skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not really true - this is mostly a reflection of there being more and more internet content every year. For example [foo bar] appears to be growing just as much in popularity.

http://www.google.com/views?q=foo+bar+view%3Atimeline&vw...
Its actually better to release during slow news days, because you'll get more exposure since you don't have to compete for attention
I think this is actually a bad idea, because tips themselves will never give you the fundamentals you need to be a good programmer. It's like asking for a steady stream of fish instead of going out, buying a fishing rod, and getting some fishing lessons.

In general, I think one should try to understand basic principles first, instead of solving specific problems they have. Nobody here can tell you what you ought to be asking, but intro textbook authors have put a lot of thought into what you need to know and base their books around that.
I agree. As a longtime Java developer myself, it is horrible. But it's horrible on its own merits; there's no reason to make things up about what it can and can't do in order to trash it.
<pedantism>

12% of that sentence was the word "actually." In all but the shortest sentences, it's strange to see an adverb as the most common word.

Edit: Thought about this more, and some people almost certainly say "like" more than any other word. (Un)surprisingly, your sentence loses little meaning if the actuallies are replaced with likes, commas optional.

</pedantism>
i do! (interface designer)
those two links dont look the same like this article. this post has a big header and drop shadow around the body
Arguing about the cause of global warming is like standing on the railroad tracks arguing whether the train is your fault. We see the train, and it ain't stoppin'.

http://www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/files/norock/research/glacier_anim...

The debate is moot. Time to concern ourselves with stepping out of the way.
Can I ask why you chose Flex over the Ajax approach? What features were only in Flex that you felt this was a better approach?
Just Got Fired From Yahoo?  Have A Taco.
I second this. Growing up in a family with a continuous lack of money, I was always having to work with computers that bordered on ancient -- the manual for my first computer was actually written in Sumerian on a clay tablet.

Having to actually learn to work with the system at a base level will be incredibly useful once you start to pick up more advanced concepts, and I imagine that the history of computing might be a topic in which you can find interest as well.
Michael Lewis: A Wall Street Job Can’t Match a Calling in Life
Safer than ActiveX: a look at Google's Native Client plugin
Somewhere, something is wrong on the Internet
Bad day at the office?
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=pw
Google Native Client Adds A Higher Execution Speed To Web Based Applications
Are they going to come out with a Mac version first?
Startup Interview: Lifeblog – Visual chronicle of life
37 jQuery Plugins and Demos for Developers
Interesting. My first guess was 300,000.

The town I grew up in is about 1,000 people, and has a gas station. Most of the small towns around that one of comparable size also have a gas station. So I figured if the population is about 300,000,000 and people per gas-station is about 1,000, then there are about 300,000 gas stations in the U.S.
No, just testing to see if that latest batch of Sarcasmometers was bad... and wouldn't you know it, they're all broken. :)
AWS or shared hosting for a new app?
What do you guys do for hosting when releasing a new site/web app?

Do you take the time to tailor your app and environment for AWS (EC2, S3, etc), or do you prefer a simpler approach such as a shared hosting account with Slicehost/Linode/etc to just get it out there quickly?

I've never used AWS, so I don't know how straightforward or convoluted the initial process is to release a brand new site on it. However, this thread seems to believe that it isn't particularly complex, provided you're thorough and have a decent amount of *nix sysadmin experience:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202056

OTOH, this post seems to suggest that shared hosting is preferable for releasing a "small" site, and that AWS should be considered later on, when your traffic requires it:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258761

What say you?
List of hundreds of books written by entrepreneurs and executives
I prefer https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm for my random password generation needs...
"You are sitting at home when your kitchen sink springs a leak that you can’t fix. You reach for the phone book and call a plumber. When the plumber arrives you ask “before you get started, could you tell me where you see yourself in five years?”

Your 1987 Impala has finally bit the dust. You call a tow truck to haul it away to be crushed or recycled. Before turning the keys over to the driver you ask “What are your biggest flaws?”

