skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Counting proper languages I actually wrote something useful in, my path looks like:

C64 BASIC -> C64 raw machine code -> QBasic -> x86 raw machine code -> Turbo Pascal -> C -> Visual Basic -> Java -> O'Caml -> Delphi7 -> Python -> C++ -> Erlang -> C# -> Haskell -> F# -> JavaScript

To keep learning very different languages is also what guarantees you will be able to get a good job when your bread-and-butter language falls out of fashion. Try to imagine being a 60-year old Cobol-only programmer in the job market today. In addition to getting some experience with the actual languages, you will also get a good grip of the underlying patterns and ideas, which will make it a breeze to pick up any new language.

Another mostly overlooked skill that you gain from working in radically different languages, is to be able to work with different priorities. Java and C++ are designed for serious work. In these, you take types, error checking and exceptions seriously, you keep the code clean and robust, and you R the FM thoroughly for every single external function you call. Visual Basic, on the other hand, is designed for slapping together something that gets a small job done. Errors can be ignored, text encoding can be fucked up, functions can run into 500 lines, and that's simply something you should be comfortable with when in VB - it's copy/paste/hack/throw away all the way. C# is again very much like Java, but without the documentation attitude. Critical bits of the standard library are woefully undocumented, and you are expected to just try some code and see if it works. When in C#, just accept that and be comfortable with it.

But, most importantly when learning a new language: Adopt the mindset. Don't try for type-safe Python. Don't write slapdash C++ code. Don't try for time-critical optimized VB. Don't box/unbox everything in F# to get dynamic typing.
How to publish long blog posts on Facebook
This is pretty fascinating, do you know of any good sites or books which will get me up to scratch on different number systems? I haven't studied math in a long time, so do you think it would be worth going over the basics, like calculus and geometry, again to build a foundation before venturing so far out?
If it's real, it doesn't bode well that they think the only way to try to steer the company is by anonymously airing the dirty laundry on a tech rumor blog. Can't get much more dysfunctional than that.
I came here to ask for that as well. Also, I like that you only have to enter a zip code, otherwise I might have thought it was a great way to harvest mailing addresses ;)
Rich countries don't pay off debt, they inflate it away. One of the main reason for European countries to adopt the euro was to get a piece of the reserve currency pie, allowing more debt to be eliminated without severe economic repercussions. Unfortunately, they hit a road block in the Mediterranean, where, due to poor fiscal management, more inflation would lead to economic disasters threatening the stability of the euro. Meanwhile, the U.S. cannot afford much inflation at the moment, since it would threaten the position of the dollar as reserve currency in favour of the euro. Worse yet, they have their biggest creditor breathing in their neck with increasing economic and military power, who would not be pleased by inflationary measures.

Thus begins the biggest poker game of all, in which the U.S. suddenly cares about military spending and is trying to get Europe to spend itself into an inflationary cycle. Meanwhile, Europe is trying to prevent that through severe budget cuts. Ultimately though, neither can get rid of their debt without inflation so both taking inflationary measures is the only logical outcome. China and other countries heavily invested in euros (e.g., Russia) and dollars (e.g., Japan) will not be pleased, but ultimately their wealth is heavily dependent on the economic well-being of their biggest lenders and trading partners. There will be few winners in this game.
vagrant looks interesting. here are some answers to questions i was going to post here but ended up finding myself via the docs:

- what this adds to just using VB itself is that they provide pre-configured, minimal environments, kept as small as possible (less than 500MB).

- pre-configured means that it includes ssh, VB extensions, sudo, assumes NAT addressing.

- it has some support for multiple vms (DB and web separate, for example).

BUT i still can't work out what environments are available for download. there must be an obvious list somewhere... :o(
4chan doesn't make money.

No one on the mainland has copied it and then paid to have it blocked
There's a reason economists look at core inflation which excludes energy and food, if you did that your whole argument would fall apart. Inflation is too low right now considering the high unemployment.
Agreed. This is a major PITA for basically all non developers in your company.
"There is no point in having more than one account"

I disagree.
Apple up, Android flat in smartphone growth
One Year with iOS
Extra <div>s just to control margins looks very much like having to add markup just to do layout, i.e. mixing markup with layout. Your nested div has no semantic meaning, they are only present for layout.
Circle Hack Lets You Experience Google+ On Facebook
You don't earn a technical co-founder any more than you earn your first secretary. Every person who is recruited to join a business must be convinced that he or she is going to get something out of the deal.

The problem quite simply is that there are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs out there who expect someone with technical chops to join them when they a) don't have an existing relationship, b) don't have a proven track record of execution and c) don't have anything to give besides equity that isn't worth anything. In other words, "co-founder" is little more than a title bestowed upon the person you need to build your product but can't actually pay to do the work.

