skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The amount in question is a paltry sum. If that's all that's stopping you from starting your own business, quit. Walk into a bank and ask for a loan. You can get an SBA backed loan for 10K with moderate to good credit and no collateral. You can also just get a credit card with a 10K limit and a 0% APR offer, and transfer the funds to your checking account. Of course, all of these mean taking on the risk personally ... but if you're not willing to do that, you really have no business running a business.
I think we should teach children to understand mathematics at an algorithmic level and let them see that programming is a tool/hammer for executing those algorithms.

Computers are useful for doing math, but for most kids, and even most adults, that's one of least interesting things they can do.

A program isn't just a hammer. It can be a paintbrush, a tape recorder, a story, a symphony, or a lab assistant. And a program is more than any of these things -- a real-life paintbrush can't change the size of its bristles, and you have to draw every stroke by hand. On a computer, everything's just code. You can run your "paintbrush" routine billions of times, vary its parameters using your voice, or earthquake data, or a physics simulation, or anything you can imagine.

As a programmer, maybe I'm biased, but I can't imagine any job beyond the most menial where the ability to program wouldn't make me more productive.
It was indeed too good to be true. I think you guys should mention that on the site.

It's not really fair to compare yourself to Amazon's micro transaction fees but not actually accept micro-payments.
Awesome, thanks for the link, and for inspiring a happy afternoon's coding =)
I would have to try it out to say anything specific. I signed up, but haven't got in yet.
Results of fasting 382 days with no food
Yeah, delay until repeat and key repeat settings, with this you can make them faster and shorter than the UI allows you to.
Whoa, the article is ageist, and proud of it.

Though this program is geared toward people of all ages, young people are the best suited to maximize its advantages. Older generations tend to have families and other financial obligations, making it more difficult for them to transition into the roles of entrepreneurs.

I am married with a young child, and my salary covers all of my family's expenses, so my husband doesn't have the pressure to get cashflow-positive out of the gate. Contrast that with my younger, single self, when I burned through the start-up capital in a matter of months and had to take consulting gigs just to stay afloat on office expenses.

Young people can more easily adapt to less expensive lifestyles.

Young people care a lot more about what others think, the very foundation of "expensive lifestyles".

Further, young people have access to a wide range of resources, such as Income Based Repayment (IBR), SCORE, Startup America, [...]

IBR is a student loan repayment program, nothing to do with entrepreneurship. SCORE is open to all small businesses (and a waste of time, in my experience). Startup America targets young companies, not young people. And so on...
Processing 2.0 will "compile" to JavaScript
Room 77 Hacker-in-Residence (HIR) - Free space + food for hackers in Downtown MV
http://www.room77.com/jobs/hacker.html

HN, we just moved into a brand new office 1 block from Castro St. and the Caltrain station and realize that we have A LOT of extra desks so we're launching our first ever Hacker-in-Residence program.

Basically, we want to find some talented devs/hackers to come in and work on their own projects while spending a few hours a week working on some open source projects that we can sponsor (or suggest your own!)

We also have some kick ass advisors and backers that you may find yourself bumping into including Rasmus Lerdorf (giving us sage advice) or the founders of Expedia and other travel industry startups.

We'll be reviewing applications and accepting those who we think are a great match on a rolling basis. Apply by sending your resume/project to hacker[at]room77.com.

What is Room 77? We're working on building better hotel search. The first iteration of our site focused on showcasing floor plans and virtual views generated from over half a million hotel rooms so that folks won't get a bad room again (noisy, looks at the parking lot, etc.) which netted us the "Best Startup" prize at the LAUNCH conference in February.
The problem, I feel, with my generation is that we're too often called 'Digital Natives'. We lull ourselves into believing that we are 'good with computers' when in reality we haven't a clue as to whats going on beneath the surface.
To make a comparison, its like being able to operate a microwave oven versus understanding how a microwave oven works. We press a few buttons and four minutes later that frozen lasagne is piping hot. But from a purely academic point of view, wouldn't it be fantastic if everyone had an understanding of the process in between?

Oh, and list 10 distinct careers where an in-depth knowledge of the Haber process is required, as that is one of the areas taught in GCSE Science for a disproportionate length of time.

Just my 2 cents
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J
You can still use Posterous Spaces as a blogging platform. We haven't removed any of the features that make Posterous great for public sharing. We made everything simpler, more social, and added a great iPhone app.
I think it was a ponzi scheme, where the interest to existing investors was paid for with money from new investments. Not sure how they convinced investors to join, but getting interest was probably a good enough reason.
I'm curious as to why MongoDB is so popular. I chose Riak, and my purpose here isn't to bash Mongo, but to understand what was the key feature that made you choose it?

