skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should listen to patio11. He's basically saying 'fake it until you make it' and this is the key to success. You need to fake the transaction until you're big enough that you no longer need to fake the transaction. Reddit did this to get started and so have millions of other projects.

You need to build the system so that they pay you before they take possession of the book.

Also build or scrape an already existing book search website. Basically, take the cheapest one there and buy it and then try to sell it for cheaper than Amazon. Even put that so they can see it. Amazon, with shipping, is $98.54 but we are $94.94. Try to break even on each of these, and then scale it up.

As for why you can't meet them? You already graduated, you're selling it for your dead cousin, you found a bunch of your brothers old text books, you transfered universities, you got a job, etc.
But if there's no free will then it doesn't matter anyway, so best to act as if there is :)
Didn't think that Nokia is still working on Symbian. :P
> The main problem is that 99% of programmers don't know how to prototype. They assume that whatever they commit is what goes into production.

My main problem is other people having no concept of there being any difference between a proof of concept (or prototype) and production code...
If you have to design for arbitrary resolutions and aspects, you are way more limited in what you can do with your design. On a touch device this is even more severe because buttons that are too narrow will be hard to reach etc.

Also, if you are not using standard controls and you have a designer make a couple of images for you, you will now have to split those up into parts to render your UI. It seems that you would argue that this is the only way to go but surely we can agree that it is more expensive for the developer?
True, that's why the article ommited the UK. (and UK startups are rarely labeled 'european')
My experience interviewing says that a great many CS graduates still have no idea about Big O, or even really understand hashtables. That's from years of interviewing quite qualified candidates coming into AMZN BTW.

They might have passed the class and test where that was covered, surely it WAS covered, but they didn't actually retain it in a meaningful way.

I'm a dropout and worked at AMZN for a few years BTW. I don't think I would have had any problem working at Google or Amazon if I had wanted to either.

Granted, I probably couldn't have worked at those companies as my FIRST job, but that isn't the argument. The argument is who is better off after four years, someone who attended university to get a CS undergrad, or someone who worked in the trenches.

I'd say if there were more good apprenticeship positions available the latter would almost always be better.
Comedy if only for the rampant insecurity oozing out of this guy's every pore
I agree. The Co-op program I'm in allows me to switch between work and employment every four months. While I've found I learn more practical knowledge on the job, I've also noticed school forces useful concepts on me that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. This includes assembly level programming and the theory and math that you've mentioned.

I think the decision to enroll in university or to abstain is is entirely dependent upon the degree.
Haha, whoops! Sorry about that, back to normal. Anyone who hit that URL in the past 10 minutes would have seen unsanitized HTML, because I was testing the impact of disabling the html_errors INI option (something one of my blog's comments asked about). I've updated the blog post to discuss html_errors as well. ;-)
Which courses teach how to make something that scales to millions of users, or run with exceptional performance?
Please stop using that kitsch abomination known as eurovision for reference. Use UEFA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA
DrChrono launches OnPatient to streamline the patient check-in process
"I normally don't bother logging out of whatever sites I'm logged in to.

I'm not too bothered what she sees if she opens up the Facebook tab with me logged in - but I can see that it may be a problem for some."

That's the crux of it - you're not bothered by it. If you were bothered, surely you'd hit the 'log out' button?
Interesting, but potentially disastrous, depending on your email contents, if the company messes up.

For this, I'd rather have a lawyer, a safe, a bank box... Anything that would end up dealing with my friends and family if I died.
Great opportunity for indie game devs (CryENGINE 3 Free SDK download)
Posing Apprenticeships as a significant alternative to higher education is delusional. First because a true apprenticeship requires a contractual relationship between the apprentice and the master. That sort of contract is extremely problematic to modern business entities because it does not allow flexibility in staffing levels, requires a significant investment in training (several years), and because indentured service is generally frowned upon and body warrants are hard to obtain these days -- there is little viable recourse should the apprentice terminate the apprenticeship early.

In addition apprenticeship is difficult because it easily runs afoul of equal opportunity expectations and requirements (in the US). The difficulty in differentiating between individuals and in determining each person's unique skill set before they are on the job is the reason all soldiers go through the same basic training and then are assigned to their specialties (of course one could argue that military skills are often determined before hand - but that is an argument for prior training (college) not against it).

Indeed the significant latitude of the military is an indication of what is needed to create any semblance of a workable apprenticeship program which provides equal opportunity on a large scale - an organization where meritocracy is highly advantageous both to the organization and the individuals who lead it, extreme prejudice in the enforcement of contracts (e.g. execution for desertion), and very one sided contracts (e.g. imprisonment for AWOL).

