skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Check http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74054

Mexican living in Ciudad de Mexico, Im not a practicing hacker though, just very interested in ideas and programming, throw me a line losdosplebitos at gmail.
[O'Reilly Radar] Is Google Spreading Itself Too Thin?
haha, I've got a bunch of pesos if anyone is interested.(I'm in Mexico)

Seriously, you guys (the U.S.) are going to be fine. You've got great people, great land. It may just get rough for a while.
Looking at the bill, the number of bad cells seems far higher than you suggest. Some people didn't absolutely screw around but many did not finish the work. The percentage gets pretty bad in some of the high detail areas.
That sounded like you were explaining some code snippet..
Well, someone did once propose instituting an MFA program for programmers, in which the emphasis would be on practicing The Art Of Programming under the guidance of mentors, rather than on learning theory.

http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html
I think these docs are intended as a way to reduce your legal hassles, but are misinterpreted as a way to eliminate lawyers. To take an investment, you need a lawyer.
How common is accelerated vesting on change in control?
When I was an undergrad I chickened out of majoring in computer science, and I'm still kicking myself for that decision, because now I realize I like the heavy theoretical stuff, and I'm no longer in an environment where I can spend 20 hours a week learning it.

Every so often at the job, I'll come to a problem and think, "if only I knew all that algorithms and data structures jazz I could solve this much more quickly". But to be honest, those moments don't come more than a few times a year.
But how long can they sustain that for?
Ops, I knew that number looked to large. I multiplied by an extra 8. Anyway, lot's of people live off of less than 1cent an min of work, but you would need to significantly cut down the PC and internet cost's to make it work out. Anyway, it can still work for a surprising number of people as 1k/year still put's you into the top 1/2 of the worlds workers.
0) The company has no customers.

0.5) The growth rate of customers is linear.

Of course, if you're in the "hype" phase rather than trying to make any money, those issues may not be that high a priority.
From the article, it looks like Digg is plateauing. Consequently, they probably want to expand and are looking for cash infusion.

Or more cynically, management is looking for some way to monetize their current shares without an IPO or buyout in the near future.
True, but selling that as a service would negatively affect their image.
The Audi turning the light for you will never fly in large markets. Too much of an opportunity for abuse.

And this dude made a William Hung reference? I don't know if I should laugh or cry!
Thanks! Very, very helpful.
Thanks! Really helpful article.
I think it actually has a lot to do with the disciplines of Computer and Software Engineering being so new (relatively speaking to pretty much every other arena of engineering). Because of this a couple of things are quite unique to programming (but also quite similar to the other disciplines when they were young):

1. Things change at a much faster rate. As theoretically useful it is to pick up a text book from the 70s, it's not going to provide you with the practical on the job experience needed to work in, say, Ruby on Rails.

2. There's not as many codified ways of working. This means there's a much larger reliance on the 'talent' of the individuals working in the field.
It's the one Apple has traditionally focused on, it's where Apple is located, and it just saw 100,000,000 downloads in a matter of months.

Thinking that the app store is just a stopgap is specious thinking. It's a big thing and its mistreatment is therefore a big matter. I know Hacker News has a segment of people who want the Internet to replace the desktop, but it simply isn't happening in the foreseeable future.
I was thinking of things like the Y2K debacle (not really scientists who made the call there, of course). Or imagine the global cooling scare in the 1970s had had a major impact on public policy.
I'm usually at Que Tal, Ritual, or Cafe Revolution. There are a few nice places on 24th street up the hill like Bernie's. If you want to hang out & work, my email is in my profile.
http://www.cafeaulait.org/course/week11/02.html
I think it's more a matter of the crowds attracted to Digg. The 360 is the "mainstream gamer" console, whereas Wii appeals to a wider audience and PS3 has a more limited fanbase. The sorts of people on Digg fall close to the 360 base.
I know, I was just joking. It will clearly set Intense Debate back even further in the quality arena. But it will make them so popular that they don't to be as good.

Still, people do install Firefox, so people will upgrade included components for good reason. Also, Disqus will probably continue their lead on all other platforms.
And the screen. Editing XLS files on a phone is brutal. I've done it. There are a lot of websites that I like being much larger than on an iPhone too.
You seem to be a fast learner, you'll fit right in here :-)
@#3...$200k income for the past two years AND reasonable expectation this will continue.
leading in most polls?...must watch fox news
Done right can be measured in terms of performance.

Any good algorithmic book would introduce the concept of Big O notation.
I don't know why they're not already doing this. In fact, they might be better off still just walking in with machine guns and shooting as many people as they can. You could probably mow down a lot at a crowded airport.