Is it pure speed on a single machine? Is it the query interface? Something else? Datacenter awareness? Geographic support?

The key features that made me choose riak:
- built in distribution/clustering with homogenous nodes
- bitcask had the level of reliability/design that I was looking for.
- better impedance match for what I was doing than CouchDB (which was what I looked at before choosing riak, but couch does view generation when data is added and I need to be able to do it more dynamically.)

What sold you on Mongo? What would you most like to improve?

(Please don't let this be a debate, I'm more interested in understanding the NoSQL market, what other developers priorities are, etc.)
Comparing consultant comp to full time salary is an apples/oranges comparison, as is the sort-of "second derivative" comparison of (a) how different consultants set their comp relative to each other and (b) how full time developers set their comp relative to each other.

The mechanics by which a consultants comp are set are just wildly different from how full time salary is worked out.
I'm not sure how much I agree with this approach. When you do what this article is describing, you are creating a very tight coupling of your css structure to your dom hierarchy. This can create a lot of issues when you are trying to refactor your code or getting new people on-boarded to the project.

These rules can get very confusing when someone tries to edit your HTML by adding classes to a new element they created, only to figure out that those classes don't add any styles in that particular context. Good stylesheets should have classes that have consistent behavior no matter where they are on the page.

That said, I think SCSS (and sass/less) is pretty nifty. The real heavy lifting they do, for me at least, comes from mixins and being able to programmatically create classes.

For an example, look at how the rainbow effect is created on this page: http://html5readiness.com (it's with a for loop in sass, technique is outlined in http://nimbupani.com/notes-from-html5-readiness-hacking.html)
Taxation is only feasible because the authorities have guns and use them to jail tax resisters. And 100% taxation is quite literally slavery. Do you seriously disagree with either of those two points?

No one signed up for continual boiling of the frog. Many, many millions of people in this country oppose this kind of divisive policy. A poor statesman rams it down people's throats by brute force. The consequence is that when the other party gets hold of the apparatus of state, turnabout is fair play.

Is that really what you want?
Inside the second: A new look at game benchmarking
I agree with you, but wonder if the following is the case:

Consider the layers of software abstraction counting upwards from 0 (the machine code) to n (whatever we’re working with now).

As we add more layers on top, layer zero becomes more and more irrelevant. However, that doesn’t mean that n-1, n-2, n-3 and so on are irrelevant. If our languages and tools are leaky abstractions, what we need is some kind of uniform depth, and the problem with JavaSchools is that they teach a very thin approach to programming.

It’s true that with new languages and tools and so on the specific layers Joel is talking in about become irrelevant, but we could write this post today about JavaScript programmers who don’t understand the fundamentals about the Java object model or Ruby programmers who don’t grok how Modules or Lambdas really work because they’ve been spoon-fed Rails.

A Ruby programmer may not need layers 0, 1, or 2 but I bet he does need R (Rails), as well as R-1, R-2, R-3, and R-4 whatever they may be.
Happy 5th birthday, Apple TV
So, why did she leave Hunch? Anyone care to fill in? Is this another example of the timeless adage "never start a company with your sig other"?
Ironically, the link is nearly unusable in my android browser!
I guess it depends what you consider "very large". If you're talking about multi-petabyte, then I'd probably use hdfs, but otherwise mongodb might fit. I hear craigslist uses mongodb to store their data since 1997, which is a fair amount of data I believe.
Stop turning everything into a game.
Wow, very useful. Sure beats hunting for this information. Is this information anecdotal or have you guys actually done the tests in each environment?

It would also be nice to be able to actually select a device + version and then getting a feature set for it. Not a big deal though as this really saves time nonetheless.
A Universe From Nothing
Style reminds me of Coelho, author of The Alchemist.
Of all of these features, the one I most want to see greater support for is Web Workers. I think this could be a huge boon for a variety of interesting client side work, and a nice complement to web sockets...
The problem with this post has always been it starts out from the outset with a title that implicitly puts down a large segment of students.

Had Joel dug deeper into how someone could solve this problem for themselves, rather than brush off those who learned in this environment, this post would have been great. Instead, it comes off elitist and dogmatic.
Tea Party Ipsum
I was up and running with MongoDB in minutes. I tried Riak a while ago and the "getting started" experience was very poor IMO.

Also, I really like the MongoDB docs.

Can you point me to a great getting started page for Riak (setting it up, loading in data, doing advanced queries, Python/Ruby libraries etc)?
4 Important Considerations for Creating a Remote Work Policy
Hypercasual: when the web gets a little too friendly
Affiliate Ad program suggestions/advice?
Hey all,

In the need of an affiliate program and really any info related to the subject. Wondering if anyone has a two cents on the matter or could reference me to an article, blog, etc related to the topic. I'd like to gain some perspective and insight.

