skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The advice is more apt for B2C services where the users don't care about the features - for example I don't care if Grooveshark lets me write a 140 character review for an album or not as long as it lets me listen to my playlist; but for B2B, features are the core, aren't they! - for example if there are two invoicing solutions, one which supports time tracking and one which doesn't, I will definitely go for the former.
FTFY: depreciated --> deprecated
In the real world, patent trolls are an insignificant minority of patent holders. Patents are either left fallow (b/c the invention has no practical commercial use), or licensed out.

The easiest way to "figure out a way through all of the legal mess" is to simply license the patent. Indeed, there is no legal mess unless you're trying to get around the patent.

Patent licensing is not a zero-sum game. A patent holder will not demand unreasonable royalties. 0.1% of something is better than 1000% of $0.
If you're working for him, he doesn't want you too active on github because that's a signal/flag to other employers and you'll be poached.
ah had no idea
“Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM” was once a popular belief that seems quaint now. It’s hard to imagine that people used to buy IBM products simply because they were so dominant.

People still do the equivalent of this all the time ... that mindset is hardly a thing of the past.
What correlation? A correlation between github users and people you'd hire (or have hired?) Or something else?
It was designed as a text for an intro to programming college course, so I'd say it is possible to complete it in four months if you devote an hour to it every night or so.
Yeah... I'm just going to have to say that I've never considered current use of a specific favored version control system in someone I am considering hiring to be correlated to their design capability in any sense whatsover. And you know what, neither have you, you haven't really seen that either, so why would you even claim that? Who knows; people say a lot of weird things here sometimes.
And here I was thinking it would take me about 2 months to finish it. Anyway, I'd definitely like to participate. Also, take a look at this: http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/sicp-study-group/
The problem seems to be that there's not much demand for people to solve those problems (not that I agree that all of those are worthy goals, particularly the "get rid of lawyers" bit).

Solving some of the things you mention could produce immense benefits for everybody, but it seems like the common wisdom is that it's too risky to pay people salaries equivalent to "finance/entertainment/social media smart people salaries" to work on them, at least not in the same quantity as those industries hire.

Finance, entertainment, and social media companies are out there digging through resume sites and college campuses, actively looking for smart people to solve problems, because they are really sure they can make enough money to compensate them well for their efforts, and have a lot left over.

I'd love to work on energy generation, space exploration, brain computer interfaces, or longevity, but I expect I'll be working on more mundane problems until my student loans are paid off and my emergency and retirement accounts are back to where they should be, because there's reliable money in mundane problem solving.

Of course, I may not be smart enough to help out on "big problems," or I may not have the right connections, or enough risk tolerance. I still hope to find out one of these days. :)
Similarly: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma... has video recordings of lectures that follow the book.
Thanks for your offer and for sharing your personal story! I do not think I am that serious and hopefully another HN reader will take your offer and see where it goes.

I look forward to checking out your library of articles that you have authored.
Helm by Steven Gould has a central premise where a colonization ship makes the choice to take more people at the expense of more technology. They land on the minimally hospitable planet with a society engineered to maximize knowledge transfer of things like germ theory and nutrition (they are taught songs as kids about it, etc.) and with comprehensive scientific information in printed form, but no advanced manufacturing capabilities.

What was most interesting to me were the people who denied that they had ever come from earth, that all the fantastical technologies of the past didn't exist, etc.
I'm wanting to learn C, like you did... I'm very interested, but wouldn't I be too far behind for it to be productive for you guys?
How much Google cares about your project.
Self-quantifiers: Silicon Valley types who treat their bodies like computers
That's not a Heisenbug. That's just a classic newbie mistake. If it's made by a non-newbie, then I highly question their competence.
At my school we went through it in about two and a half months (my school did quarters instead of semesters), but I recommend taking more than that.
Sounds pretty rational to me for both of you. The important thing is whether someone can deliver the goods, not how long it took them or where they were sitting at the time. Most of my critical design work is done in the shower or laying flat on my back looking at the ceiling. Having the time to do deep consideration and reflection is a critical part of quality design work. Sitting and typing furiously in a loud open work environment next to sales guys screaming into their phones, secretaries flirting with management, and air conditioning blasting away may look more impressive, but never produces quality work.
I have a lot of respect for Herb Sutter--his articles on difficulty of multiprogramming are worth study by all. But there is an element of Kool-aid in his comments about other languages. Hadoop is written in Java; much of the world is written in C, and in very restricted versions of C++. I say this as one who did 10 years in industrial-strength C++ programming.

