a ton of iron), it is valuable as long as iron is valuable. You can always sell your iron-dollar to someone who only wants the iron it is backed by. And a fiat currency will remain valuable (as long as it's not diluted by hyperinflation) because the state requires its residents to accept it as payment -- called "legal tender". But bitcoins? They are a bizarre sociological experiment -- a pyramid scheme, an enormous speculative bubble in something that has no intrinsic value. Or perhaps negative value, since bitcoins are costly to "create" -- they consume large amounts of CPU time.

What cryptography (reasonably) guarantees is that bitcoins aren't double-spent, aren't created from thin air. Not that they preserve value or are acceptable as payment.
Thanks, I'm very proud of those graphs. :)
What about making a list of unsucessfull startups? I bet there be a lot of them with funding too.
I am with 37signals on this one — funding only teaches you to spend money.

Even if funding is the first step to success it is still wrong to pronounce startups most sucessfull based only on that. How about waiting till they start to to make money?
Or to put it another way, it's the system that is most likely to throw complete and utter incompetents out of office in a reasonable period of time.

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
Both China and India share pretty much exactly the same imbalance until the last two age-cohorts as you suggest, but while both increase, China's does so substantially more. This can't be ignored as being "exactly the same manner". To do so is being scientifically irresponsible.

My take is that both cultures have very prominent views on the preference for male children. You can see this even in the large Chinese and Indian communities here in North America. What has most likely happened is that the one child policy has simply enabled those cultural preferences in China much more than the exist in India.

It's also interesting that India itself has at several times flirted with restrictive population polices, including forced sterilization at right around the same time as China introduced their family planning program.

While that doesn't suggest that the one child policies are the only cause, I think there is enough evidence there to suggest they are a factor.

Nonetheless, all of this wasn't actually a real focus of my original point at all.
Thanks for the correction. s/wave/continuous beam/.
I agree that for CPU emulation, something low-level like typed arrays is absolutely necessary.

However, with more high-level code, in general there shouldn't be such a need. For example, RPython is very high-level, but is compiled into very efficient C. The same could be done for JavaScript (and to some degree already is).
<sigh> Let the Oracle-bashing commence. Does anyone seriously assert that any of the changes described in this post are not improvements to the current process?
How to Get Incredible Summer Interns for your Startup
It's similar to how something like Pandora can use massive amounts of bandwidth despite just being streaming audio, because people listen to it for 8 hours per day, 25 days per month.
First off, I never said the entire value, but meant to point out that their potential stake could be worth far more than $65 million. According to the linked article they're claiming Facebook lied about its value at the time of the settlement, and they they're entitled to an amount promised based on its true valuation.

Your point about what they hired him to do is closer to what I was getting at, but I suppose that point seems clear enough given that they came to a settlement.
"Remember him from Black Mesa? Your old administrator?"
Why k > 2? k > 1 is bad enough. Otherwise, recursive fib(n) would be just fine (O(~1.618^n)).
Blackberry Torch 2 | Technorox
This is a really valuable list, specially because by reading journals and going to conferences one would not think these are the major problems (as most of these are too hard to be tackled directly and yet need simple solutions that would not translate to dozens of publications), but at the same time in talking to non-researchers there is too much clouding this clear picture.

I'm trying to focus more on these problems in my research, but it is no accident that they are still unsolved.

I think the main recent ideas to tackle these are: sampling instead of doing things exactly, random projections to compress information when needed, limiting the memory footpring of existing algorithms, and controlling shared state to increase distributedness. The hardest of these problems, how to act when what you do changes the world and the data you see, desperatly needs at least some guiding principles.
Thanks. I knew reading the comments before excitedly RTFA’ing was a good idea.
5 Ways Standing Improves Office Culture
Sean, that sounds great, I just shot you an email. Looking forward to your response.
I’ve been told that this comment of mine was overly naïve and idealistic and that such deals aren’t unheard of. My cynical side still views such deals as corporate politics that primarily benefit the individuals involved.
all criticism should serve a business purpose

That's an awfully narrow purpose for giving criticism; not all of life takes place at the office. (I actually get what you're saying, but a slip of the tongue like that in different company, say with a significant other or a child, can leave you looking like a cold and uncaring bastard. Just a friendly heads-up ;-)
Bing Ups Ante In Social Search, Adds More Facebook “Likes” To Search Results
Square to livestream major announcement on Monday, May 23rd
"Construct a list of the most successful technology startups however you like (by revenues, market cap, number of users), and you'll find the number that didn't take outside funding is zero or near it."

