skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect that this doesn't hold nearly as much in high tech as it does in other fields like banking or law.

For starters, the "top" programs in engineering and computer science is shuffled pretty heavily - Caltech, MIT, and Stanford are in there, but so are Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, etc... These are all serious institutions, of course, and of course by national standards even the huge public ones are selective. But I've also noticed (this is just my own experience) that top "tech" companies considerably less concerned with whether you went to a "top" school in the first place.

I wonder why this is - I mean, I'm glad for it. I have a few theories.

The typical techie degree programss (math, physics, computer science, engineering) are so rigorous that people tend to respect the accomplishment (as long as it comes from a recognizable school with integrity).

Tech is a fundamentally creative field, rather than a positional - in other words, techies have the opportunity to create wealth rather than position themselves for a slice of the pie. If you can create wealth, well, get out there and do it! No permission is required.

On a similar note, high tech is extremely disruptive - time and again, tech founders overthrow the established order. These disruptive people often do come from Stanford or Harvard, but I think the personality type of someone who seeks to disrupt the ruling elite is going to be more open to top talent regardless of where it comes from (unlike investment banking or law firms, where (according to the article) graduates of super-elite schools are likely to filter out people who haven't attended a similar school).

Also - high tech tends to have a closer, more symbiotic relationship with academics than investment banking or even law. So high tech will place a greater premium on degrees from universities where top research in engineering and science takes place - not so much out of snobbery as because they have a close connection with these universities and get to know the students there. Interestingly, this doesn't correlate all that well with eliteness of undergraduate admissions (the ivy league, in particular, is surprisingly MIA where it comes to top graduate and or faculty departments in engineering and science... Cornell, which isn't high in the ivy pecking order, is probably one of the best).
The sad thing is the amount of non-coding work that exists.

But that's government. Still want to move more things under their purview?
ha, you beat me at it. I typed the post and got back to Campfire alerts at work and found yours :)

thing I love about Vundle is that it makes it really really simple to maintain your vim stuff. Your whole vim setup is down to just your .vimrc
"Clojure in Action" author Amit Rathore will teach on CodeLesson starting Dec. 5
Of course the rating and chart position are relevant!

If you want to deduce something from an anecdote like this, these details are absolutely critical. Otherwise you can't distinguish between the performance difference being due to something random (maybe app got featured in one of the stores, causing a positive feedback cycle via the charts), something specific to the app (maybe the app was ported badly to one of the platforms), or something that applies to a wide range of similar apps (maybe the users on one platform just never buy anything).

If you find out that the app is #10 on the relevant list in one store and #1000 on the other, one of the first two options seems a lot more likely than the third one. If it has great ratings in one store and mediocre ones in the other, that's rather suggestive of the second option, etc.

You say that for the OP only the amount of money he's making matters. Maybe that's true for this single app, but it's not true when making the platform choice any future apps. For those decisions, it's critical to have more understanding of why the app performed badly on Android.
Carmack: Parallel Implementations
Thanks brett. We have even better productivity apps coming soon!
"broken proprietary software which the public isn't even allowed to fix."

This is recurring theme that traces back at least as early as the 1990's.

What's different now is that there is historical evidence that open source projects can produce higher quality software than proprietary ones.
Are you REALLY an expert?
This infographic may prove you wrong. Did you know that it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert? Well according to Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers it does. He claims that the “10,000-Hour Rule” is the key to success in any field and is a matter of practicing a specific task for around 10,000 hours. This infographic demonstrates what it takes to become an expert in areas such as astrophysics, sports, litigation and even poker
Forex Strategy Secrets
In the governments defense, I think big corporations routinely overpay for web development and marketing expenses.

Aanecdotally, a girl I know who works for a pharmaceutical company said they spent $60,000 on a three page web site.

Then I sit in Starbucks and listen to some freelancer get reamed for charging $1,000 to build and manage some guy's website. One would think that the price discrepancies for the same product among different buyers would not be so extreme in a capitalist marketplace.
Are you implying that qmail and tex don't have actual users?

The point those packages make is that some problems can have a solution that lasts years or decades instead of mere months.
Personal Diet solution Program Review
It's really nice to see online community evolving out of threaded discussion boards. The paradigm from Invision et al seems so stale lately.

That being said, I wish all these great new tools and systems had a white label option.
Hall Adds Activity Stream, Bets Real-time Is the Future
> Sure, they were probably interested in celebrities while we're interested in technology & business, but the similarities are still striking....

I'd relate the start-up community to the celebriy community in this way:

In both communities there are those who have succeeded: Celebrities and Startup Founders with an exit.

There are those who want to do: People who move to Hollywood, and people who move to Silicon valley.

And there are finally those who only watch others doing: People who only read People Magazine, and People who only read Techcrunch.