Modern higher education has grown because it offers such a powerful solution to many of the problems created by apprenticeship particularly lack of equal opportunity, exploitation of apprentices, diversion of resources to training and away from profit making activities, and long term commitments to particular individuals who may not be suited for the profession.
'Britain's first pre-Roman planned town' found near Reading
Sports: Alien Bike - Free Online Games
Very nice - you should do what I figured out for a project - momentum when there is a big action, and fine control for small actions - if I scroll the wheel dramatically, give me some momentum on that zoom - if I scroll it slowly, no momentum and fine increments (like you have now)

The way I did this in javascript was to create an array of zoom in/out and the four directions - then you add or subtract from the array based on intensity of gestures over time - even keyboard action keys (+/-) can have momentum this way by adding when there is continuous keypresses - I was pleased how it turned out in the end.
Sounds interesting!

I'm unable to find a more subtle way to ask this, so I'll be blunt. (pardon! :)

How is the English literacy in Estonia and in Tallinn in particular? Of course, if someone expects to live somewhere s/he should be expected to learn the local language and customs, but if you're there for only a month or two then it's challenging.
Something similar could be constructed using Shamir's Secret Sharing (for example) [1], where the involved parties would have to communicate (and thus know each other) to retrieve the secret from their parts. The linked service surely is easier to handle but such a scheme would not depend on any trusted host (except yourself as you know the secret and share the parts). Possibly a combination of both would be great, to ease the communication issue and still keep security high.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
Ask HN: What is the ratio of worthless applications to your job advertiesments
I presume, with every job advertisement you publish, there must be some bullshit applications which waste your time. (Under-qualified applications etc)

I wonder how much trouble they give it you.
I'm ambivalent about portrait QWERTY typing.

I struggle to type on a QWERTY touch keypad on the SO's iPhone 4, and much prefer Swype in landscape, and T9 in portrait.

Having said that however, Nokia has screwed around with the T9 algorithm to make it 'smart' (at least on the Symbian^3 range). As a result, you can't cycle through options in a predictable manner any more! As a life-long Nokia supporter (so far), and a fan of the awesome industrial design that goes into their products, this is ridiculously infuriating.

(For e.g.: 4663 produces 'home' or 'good' first depending on which was used more often recently. Cycling through punctuation symbols is again determined by [what the algo thinks] the most frequently used symbols. Gah.)
Little-Known CSS3 Typographic Features
Modest Windows 8 Wish: System-wide Spellchecker
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/datawithoutborders.cc

seems down at the moment

edit: 'not found' now, but seems to be here
http://jakeporway.com/2011/08/data-without-borders-logo-cont...
Update: Wordpress Add bookmark links to the wp_nav_menu
I'd enjoy this much more if it also integrated GitHub Notifications, not just private messages, or at least had an option to do either/both.

Otherwise, this is quite handy.
Java enum tutorial: 10 examples of Enum in Java
Mobile Patent Suits (An interactive visualisation)
tl;dr one of the most famous people in the PR industry with over 100k Twitter followers gets a free steak after he jokingly asks for one on Twitter.

Still, well played by Morton's and well-earned following I believe.
The Age of Noise
His "non-dumb" code converts colors from a vector-space to a laundry list.

The tuple representation of colors has algebraic qualities absent from the simplistic lookup-table he proposes (in fact, he's inadvertently taking us back from full color to "indexed" palettes common in the 80s)

I prefer the tuples better; at least they can be logically extended to include alpha & depth information, and can be efficiently packed into a machine word.)
Very cool, unlimited zoom is an awesome idea
One big part is that when something is designed for print, it is essentially always designed for a fixed size page, so you don't have to deal with resizing. Then there is the fact that web sites have to cope with people not always having the same fonts you do - which makes it almost impossible to do pixel perfect designs involving text rendering.

Then there is the fact that something like an Indesign document doesn't really have any concept of separating the style from the actual content. For the time being at least, humans are much better at logically ordering and marking up text, and then adding the style with CSS, unlike programs which add a whole lot of extra markup and CSS to do the same thing.

Those are just a few things which make WYSIWIG work a lot better for print than it ever could for web - and there are more... These things will probably be somewhat resolved as time goes on (ie. with wider support for @font-face and so on) but I think that hand written HTML will be better for a long time to come.
WTFs by programming language repository on github
Hi, Matthew Trost (author) here. I'm actually a bit mortified that this found its way onto Hacker News, as now my admittedly bush-league JavaScript code is getting the brickbats. :-) In truth, I made it mainly as a practice exercise: code, UI, documentation .... So, please check out the links offered by others here, as many talented folks out there deserve attention for their far-more-sophisticated work!