If you look at C++ without rose-colored glasses, it is a pretty frightening prospect. Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu is a very awesome book, but the fact that there are surprises in it for Scott Meyers should give the student pause.

And to all of you who are beginning programming, you will be better off in the long run if you become proficient in several languages. I predict that in your successful career you will be ahead if you are able to pick up new languages rapidly. Time spent mastering C++ might not be the best use of your learning budget.
Rails Is Too Easy
I don't see how any of these features are examples of Apple "suspending their priorities" (Assuming that means making sacrifices to design/usability). In most cases it is quite the opposite, where they delay the release of a feature like Copy/Paste or multi-tasking until they get it done the way they want. Apple was mocked consistently for not having these features, if they really cared about comparison charts wouldn't they have rushed something to market?

Same with adding carriers. It isn't like they chose AT&T for an ideological reason, they were just the most pliable carrier in 2007. A lot of the other stuff seems more like design choices you would make after using your product for a while e.g. notifications and the camera button.

If anything the most blatant "ripoffs" were of Camera+ more so than anything on Android, everything else seems like normal evolution.
Hey, how about an IRC channel? The nice thing is that a lot of people already use it and people can just hang around in there and converse when people are on. If not that, then some form of chat would be nice.

------------------

Edit: Here we go: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/p2pu-sicp/AwNI2g5_8i...

It's #sicp on irc.freenode.net.
Would someone be willing to do a quick "for engineers" précis of the core ideas of his theory of constraints?

I ask as I've seen The Goal and some other books of his on a colleague's desk. Have to admit that on the surface it does look like exactly the kind of "management self-help" book that I'd naturally be a bit skeptical of, but it sounds like this guy is somewhat respected amongst the technology crowd so I'd be interested to find out a bit more. Without necessarily going as far as reading a novel about operational management of a factory :)
Interesting, this seems to be a better way to organize the process than a wiki :-)
Check out http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ (C++ Frequently Questioned Answers), particularly Defective C++ http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html, and most interestingly Undecidable Grammar at http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html#defect-2.
Given how often this happens with Twitter, Facebook and ever other Corp-owned namespace the more I appreciate the clear ownership status afforded by DNS, despite it's many flaws.

It's also why I put my domain on my business card but not my Twitter, all it'd take is an account hack and some spam or a backhander from some firm and it would't be mind anymore with no recourse whatsoever.
The Math of TechCrunch: Is TechCrunch Still About Startups?
I'm an autodidact that managed to earn ~100k without formal education with programming, and then got some formal education in something else just for the fun of it. I don't like it when people use their adacemic experience (or lack of it) to bludgeon people that have backgrounds different from their own.

I think drawing those kinds of distinctions in headlines is unproductive and foolish.
From what I can gather that's the idea behind this project. It's one of those marker phrases that normally signifies offense is about to occur.

Eg.
I don't mean to offend you but....
Don't take this personally but...

I'm not racist but.. is one of the most famous of these and often, though not always, signifies that something racist is about to be said.
well i guess for the text based one it could be either. i assume most? people use hanyu pinyin to input characters anyway. but a speech bot would be more interesting.
I'm getting entirely different results with Python 3.2:

% python -m timeit "[ x**3 for x in range(10000) ]"
100 loops, best of 3: 7.85 msec per loop
% python -m timeit "map(lambda x: x**3, range(10000))"
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.26 usec per loop

By these benchmarks map is 700 times faster than the corresponding list comprehension.
At Berkeley, I did 61A as a summer course (which is based on SICP). Admittedly we skipped a few sections, and of course we didn't do all the exercises, and it was hard to keep up, but if you're wiling to dedicate a reasonable chunk of time to it every day, it's possible to get the material substantially faster than that.
Human cell becomes living laser with jellyfish protein.
Let me know if you're going to make your own study group.
The quoted article http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html does not say that ideas are worthless. Instead it says But ideas are only valuable when someone (like you) makes something happen. And they give you 999 ideas ready for the picking.