*You and your family are taking a trip by plane. You are all a little nervous, as most people are when flying. To assuage your fears to walk up to the pilot and ask him “How many crosswalks are in New York City?”"

Certainly puts things in perspective. This seems an excellent criterion for determining what are good and bad interview questions, assuming that your goal is actually to hire someone to do a job.
How would you update this list?
Thanks PG. This is a great advice. I'll stick to my plan then.
I have been getting better as I get older. But I also worry about letting people down. In my industry (the legal field) you just can't take a chance you'll let somebody down. I don't want to be that guy. There's too much riding on the work.

So I do the drudge work. I know I can get it done. It some ways it makes me feel better because I don't have to worry about getting over the hump.

One of my options is simply increasing the amount of money I get paid for doing something I know I can do. Then do my own thing on my own time. I call it drudge work, but in reality its something that requires a set of specialized knowledge or special education, but has to to be repeated over and over again (hence the drudge part).

Maybe I need to come up with ideas of thing I can learn that people will pay me very well for because they need to be done over and over again and nobody likes doing them, but are hard enough to require specialized knowledge.
Just a guess, but they may feel that having the beta label on a downloadable app tends to turn people off, whereas people don't mind beta web apps (its the norm and they won't screw up your system).
From the comments section

Well, I am a school teacher in the Austin Independent School District and while I don't know any "Karen", I am intimately familiar with the rhetoric and attitude. The author here is uncomfortably close to knowing what he's talking about when he speaks of the NEA. We are "encouraged strongly" to discourage the use of anything other than Microsoft products in the school district and between the Tech folks fearing for their jobs and the ignorance of all the "Karens" I deal with daily, it's a wonder the boy wasn't publicly flogged.

I have been trying to get our school district to use Linux for 3 years and I've been told that I am to desist with this quest if I want to keep my job.

Those who questioned the email's authenticity owe him(?) an apology. Of course as I peruse the comments of the sort, I note with a wry smile that you don't have the courage to sign your name to it.

Cowardice is easy. I wish this author well.

Tim Daily
Seems like a spam account. Created 10 minutes ago to promote duckduckgo.com.
That's why I use SuperGenPass, it works on every browser, it's open source (it's Javascript) it's handy and it even works on my phone. I've got a different password for almost every site now and I don't even have to know them.
The hardware has drivers, just included as binary blobs; they are not open source, akin to Nvidia's binary driver for Linux.
Joel is absolutely right.

If you ask people to enter their time, they will lie. Sometimes not on purpose, but they will lie nonetheless. And, they'll eat up 10-30 minutes trying to remember what they did and enter it in in a human-readable way. And they'll piss away some time/focus shifting from productive stuff to time-entry stuff and back throughout the day.

Of course, for time/materials folks-- lying is GOOD. It almost always means that you bill for more hours than you spend on behalf of the client. If you bill for an hour of time, you almost certainly aren't subtracting the 7 minutes you spend emailing your girlfriend and the three minutes you spent twittering about the bowl of oatmeal you had.

But I truly think that one of the most important things a person or business can do is understand how people spend time (and how that changes over time).

(note: I run RescueTime, which passively records how people spend time/attention. I also ran a time/materials consulting biz for 8ish years and constantly was nagging geeks to enter their billable time. Yuck!)
It's really an unfortunate double standard in our culture. Women can have all manner of mechanised play things, and that's a-ok by everyone.
This is the way I would answered in an interview as well. I guess it heavily relies on the type of town you are from. Even smaller towns in remote areas tend to have a gas station. But I think whats important is not your answer, but how you came to the number, and 3x off is actually not bad for something you don't know anything about.
Yeah, a lot of this stuff seems sort of obvious, but if it's so obvious that these questions are bullshit, why do interviewers keep asking them?