It's no surprise that it's hard to find a "co-founder" of any type under these circumstances. When somebody you briefly spoke to at a meetup asks you to be a "co-founder" in exchange for 10% of a company that doesn't exist yet, you're naturally going to be skeptical. If that person adds a reasonable salary to the equation, you're far more likely to take the proposition seriously.

Additionally, I think it's worth pointing out that wannabe entrepreneurs have a lot of misconceptions about what type of technical skills they need. Instead of looking for someone who can build a basic web app (which is what 99% of them want to build), they look for a hipster developer whose resume is filled with all the buzzwords of the day. You do not need a Ruby on Rails developer with MongoDB experience to build a web application where individuals can organize and share pictures of their pet goats.
tax identification number (I forget what it's called)

PPS Number
very true.

Tumblr isn't blocked

recently two clones launched (diandian and one from sina)

I'm sure it will be blocked soon
It seems that an obvious attack against the Chinese filtering system would be fooling it into blacklisting a huge number of neutral sites - I mean the good old poisoning with fake keywords technique. Yet I haven't heard about anyone trying this approach.
iPhone 3GS and 4 are pretty quick to boot. My Nexus One is noticeably slower, and I don't know how they stack up against any BB devices.
IStopOver acquires vacation rentals competitor Vacapedia
I agree with this guy. Learning some very basic technical skills is very easy and can help you a lot.

A small tip I'd like to give to any non-tech person. Is to watch Stanford's CS106a lectures on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps8jOj7diA0

You can watch the whole thing in about a week. It gives you a decent grasp of what coding is. And they use a very friendly language that anyone can understand.

It's a very small effort that will make it much easier for you to talk and understand tech people. Worth your time in my opinion, take a look.

Also, it's important to note that there's almost always many alternative routes that you follow to get somewhere. While learning code yourself is a great route. It's for sure not the only one. I think the most common solution for people looking for a technical co-founder is to stop looking for a co-founder and look for an employee. Which can become a co-founder in the future once you get along. The article talks about this as well.
This looks promising. I found a small issue off the bat - when I created a new guestbook app and then previewed it, I received the following error:

TemplateSyntaxError at /

Caught TemplateDoesNotExist while rendering: base.html

I went back and edited the 'base.html', hit save, and this fixed the problem. Thanks for the preview and good luck!
Good post. "Entrepreneurs" nowadays seem like a bunch of whiners. Maybe it's the internet that encourages such passivity and hand-holding over the internet.

You want to succeed? Do whatever it takes. Learn how to code even if you won't be the one coding the program. Learn to speak the language, whether it's VC/investing, tech, or business. Sell your idea to a tech cofounder.

I agree idea guys who can't do sh are pretty much worthless. But I worry that there's been an overemphasis on the technical side. Sorry hackers, you aren't as special as you think you are. You have some personal projects you want to work on? Most personal hacking projects are worthless and even worse ideas than the ones business guys come up with.

Also worrisome is the attitude hackers have of only working with people with successful track records. I think that's the exact opposite of what you should do. People with successful track records have more to lose, and may have just gotten lucky the first time around. We should pay attention to the idea, not necessarily past success. You don't see business guys recruiting hackers based on whether they founded twitter/facebook/google do you?

A great hacker needs to be paired with a great vision guy. If hackers were as important as they thought they were then all hackers would have made it big already, and that is very far from the truth.
If you are a EU citizen you can move and live here (think there is some restriction on new accession states). If your grandparent is/was an Irish citizen, you are entitled to full Irish citizenship (and hence you can work here or anywhere else in the EU). Aside from that, I'm not sure.
Check out WidgetPay (https://widgetpay.me/), which is built on top of the Stripe API (https://stripe.com/), and run by my startup.

I've compared using it vs PayPal on my blog: http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=572

If you're comfortable with coding, though, you should just go to Stripe directly.
You're going to get variations on that quite a bit when looking for a merchant account, since what you are doing actually is very risky. This is not a Paypal issue so much as it is, shall we say, a divergence in perceptions of reality vis-a-vis how much payment processors care that your business requirements are their business requirements. Supporting pays-only-if-event-happens is your business requirement. It is very, very quirky for payment processors. They can do quirky things. They're expensive, require reams of paperwork, and you have to be able to convince them that you're good for it. Operating history of a week will not do this.
Really using Redis to build fast real-time web apps
BUT i still can't work out what environments are available for download. there must be an obvious list somewhere... :o(

http://www.vagrantbox.es/ has quite an extensive list of user-created Vagrant boxes.
http://www.chasepaymentech.com/ is good but costs a bit to get set-up.
Can you add links to their sites? I know it would be a pain, but would be useful.
If no one enforces laws that prevent underhanded tactics in business, how is that a healthy market? And don't say that consumers would naturally avoid companies that collude together to raise prices or put lead in paint.

