skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's only the "wrong message" to people who aren't young anymore and don't program yet, which is most people. It makes programming seem less accessible.

To young people, I agree: start now.

I realize this seems circular, and there's probably a better way to make my point. My motivation is all the non-programmers I meet who think programming is scary. I don't believe it is (hence the mention of codecademy.com at the end of the post).

As for payment, you're right: making something people want is a better measurement of value, regardless of whether others pay for it, and even that's not a complete measurement of your ability. But Mozart made money early, which is why I mentioned it.
How HP Tried to Sue Itself Over TouchPad Refunds
From a technical point of view:

- no real issues with performance or usage (see benchmarks section in the README, that being said Common Node isn't in production anywhere yet), Common Node runs at about 70% throughput (in req/s) of plain Node and uses around 10% more memory in high throughput benchmarks; comparing Node and CommonJS implementations like for like is difficult though, since for example Node doesn't clear its Buffers

- Node's insistence on reserving the "fs" module name & removal of exports.paths has been a slight issue - it means the users either have to set NODE_PATH manually or need to run apps via the bin/common-node wrapper script to retain compatibility with other CommonJS platforms

From a community point of view:

- as you say, people are pretty resistant & I spend a fair amount of time one on one trying to convince (ex) front end Node.js developers why a sync programming style isn't "magic" and is easier to work with; hoping to remedy that by doing a few talks at various events over the next few months and might write a blog post or two

- lack of clear CommonJS proposals for Sockets and Subprocesses

- the whole sync ServerJS scene is very fragmented - it would be nice to have a project like commonjs-utils or a subset of narwhal which implemented the JS only modules (like base64 etc.) and became the de facto standard lib that they would all use rather than reinventing the wheel and making it impossible to write portable webapps
The age you started programming doesn't matter.

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

Sure it does ... if they've been programming pretty regularly from age 6, by the time they're 20 they have 14 years of solid experience on someone who starts at the same age, plus you pick things up much quicker when your younger. Its the reason a lot of sports professionals (even musicians) start out pretty young.

Starting at a later age doesn't mean you can't be very good, it's just that all things being equal the person who started earlier has an advantage over you, lets not try to act like that doesn't matter ;)
YC-like international incubator program
Software Engineer, San Francisco CA

OcuSpec is a venture backed start-up developing motion control technology that is radically more powerful and affordable than anything currently available. We're seeking smart, passionate people interested in challenging problems and changing the way people interact with machines.

Desired Skills/Experience: Software architecture, cross-platform APIs, C/C++, parallel processing (GPU/CPU), computer graphics (openGL/DirectX), real-time systems.

This is a great opportunity to work on and take ownership of bleeding edge technology at a early stage. We offer very competitive compensation, great benefits and an office near the Caltrain.

http://www.ocuspec.com/
The line drawn in Benson, Flook and Diehr would be adequate to solve virtually all of today's software patent problems. Shouldn't that be where the line is drawn now? Here's what the Fed Circuit said, and the Supreme Court affirmed it:

Therefore, we also conclude that the "useful, concrete and
tangible result" inquiry is inadequate and reaffirm that the machine-or-transformation
test outlined by the Supreme Court is the proper test to apply. As a result, those portions of our opinions in State Street and AT&T
relying solely on a "useful, concrete and tangible result" analysis should no longer be
relied on.
Place Pulse: ‘Hot Or Not’ For Cities
Womens air max 2011 mesh black orange
Steve Jobs explains why Apple wasn’t keen on tablet computing back in 2003
This is spot on.

The whole "I've been programming since X" attitude is BS and does nothing but continue stereotypes, I suspect stuff like this is a big part of why there's such a lack of diversity in CS.

As someone who "started programming at 14" and a current CS undergrad, I know enough to know that I know next to nothing. I know plenty of people who'd never programmed before college who are way better at it than me.

That said, I would really love to see programming taught early on, since I'm sure a lot of people who'd really love it get put off by this sort of attitude and just never get exposed to CS (every chance I get, I point people towards my school's excellent intro classes).
I think there's nothing better when your young (or old for that matter!) to muck in with a startup. Although it isn't Silicon Valley, I interned with two businesses this summer a loved it.

With one, we were brainstorming ideas for the product and mapping out the development schedule. You guys know what it's like - your sitting in a noisy cafe with a pen, a piece of paper, all grinning at each other as you see ideas coming together. It's even more awesome now as the products get developed (we've got one developer. He's a real trooper!). You learn how to work with other people. You learn to expand on other people's ideas. You learn to ship.

The other business I worked with is a bit more established, (an SEO consultancy) where I was working on my own within the team to produce a one-off guide to creating linkbait. It took two weeks of research, interviewing the team on video, editing video, working with the design team and writing it all up... then about a weeks editing which included learning bits of CSS mighty-fast to fix formatting errors! Hehe...