Thankfully, any smart interviewer already knows this. Being asked these questions is a sign you might not want to work for these people because they are not very smart and/or don't think about the things that they say.

To be honest, in the interviews where I thought "wow, these people know what they're doing", they did not ask these questions.
I still stand by the comment I wrote 135 days ago in the second topic you cited above.

AWS is a good way to add or expand capacity to an existing "static" server. Last time I looked at the pricing, for a moderate volume site, AWS is more expensive than a comparable semi-shared sort of server arrangement.
Why oh why did I read that last sentence as "No because I'm out of your gay parade".

Why.
Turning the Page of Publishing: Launching E-Books into the Mainstream
Continue to share your twitter credentials with sites you trust, but stop once they implement OAuth.

Consider the rampant use of twitter clients. Should you stop using them? Stop trying new ones?

No.
Good point - there is definitely fundamentally beautiful and intrinsic about the balance and simplicity of lisp. Personally I find removing syntax (another way of changing it) to be an empowering project. My current project is to introduce a syntax for php which is something more along the lines of smalltalk meets lisp - the real trick here was removing syntax and making it more gramatically relevant if used at all.
There was a book on this very topic called "Love and sex with robots." I forget the author's name (and don't want to google at work), but I recall he went into a lot of depth that was backed by research and studies.
Only a tiny fraction of users are ever going to find out what a password manager is, so you really haven't addressed the article's point.
Thanks, I just want to have a firm grasp of theory and algorithms because I want to prove I'm not just a tester :)
Also, I think I want to improve my chances of getting hired into a good software company. Because I guess if I apply to Google then I think they expect me to know decent theory and algorithms. So two aims a) internal gratification and thirst b) improving my odds.

Thanks again for writing in.
Interesting way to get [most likely] good job applicants. Also love the picture of Jerry Yang at the end of the article.
There is no "trouble." The App Store solves a distribution problem, not a marketing problem.

What developers really want to do is stimulate demand. If you believe the App Store is your marketing channel then the only way to do that is to cut prices and try to get that top spot. That's what everyone is doing.

Instead developers should be looking for ways to market their app outside the App Store. They should be driving people to the store, rather than hoping the people already browsing will just happen to buy their app.

I wrote about this, here: http://20bits.com/articles/the-099-app-store/
+1 on point about family wanting to see you secure. I don't usually like quoting Paul Graham, but he really did write the best essay I've read on the subject of "Inequality and Risk".

With family it's tricky; they're not as really interested in "what you do" as "how will your chosen source of income ensure your happiness?"

I'm from Hong Kong, so the standard reply for family is usually "I do IT"; over there IT doesn't stand for Info-Tech, it is an umbrella term for all things technology related, from using accounting software to engineering boeing 747's. Implication: It's a safe desk job out of the sun and rain, it makes money, and you're fairly smart and able to take care of yourself.

Then during the bust they worry again, and I tell them nono I'm fine, my company builds buildings. The city I live in has been experiencing a massive boom in property value in both residential and commercial sectors, so then they didn't panic about my job. Plus, I'm still out of the sun and rain, so, to them things look pretty good.

So this time with the US housing melt-down, they worry again. So this time the emphasis is on what an awesome guy my boss is, that in the past even when things are slow he doesn't let anyone go, that the company is financially sound with everything paid for in cash, and all he has to pay is wages. So the office is here to stay for sure, keeping me out of the sun and rain.

PS:
I work in a rough area of the city, and on my bus commute there are a lot of construction workers, day labourers, unemployed individuals, folks slightly intoxicated or look like they have had a rough night outside. I have the luxuary of telling them I work for a construction company.

yeah Chinese people try to stay indoors as much as we can
For a huge percentage of all Internet users, a Google or Yahoo compromise is game-over; they're going to lose their bank account, and then their social, and their identity (if they lose the lottery). So centralizing on Google or Yahoo is a sensible plan.