In any case, I love this discussion. Programming is fun.
I agree on the last point. I think this sort of stuff can be learned in an apprentice-type way, but not many positions currently do a good job of it. A great motivated way to learn big-O type analysis, for example, is to work on a system where a bottleneck gets improved from an O(n^2) to an O(n logn) algorithm, while working alongside someone who explains to you what that means, how you determined which algorithm was which, and why this is useful analysis to know how to do.

A lot of non-degree programming jobs seem to lack both the challenge and the mentoring to make that happen, though, so you end up with people who learn more about how to bang scripts together out of snippets pulled off the web. That's actually also a pretty useful skill, especially if you become a very fast and skilled applier of band-aids, but it's not quite the same as a CS apprenticeship.
Probably not in that scenario, but plenty of anti-social types manage not to bring down the productivity of everyone around them.

If someone's social problems are destroying their value to the company then by all means they should not be employed there. I simply strenuously object to the blanket statement that all anti-social people should be completely unemployable regardless of circumstance or value.
Morocco: Families join "Breakfast in the streets" event
PNG optimisers are still automated though. I think parent was referring to hand-tuning the parameters yourself.
I disagree, at least regarding this move. Carriers know the tendency is inevitable, and they have no interest competing with free. They're doing this to milk it while it lasts, and then they'll gladly let Apple pay for the messaging service while they charge for the data. You're still tied to them anyway.
At least Israel is a recurring participant at the european song contest[1]. This might have influenced wired's judgement profoundly.

[1] http://www.eurovision.tv/page/dusseldorf-2011/about/shows/pa...
I could not agree more, and although this applies to a broad range of industries it is extremely pervasive in software development (Related, I have heard a few computer science folks highlight that computer science as a major is not targeted at creating software developers - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884255). True enough.

I stand by my sentiment on that post, that open source projects are a great 'apprenticeship' opportunity for those interested in computer science-like fields (software/web development and the like). That said, I have participated and watched at http://opensource.com and http://teachingopensource.com and come to realize just how difficult it is to get opensource into the educational system.

Knowing that difficulty, I might categorize experiences in the following best to worst order for new hires:

1. Active open source contributor
2. Active open source contributor w/ non-CS degree
3. Active open source contributor w/ CS degree

Two additional notes:

1. These are not meant to be absolutes, there are certainly individuals who fall into the above-mentioned category 3 that far surpass a category 1 candidate in a particular skill. I am merely suggesting that at a high level, the likely skill-set available to a category 1 candidate is often more desirable than the likely skill-set of a category 2 or 3 candidate. A lot more could be said here, but it is not the point of this post.
2. While this most obviously applies to software development, it also has a natural home among technical document authors, marketing, customer relations, QA, and many other aspects of business that exist and flourish in open source communities.
This may be a stupid question but considering if you have the key you can get the original data, where is the boost in security in AES versus a simple obfuscation using a key? Is it in the complexity and variations of the underlying algorithm and not having many people that can reproduce it? Or is it the time factor of having to run through the algorithm thus increasing the sheer amount of time it takes for an attack?
China Reveals Solar Sail Plan To Prevent Apophis Hitting Earth in 2036
We have a bunch of topic- or project-specific rooms, one room for animated gifs and pictures of cats, and one room for serious business stuff.

Pretty much everybody hangs out in the cat picture room and serious room. The rest are just people interested in that topic.
While I don't bemoan this man his steak, this kind of things increasingly bothers me.

On the internet I sometimes get the impression that "everyone" has cute things like this happen to them. When you dig, it often turns out, like this, the person is big in PR or some related field.

It can get easy to forget that 99(.99?)% of the people regularly on the internet aren't getting free stuff, lighting up twitter, hitting the front page of reddit, etc.

From the article:

"I don’t think it’s about my follower numbers. I think it’s about Morton’s knowing I’m a good customer, who frequents their establishments regularly. "

I am 100% convinced this is not true. I'm sure if I (with 15 twitter followers) had posted something similar there would be no chance of something similar happening.
HTC & Sharp: Pioneering Android Differentiation
I think you are not considering the many websites for which this inefficiency doesn't matter. Sure, if you're write Google's main web page, every extra byte counts. But there are not many web sites where this is even close to be true.