I think looking at how much money the founders made would be the most objective measure. Of course you're going to be able to create a bigger company if you go out and raise a few million bucks, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll personally be better off in five years.
Otaku Emin
Blog about anime, game and manga i post things like small reviews on anime and mangas.
post about games i have played.
Amv of the week.
information and a place to see what to read or watch
Agree on this, but find a replacement (or firm) that will be willing to take on the project and work with the investor to make sure it gets done.
You could also use the bitcoin calculator: http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php
More like a starlet who got the casting couch.
I must admit that beyond the anecdotal, I do not.

There is a relatively established method though of creating boards of directors and/or leadership "teams" to achieve better decision making patterns; for this exact reason.

The group is more often than not a better performer than the individual.
I fixed a bug at work.
Medium Length Hair Styles 2011
Medium wavy hairstyles look great for any occasion. Because nowadays all hair lengths are popular we have put together some tips to help you create different wavy hairstyles to suit your style and to make you look amazing.
If you setup the list I've no doubt that people would love to see it.
to summarise, JFDI.
unless you want to go it on your own

There are plenty AMIs based on stable AKIs out there. Moreover if you manage a "very large EC2 infrastructure" then you don't rely on 3rd party AMIs, do you?

Finally, your links point to... Ubuntu bugs.
If I missed one that was tracked back to an amazon AKI then a deeplink would be appreciated.
I'm a happy paying user. Really dig the site. A few ideas for UI enhancements, but I think this is a great and easy way to quickly test site changes without having to dig into the code or Google Analytics, which makes the process incredibly difficult.
This site is dedicated to people w/ big ideas - here's just one interview.
It's easy to escalate all of the discussion here.

Poor programmer expect to be correct.
Better programmers guard against a variety of error types
The best programmers are constantly thinking up new ways
things could good wrong, not satisfied with just a set list

And I'm sure we could add more.
I wonder if there's a way to track the date bitcoins were mined - make those less valuable... or something like that.. you have a fair point.
Taking it a bit further it's often useful to invite criticism. Next time you show off your latest prototype instead of asking "What do you think?" ask "What do you hate about this?". Sometimes your peers are reluctant to criticize; make them feel comfortable to do so.
So you can tell in advance what any given currency will be worth tomorrow, next week, a month from now? Your money is always "gambled"
Food Consumed
This slideshow looks like a YC photo album. Congrats, Paul.
Imagine what kind of advances could be made if a common bytecode was established

I'm beginning to believe NativeClient and PNaCl (LLVM on NaCl: http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf) has the best shot at becoming this.

Google is already including NaCl in Chrome developer builds, so I wouldn't be surprised if they enabled it in releases by the end of the year, and started releasing Native Client applications soon after.

http://blog.chromium.org/2011/02/native-client-getting-ready...
Original paper is here if you want to judge motivations: http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

At the current value, they are already rich and probably not forlorn.
I took your advice and we added a link for more details which leads to an about us page. Thanks again for the input.
Android Tablets Will Overtake iOS In 30 Months?
The argument that important ML algorithms should be highly scalable ( O(logN), O(N), O(NlogN) ) holds in fields that are rich in "big data," with millions to trillions of data points.

However, there are also many fields where acquiring a large ( > 100s-1000s of samples) is infeasible. This is especially relevant in medicine and biology. Many applications are constrained by small sample sizes and may have a feature count that is orders of magnitude larger than the sample count. Examples include fMRI studies and gene expression studies. Don't discount research in methodologies (such as SVMs and many graphical models) that have superlinear performance as impractical for real-world applications, because these are used heavily in certain fields.
>What's going to stop us from building a human body, including the brain, once we have the manufacturing technology to do so?

it's that we don't know what "manufacturing technology" we need, because we don't have a deep enough understanding of how the brain works. I think the parent's point was that attempts to engineer complex systems fail because these attempts can't reproduce the emergent behavior that arises from many layers of interactions from individual agents. a plane is complex, but it's not a complex system.

edit: I actually disagree a bit with myself - you can make a case that planes have elements of complex systems, but it's not at the same scale as a brain, in my opinion.
I'm not sure how this is relevant?