As for your cautionary tale, I'm pretty familiar with the players here, axod. Why don't you tell us?
15 Billion Views and not a Dime of Profit
HP Notebooks Going "Green"
A small Boston-area company Boston Power won a lucrative contract from Hewlett-Packard to produce green power batteries for HP's line of laptop computers.
There's Python+Zope group [1] in DC, but I've never been. Refresh DC[2] is huge, and web developer-designer oriented, and Fringe DC[3] is functional programming oriented. I really want to go to Fringe, but I haven't been yet. There was recently a Barcamp in DC[4], and I expect there will be more. Twintech[5] is basically a party for techies AFAICT, lots of people seemed to have fun, there's another one coming in January.

I'm in Baltimore, so it's a little tough for me to get to DC events. Our best event is the SocialDevCamp East [6], which is basically a Barcamp-style event.

In April is jsconf[7], though the speakers and location are TBD.

[1]: http://zpugdc.org/
[2]: http://refresh-dc.org/
[3]: http://www.lisperati.com/fringedc.html
[4]: http://barcampdc.org/
[5]: http://twintech3.eventbrite.com/
[6]: http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/SocialDevCampEast
[7]: http://jsconf2009.com/
Good comment. Basically, my aim is to learn as much math and theory as possible. Also, to eventually become a rock star web programmer and a compiler writer(I want to write fun little computer languages one day).
Thanks, Jonathan. I really appreciate your reply.
My personal approach is a mix of both.

With my startup(s) we plan to release on a shared hosting at first (alpha) before moving to a single dedicated server (beta) and then later (assuming it takes off) to EC2 (probably).

I've always maintained: if you plan to at SOME point be utilising AWS then you need to plan that into your app. All the code we write is scalable and modular - so things that wont work on the next step up can be pulled out and replaced with bits that will w/o breaking the overall system (memcached is a good example - we have a fake caching layer on top of our database layer at the moment so that memcached can be added in later :)).
I've never quite understood this argument. If humans are causing and/or worsening global warming, then understanding how we're doing this will let us know what we can do to mitigate it.
probably why the link to their site is "rel=nofollowed" this make the link, just a link - and if their goal is anything but "sharing information" (I.e. ranking in google..) this does nothing for him.
Cool video of game of Go on Microsoft's "Surface", played against an HPC cluster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe0o-IvHOa0
You're sidestepping the point of the article. Ivan Kirigin is not going to get screwed over by a website that asks for his Twitter password. But my mom might, because it is extremely likely that one of these fly-by-night Twitter add-on apps will lose their database to some stupid SQLI bug. My mom almost certainly uses the same password for Twitter and Yahoo Mail.

Moreover, each app that asks for passwords for another service adds social proof that this is how we build applications. It isn't.
Part Brilliant.
Part Sleezy.
100% Taco.
You'd think that there would be a standard place for minimized windows to go so that it isn't needed or something...
He starts with the UN IPCC estimates for what the effects of Global Warming are likely to be in the next 100 years, and bases his recommendations on that. If he doesn't address some doomsday scenario, then it is probably because no scientist thinks it particularly likely.

It is a 30 minute talk, after all.
AC is one example of mitigation that is independent of cause.

I think it's important to compare the cost of preventing global worming vs dealing with global worming. I suspect that finding a cheep alternative to Coal power plants and internal combustion cars is going to be the cheapest long term solution, but there are a wide range of options. In the end CO2 can only have a finite impact on global worming so the question becomes what trade offs are worth it.

PS: When other options become cheaper then stopping becomes "free".
The genetic algorithm technique is often used to solve a problem just because it's cool, and not necessarily because it is the best way to solve the problem.

Is this the case with this "Mona Lisa" problem? Is there an alternative algorithm for finding the polygons that would be more efficient and give better results?
How about letting people know, honestly, what your strengths and weaknesses are and then letting prospective employers make the choice about whether they want to take the risk of hiring you?