Specifically in this scenario, how could the British government remaining uninvolved with the BT situation have led to a better market?
I got an invite yesterday. The iPhone experience was a little opaque. E.g., when you go to Circles the first time, you see a note telling you there is no one in a circle, but there is no way to add anyone. But I definitely didn't have any of the profile-related difficulties the Manchester reviewer found, and I did get some circles set up. I like the default separation into Family, Friends, Acquaintances (which I just discovered I don't know how to spell) and Following.

The website experience is much better and now that there are some messages I see it is rather Facebook-y. Unlike Facebook, photos pop up instantly (vs. Facebook's sometimes interminable delays) but of course this may be load-related. It isn't yet obvious Google+ is _better_ than Facebook, esp. since all my extended family is already there. Perhaps there are some great features I haven't discovered. But, unlike Waves and Buzz, a decent stab at social.
How to Talk to Little Girls
Someone email this to the Winkelvoss twins. Every time I hear about how Zuckerberg stole their 'idea' it makes me mad. He didn't steal it, he implemented it. The idea wasn't worth much, the implementation was everything.
Also, be aware that they recently limited the free product to 10 accounts per domain. Likely not an issue for anyone wanting to us @firstnamelastname, but others might find that information useful.
VCs are now selling their ideas to entrepreneurs
Are you implying a chicken and egg scenario whereby a third-world needs a first-world before it can become a first world? Going by that logic there should have never been a first world country in the first place. Who was the United States' United States?

Much of the third world is the way it is due to a history of instability, violence & repression, not necessarily a lack of well to do business men looking for an opportunity to avoid having to deal with pesky ideals such as labor regulation.

While it's great that Chinese have the option now of working 12+ hour plus days 6 days a week instead of going off & dying in a rice patty field, somehow I doubt philanthropic philosophy is the reason business goes to China.
Yeah, they should really make this known before invalidating an account based on it.
In soviet Russia, entrepreneur funds you.
Oops, NOW it's in my profile
Virtue of Automation: A simple script for tests which each need reboot
Looks interesting, we've created a similar free Web IDE for server-side JavaScript - http://www.erbix.com/js/ . We'd love if you take it for a spin and give us any feedback you might have :)
There's been discussion of the uptime claim and its relevance to users; however, I know the it to be completely untrue. Users having to restart their blackberry in order to restore messaging, for example, is not at all uncommon.
Thank you, I will check these out
"All your code are belong to us!". Somehow a web IDE doesn't seem to make much sense.
The geocoding service is provided by the Google Maps API so you can search all the available levels on that API.
Wow, this is pretty comprehensive. Definitely gotta try django-annoying and automate things more with fabric/puppet/vagrant.
If you only use it for system volumes it will still get written to multiple times with os upgrades, security fixes, and atime modifications. If you don't pull out the page/swap file/hibernate file you are going to be writing those often as well.
Nifty. What is "FX"? I've not heard of that, and google wasn't much help.
MasterCard downed by ISP, not Anonymous hackers
I have a strange view of this. I wouldn't generally consider myself a technical co-founder, but keep getting approached as one. I think I am better at the business side of things but get forced into the technical side because who else will do it? The constant business pitches are somewhat boring, I haven't seen one where I thought, 'damn I need to join that guy/company.' It feels like most approaches are somewhat desperate, and that's a turnoff. Instantly what comes to my mind is 'why didn't someone else take up this offer if it's so good?'

I can only speak for myself, but it wouldn't surprise me if others used similar reasoning when being pitched (perhaps on both biz/tech side). Almost always, these things seem forced rather testing interest and seeing if there is any match. If a founding team is like a marriage, these guys pitching you to join them as a cofounder are asking you to jump straight into bed with them, there is no real courting period or build up. I feel like that's what's missing.
Which makes it pretty silly to talk about recovering energy from the particle stream, instead of getting that energy from your power source directly.
More examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party
And A2Z, Zappos, the Kindle group. Search the job board and you will find those Amazon subsidiary job come up often. The are enjoying huge tax advantage over other retailers. You can be sure they will make every legal maneuver to work around this.
Excellent advice, I will be quoting him on having to "earn" a technical cofounder. He couldn't have said it better. The truth is, ideas and idea people are generally a dime a dozen. For the most part, it is all about execution.

For non-tech cofounders, you need to prove you bring something substantial to the table. The best piece of advice in that article is to learn to code yourself. If you really think you have an idea that could turn into a company, you should be driven to do anything it takes to build your MVP.

Just starting to code the front or backend will show people how dedicated you are and that alone is impressive to coders. Also, having a piece of your site already started will help you explain your idea to a potential tech cofounder better than words alone can.