The girls you saw were the last bit but HN is something akin to an industry journal/forum---we have a greater mix of the first two bodies: the doers. So when an article on HN appears about depression in the startup community, I instantly think of people who have their own startup, work 12 hours aday, and pour their savings into building a product based on a dream. These guys are nothing like a passive watcher, and the causes of their depression ought to be far different from merely mistaking 'details for issues'.
Other candidates: fasting, exercise, and low carb diets.
"not trivialize mental illness"

I don't think edw519 was trivializing mental illness as much as pointing out similarities that might lead to (non suicidal) depression in people. There are definitely similarities to the blue moods that would be part of the girls reading "People" and aspiring to be someone that they are never going to be compared with hackers(say luck, skill, brains vs. looks, weight luck etc.)

Or being accepted or not accepted by the group. Something HN manages to accomplish by the whole voting system that keeps many in line with the group think and desire to be popular or gain karma and avoid down voted comments.

Sidebar: It's funny how on HN someone who makes what people think is a stupid comment (who may suffer from depression for all you know) gets no compassion at all and gets downvoted and marginalized. Someone who posts a blog post and cries out for help though get's plenty of attention and up votes and all the sudden everyone is nice and bending over backwards to say "don't give up" what can we do to help?
We do theoretically have such a thing in the US, for instance: http://www.findrfp.com/service/search.aspx?s=iphone&t=FE...

You can also go here and see contracts already awarded (search for "iphone" for instance): http://www.usaspending.gov/

The US allows "no bid" or "sole source" contracts, which have several problems, not the least of which is rampant cronyism. Note that even the President failed to stop this gravy train: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/pr...

Also, you'd be surprised on how many hours get billed visiting the stakeholders for "face time" and to ensure follow-on work.
And finding out exactly what they want done, and documenting it could have taken weeks.

Also, where is the code?
Thanks Brett Hardin (I'm a co-founder). Would love to hear what other types of productivity tools you would imagine us having.....
For Founders - International - 4startup
Amazon Kindle Fire review: It’s no iPad killer, and that is why it will succeed
Referencing Malcolm Gladwell unironically == zero credibility
Mammoth Hot Springs
I'm used to attending and giving presentations that are a bit outlandish, but this is gimmicky enough that I started losing track of actually learning anything out of this.

I'm sure it's better in-person or with a recording though.
I've been trying to replicate the filetype specific bundles using pathogen's disabled bundle feature, so unbundle is a nice discovery. To allow for more flexibility such as enabling a bundle for more than one filetype but not all (e.g. just jvm languages), there can be a separate directory that contains all bundles, and these can be symlinked from ftbundle and bundle. This also allows disabling bundles that you're still testing.
Yup, exactly. And being forced to goto Contacts just makes the whole thing hell.

It could have easily been implemented by entering a location into a textfield accompanied by a map, the exact same way you enter "places" everywhere else on the device and the web.
Generaci�n 2.0
I'm not even sure what an "APU" is, frankly. Lots of undefined buzzwords in that article.
True, but I don't particularly want to have CVS and Safeway in my address book :p
Welcome to Ceylon, a JVM-based programming language
I ran into the same problem myself and started using my left hand for my mouse -- less travel and surprisingly convenient for most of my normal mouse interaction (which is primarily scrolling, I tend to use keyboard shortcuts for most active interaction with content).
That is true, but in an ideal world, it shouldn't.

You can get it from MuckRock or from OSHA's own site.
http://www.muckrock.com/foi/view/united-states-of-america/so...

They provided it 20 days ago, so no idea why the author mentioned that it wasn't available.
Traveling, Writing and Programming
Google   for Mac Users
It's not specifically a complaint about this article, more just a general complaint about the state of UI blogging. The headline led me to believe that this article would break the mold, but it didn't.
You're only 4 degrees of separation from anyone on Facebook
Don’t Look to the Ivy League
Agreed. I can't really think of any use case where a user would need to include a complex drawing with multiple text fields, shapes, colors, etc. just to report a problem.
I highly doubt there was design by committee. More like:

1) Dev gets contract, builds app
2) Person who was arbitrarily moved to dept. of mobile-app development reviews app, figures it's good because it works on a phone, forwards the results to his/her boss.
3) Repeat step 2 at a higher level
4) Done.

There is a more stringent audit trail, perhaps. But I doubt there's a committee of people who sat aorund a whiteboard and designed this puppy. I hope there wasn't, at least.
My initial feeling is that I prefer modular to bundled in this case. That is, I use shell scripts or small programs to mass-install or mass-update bundles, and I'm not sure I want all that information in my .vimrc. That said, I can definitely see why some people might love it, and Vundle itself looks interesting. I'll definitely take a look.

@SingAlong (I can't reply to your reply, so I'm replying here.)

> Vundle does exactly that - makes installs and updates easier.