Thanks very much!
> The biggest remaining fault, in the context of web apps (IMO) is the lack of transactions

While not ACID, "tension" documents are a good way to add a level of transactional support.

For example, if you want to update multiple documents, instead of modifying the original documents directly, you create a new document with instructions on how to update the original documents. Then, you roll through the tension documents and apply their changes. Any failures can be dealt with on subsequent passes, only removing the document from the scan once it has been successfully applied.

It is an eventually consistent pattern, but that is a tradeoff you have already accepted by choosing MongoDB in the first place, so it ends up working well for a lot of transaction use cases.
As VC firms are not about charity, but profit, I can only understand that they think they are able to buy those who invested their last dollars much cheaper.

If I were a VC (or when I become one) I wouldn't trust desperate people, those who bet everything and their arm on a deal. I understood that the article describes these as pigs. Such people could actually be even dangerous.
It depends on the school, but it generally seems true that most don't start at the lower levels of abstraction. What I've seen is that it is fairly common to start with Java, but to also have a course in C as a requirement (sometimes including some light exposure to assembly).

For computer engineering students who need to work closer to the metal, starting with assembly or C is a lot more common.
Super Frogger Mario Bros
Order of elements in a hash collection
Google to kill javascript and replace it with Dart
I dont even know if there's a line between troll and inspirational out-of-the-box thinking, but if there is, Feynmann dances all over the place and probably laughs about it from beyond the grave.

I love that dude.
Mike Arrington has played his "nuclear card"

Nowhere in the extensive coverage of Crunchfund or the op-ed scolding by David Carr did the NY Times mention that it was an investor in True Ventures.

Ironically, the NY Times even lumped GigaOm and Om Malik into its list of conflicted bloggers.
Why thread priority rarely matters
Gowalla Is Reborn As A Beautiful App For Travel And Storytelling
It makes no sense to judge people or award "points" for things wholly outside their control. As human beings, we aren't capable of perfect knowledge, and we don't have total control over most situations. So judging people on "actually being right" has limited utility. You may as well decide to slap a random stranger in retaliation for the weather being inclement.

For example: If Gandhi had been assassinated earlier, would that have made him a worse man?
Ironically, half of this page is unreadable on Opera Mini 6.x
Not just for kids either. I realised at some point that one of the best way to learn things is to try, give up and then come back later and try again. By some magical means, the timespan in between will always make it tremendously more intuitive the second time I came around.
Current Hot News: Dr. Phil on George and Cindy Anthony Interview VIDEO
Every year, our city has 'restaurant week', where tons of local restaurants offer 3 or 4 course prix fixe menus for the same price (usually $24.99 or so).

For some of these restaurants, that price point is SIGNIFICANTLY lower than their normal price.

Inevitably, what happens, is that throngs of people who wouldn't dream of making reservations and paying $150 for a meal show up and demand the same high quality food and service for $25. Guess what - it doesn't happen.

Now those people who don't know any better, assume that the $150 is a total rip off and that the restaurant isn't any better than the $20 place down the street. It also makes life hell if you want a real 'nice' meal that week...

Is it dumb for the high end places to do this? I think so, but I guess they like to 'show support' for local restaurants or whatever. Groupon feels like it's just the same thing, one place at a time.
If there was an exchange, there was consideration, and this seems more like a barter, not a free give-away.

I bet a good lawyer could have made a case for you.

I believe the IRS would consider the advertising to have some monetary value, which is what your gross profit fee would be based on.

The fair market value of goods and services received in exchange for goods or services you provide must be included in income in the year received.

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html
There have been about 40 interviews so far. I've refined the process a good deal so that they actual interview and editing process is pretty quick and easy. But, increasingly, I'm looking to work with companies or conferences to gather content in bulk. I plan on getting another 40 interview over the next month before I launch the beta.
Copyright extended from 50 to 70 years in the EU
Teds Woodworking Project Benefits – Affordable and Easy but Very Profitable
That sounds like a business idea (that I'm already working on actually). Archive everyone's personal online history and let them contribute/share their experiences with the 'collective'
Also (I dont think I mentioned this in the post), I'm prototyping it by focusing on green jobs (and specifically cleantech and green buildings) in the bay area. I figure I need to narrow it down to make a prototype like this relevant. Again, thanks for the comments!
Great advice. I started a nonprofit a six years ago and we had big plans to build a volunteer tracking app and collaborative tool in a hip new framework like Django. Six years later, and we are building a very un-hip tool in Drupal that will ultimately replace three tools we've adopted in the interim (a spreadsheet for tracking hours, a Trac-based wiki, and Google groups). But, this time, after approximately a false start once a year, we finally have traction for the project.