So why not evaluate those?
WordPress - PHP

Buddypress - PHP

Joomla - PHP

Drupal - PHP
Thanks for bringing this up. I brought the book after being inspired by Abelson's first lecture here: http://goo.gl/5Qoz9.

But never followed through with it. Since my work doesn't depend on it, it gets lowest priority. Some peer pressure should definitely fix that. Count me in.

Should we have a IRC chatroom (#sicpgroup?) as a place to have discussions?
Why QWERTY?
Legal rights aren't rights?
I like this a lot; the wiki is going to be useful for a reference-type resource, but an IRC channel would really create the interactive community that I think the OP is looking for. Great idea :)
I'd say the biggest problem would be the lack of modern argicultural chemicals and fertiliser. Without them we can't feed 7 billion people. There'd be famine quickly and within a gereration the population would be down to middle ages levels
Set and dictionary comprehensions, and set literals are both very cool. I wonder though: is back-porting all the nice features of 3 into 2 going to encourage adoption of 3? I somehow doubt it.
Perl - C

Python - C

PHP - C
Great catch.

Here's their statistics on graduation rates by degree. It's a few years old but the latest isn't going to be all that different.

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_degrsbystudyfi...

Aerospace engineering - 102

Biomedical engineering - 48

Chemical engineering - 68

Civil Engineering - 50

Earth Systems Engineering - 1

Engineering - 9

Engineering Physics - 10

Financial Engineering - 16

Nuclear Engineering - 16

Now I'm going to guess none of the above degrees are the majors we are talking about for these startups, who are looking for software developers.

More relevant:

Computer Engineering - 84

Computer Science - 158

Electrical Engineering - 170

---

Total: 412

Maybe we should throw in all the Math, Physics, Linguistics and Music majors as well? Those are fields that are often sorted through for developers. It's a small number of each that goes into programming, but not insignificant.

In any case, this is Ann Arbor only. Can the claim of 8000 engineering graduates per year be substantiated for the entire system. Seems unlikely, but we need more data, and we'd definitely have to be including every field that has any possible connection, perhaps someone had a statistic that said there were 7002 STEM degrees granted system wide per year, and that turned into "around 8000" and then "8000"?

Ah, here is a year by year summary and one that puts all forms of engineering in one category:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_degrssummary_1...

year - # eng degrees

2006 - 1034

2007 - 1065

2008 - 1150

2009 - 1198

2010 - 1254

That is undergraduate ONLY. There are also on that list comparable numbers of graduate degrees, so double the number for all degrees altogether: 1254 + 1035 = 2289 engineering degrees conferred in 2010. It's kind of amazing that they have the same number of grad students as undergrad, that means there is a near 1:1 ratio between grad students and undergrad, so each undergrad theoretically could be taught privately by a single grad student tutor if they wanted.

So to hit 8000 we need only 3 other U. Michigan campuses the same size as Ann Arbor.
Like: "I know we could teleport. No, I didn't see any massive power supplies, it was just a box about the size of your 'car' and it cost as much as a loaf of bread to use it." or "I called my sister on Alpha Centauri every Sunday, and we'd chat about the weather."

Just knowing it's possible, with gross engineering parameters, can be half the battle.
Made made his death out of it, too.
I'd love to do this with everyone. Have you thought about Convore or a Google Group to organize discussions?
Hey everyone...

Wow, there's a lot of interest in this! Sargis discovered a group on P2PU (and Google Groups) that's just getting started, so I figure we might as well join up there rather than reinvent the wheel.