We launched this afternoon - Seth Godin picked it up! WOW! That and a few hundred other tweets and some really quite humbling comments from the rest of the SEO community.

Why in the world that we live in would you not try and connect with people and do awesome, challenging, fun stuff like this. And why would you work in a corporation?!? You'd never get anything like that kind of flexibility you get with SME's and startups.

I'd love to do what this guy did in the valley someday. Better still, I hope to get more people interning in the valley and across the world with startups. Maybe there's some money in that?
The Nexus S Powers NASA’s Lightsaber Sparring Spheres, In Space
Scala is one of those languages where you need to employ some restraint in order to use it effectively. I think Lift in particular suffers from too enthusiastic a use of the more esoteric language features.
The downloaders will have to be aware of the "no warranty" clause of the license Linux uses, and take responsibility for the software they bring into their environment. The kernel developers provide instructions[1] on how to cryptographically verify the authenticity of a downloaded kernel, including building a PGP "trust path" to their key.

1: http://kernel.org/signature.html
San Francisco, CA

Academia.edu is a platform for sharing research. Fundamentally we are trying to massively speed up the rate at which research whizzes around the world. For people who have just published a paper, we want that paper instantly to get into the hands of people. For people who are following research, we want our News Feed to deliver them the latest papers in their fields in real time.

Right now we have over 550,000 academics signed up, with about 2,000 joining each day. Our monthly uniques are over 2 million. We have about 700,000 papers, with about 80,000 new papers being added per month. Amongst other technologies, we work with Rails, Redis, MongoDB, Beanstalkd, Varnish, Solr, PostgreSQL, Node.js and Memcached.

We're a small team of 7 people in San Francisco, backed by venture capital (Spark Ventures) and angel investors (Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, and Rupert Pennant-Rea, Chairman of the Economist, amongst others). We have a very engineering-focused culture. You can read more about our culture here http://academia.edu/hiring/culture and here http://academia.edu/hiring.

We have a very collaborative culture, where everyone discusses everything going on with the company: engineering, product, revenue, user growth, recruiting. We think that building a successful startup is hard enough that we need to leverage everyone's brain power.

We're very happy to handle the H1B application process for foreign applicants. For anyone interested to learn more, feel free to email me directly at richard [at] academia.edu
He might be referring to this:

Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Please try your request again later. Why did this happen?

IP address: x.y.z.t.
Time: 2011-09-01T19:03:40Z
URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=9999999..99999999999999999999...
Indeed. I never meant to say you should use the unlimited trial forever.
Touché. I wasn't sure if this was a joke or not though. The fact that people actually do this when naming something made it pretty hard to figure out if he was serious.
"Programming is so hard that in order to be good at it, you should've started when you were young."

Strawman.

Putting in 10,000 hours on _anything_ is so hard that you should've started when you were young. That way when everything else in life (schooling, emotional & physical maturity, legalities, social networking, etc.) converges you're ready to take full advantage of the opportunity at a point where most would-be competitors are just getting their bearings.

I started programming in 4th grade. For medical reasons, bypassed the usual school sports route and got in 2-6 hours every day programming. Sold my first program before leaving high school, having already gotten my 10,000 hours in. First two jobs were programmer - before college. Not bragging; making the point that there's no way I could have been that far ahead of fellow students without having started at age 10. It's not that it was hard, it was that I couldn't have gotten to that level of mastery of _anything_ by graduation had I not started early.

Kicking numbers around, I notice that 4 years of college amounts to cramming that 10,000 hours in on the subject of your choice once you realize you in fact need to master a subject to make a living.
San Francisco, CA - Triggit

Job Title: Sales Director

Triggit is hiring a senior sales professional to take on the role of Sales Director. Candidate must have a proven track record in digital media sales and have existing relationships with advertisers and their ad agencies. Candidate will be responsible for direct sales to companies of varying sizes, including ad agencies.

Commission and Equity package will be very aggressive and encourage groundbreaking strategy, concepts, and sales.

Requirements:
* 5+ years of integrated media/digital sales and or agency experience.
* Strong understanding of core developments in digital media sales and underlying technologies. Have existing relationships with advertisers, agencies, and media buyers. You should be able to close deals today with a phone call.
* Ability to understand and communicate Triggit’s core business propositions and technologies.
* Identify and close deals with digital brands and advertising agencies to achieve Triggit’s and individual’s quarterly and annual sales goals.
* Excellent sales skills with a proven track record of success negotiating, closing and delivering complex, high revenue, deals (6-figure +).
* Comfort working in a fast paced, rapidly changing, start-up environment.
* Ability/willingness to travel as needed.

