skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO, if you have 1-2 years and you're very motivated/disciplined, you should try to get to the point where you could be a professional software engineer or web developer. I think that having strong programming skills will increase your odds of success more than anything else in the software startup world.

(1) The time it takes you to develop a solid product/prototype will decrease.

(2) The quality of the product/prototype will increase.

(3) You will be able to tackle more technically challenging ideas (I think a lot of the juicier ideas go beyond the difficulty of a trivial web app).

(4) Good software developers will be more likely to partner up with you if they know you are a good developer.

(5) Your ability to come up with good solutions to technical problems will increase. You'll start thinking, "how long will it take me to automate this?" instead of, "I need to go hire a person to do X". Your technical toolbox will almost always have a good tool for the job.

(6) What happens when you fail? Startups are always in need of good programmers.... However, I've never seen a job description asking for a mediocre programmer who is also an ideas man. It's possible that you'll need to get money from a day job and work on your startup ideas on nights and weekends. Being a good programmer is a good way to get a good paying day job.

The way to accomplish the above: program every day! Take all of the programming intensive courses that you can (the ones you listed are good), but you need to program more than just the projects. You don't need to overdo it on the quantity of languages at this point. I would focus on JS, Java, and Ruby (look into debates about learning languages and see why it's important to learn languages from different classes (scripting, oop, procedural, functional, etc...) I think C/C++ are very good to learn... but since you're already on the java track, I'd just keep going.

If you code for 2-3 hours a day, you'll improve immensely. Make sure to go back and refactor your old code. It's a good exercise.

Finally, if I have not persuaded you, I'll answer your well defined question :P. Take the programming courses that you plan to take and simultaneously hit ruby on rails (scratch your online curriculum except for #7). 2-3 hours a day (min) of JS, CSS, HTML, and RoR. Find a website (e.g. twitter, facebook, hacker news) and clone it using your RoR stack. Get them to look visually similar and have the same functionality. Don't quit at 90%... try to copy everything exactly (the main functionality at least). Once you can clone these popular websites in no time, you're ready! Just be prepared for a lot of struggling in the beginning.

Start your hacker news clone today.
It's good for CmdrTacoMalda that he's too busy trying to get his site back up after its current HNing. Otherwise, he'd probably have time to read and be annoyed again by this comment. ;)
People tired of Apple news, please take a HN vacation today
Efficient IT Management: Silos aren’t the answer
Apple iPhone Unveiling [LIVE BLOG]
Jesus just get in there and start emailing buddy. :)
Here is a heatmap I made of Kindle Fire sales by warehouse:
http://yfrog.com/z/kj34txp
I usually don't go for the conspiracy theory. But my first thought after reading the stuff about the Fire was that I should probably get in my order for a second one soon if I want it to show up before the holidays.

Although leaking the other Kindle data doesn't seem as convenient.
HN will be flooded with Apple stories in about 30 min. It happens every 4 months. Please just deal with it instead of writing complaint posts that make the site doubly noisy.
Does it have a good browser? Can it access Gmail, YouTube and Facebook? In that case 90% of people will be happy with it. I know I would be, if I could buy it in the UK.
I used those numbers as an example. Not to be taken literally.
Microsoft Will No Longer Make Zune, Focusing On Windows Phones
It's not even news yet, it's all speculation for at least another half hour.
Serious question: Have we heard from a human [1] in Bethesda's ranks about this issue? Or are they just playing the silent giant?

If I were the head of Bethesda's PR team and I saw this post, I would be having conniptions.

Footnotes
[1]. "human", that is, an individual person speaking on-the-record, having identified themselves by their name and position within Bethesda. Not a legal team, committee or any other culpability-diffusing vehicle.
thx, actually quite an interesting read.

thx, actually quite an interesting read.
I wouldn't say that the concept of selling an app is naive and outdated. But yes, competitors will probably release a similar app for free, which indeed is a dilemma.