Check out the group at:
http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/sicp-study-group/

And on Google Groups at:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/p2pu-sicp

Also, for anyone interested in discussing informally as you go along, shoot me an email at:

dustin [at] myplanetdigital [dot] com

With your skype username :-)
Just joined up there! Shoot me an email too if you'd like to discuss on Skype as you go along.

dustin [at] myplanetdigital [dot] com
Freedom in the Fifty States - An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom
One more developer to the existing one and you will be number one.
Scala: The Static Language that Feels Dynamic (Bruce Eckel)
I didn't know that you couldn't arrange mass in any way to get a wormhole.

I've never been able to figure out in my (broken, I'm sure) mental model how you could create a wormhole but I suspected that the people who actually understood physics did know.

Thanks a lot, man. Interesting stuff.
Some of these things would be helpful but you'd need to have them on you if you were dumped in the past. If you landed (now) in the Roman Empire how would you bring them potatoes? ("Just sail across the ocean, then go up the mountains on the other side of that continent and eat those root things there. Easy!")
makmanalp, do you want to put one together and share it with the group here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/p2pu-sicp

I'll admit I haven't used IRC in a while so it would take me a while to figure out how to get a channel set up.
There are domains where, if left unregulated, the expected payoff is asymmetrically positive. The Silicon Valley tech ecosystem is one of those. Investors bleed money spreading relatively small investments across a pool of companies, but every now and then, boom you get a Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc, and it makes orders of magnitude more money than was lost.

There are other domains where if left unregulated the expected payoff is asymmetrically negative. Banking appears to be the primary example here. You can make your ~5% yearly return relatively safely, but making significantly more than that can only be done with exposure to a much higher risk of a major collapse.

If you start at the Great Depression and work backwards in time, there's a financial crisis every 20 or 30 years for over a century. It wasn't until we figured out how and gained the political will to regulate the industry that that was mitigated.

Utilities may be another example. I grew up in the Southeast where electric is heavily regulated and boring, but always stable and predictable. It was interesting to witness the California energy debacle with Enron a decade ago, and compare the two.

Stable, predictable, and boring is the ideal state for systems like electricity generation/distribution and the monetary system. Underlie much of the rest of the economy and infrastructure? Check. Expected payoff is negative? Check. Then regulate for stability and robustness. Such states don't tend to naturally emerge from deregulation, except in the form of monopoly or trust, and then you've got innovation-crushing rent-seeking and anti-competitive behavior to deal with.

Now I'm not certain which domain the telcom system falls under, it doesn't seem vulnerable to the kind of major collapse enabled by deregulation in electricy and banking. However, it does have a history of monopoly and rent-seeking behavior that I think behooves us not to discount or ignore.
I wonder the same. I like to imagine the current population being transposed to an alternate Earth where humans never existed.

I guess the first most important step is for everyone to start documenting everything they know of science, creating a kind of ad-hoc paper Wikipedia (once we make paper, of course). If the current generations die before their knowledge is recorded or passed down, we're going to be held back hundreds of unnecessary years.

I imagine with some excellent leadership and coordination, we could be back to computers, complex medicine, and aircrafts within a century. Maybe even decades, if the culture shock doesn't trigger famine, disease, wars, and depression.
Thanks for posting this. I may be able to tie it into something I've been thinking about lately. Here's a link to my previous post. May seem like it's off-topic, but to me it's dead-on.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625009
Nice, I've got all of those except for the CSS, Head First, and Rspec book... so I'm glad I've been headed in the right direction. Will look into those other books, I hear the RSpec book is real handy.

Thanks you so much for the tips and the list. This is why I love Hacker News.
When times are that short you should question if Python is actually doing anything, or just promising to do it later (remember that range is a generator in python3).