To Apply:

Please submit a Resume and Cover Letter answering the following question to jobs@triggit.com:

1. If you were to start selling at Triggit tomorrow, who would be your first sales client, and why?
Funny, I went as far as the credit card entry form of http://www.geekdesk.com today but stopped short of sending the order. I looked for cheaper alternatives, and found http://www.ergodesktop.com, which is still pretty damn spendy.

What I want is a solution that's easy to setup, and is portable. I work at a variety of locations and would like some mechanism for turning any surface into a standing workstation. I think I may whip up a few prototypes in my spare time.
Counterpoint: I have been programming since I was 6. I skipped a grade and school and was still in more advanced maths courses than anyone in my grade, though not as much as you seem to have been.

The only bit of this I usually ever mention: the bit where I've been programming since I was 6. And I don't say that as a form of bragging or a form of indicating my skill; it is merely the first sentence in response to the question "how did you get into programming?"

The main reason for this, though, is that I'm embarrassed by the fact. I feel like, if I've been programming for so long I should be better at it than I am. There seems to be an expectation that just because I taught myself how to program using little more than the source to BASIC games that I should be a super-rockstar or something and I'm not.

Point is, I don't mention it because the fact I've been programming so long doesn't really mean shit.

[EDIT: I also know a number of people who never touched code until college and got really damn good before they graduated, let alone after that.]
They probably told him that their call centers are in the UK - it's seen as something customers generally much prefer.

e.g. For RBS

"At The Royal Bank of Scotland, all our call centres are based in the UK."

http://www.rbs.co.uk/private/current-accounts/g2/switching.a...
It does whatever you want it to do. ~->, <~<, and %% are just method names. It parses like:

val foo = bar.~->(45).<~<("Fred").%%(x)

If those same methods were called a, b, and c instead, it would parse like:

val foo = bar.a(45).b("Fred").c(x)

Yes, some people abuse symbolic method names. Unless your method makes overwhelming sense with a symbolic name (+, -, *, etc), just don't do that. But this problem isn't unique to Scala; poor names can strike in any language. If I called my method "slfjowierlksdfjnas", that'd be bad too. But most developers have enough common sense to choose reasonable names for their methods.
Tiered, Adaptive Front-end Experiences
The Magic of Minecraft
TeleHash / JSON + UDP + DHT = Freedom
Is Advertising Killing Social Media?
Any advantage/disadvantage to replacing aspell dump master with cat /usr/share/dict/words ?
http://gamedev.stackexchange.com - this website is great for finding answers to question you haven't asked yet!

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes - here is a collection of awesome questions to begin with getting solutions for.

http://gamedev.net - here is another great website with everything you can ever need, check out the forums and article archive!

http://gamasutra.com - professionals hang out here.

http://www.gpwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page - here is another great wiki filled with good use.

You're in for a joy ride. Prepare to devour information like never before.

By the way, you'll learn best by just doing, so join in on http://www.ludumdare.com and other indie gamedev competitions! Use Google, it's your greatest resource.

I can recommend XNA with C# if you're on Windows, or PyGame if you're using Python (there are equally good platforms for any language you pick, don't worry about it - the same methodologies apply to them all (more or less)). Start simple and then go on to the harder stuff once you really feel like you've grasped the fundamentals. I love this question: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/854/what-are-good...

Remember, the biggest thing you can do wrong right now is trying to write the next-gen MMORPG. Scale after you've got something working. And while building your game, you will have your engine (common question, common pitfall).

Good luck!
New signup page for Gmail
When System.currentTimeMillis() is too slow
Just delete the cert altogether - there's no reason to leave it on the system at this point (i.e. Google Chrome does not trust it in the latest updates regardless).

http://vimeo.com/28362457
On TUAW, the comments on a post[1] about removing the DigiNotar certificate indicate that all you really have to do is quit and relaunch Safari to get it to notice that the certificate has been marked as untrusted. How did this article decide that EV-SSL was to blame?

[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/01/how-to-get-rid-of-diginotar-d...
Reading this reminds of pg's article about how PR works: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It reads as an ad as much as a newspaper article.
No, the motorized ones are better. There are desks with memories for different heights, so you just push a button. Those are nice.
This paper talks about an alternative to SMs:

"Protothreads: Simplifying Event-Driven Programming of Memory-Constrained Embedded Systems"
http://www.sics.se/~adam/dunkels06protothreads.pdf

source files (~60 lines without comments):
http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/

abstract:

Event-driven programming is a popular model for writing programs for tiny embedded systems and sensor network nodes. While event-driven programming can keep the memory overhead down, it enforces a state machine programming style which makes many programs difficult to write, main- tain, and debug. We present a novel programming abstraction called protothreads that makes it possible to write eventdriven programs in a thread-like style, with a memory overhead of only two bytes per protothread. We show that protothreads significantly reduce the complexity of a number of widely used programs previously written with event-driven state machines. For the examined programs the majority of the state machines could be entirely removed. In the other cases the number of states and transitions was drastically decreased. With protothreads the number of lines of code was reduced by one third. The execution time overhead of protothreads is on the order of a few processor cycles.
just catching up on my comments.. UID 6588. A friend of mine had the fortune of getting UID 1234.