I know. But that's what I meant by "I prefer modular to bundled in this case": I don't want all of that in one place (my .vimrc). I'm not saying Vundle is bad or that this is a wrongheaded way to do things. It just don't fit my preferences.
Whoever runs ERG is getting very rich by making crap that doesn't even work. It's like a negative programmer. Except we're all paying for it.

And this is the 'obvious' case, in which it's easy to tell it's crap. What about those times when I'm relying on the experts at these agencies to find solutions to difficult problems without a clear indicator of success? I'm not anti-government by any stretch, but man. The legalese sounded so good: "critical, real-time hot weather information"...

Sure, I know that's BS, but what about when I'm not qualified to judge it (i.e. military decisions in Afghanistan based on intel that I'm not privy to).
Apparently. It's a shame that researchers hae to use such software. Probably part of why research is so conservative and slow. Why not a funky html "paper"? With interactive formulae, clickable links (hey, wasn't PageRank based on references? Maybe time to turn that around) to references. Most important, a clickable link to an academic profile.
Actually they will reduce the comment's score too, it just won't show. The difference is that if it is showing -4 and someone upvotes it, it won't neccesarily go to -3, because it's actual score could be much lower.
License Plate Scanners Logging Our Every Move
Rackspace Cloud LEMP Ubuntu 11.04 Server
Oh for sure compatibility is a huge issue and getting airlines to update and keep in step with things like herding cats. I don't envy the role of a dev who works for one of the large GDS's
Its important to recognize that Backbone is a framework and Knockout is a library. These are very different things! Because of this, comparing Backbone and Knockout side-by-side is inappropriate; kinda like comparing a building with a vehicle.

For the record, Knockout handles way more than just forms. The statement that Knockout doesn't offer much beyond forms is simply false.

After writing code using both, on my next app I will use all of them:
- Backbone for application structure and the client-side model layer functionality. Backbone is good at this.
- Knockout to make handling user-triggered events a breeze, keep data in sync across views and layouts automatically, and to keep my markup and JS code tidy and separate with client-side templating. Knockout is good at this.
- jQuery to interface with "low-level" constructs such as DOM elements. jQuery is good at this.
In this set up, Backbone is the framework, Knockout is just another library being used, and jQuery is just another library being used.
:-)
Do I know if my suggestions will fix anything? No of course not, they have to be tested. But my experience tells me it could be improved significantly.
Linux syslog on the way out?
By popular demand: The worst employee I've ever worked with. : funny
Universal Music Sues Grooveshark for 100,000 Illegal Uploads
ironically, it could work super easily on a $99 touchpad. since you have all the UNIX stack to play with, and no corporate control-freak limiting what you can do with your device.
But what's the quality expectation on the reporting and documentation? Is it likely that your audience (the gov't managers) have lower standards?
VRAL- Up 50% Already- More 411
Darpa to banish “geeky, formal” way code defects are eradicated
Disclaimer I like Fantom and it is my language of choice. That said, I agree he (Stephen) for every fault he finds Scala finds a way to recommend Fantom. That strikes me as dubious.

Nevertheless I find this statement:

> Scala is lightyears ahead of Fantom and Fantom will probably never catch up. If Fantom can't win on technical merit, then apparently the next best strategy involves negative blogging!

Baseless at best.
In what aspect is Scala lightyears ahead?

Also what are you implying by saying 'if it can't win on technical merit then best strategy involves negative blogging!'

First Stephen is just one guy.
Second I think Stephen just likes Fantom for the same reasons he dislikes Scala and wanted to blog about it.

The authors and the community have overall been quite ambivalent to Scala. As witnessed by this blog from one of Fantom's authors: http://fantom.org/sidewalk/topic/675
Vundle does exactly that - makes installs and updates easier.

So you add: Bundle "rails.vim"

to your .vimrc and then in vim you do :BundleInstall! and it updates all the bundles. The "!" suffix also updates plugins already installed. Also makes it easier to specify github sources. Instead of just rails.vim, you specify "tpope/rails.vim" and it'll get the repo from tpope's github repository.
What test would they use to check whether an app is simple or not? At a certain point, you put out a bid for a complicated monstrocity, and the only entrant is some RentACoder who claims he can re-write Windows in Python in two weeks for $50.
I see the protests about inequality and the high cost of housing that took place in that boulevard, but I don't see why that's relevant, could you please explain it further?

I get that you might find it to be immoral, maybe, that so many startups are getting funded or getting pretty good exits in the U.S. (after all, that's the best place atm to get exits), while Israeli are having protests about inequality and high cost of housing, but then again, U.S. has a very high number of startups, and yet we are seeing protests everywhere in that country. That still doesn't mean there aren't startups in Israel.
If you feel a swelling sense of pride every time you publish a mockup or do an a/b test you might be missing the point of MVP -- solving a problem without getting caught up in process.
"and other Internet-facing Simatic HMI systems .."