$ python3.1 -m timeit "map(lambda x: x**3, range(10000))"
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.01 usec per loop

Seems fishy. Adding up the elements forces Python to actually do the cubing on all of them:

$ python3.1 -m timeit "sum(map(lambda x: x**3, range(10000)))"
100 loops, best of 3: 13 msec per loop
$ python3.1 -m timeit "sum([ x**3 for x in range(10000) ])"
100 loops, best of 3: 10.6 msec per loop

map really is slower, at least for me in python3.1.
I guess the counterargument is that if you had launched a really polished site, you may have gotten positive press from the get-go and a much larger userbase.
I suspect once an organisation gets big enough, you're going to find perl and python in use somewhere.

The OSX kernel is written mostly in a restricted dialect of C++ once you get above the microkernel level isn't it?

The control software for the Space Shuttle is written in a custom PL/I based language called HAL/S (S for Shuttle).

The bottom layers of Android may be C, but most of the code you actually interact with is written in Java.
As a product it's a great idea, I'm sure it would sell very well.
As an effective learning tool I'm not so sure. Unless you could implement top notch speech recognition it would not do too much in improving your speech. And so far I'm yet to see English speech recognition software that would be suitable for such a purpose. The situation is even worse in case of Mandarin (and probably Cantonese too). Mandarin speech recognition that is out there is not suitable for anything more than simple voice-commands, at least last time I searched.

Generally speaking I'm not an advocate of practising speech before attaining a certain, relatively high level of proficiency. But that's a completely different matter.

A text bot from a technical standpoint would be completely doable and should be a good product as well.
You could actually build a pretty sophisticated course utilizing that text bot, a lot of people would be interested I'm sure.
Some Thoughts on the PC vs Console Debate
The epic battle of two of the greatest and most powerful gaming weapons of all time is analyzed and re- analyzed for the ultimate conclusion of who gets the upper hand.
People already do this. Some only go so far as stone blades, or allow modern tools for certain steps. Others bootstrap the whole process from stone-age to steel.

I've never done it. It's incredibly time consuming but satisfying, from the first hand accounts I've read. You can cut hours or days off of your work time by using modern tools for some of the most seemingly trivial steps.
You have had the worst luck with Linux that I have ever heard of. Among my dozen or so personal and work acquaintances who have installed Linux for desktop use, none of them have put in one tenth of the work you have, and all of them have multiple fully functional desktop systems to show for it. My condolences for your absolutely spectacular bad luck.
map() returns an iterator in Py3k.

> python3.2 -m timeit "( x**3 for x in range(10000))"
100000 loops, best of 3: 2.67 usec per loop

> python3.2 -m timeit "[ x**3 for x in range(10000)]"
100 loops, best of 3: 9.53 msec per loop

> python3.2 -m timeit "list(map(lambda x: x**3, range(10000)))"
100 loops, best of 3: 11.8 msec per loop

> python3.2 -m timeit "list( x**3 for x in range(10000))"
100 loops, best of 3: 10.7 msec per loop

And here's the Python 2.5 naïve/in-memory version recreated in Python 3.2:

> python3.2 -m timeit "list(map(lambda x: x**3, list(range(10000))))"
100 loops, best of 3: 12.1 msec per loop

And on Python 2.7 is still the fastest:

> python -m timeit "map(lambda x: x**3, range(10000))"
100 loops, best of 3: 4.33 msec per loop

> python -m timeit "[x**3 for x in xrange(10000)]"
100 loops, best of 3: 2.32 msec per loop

> python -m timeit "[x**3 for x in range(10000)]"
100 loops, best of 3: 2.66 msec per loop

On PyPy (1.5) it's pretty much the same, which goes to show why this is not “Python idiom”, but rather CPython's implementation detail:

> pypy -m timeit "[x**3 for x in range(10000)]"
100 loops, best of 3: 2.73 msec per loop

> pypy -m timeit "[x**3 for x in xrange(10000)]"
100 loops, best of 3: 2.62 msec per loop

> pypy -m timeit "map(lambda x: x**3, xrange(10000))"
100 loops, best of 3: 2.51 msec per loop

> pypy -m timeit "map(lambda x: x**3, range(10000))"
100 loops, best of 3: 2.87 msec per loop