Also, not all apps have potential to generate an alternative revenue stream, if so, great, otherwise I believe it can be quite problematic to monetize on many app concepts.
Remember all of the stuff that the iPhone lacked when it launched? No 3G. No copy/paste. No third party apps. No Flash. No carrier choice. No removable battery. No OTA syncing. No Exchange. 2 MP camera. No front camera. Watered down Bluetooth. Amazon isn't Apple (yet?), but the focus on experience and not features is what's going to make or break Kindle in the long run.
>remove the overhead of the interpreter, before you worry about overhead of a GIL.
The overhead of the GIL killing parallelism is nontrivial, even next to the interpreter overhead

>(since the above argument can be made that those workloads would be better in a different language).

Thats a pretty self defeating argument. Every single possible ruby workload would perform better in another language.

>So, asking for GIL removal is asking all users of the language to pay a 'threading tax',

First, the existence of the multithreading support already has a threading tax, the GIL. Second, sprinkling in the use of some more mutexes wouldn't make a significant performance impact, especially not in a interpreted language that we already agree is not good for performance.

Of course, if the runtime knew it was only running one thread it could ignore much the synchronization code altogether, but we don't want to pay the tax of a single branch decision, do we?

>IMHO, if the resource difference between processes and threads is significant [...]

What about all situations where you want to use threads, but not due to resource constraints? I would assume your answer would be "don't use threads" but you say you're not rabidly anti-thread.
I played for an entire month. Not only did my dog die, but my grandfather did too (the funeral was a $350 airfare away). Then my best friend from school got married a few days later (another $350 airfare). I got sick twice, and my mother got sick once. Oh, and a neighbour's kid broke my window too. And I spilled bleach on my nice new shirt.

If this was billed not as a poverty simulator but as an "Unluckiest person in America" simulator, I might see the point. Perhaps the game should just start off "You go to look for a job, but you get hit by a bus and die".
They in no way represent what you would see with your eyes

You'd think that would be obvious with a radio telescope...
I can't speak for JRuby or Rubinius, but in MacRuby one of the main reasons that lack-of-GIL is not a more serious problem is because MacRuby has the Dispatch library (based on libdispatch, a.k.a. Grand Central Dispatch) which makes working with multiple threads safe again.

If you were to invoke Ruby's Thread library directly in MacRuby, you would find that things get crashy rather quickly!
The question is of enforcement and incentives.

Ask people who are involved in this issue, one way or another. Employer, worker, or organizer in France versus the USA. No matter their ideology, they will agree that management has far more freedom of action and employees have far less protections in the USA.
I don't know. It seemed to me that everyone was pretty aware of the fact that their not trying to profit on the hardware and that selling content was the main goal.

Even when they released the original Kindle, selling ebooks was clearly the main focus and that turned out quite well for them.

The story is still relevant in that people are buying them at a rapid rate.
WSJ : Apple's new iPhone won't run on 4G WiMAX network
i think im the only guy from algeria here :(
Why does using google and stackoverflow get a negative connotation?

There's a collection of information on a topic that's larger than any other collection in the history of mankind, and we can search it in minutes. Why shouldn't that be the first option?

And those solutions certainly don't preclude the "think" option, they augment it (Also, I've already RTFM).
IPhone liveblog with photos
and now the store is updating http://store.apple.com/
"We'll be back soon"
That is a very odd interpretation of Harrison Bergeron. You believe that it's about taxes and the welfare state? I find that hard to believe considering Kurt was a self proclaimed socialist.
Who says I haven't? All I'm saying is I wish he'd charge more. He would get more money overall from the people who would not have thought to do such a thing :)
Federated Media buys Lijit
Apple's 'Let's Talk iPhone' keynote liveblog
Apple Store in Japan just unveiled iPhone 4S launch on October 14th
Considering how tight-lipped Amazon is about everything (including the fact that they've never divulged the number of Kindles sold) I'd imagine Jeff Bezos and Tom Szkutak might be less than happy.
This is pretty awesome news. I've been running GlusterFS on my guild hosting system for coming on 4 years or so. While I haven't followed the project terribly closely, hearing RedHat has acquired it is good news for the longevity of the project. I never quite knew how well known or high profile it was, and always wondered if it would be abandoned.