I love that ThreatPost wedged that one in there -- anyone who has worked with SCADA systems knows the second rule is "don't expose your HMI's." (The first rule is "don't believe the vendor.")
Scientists in Politics
Seems to be a point in favor of the "Real men have fabs" quip. See:

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4210796/Real-...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1031588/amds-sander...

(Unfortunately, AMD had to spin off its fab capacity as Global Foundries a few years ago.)
http://twogiraffes.com
http://kyan.com/
http://www.glitch.com/
Aliviar el Estr�s con la Nataci�n
The simple case of sending feedback of just a comment should be simple. Click Wishbox, gives you simple form asking for name, email, and message. Beyond that, I think this is really cool that you could easily add a screenshot with arrows and text explaining the issue.

Overall, I think the UX could be improved, but it has a lot of potential.
Is google still investing resources in Google Groups? It doesn't look that way.
The government's duty to protect your life does not extend beyond protecting it from the use of force by other people.

If you choose to work in a place, that's your choice. Even if you fail to make sure it's safe before you work there, or decide to work there despite the risk.

Anyway, even if OSHA were legitime, this app is not effective at achieving anything, even if executed well.
Clearly without copyright there would be no copyright. I was unable to find a copyright picture on google that was not copyrighted.

"Yo dawg, I heard you like copyrighting, so I copyrighted your copyright application, so you can violate copyright while you copyright."
I think the issue is not that there aren't applications, it's that people just aren't used to looking for them. As an example, let's think of classical geometry. They figured out the area of circles, the volumes of cones, etc without any calculus. If you know the tricks you can figure it out too, or you can just apply a little calculus and it just falls out. I feel that people dismiss the math as unnecessary because they can get by without it, but in reality the math is always there and sometimes provides much simpler solutions.

I've found over the last few years that my thinking has morphed from primarily OO to primarily functional. It isn't for lack of writing OO code, which I do professionally. I find that my brain loves to think in terms of functional transformations on classes of data types.

Suddenly I find myself noticing when things should be expressed as a monad or monoid. I also find myself thinking in type signatures for dynamic languages and silently cursing the language designer who decided a function can return null without warning. I see patterns in my code and find myself wishing I could overload the semi-colon to implement monadic behavior.
Didn't Stephen already linked to Fantom :P (which is quite a coincidence since Fantom uses Hg as it's DVCS of choice).
Get the New YouTube Interface Right Away, Before Everyone Else
Some might want more control over the presentation of their photography and a choice of back end service providers (such as getting prints). And, some of the services you mention have a preference to have you license your pictures under more permissive licenses.

These services are great, for free, but once you want something more, they start seeming a little lacking.
Never Commit to Your Master
How the GIT commiting process works at Cloud9 IDE.
Daily Mobile Minute #57: Is the tablet a PC?
I have worked for one of these "green energy"/"smart grid" companies. My conclusion about that company (after about six months of working there) was that its core competency wasn't writing software. The software was a shoddy pile of half-working crap written in a proprietary programming language made by another company that didn't exist any more. No, their core competency was 1) navigating government bureaucracy and 2) filling out government forms. These two competencies ensured that there was never a need to actually produce good software because few competitors would have the time and contacts to even bid on the contract, much less secure it and write good software.
The actual password was "100".

http://support.automation.siemens.com/WW/llisapi.dll/4581536...
Heres my take. No way.

Well, 23 year old me says sweet, older me says no way. But at 23 I wasn't near equipped to build a product from scratch.

What you really need is a CTO that gets founder equity. But you already have a CTO and it sounds like they don't bring much to the table besides you being comfortable with them. Which is important no doubt about it.

So you've got all the founders you need, but still don't have a means to build the product. Building a product from the ground up for non-founder equity and room and board is ridiculous. If you are competing for people with the skills to build a product from zero to MVP and beyond on a global scale, you must realize these same people have the opportunity to do the same thing somewhere else but for an equity share matching their contribution.

I see you have a few options:

* Pay your hackers market salary minus local COL. (2 month contract I'm guessing would be about 20k per head)

* Outsource the job (Guessing somewhere around 50k)

* Replace your CTO with someone who can commit and build the product. (Free)

* Roll the dice with some go getter looking for an adventure.
Yeah, I like the wearable computing idea much more than I like walking about with a "smart" phone.
I was surprised by this and decided to check it out, and it looks like they're not really.

the implementation of EU government law by national governments is far from uniform and sometimes weak – in 2002, for instance, only 16% of governmental calls to tender were published – government procurement has been called "the weakest link in the common market".[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_E...

Also check the minimum amounts this applies to, this probably wouldn't have been necessary to put through the process anyway.