It makes me think that we're doing a pretty good job of keeping most of them out of the country in the first place. Otherwise I think we'd be seeing a rash of smaller scaled, highly targeted incidences like this.
I turned down money from my family... but I'd turn down money from anyone who wasn't going to provide me with more than just money. I want a business guy, with relevant contacts, and this family member was a business guy, but he didn't want to advise me on the business side of things.
How is it an abuse? Many lights already have sensors in the road that will change the lights for you if there is no one waiting to cross.
The Fable Of The Keys (dvorak vs. qwerty)
This is a pretty common practise here in Australia as well. I've been contracting through an umbrella company - certainly takes the headaches out of paperwork. Don't quite know how they manage it but usually their fee is added on top of my negotiated daily rate rather than taken out of my rate. Works for me :)
Did you miss the 9000 posts yesterday on the subject?
World Day Against Software Patents - 24 September
It is. Java breaks for me as well, though Flash works.
Apple blocks ad hoc licenses for App Store reject
You think that only 10-20% of all iPod users buy tracks from iTunes? I don't think that would be enough to make it the #1 music store.

I have no actual data to back that up though.
And if I owned the Michelin Guide, I could make everyone think my cousin's hot dog stand was better than Perilla!
Automatic Rails at Slicehost
Tuesdays with Rupert
Convertible Debt is a popular instrument currently. Make sure you understand it though. What is it convertible to? This typically means that you intend to allow your debt holders to convert their investment to stock offered at the time of accepting Series A (or next round) funding....and they convert it at a discount....and the interest accrued is converted to stock at the same discount. Typically the max time frame for the debt is 1 year (securities issues I believe...has to be registered if longer), so if you don't anticipate taking additional funding in the near future, convertible debt is probably not for you. We could discuss this forever, but thats enough for now.
Google 10th Birthday
A FREE alternative to the taxpayer funded Fed bailout
Alaskans have no personality at all, it seems.
It's all about "systemizing".

The inability of current degrees at predicting the actually efficiency of the programmers explains their lack of credibility.

The day a degree will correlate with skills in computing, that degree will be needed.

The reason why current degrees don't match industry needs is because what is taught is irrelevant for the job, probably because it is taught to the wrong people.

There is a paper about a test to determine who will succeed at programming. That test points out that a special ability is required. That ability is related to systemizing.

The usefulness of that ability is recent, much as computers. This explains why the academic system hasn't embraced it yet.
I've seen as many bad and good programers with and without degrees.
The fact that you can teach yourself to program doesn't mean you will do it the right or wrong way.
I don't have a degree, and consider myself a fairly good programmer, and after more than twenty + years I'm still trying to improve my skils.
Is not about reading a couple of books. I've read a lot of books, seen a lot of online lectures and codeded and coded and coded, critiziced it, done it again and again.
Although, regarding the issue of non degree professionals in other disciplines, there are with no dobut, but in ours is specialy noticiable due to it's recent history. Most probably will fall towards the side of other older, more mature sciences in the future.
Designing the UI of Things for iPhone
Are they a high net worth individual?

If not, there are additional legal issues you have to contend with. Various "protect the little old ladies from being taken for a ride" laws make it more difficult for individuals who aren't worth millions to participate in private investing. At least, that's the case with corporations. With an LLC and proprietorship, I guess it's more like a personal loan and all of the legal stuff that surrounds personal loans would apply. Presumably you plan to, or already incorporated. As you've noted, spending a couple of hours with a lawyer is probably a wise investment. Just a phone call to a startup-focused lawyer will get you a few minutes of free advice on what you need a lawyer for (the better a lawyer is, the more likely they are to try to avoid doing extraneous work for you--they may charge twice as much, but they'll put in significantly less billable hours). Surprisingly, perhaps, raising bigger money from angels (who are high net worth individuals) can be less legally complicated, and the boiler-plate stuff that YC provides will probably do the trick.
"Mathematics can certainly be learned outside of a university. Look at Ramanujan."

I don't think illustrating your point by naming an absolute mathematical genius is very optimal.
Not to mention their analysis is skewed. Could they not have compared the browser shares circa a major FF release? FF3 usage was way up, then declined slowly.
My first thought was - yeah, that'll create a lot more speeders! But actually on reflection I think there are a couple of very good side effects to come out of this:

1. The most dangerous time to speed / stop heavily is in or very near an intersection. Giving drivers more warning may actually encourage them to use the actual intersections more safely.

2. Traffic is considerably congested by the stop start nature of intersections. If this helps to more gently control cars passing through in both directions, it may considerably speed up everyone's trips (even those that slow rather than speed - keeping in mind they can then still hit the green light at say 2/3 speed rather than zero.)
Those sets are not necessarily disjoint.
Teamness - a cool online project manager
What Apple TV 3.0 Needs In Order To Be The Next iPod
He means "... you needn't know."
The big one was the "benefits". If the Umbrella corp offers, say a brand new laptop as an employee benefit, which they lease for you and simply deduct from the total amount paid by the customer, and not from your salary, you can essentially obtain a laptop by paying for it with pretax dollars. You could basically extend this to everything... cars, first class airfare, hotels, superbowl tickets etc.