This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. thumbs up
Obviously, there's a limit to the extent that he could make himself lose the benefits of race, intelligence, and education. But I think he did a pretty reasonable job. He moved to a city semi-at-random, where he had no friends or family. He never claimed to have any more than a high school diploma. He lived in a homeless shelter and worked day-labor jobs until he could save enough to move out (with a roommate he met in the homeless shelter).
A Story of GameLayers, Inc.
I think he means that the design of the site is better if you have a not-so-good connection, as HN is much lighter in the HTML department.
>and more to do with the "impending end of the world scenario" that's been in the media now for nigh on 4 years.

Agreed. I don't watch the news anymore (besides industry news) and I'm no longer politically involved. Ignorance is bliss.
Slow rate denial of service attack for apache and mitigation
I actually have found many great examples searching through the archives of HN. What I would prefer is something that helps hackers get out from behind their computer and effectively sell to potential clients, in person. Something that helps hackers effectively communicate with others, in person. Things like this would be helpful to me...
The game is a lot easier if you act like a total sociopath (e.g. don't buy your mom's medicine, let your pet suffer, etc.)
"Identity theft is still called theft"

Identities are supposed to be unique, its part of the whole idea of identity. If someone else is using your identity, you are being deprived that. So in that case, yes, it is analogous to someone actually taking something physical to you. You cannot fully use your identity once someone else starts using it.
> Can anyone compare GlusterFS to HDFS? I think they're booth GoogleFS clones but I'm not sure on the details except that HDFS uses a name node and is written in Java.

I don't think GlusterFS is GoogleFS clone. As far as I know HDFS isn't meant to be a mountable file system. GlusterFS is a near POSIX-compliant FS that can be mounted with FUSE. The FUSE mounts are then exported via NFS or CIFS. At least that is how it was 2 years ago when I tried it. I think NFS is now a native export option of GlusterFS volumes via the NFS Translator. In my mind GlusterFS is more like Isilon than HDFS.

I don't really like the fact that GlusterFS is in user-space. I think Ceph is a more promising project: http://ceph.newdream.net/
Anniversary Poems
Great idea. Here's how we market our website, may be helpful: http://feefighters.com/blog/how-to-market-your-website/
Yeah, windows doesn't have a resolv.conf. And on OSX that file is only there for unix applications and it's overwritten when you change networks. Native Mac apps don't use resolv.conf, they use the system apis.
Curtis Painter, Might Have Done the Best
Shhh don' tell Apple that who still makes most of their profit from shiny devices. They also sell content, but it's not the biggest slice of their pie. They may be the lone exception, but a large one at that.
Not people, but you need to understand that many of us already know this. The point is that the devices are selling. And people will buy content for it. Selling the devices is the first step and that is all this article is saying.
Best part of the post was where someone suggested he increase his heap size to 1GB to get a fibonacci algorithm to run.

After pointing this out, a member of the Node.js
community (post now deleted) suggested I might have an
obsolete version of Node with a 1GB heap limit and that
I recompile without the 1GB restriction so that this
retarded algorithm can continue eating up all my system RAM.
Live From Apple's 'Let's Talk iPhone' Event
>But the real fun is in "synchronized" keyword of java. Can

>we should design "Truby" which is a new languages for multi-threaded ruby

But thats just syntactic sugar for managing a lock. I don't follow ruby exceptionally closely, is the syntax of the language frozen forever? Can similar sugar not be added?
Just wanted to say brudgers, thank you so much for the "Chinese water torture" analogy. It made a ton of sense and I'll be meeting with my programmers to get things realigned from an expectation and compensation standpoint.
Bonus: the original iPhone was $600 (later $400) /on contract/, and it still sold like hotcakes. This is a $200 tablet with no carrier allegiance required.
Maybe, but it's a shame you need two competing, but very similar projects, to accomplish this. If people had been competing about contributing the best code to the same project, we could have reduced the duplication.
Turns out, we geeks REQUIRE innovation. It's in the brain chemistry.
Are you kidding me? This is just regurgitated bullshit with upsell's and ad's for his own gain wrapped around it.