Basically every time I've grown as a person has been because I took the risk of letting people down, and then felt I couldn't let them down and so completed the task. If you never put yourself in that position, how're you going to grow?

You'd be surprised how many people are willing to take that risk, because oftentimes it does pan out, and they get a pretty substantial return on their investment.
Yes, as patent trollling is a good way to do that.

How is when Amazon tries to patent single click checkout, that is evil, but when your favorite company does the a frivolous patent, that is just protecting their ass?

Also related read: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2007/09/reforming-pat... (Google's official policy on patents.)
Programmers and designers cost $150-200/hour? WTF is he talking about?

Is it so hard to make a point without exaggerating the hell out of your arguments?
Looking at your more complete list, I see a bunch of QBs who were first picked who did well, with only one or two exceptions. I see some QBs who were picked second or third who also did well. (Overall picks aren't really fair, as teams have many reasons for selecting other positions.) And I see a couple black swans, like Romo.

That's what you would expect if they were really good at their job. If they were bad at it, you'd expect more first picked QBs sucking, and more people coming out of nowhere.

Objectively measuring is impossible. Passer rating is more an indication of the quality of a team's offensive line, receivers, etc. than QB skill. It's a nice number for commentators to throw out, but it's of little use to a statistician.

I'd say maybe Pro Bowls, but again, there are other factors in play there too.
Grass grows over mountain inside of 200 years. Film at 11.

Forgive me for not panicking, but somehow I missed the comparison with other planets and 10,000,000 year graphics that put this in perspective.

Oh. That's right. We have no other examples of complex ecosystems to draw on, and scant little data to draw conclusions with on with our current climate.

But by all means, it must be disaster on its way.
Good editors aren't better or worse, just different
I wish. But probably not.
I read the blog post that was cited in this article yesterday.

I mean no offense (particularly if the author hangs out here on HN), but it sounded an awful lot like whining to me. Why does it come as any surprise that consumers are flocking to the cheaper alternatives? And of course, given that application developers are competing with one another, price is one of the key ways they are going to do that. This is classic supply and demand at work.

Maybe this is just because I look at it from the perspective of a web application developer, and think to myself, "If ONLY there was an easy way to charge people a low price like $0.99 to use my app instead of having to rely on Google Ads for revenue..."

All of this said, it does sound like Apple could make some changes to the iTunes app store experience to help application developers better showcase the experience of higher priced apps.

Another interesting idea would be for Apple to facilitate a way for application developers to create charges from within the app itself. So maybe you could download the app itself for free, but the app could charge you for premium features, or pennies for certain kinds of usage, etc.
Put it this way, I haven't entered my timesheets since September.

Yes, I'll do them, probably this week when I have a spare hour, but how accurate do you think they will be?
I wasn't suggesting you should have. I just wondered what your reasoning was. Thanks for explaining.
All articles I have seen talking about polar bears and global warming have made it seem like they were going to go extinct because of it. It is sobering to think about how misleading journalism is.
Following this advice will work if you're hiring contractors to do a specific project. But when you're building a company, you're looking for generally smart, enthusiastic people that will be able to do the jobs that need to be done now, and also the jobs that will need to be done when the current projects are done, or when they decide to move to a different team.

A super-hacker-who-can-do-the-job might be useful to hire for a specific project, but will they be a useful employee when the company decides to change directions or technologies?
How did Pascal fail to teach computer programming in the '80's? (While we're at it, how does a programming language teach at all?) My impression is Pascal got replaced by Java in intro to CS courses.
There is no "Tim Daily" that is employed by the AISD.

http://www.austinisd.org/inside/directory/index.phtml?alpha=...
Several reasons, but the key one was that to build the kind of user experience we were aiming for, Ajax would have been a major, major, major nightmare - and probably not even possible (especially 1.5 years ago, but still today). With Flex, we got a very different set of compromises that worked out much better for the users.