Theoretically, you could do all of this as a contractor too, but you pay the umbrella corp for the hassle of balancing the books for you, while you collect a salary and pay income tax instead.

In Canada, where contractors are responsible for charging GST and remitting it to the government, and employees aren't, these types of companies could save a lot of hassle.
Well... Any non-Windows user uses a computer that's almost 100% Chrome-proof.

I won't try to run it on my Linux notebook, but I am still typing in Chrome on my Windows one. And IE sucks so badly I can´timagine anyone who _prefers_ it over Chrome.
Unit Testing File Modifications
Being in power tends to mean one has responsibility to others. To not piss them off, making few or no changes works well.
Whether a design is "done right" is about a lot more than just performance. Even being able to distinguish between good and bad design requires some considerable training -- ideally, both in computer science theory and in practical experience.
I thought long and hard about getting a CS degree, then I decided to "learn by doing" instead and started working on an open-source project in my free time. Eventually, I used that app as a code sample when applying for jobs as a web developer. Now, I'm learning while doing while being paid. All in all, I think I've had a much better 2 years than I would have at school - but maybe that's just me.
Does this mean I can run pidgin/gaim on osx now?
I agree with the programming/computer science distinction; in my experience the skillsets are fairly disjoint, and having a CS degree (or knowing what school it was from) bears very little correlation to someone's ability to code. Honestly, having an MS or a PhD often has an inverse correlation to someone's ability to code, since it probably means they're more interested in the theoretical side and less concerned with the practical side (though I don't think that's true for a BS).

I have, however, found that a college degree in general, regardless of the field, is often a good proxy for someone's communication skills. Someone with a degree from a "good" school is, in my experience, more likely to be a clear thinker/writer/talker that someone without a degree or with a degree from a middle-tier school, regardless of their ability to code. I don't want to hazard a guess as to which way the causal arrow points there, but it's definitely a pretty clear trend I've noticed from interviewing several dozen candidates over the last few years.
Actual traffic data, from http://www.quantcast.com/digg.com:

156.4M monthly US pageviews
224.1M monthly global pageviews
PuTTY works perfectly on Vista 64 here, with DEP on.
Ask HN: django vs php: a hard choice
I'm making plans to start my own killer-webapp and I just can't decide in what I will develop it.

I am currently a php developer so I know my way around php and I'm able to make the application I have in mind without any problems. But I'm also very interested in django, a relatively new thing for me but it sure does look promising and worth my time to invest further.

I tend to choose php because I know it, I know it is well supported, it scales without large problems, I can configure it and optimize it without a problem.

While django is very fast in terms of development time, it's a challenge, probably good for my career if I can add django/python developer to my CV and it has a great community.

But I have doubts for choosing django... For starters, I don't know if it's 'economical' to choose django in terms of performance. Does django beat pure php in complex sites pageviews? In other words, do I have to scale faster with django then with php?
Will I be able to find additional programmers if my website becomes a success? I live in Europe and I don't have the impression django/python developers are common here (prove me wrong!). How is the support going to be? I'm always surprised to see very old php4 code runs fine on the newest php5 release, but I heard djando changes quite often and you have to re-write code if you want to use a newer release.

Like I said, I don't have any real-world experience with django, so I'd like your advice/thoughts on this.
I think everyone agrees the status quo for most companies isn't working. The hard question is how do you change it? Simply 'challenging' your workers is not really enough (although a good start). For smaller innovative companies there isn't a lot of bureaucracy yet, and the chances are the founders have had a direct part in hiring all the staff – with a vested interest in picking the top quality people they can. And with top quality staff of course you naturally give them the freedom and flexibility to be as effective as they can.

The problems I believe starts when the company is much larger. The bureaucracy kicks in and each line of management struggles to work out what they ‘control’. Large bands of like minded ‘productive’ workers congregate which is great, but large bands of ‘we don’t do much around here’ workers congregate too.

Ricardo Semler (Semco) had an interesting strategy for dealing with this that I think would be interesting to see IT shops try. He broke his company up into many autonomous cells all less than 100 employees. He also stripped the management and kept a hierarchy of only three layers.
It isn't an abuse currently. I meant allowing a censor controlled by a person to provide input into a stop light is troublesome. Just like people who get ahold of the light emergency vehicles can use in certain metro areas, having another way to try and hack the light is likely to cause problems.
You guys seem to have been missing his point which is rather simple. Most people, unlike us, do not know how the internet works, are rather new to the internet, maybe have not even heard of digg and are stupid, as far as the internet is concerned.