1. Am I Passionate About This Business?
2. What Am I Passionate About?
3. What Problem Am I Solving?
- "remember to stay Laser Beam Focused!"

This is complete garbage...
Perhaps. But don't you think they can put out a press release that would be covered by every major newspaper, online and offline? Or Bezos could give an interview with the WSJ, NYT, or anyone he chooses. Why would they leak it CultofAndroid.com, a second or third tier niche tech blog?
As science delves deeper and deeper, it has become a more collaborative enterprise. Consider that there were only 3 authors on the paper describing the structure of DNA but ~300 on the paper describing the structure of the human genome.
Isn't it the point of all this madness that jumping the shark for these small and trivial problems is fun and thought provoking?
Skin Cancer Causes, Treatments and Effects
For the first year and a half after starting my company I made considerably less than this and got alone just fine.
Personally I am happy to see a company make solid money creating good technical products. Especially open source code. 136 million $ in cash for an Open Source company is pretty sweet. Gluster has some awesome people and they deserve their success.
Who's Behind Dart
> If Amazon really is making $50 per Kindle Fire sale that translates to $125 million in revenue on day one

The author doesn't know what revenue really means. Revenue is the total cash taken, not the cash left after paying the manufacturers. He means gross margins, although the 25% GM is dubious.
Caught: unsung heroes in action
Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre.
jtchang, thanks. I appreciate your comment and honesty on why deadlines can be missed. It was also on me not defining expectations and he may feel we'll just profit off his work and pay him peanuts. I really want him as an equal founder and would love for him to want it as bad as us.
agreed -- for what it's worth, I've looked into node.js for some of my projects, then thrown it out because I already know other technologies which serve the same purpose. the problem isn't with the technology, the problem is with the marketing (and that includes grass-roots marketing through engineers who swear by the technology as one-size-fits-all.)
I think your last point is interesting as I view that as a clear positive from a user experience point of view.
"Second, sprinkling in the use of some more mutexes wouldn't make a significant performance impact"

The people who tried this in python would differ.

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214235

"This has been tried before, with disappointing results, which is why I'm reluctant to put much effort into it myself. In 1999 Greg Stein (with Mark Hammond?) produced a fork of Python (1.5 I believe) that removed the GIL, replacing it with fine-grained locks on all mutable data structures. He also submitted patches that removed many of the reliances on global mutable data structures, which I accepted. However, after benchmarking, it was shown that even on the platform with the fastest locking primitive (Windows at the time) it slowed down single-threaded execution nearly two-fold, meaning that on two CPUs, you could get just a little more work done without the GIL than on a single CPU with the GIL."
Designers Are The New Drivers Of American Entrepreneurialism
The power of branding is illustrated by my mind reading that as "Khan Academy launches site specifically for teachers," and not noticing that YouTube was mentioned (and NOT Khan Academy) until I followed the KQED link submitted here to YouTube Teachers and then registered on that site. It will be interesting to see what this new degree of teacher-friendliness prompts by way of changes to Khan Academy.
Reminds me of the EFF's "Panopticlick" [1] page, which highlights that browser uniqueness can be inferred from not just the browser/OS user agent info and the combination of plugins (as the article points out), but also the available fonts, screen size, and time zone. This doesn't include any geo-URL lookup services.

1: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
I thought you didn't need to keep all your videos on your device. You could archive and re-download whenever you wanted much like the Kindle app on iOS?
You forgot 4G LTE. The Xoom has all of those features and because of it, it is flying off the shelves -- err, no, wait a second.