All programs have an infinite number of possible inputs.
You check the ones that you expect.

Is that somehow non-obvious?
Interesting to note that Google ( Youtube was known to loose money so I am not including it for the rest of this comment ) is no where to be found but FB is on all 3 list. FB isn't getting more $ per ad than Google ( probably less ) but their underlying technical cost to handle an individual users is apparently far greater.
You keep lumping the linux distribution in with the linux kernel. They are separate things. You can run Ubuntu on an Amazon AKI. I run Debian on Amazon AKIs. And if the latest Ubuntu depends on a particular kernel feature that the tested kernels don't have then it's probably not a good idea to run the latest Ubuntu.
Yammer Announces Suite of Integration Products
Hi Nathan, glad you dig our site! We're honored to have you as a paying customer. If you have any UI suggestions for the product we'd be glad to hear them. You can email us directly at hello@optimizely.com
Ashton Kutcher On Stage At TechCrunch Disrupt
This whole policy assumes that attacks would only occur at a national level - ie government initiated/sponsored attack towards US assets.

Aside from the issue of it being hard it is to be able to successfully geographically locate the source of an attack, what if a bunch of hackers in China, operating privately, decide to hack the US. Is US going to bomb China if the level of the attack is severe enough? Diplomatic efforts will fail pretty quickly if it genuinely isn't anything conducted by the Chinese government.

But hey, let's swap out the contentious example of China for Australia or France - is America going to bomb either of those countries because private citizens in those locations are pursuing a national cyber-security warfare-level attack?

If Al Quedia et al have taught us anything it is that we cannot assume national security attacks (and our defense strategies) to be state-sponsored any more.
Interesting, but pg's set of measures is also necessary to evaluate impact upon society and the world at large.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heretical-Open-Source
Sorry to respond to my own comment, too late for edits...

I want to point out that I'm extremely enthusiastic about majoring in science or engineering, and I think an MS program (especially an employer sponsored one) can be a great way to dig a little deeper into a field or get a background in a new discipline (ie., get an MS in CS if your undergrad was in math or physics). In fact, someone with this background who gets a jd or mba almost has a superpower in those fields. Hard Sci/Eng/Math is also just a great background to get out there and start a company or start doing high value work the moment you hit the workforce.

PhDs are a different beast. Incredibly long training, often highly specialized, generally directed toward an academic career, even if alternatives are available, and kind of scary low pay considering the intelligence level and barriers to entry. I'm not saying CS PhDs aren't employable in Industry at fine salaries, but are they more employable than someone with a BS who rocked it in the workforce for 10 years instead? Are their salaries much higher than people who got professional degrees with shorter completion times and vastly lower attrition rates? No way.

Anyway, I should acknowledge a distinction here - the RAND study is more about PhDs, whereas this article is more about general background. Engineers may not populate government, but it's the most common background among fortune 500 CEOs, way out of proportion to the general degree population.
And providing security against attacks. The more legitimate miners, the harder it is to gain control of the system.
brains and markets are both complex adaptive systems. they aren't similar in high-level function, but they are with respect to low level dynamics.
PloobsEngine, a opensource 3D Game Engine released for XNA 4.0
Space Shuttle Twitpic Launches Woman to Tweeting Fame
That's not correct. We7 isn't just another web radio service. It absolutely is a service where you can listen to whatever you want, with a fairly decent selection of (major label) tracks. The major advantage over Spotify up until now has been the fact that it has a web interface, although I do take your point that the UI is pretty horrendous.
Off the top of my head, this seems to be one possibility of having something like a persistent development environment. I could fire up vim, the server could store the environment and I could easily write code from every place with a decent browser.
Thoughts on Twitter's rate limit
Are they scientists or engineers? As far as I know scientists do research, write papers, file for patents etc. etc. and Engineers build stuff. How many papers have the published?

Also, being a scientist does not mean that you will be a good administrator or politician. Politics is better left to politicians.
As a US citizen living in China, this policy scares the shit out of me.
Yeah, I thought the same thing. I recognize the need for funding (for some, not all), but I hate using it as the primary barometer for success.

How about revenue, or users, or even active users?

It's just damn disappointing to see that the mantra being spread is "raise a ton of cash or bust," and that people not raising money are often ignored.
> I'm beginning to believe NativeClient and PNaCl has the best shot at becoming this.