It's awesome that so many people can remember their UID's, even a decade later.. Goes to show you how important Slashdot was.
Mountain View, CA - Polyvore, H1B

Polyvore is hiring all types of developers --mobile, frontend, backend, data mining, generalists… polyvore.com/jobs

Polyvore is a social shopping platform with over 10M uniques/month. Our goal is to build a style site that's endlessly browseable, instantly shoppable, and caters to every niche of taste. Our approach is to build platforms and tools that harness the creativity of our user community, empowering them to define trends and express their style.

We're well-funded by Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners AND became profitable this year. With 10M uniques/month, we are the largest fashion site on the web with plans to expand into other categories. Named 50 Best Websites of 2011 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...
Unusual Things I Learned When I Learned to Hula Hoop
It might be less complicated then you'd expect (at least one way of doing it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

The core idea is linear regression.

Here's Google's service: http://code.google.com/apis/predict/. Here's a commercial API service: http://www.directededge.com/.
The problem is the certificate can be re-added when you do an update (if the update included new root CA's). Thus it's usually safer to just mark the CA as untrusted.
San Francisco, CA - Triggit

Inside Sales

About You:
# You know you can sell. And you enjoy it
# You’re a hungry self-starter with a relentless work ethic who doesn’t want or need to be micromanaged.
# You’re motivated by making large quantities of money. And you’ll work for it. OTE is $100K+ for top earners.
# You’re never afraid to pick up a phone and cold call. And you’re relentless enough that you’ll never quit.
# You understand that finding the right person to talk to is as important as saying the right thing. And you’ll pound the pavement, or weave the Internet, to source the right lead.
# You’re fascinated by technology. And selling groundbreaking ideas and products excites you.

Requirements:
# 2+ years of integrated media/digital sales and or agency experience, or a way to prove you don’t need it.
# Ability to understand and communicate complex technologies.
# You understand Triggit’s core business propositions and technologies. And will be ready to communicate this understanding during your first call.
# You can identify and close deals with digital brands and advertising agencies to achieve Triggit’s and individual’s quarterly and annual sales goals.
# Excited to work in a fast paced, rapidly changing, start-up environment.
# Ability/willingness to travel as needed. .
# College degree with a solid GPA or equivalent work experience.

To Apply:

Please submit a Resume and Cover Letter answering the following questions to jobs at triggit dot com:

When our CEO Zach was 16 he rode his bike from Minnesota to the Atlanta Olympics and traded enough pins, and scalped enough tickets, to pay for his entire trip and deposit $5G into his bank account to boot. What’s your sales story?

Compensation:
# Role is contract-to-hire with aggressive commission structure, but solid base pay.
# Pay is competitive with entry level at Google etc, and when hired full-time, package will include stock equity, 401k, health/dental/vision insurance, commuter benefits, plus breakfast and lunch every day.
If you can start one then great, but it's difficult to get your own startup to the point where it is paying you and your cofounder's living expenses.

Most likely, starting your own company consists of working a full time job and half-assing a startup on the side. A much better first step is to immerse yourself in an existing startup, plus you'll have the added bonus of a large financial upside.

Besides the financial risks of starting a company, it's extremely helpful to learn from existing entrepreneurs, which you also get working at a startup.
Stephen King gets Klout
Yes, it is.

This is why Gosu has, for example, covariant generics. Yes, it is unsound. But it is simple and good enough.

Type systems should be there to help us write code, in particular to support things like IDEs. Correctness is great as far as it goes, but it turns out it doesn't go too far and you get 90% of the correctness benefit with, hey, look at that, 10% of the effort and complexity.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Absolutely agree, in the case of Minecraft luck was important.

With fat tails anything can happen, partly because luck, most of the explanations are just hindsight bias.
Airbnb Launches Sublets
Huh. His IDE opinion surprises me; I use it on a daily basis and it actually is pretty nice now. Not 100%, but >80-90% IMO.
Distributed team, East Coast seeks Python generalists.

HiiDef, Inc is a consumer web company with two rapidly growing properties, http://flavors.me/ and http://goodsie.com

Help us solve the challenges that revolve around top notch user experiences. We're continually building new products and features, scaling infrastructure, and responding to our enthusiastic customers.

Team members have flexible hours, top notch hardware, and experienced, talented co-workers invested in their success. We pride ourselves on a results oriented, laid back culture and seek people who can thrive with an exceptional amount of independence.

Please contact johnwehr@hiidef.com - Looking forward to hearing from you!
Connecting Music and Math with Wolfram Alpha
hmm, i thought behavior-trees are predominantly used for large scale / fairly complicated games.