Nilay Patal had a great quote about the Fire v iPad. He said the Fire actually competes with the iPad not because it does more, but because it does less.
The Windows approach to threads is essentially equivalent, both kernels mainly deal with threads that only incidentally belong to processes. While in Linux process is essentially an special case of thread, Windows kernel actually has processes as distinct entities, but that is mostly an implementation detail, to some extent, NT kernel is even more thread-oriented, as there is more state associated with thread (and surprisingly, some things that might look like in-kernel process state from Unix standpoint are actually illusion provided by Windows userspace components).
> Why would they leak it CultofAndroid.com, a second or third tier niche tech blog?

I can't really answer that, but this article is currently #2 here. Can't argue with results, right?
Starbucks Now Calling the Cops on Laptop Hobos
Most people don't realize this, especially the general public.
...because taking money for that software lets you continue to eat while writing more, better software?

Ain't a hard concept.
It's hard to simulate poverty. Of course I can make the right decisions. I'm not hungry, and this is a game. Sure I'll choose to buy the cheapest, and healthiest food I can. Real life is different, after being hungry for a while my decisions would be different. I don't feel this game highlighted how the mentality of the situation compounds itself.
I wrote this. Feel free to check it out, but it's just a toy I wrote to scratch an itch (searching stackoverflow in parallel to my main search). It was hacked together in a few hours and is running on a micro EC2 node (which also serves some other projects at the same time).
Jumping the shark is the moment when something, such as a TV show, or in this case a community around a web framework, begins to decline in quality beyond recovery, so “jumping the shark for these small and trivial problems” really doesn't make sense.
The 10,000 hours meme is something a bad author made up to fit his pile of anecdotes.

It's not a fact, it's a number he pulled out of his ass.

He never made it about deliberate practice, he used the Beatles jamming and fucking around for 10,000 hours as an example.

Stop talking about 10,000 hours IT'S BULLSHIT. You might was replace-string it with "SIX-SIGMA CERTIFICATION", it means nothing!
It's more than a little dodgy to describe behavior that imposes on someone else's time and resources purportedly to help others as "altruistic."

I came here to say the same thing. What does imposing undesired and excruciatingly painful medical procedures on a terminal cancer patient have to do with altruism??? I'd say it verges on evil! The doctor put his own ego above the patient's interests. This is arrogance, not altruism.
CentOS claims to be a clone of RHEL. There is a desktop install package that puts Gnome with the usual (firefox, openoffice, evolution). There would be some post installation fiddling with different repositories to get any sound software you need working. Scientific Linux is another distribution based on RHEL but which changes the binary packages more. Again, repositories and some twiddling.

What sound software do you use? Does it involve Jack?
I think there should be a new way of control in the app, like only letting people registered on a database use the app, and in that database there should be only users that had paid for that service, but this is more trouble for the user, and users hate this, also piracy sometimes is fault of the user and sometimes is fault of the developer, i had to get some free apps because getting the app is really hard because of the restrictions on my country, but piracy is a problem every developer has so instead of complaining after the app is done, we have to make a contingency plan so we can be ready for all.
You can always check if all address lines transitioned from 1 to 0 on an instruction fetch and increment whatever you use for PBR...
Hmm, sounds more like reddit is the thing that has jumped the shark :)

Most people using Node I've had contact with are firmly in the 'right tool for the job' camp. No one sane does CPU intensive tasks inside the event loop... that's what delayed job processor stuff is for.
Robert Scoble live coverage of Apple event & What's Trending
I am chasing one client for 2 months now. He didn't pay me. The problem is he is father of one of my best friends, who I know since early childhood. Everytime I call him he postpones our conversation. And this is one of the numerous examples of me chasing clients. I know how you feel, even if its 10$ job, you still feel crappy if you are not payed at the end of the day as negotiated. 2 years of freelancing experience here, I guess I'll quit soon. Good luck!