Me too, although the biggest hurdles seem as much political as they are technical.

My hope is that Google can strong-arm NativeClient into active use, forcing otherwise recalcitrant browser makers (Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft) into adopting it.
How Pretzel Crisps used social media to engage and provide snacks
NativeClient is being distributed in the official public build of Chrome, just in a disabled state. You can turn it on in about:flags.
The PCI DSS does differentiate between handling encrypted data and handling unencrypted data -- some requirements are only in scope if handling unencrypted data. It's important to note that Transparent Redirect doesn't remove the need for a merchant to become PCI compliant, it only reduces the scope of what's necessary to achieve compliance.

It's true that if your form is hacked it could be modified to send credit card details to an attacker. But that's also true even if you're redirecting the user to a third party page like Paypal to complete the payment. If hacked, somebody could change the Paypal button to redirect to a malicious page.
Google Testing Longer Descriptions for long-tail results
Awesome thanks for the advice! I need to do some research tonight on technical aspects they deal with so I can relate my knowledge to their needs. I also thought about writing some js to run on the page to make a few improvements I've thought would be good ideas, then uploading to github. Either way, I can't wait!
Nice post! If a paid position, how much have you typically paid interns? Is it hourly or project based?
Seriously.. have you written larger works? Would love to read them.
They might be trying to get an optimal mix of debt and equity, but its only speculation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade-Off_Theory_of_Capital_Str...
It's been suggested on the other thread that he works at Netgem: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netgem (sorry, the link is in French, but it's been deleted from Wikipedia EN). Wikipedia FR for Fabrice Bellard supports this claim.

A quick google for "fabrice bellard netgem" shows his email address at Netgem and a slew of C header/source files copyrighted Netgem and written by him, so he was definitely working there at some point.
US Treasury Series I Savings bonds are currently paying 4.6% per year (their rate rises with inflation), income is tax exempt until redeemed, and can be redeemed at any time after 1 year.

I think you'd be better off going to the nearest bank with your $1,000 and buying an I bond. It's not a popular thing to do (only grandmas seem to like these things), but it's a pretty much slam dunk investment with zero risk.
Get with the brogram.
Its happening: Brain Computer Interface Technology
I wonder why he chose this kernel version instead of the latest
Am I too much a video game nerd if my first thought was, a new Final Fantasy?
And the motherboard uses 10W, the disk 10W, and the CPU 50W. We're still not at 700W.
We pay a stipend for the whole summer ($2K). I've heard everything from unpaid to $4K for the summer. More than that for a business intern, in my opinion, is unnecessary and doesn't get you kids who are there for the right reasons.
Supreme Court OKs Warrantless House Search
As an "outsider", the only thing I really take from this - besides seeing the prominence of YC startups - is that there certainly is a shit ton of money chasing unproven ideas.

I mean, all of these products seem on the surface to be viable entities. I suppose that alone is better than what was happening ten years ago. However the issue I have is that the degree they need to succeed just to be a positive return is sometimes bordering on the outlandish.

Groupon - a BILLION dollars? Seriously? It's news if an entire industry is worth this much, let alone a single company.

Maybe I'm just not getting it, but a lot of this stuff seems to be overvalued in the extreme.
Did you try not requiring sign ups to respond? Invitees should be able to click yes or no and automatically create an account for them.
My domains are at Moniker. SSL Certs at namecheap.com. I use a couple of VPSes at Prgmr and WebbyNode for hosting. And most of my mail is with Google.
It is important to remember exchange rates are not static. The exchange rate is determined by the supply and demand of the two currencies for exchange. If you suddenly liquidate a lot of BitCoins all at once, you will raise the supply on the BitCoin side and thus drop the BitCoin-to-dollar exchange rate. It is not valid to take the exchange rate, multiply by the number of extant BitCoins, and declare that to be the size of the BitCoin economy in dollars; that will grossly overestimate it.

(This has nothing to do with BitCoin qua BitCoin, it's the nature of currency exchange. Because most currencies that people deal with have such enormous economic bases, people tend to reason about them such that they neglect certain terms that they don't have to worry about in practice because of sheer size. If I exchange $100 to Euros, I won't personally budge the exchange rate noticeably. But in a much smaller economy, you can't neglect such things.)