No wonder that market is growing, new people are coming and porbably always will. That I suppose is what the "make a million by tomorrow" market relies on, also spam as he mentioned etc.

His point kind of seems to be, make money off the ignorant as there are many of them.
I'm pretty sure the average Mechanical Turk user could have scraped together $100, if they'd thought of it.

If you're going to talk about Big Capitalism exploiting the cowering, puny forces of labor, you might want to pick a business where the startup cost is in the low three figures.
Just giving him the benefit of the doubt.
"And going toe to toe against the "Degreed" programmers there was no contest. They were smarter, more focused and better able to handle the task because they learned what they NEEDED, rather than what the school taught them."

Now you are say that programmers without degrees are better?

Come on.

It has to do with how smart and how much practice the person has. But they way you put it sounds like it is better no to have a degree.
DropSend Acquired by MakeMyComputerFaster.com
Sort of like how Joel Spolsky makes more money via the job board on his blog than via sales of Fog Bugz. Hmm, doesn't some other blog have a job board as well?
A few points:

- Don't worry about scaling problems - if you have scaling problems you have a succes already. 99% of startups unfortunately never get to have scaling problems.

- The main focus should be to get the killer-webapp up and running, not getting a CV or trying out a new technology. Starting a company is in itself a huge challenge. No need to add to the risk by trying to do it in a language you're not familiar with. If you're good at PHP stick with it.

Just my two cents...

Where in Europe are you from btw?
Django released version 1.0 earlier this month so your concern about it changing out from under you is probably a non-issue.

You should try it for a small test site. Either you will like it or you won't. IMO, scaling problems in web apps are a application design issue, not a technology issue.
JM2C.
The Angry Drunk: Why I would never buy a Google-made phone
I took Software Development because it had an AI minor. I didn't take Formal Systems, because of my AI, which made things easier. I also learned Scheme in the CS lesson, which led me to Lisp.

But now, I'm sure I use skills learned from the course, even if I didn't get a job out of it.

This University was BCS accredited, which means a lot in the UK. Unrelated, but I met the at-the-time President of the BCS at a conference in 2003.
I think he's referring to this line in the article: "Even better, if there's no oncoming traffic, your Audi can make the light turn green." I'm pointing out that there are lights that already do this for regular cars.
Probably because some of the pioneers of Silicon Valley had dropped out of either graduate or undergraduate programs in order to start companies...the products of which we started using like hair on a gorilla...and then those same dropouts were glamorized to no end by the media...

...but that's just a crazy guess on my behalf.
You do realize you're comparing apples to oranges right?

django is a framework, and PHP is a language. You should be comparing django to CakePHP (or whatever) or PHP to Python.

Assuming the latter, having gone from C++ to VB (pre-.com) to ASP to PHP to Ruby (briefly) to Python, I really prefer python as a language.

I think mixmax's advice though should be heeded.
Rososo: ultrasimple RSS
and somewhere in fine print it says all submitted ideas are automatically owned by google
Awesome to see a Dave Ramsey article. He rocks.
maybe you could, but why in the hell would you want to?
These package managers are a far cry from a decent Linux, dependencies are handled poorly, installing an innocent looking library sometimes takes hours. If you do a search you will find a lot of painful stories or long pages with tons of magic to install a simple piece of code. Duh.
Most people in the real world use PHP, but those on reddit and HN tend to go against the grain and use Python (or Ruby). If you know PHP, don't bother changing; there's nothing wrong with it.
It's certainly a lot closer.
Actually, I did ask myself that question (clearly, I'm not always listening to my own answers).

Re-reading what I wrote, it sounds harsher than I had intended. Here's what I was trying to get at: for me, most of the meaning in projects like this (IMO) lies in the interpretation of why the artist chose to do it at all. My own limit is not typically fear, but indecisiveness.
Muddy Waters off of 16th and Valencia is good. The Kirkland North guys are there pretty often...
check out the symfony framework for php - http://www.symfony-project.org/

It has MVC architecture, is decently fast, and has an active community behind it.
Congrats to Hyman Roth/ Digg (Marksonland)
Making methods immutable in Ruby (or, Death to Monkey Patching)
This one's funny. In 1998 I built an app that does maybe 80-90% of what Posterous is doing under the hood. That is, a huge multiuser system that parsed incoming email, ripped out what's inside, stuffed that into the right places in a database, and displayed the right stuff to the right users via the web.

The experience at the time, dealing with email parsing, buggy DB drivers and crazy deadlines was so horrible that when it was finished, I specifically went back to school to finish my degree so that I would never have to work on an application like that again.

That said, I love Posterous - just wanted to suggest that degree from Stanford or not, one man's dream job can be another's worst nightmare. :)
Have you ever looked at adium?
State of the Mobile Web: Long Tail Sites Increase Their Presence