For example, there is no big difference in functionality if the Adobe web site takes a few extra milliseconds to load. Customers just want to buy a product and get out of the way. And Adobe is a big company... This is even more true for their customers, thousands of small websites that just want to publish content as quickly as possible.
Badges | Lanyards | Plaques
Show up to the improv lessons offered by BATS Improv (www.improv.org). They teach a bunch of classes in San Francisco and occasionally in Palo Alto as well. I did this and the lessons are awesome. You are constantly forced to say something - anything - on the spot.

Give up the idea of taking it step-by-step, being comfortable, or having instructions to follow. If you want to learn to talk to strangers, just do it. Say something or ask a question to the barista every time you order coffee. Plan on awkward moments aplenty. This can't be avoided; don't even try.

Also give up the idea that you need to fix yourself. You already have plenty to offer, as indeed everyone does. As I was told once, "your attention is enough". Just pay attention to people and don't mentally check out when situations get confusing, ambiguous, or awkward.

Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times. :)
In my experience, Ruth's Chris > Morton's. Assuming neither gives me the royal treatment (and they never do).
The moral of the story is that it pays to be famous.
Some people here actually run popular web sites. When you're serving millions of requests a day, a few KB of difference in page size can make quite a bit of difference on how much you pay for bandwidth...

Not to mention that when a browser doesn't render the page correctly, some people don't like wading through thousands of lines of div-soup when they could be debugging one hundred and fifty lines of markup instead...
Also, not the capital of Israel. (A main city, sure)
Anyone going to this?
Why not CQ5 or ADEP?
Good point, and actually one I overlook too often in my own experience.

I went to CMU for two years before dropping out, so I did get a decent grounding in data structures / algorithms etc.. And I absolutely agree that that grounding has been important and is hard to get in the trenches.

Maybe we need to be arguing towards one or two year of school then apprenticeships?

My housemate teaches a one year CS fundamentals course here in Rwanda. It is essentially the only real CS training available in the country, though there are plenty of people with degrees from the universities. But he does a pretty good job of covering the basics. I'm sure he'd confess that two years would be better than one, but I'm not sure he'd argue for more.
The Best Geek Business Card
Imagine you offered a job position of "software apprentice" and say you got a thousand responses. How would you identify the ones that would be worth gambling on ? - there would be little to nothing to differentiate candidates.

By and large you'll have candidates who didn't do well at school (because those who do well at school tend to go to university), have never done anything to show that they're capable of long term commitment, and have never done anything significantly intellectually challenging.

CS & SE courses at top universities which get to have the pick of the best students still have a first year drop-out rate of 10-20%.

Any company offering software apprenticeships can expect to suffer huge drop-out rates with minimal upside.
Sports and Tech Startups
If only US society actually did provide four years of education and living expenses, then patio11 would be correct. Sure, such offers exist but only if you're poor. Or are the valedictorian. Average Joe gets no free ride for four years.
Sounds like an interesting idea. But, like others, I am skeptical relying on a "beta labeled" web service to handle this for me.
Want to make your own? See this recent post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877790
Speak.js: Text-to-speech on the web
I remember a service like this at least 6 years ago, possibly much longer - would be interesting to see if they are still around and if they ever had to "activate" for anyone.
I didn't think the elvis operator (?:) made it into java 7?
Good points regarding the shortfalls of a proper apprenticeship in this instance (particularly in the US).

However, I strongly disagree that modern higher education does much to combat exploitation of new grads, resources diversion to training, or long term commitments. Higher education often fails quite admirably on these points as well.
One book I like is Bolles' "What color is your parachute?" It is about job-searching, but the message of the book is: find things you like; be cheerful, polite, grateful always; remember that most people are usually happy to help; nobody owes you anything, and you don't owe anyone anything.
A fascinating system. As a college student I thought it was the coolest concept (and it's still awesome 30ish years later). The immediate obvious problem, and what took it down, was the amount of hardware required and the paradigm shift to use them - not a huge obstacle, but enough to hinder proliferation.
The Screen Capture plugin (by Google) can do that as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cpngackimfmofbokmj...
A Few Surprising Winners from the 2012 Campaign
I see you are not Daltonic at all... good to know
No, clean HTML semantics still matters a lot! Forget about programmatic efficiencies like crawlers and page load times. Think about the poor web dev who is handed this steaming heap of bad markup like so:

Management: "We need you to change all the buttons on this web site and enlarge the logo."

Web dev: "OK, these pages were puked out of Muse. Do you have the Muse project files and a copy of Muse for me to install?"

Management: "Muse? What's that? No, we don't have the source files. Can't you just edit the page?"

Web dev: "Sure. After I drink this bottle of Scotch and look for other job postings."

So guess what? HTML is still source code not a machine language.