To those who are concerned this stifles innovation and "thinking inside the box" -- unless you are lucky, a genius, or probably both, knowing one's problem space intimately is a lot more likely to yield a useful innovation than not.
5 Reasons Arianna Won The Techcrunch Fight
Mobile operators will lose voice services to mobile platforms
Channel the voice of Paul Graham with WriteLikePaul.com
So this was a quick hack for the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon. As you type, it uses the last word you've entered to grab all the "next words" that Paul Graham might say. So if you type in "Startups", you'll see a list of words that have followed the word "startups" in PG's essays.

You can click on words to select them, or use up/down arrows to navigate and the right arrow to select.

It's simplistic and a bit buggy but was fun to build. I used Node.js, Express, Now.js, and Redis. It's hosted on a free Heroku Cedar instance.

http://www.writelikepaul.com
One word: Solyndra.

After they just wasted another $535M of taxpayer money in crony capitalist payments, why do you think it's "ignorance" to evince strong opposition to these kind of attempts at meddling in the economy?

VCs and angels fund selectively and with their own money. The govt funds politically and with other people's money. That selects for Chris Gronet and George Kaiser, not Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel.
I'm all in favor of disclosure, so bad on the Times here etc. All the same, if we accept that there's an utterly subjective continuum between "appearance of conflict" and "actual full raging conflict impacting journalistic coverage" I would place the Times at the former end and TechCrunch at the latter.
Because I'm at work and can't use my preferred browser (chrome), I am forced to know nothing about the site other than the creator’s appreciation for internet memes and the sites apparent need for canvas support. You should really make sure every visitor becomes a fan of your idea even if they can't use it until they upgrade their browser (or get home from work). Now, I may not remember to check this out when I get home because nothing grabbed my attention.

FYI, I'm not trying to be a jerk. I found your no-canvas alternative to be very humerous. But you should really have told me something about your site instead of making me laugh.
The stack is all Python (2.7) using Django (1.3) on Ubuntu (11.04) and it works great. Python is fantastically easy to program and Django does plenty of heavy lifting. We use the ORM in about 95% of the queries and raw SQL in the other 5% (The Django ORM doesn't handle all m2m queries very well).

We use Celery for asynchronous processing and everything is running on Amazon Web Services. We use ec2, RDS, S3, SQS, CloudFront, Route53, and ELB so we are heavily invested on that front.
> who waste their time creating new languages and frameworks

Well that's just laughable, and says more about yourself than any of these allegedly offending third parties. There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.
>I don't understand why people keep falling for these.

The same reasons people fall for them in real life.
The Four Technologies You Need to Be Working With
Any suggestions on how to find the "appropriate clients"?
I now call for a classic fixed round, but barring emergencies you do raise angel investments.
Yes, it is unfair to offer a contract that is "biased" to the firm that writes it (within reasonable definitions of "biased").
I'm an Acquia Project Manager that started working with Drupal in a company that I owned and was one of the PM's for the drupal.org redesign.

2 quick things...

First, I'm struggling with relating Acquia to the MSSQL and Oracle work that was done with the new API. Didn't that come out of AF83 / CG getting a significant amount of investment from Microsoft? Hasn't the decision to put it into core led to a lot of really good conversations and partnerships with other technology providers including everything from additional funding for contributed modules, core, drupal.org features and other things? To be sure, it's easier to develop for just one DB, but it creates a choke-point for adoption that has the potential to stifle a lot of really good things that come out of it. While Acquia has supported the new API, I think it's a stretch to say that Acquia went for the cash as I think we've only done one or two projects of any significance that were not based in MySQL. I've heard of several other projects, and even some really big ones, but they're all at other shops. Singling out Acquia is a clear case of misperception here, and I think if you're going to bash, you should do so fairly.

Second, what's wrong with developing in a direction because you're being paid for it? SOMEONE needs to make money off this, and contributions like the ones your pointing out are both significant shifts in what a group of invested organizations, developers, peers, and business-types decided was the right way to go. The sell-out argument is weak - nobody is running a charity because there are too many of us that have to have jobs so we can pay for things. I agree that the endless pursuit of revenue is not the only thing that matters, but I struggle to see where our (both Drupal's and Acquia's) purpose has become unmoored from our profit motive. The new DB system, fields in core, overlay, and the myriad of other D7 changes are big. There are sacrifices. However, they will continue to improve as more development work gets done and we'll see significant incremental improvements in what many smart, dedicated, and yes... even non-Acquia people agree is the right direction.
That's only a step up from barter, though. You could exchange ISK for live chickens if you could find someone interested.