My biggest suggestion is to go to "hack nights" in your area. You will kill two birds with one stone by doing this. First, you will be around people willing to teach and help you with your project. Second, hack nights are a great place to meet people looking to join a project.
It would also be nice to get a hint about the type of programming they offer - but I don't know if that data is available.
Nielsen: iPhone sales climb as Android sales flatten out
Thanks for passing this on, we'll look into it!
This is pretty handy if you want to try your hand at running a pirate radio station.
I can help with that, I am running Nightly 7.0a1 (2011-06-29)
My results:
Tests To Run: 10935 | Total Tests Ran: 10935 | Pass: 10732 | Fail: 203 | Failed To Load: 0
For my address (94107), it shows a band called FX, I did a search for 'FX radio band' and didn't immediately find anything on it - what is that?

Also, in Chrome, hitting enter in the text box doesn't submit the form, which would be a nice touch.
They don't do that. I have my account blocked on adsense/adwords since 2006. Some "illegal" clicks bullshit that wasn't my fault. I can still use any other google service without problems, it just tell me I'm blocked if I go to adsense.
> But interns aren't producing anything (if they are, it's not an internship).

That seems like a false dichotomy.

I'm at an internship right now getting paid quite well and I'm contributing to their bottom line (albeit indirectly since I am working on internal tools). I'm also learning quite a lot.
OK, nice letter, but. Why would RIM spend a boatload of money investing in QNX going forward? They already wasted enough buying it.

Why not bite the bullet and adopt Android across the board? Instant developer network, Google support, huge non-North American user base, etc, etc.?

I'd buy a BlackBerry and a Playbook running Android tomorrow if they existed.
I would argue that Sweden does have a minimum wage since, from wiki - "There is no minimum wage that is required by legislation. Instead, minimum wage standards in different sectors are normally set by collective bargaining." I think that having a government lobby for your interests is the same as a collective doing so.

Looking at countries with no minimum wage, or, to put it another way, no formal organisation(s) to lobby for the rights of workers, it is clear that the results are less than savory (hint: the only country this applies to is North Korea) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_countr...

I think that the core issue is that the majority of people expand as much as they can until something stops them, which is why formal agreements are necessary at this stage of humanity's development. Few people are conscious enough to act fairly in the absence of law. I think that the long term solution to creating a society where a minimum wage is not necessary is education and a culture of personal development. When people stop outsourcing their morals to authority, they will make the right decisions.
The End of The Space Age
Which phone do you have or specifically is there something about the web experience that "kinda sucks"? Starting with the Torch last summer the Blackberry's one by one have stopped shipping with the home grown java browser and switched to WebKit which has been tons better. While the browser can be better it is far better than what RIM has had in the past.

Disclaimer: I'm on the WebKit team at RIM.
As someone who did Blackberry development professionally for the better part of a year, the sentiments on developer friendliness really resonate with me. Working alongside iPhone and Android developers, I truly felt like I'd been relegated to working with stone tools.

As a prime example, making a network connection is a black art using their SDK, and every developer ends up rolling their own connection manager to do so. If you join the Blackberry Internet Alliance (~$1,200 a year IIRC), they'll make this easy on you by letting you use BIS (Blackberry Internet Service). This is ridiculously constraining when it comes to creating useful apps.

Another major point of pain is their code signing tool. To produce a build that's deployable to a device, you have to sign the COD file using their remote code signing server. The server was down almost daily leaving me dead in the water during critical testing periods.

Lastly, if you decided to make use of certain API facilities like persistent storage, a device reboot was required after every deployment. Given a five minute reboot time on many devices, this could consume an hour or more each day of my dev time.

I'm not sure what RIM's future plans are, but making things easier on developers would definitely be a step in the right direction if they want to remain viable.
The super angel founder investor cometh
FX is a FM booster or translator (rebroadcasting). I'll show the FM callsign in the next version.
Month of uptime? Every time you delete/install an App you have to reboot the device, which is painfully slow and takes almost 5 minutes. When I'm developing for BlackBerry, my workflow is basically:

1. Change some lines of codes

2. Deploy to device

3. Wait 5 min.

4. See if it worked

5. goto 1

My average uptime is about 2mins. doing that.
thanks for the feedback.

1) The target temperature actually is subject to change as often as I take a temperature reading, but it just happens to alternate between a few predefined (in google calendar) states. I could make that line smaller/faded/etc to make the actual temp stand out a bit more

2) true :) is the name of the project confusing, since it's currently cool-or-not ?

What would you like to see with regards to the on/off time vs. the temperature? I was thinking about a faded background highlight when the HVAC was on (blue for AC, red for heat). Is there something more that would be interesting?