skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But people do get told that. They downvote anyway.

The problem is that the big Hacker News personality type is one that gets very intent about arguments. I absolutely do. And when you're in an argument, even if you think the response is intelligent and contributes there's a kneejerk desire to downvote and hope that the hive mind will follow you and downvote. I'll admit that I've done the same, on occasion: it's a very pervasive mentality.

It helps not being able to downvote until you have a certain amount of karma: it gives you a period of time during which you need to learn to respond intelligently. But that isn't an entire fix to the problem. Thankfully, to date it's still the uncommon thing to happen.
On the other hand, as an engineer you can:

-Work for a big company, a small company or just work for yourself.

-Work from anywhere in the world you can take a laptop and an internet connection

-Use free tools to create a product you can duplicate (and sell) infinitely

-Be a part of an extremely active and passionate community that is on the cutting edge of the industry that is driving the global economy

Where else are you going to find that much flexibility and potential?
Because Don Dodge wears a toupee.

Oops wrong article.
Ok fine. :-)
Web Firms Step Into Green Shadow in the Valley
CSS and Tables; The war continues
The only problem, as was demonstrated with the AOL fiasco, is that many people use their searches to target themselves. It's very easy to track some percentage of the world's population down by looking at their search history.

That and if opening search data became known, people would suddenly start restraining their searches. And caution's something I'd rather not have enter the search process.
A Google search results page fit for an iPhone
Right. I think it's notable that karma and downmodding seems to generally take a back seat here. Very rarely have I seen something go -1 or worse that I still consider useful or legit. Generally, HN seems to favor commenting over downvoting, and that's good.
I can't help but notice the massive karma boost your sudden celebrity's gaining you...

It seems to be a vicious circle. :-P
This misses two points I consider important:

- A whole lot of C code is old. Old, actively maintained code, tends to be more reliable than new code.

- C tends to be employed in relatively predictable sub-systems. Something like a device driver has a relatively predictable set of states relative to a GUI application. There aren't that many paths. C code for GUIs, in my experience, tends to be at least a buggy as code in other languages.
If I recall correctly, something like 20-30% of undergraduates drop out during the course of their degree. Engineering is generally the most difficult program, so you'd expect that the dropout rates would be higher. I suspect there's also a number of transfers to less demanding programs baked in there.

Why should we want to minimize drop-out rates anyway? It doesn't necessarily indicate there's a problem with the curriculum - engineering should be a tough program. The only way you could minimize drop-outs would be to prevent all but the strongest students from entering in the first place. I think it's telling that the highly-selective schools have very low drop-out rates. Is MIT's methodology all that different from less selective universities? I doubt it.
More flush with cash and profitable than desperate I'd say.
Joel Spolsky, or maybe Steve Yegge (or maybe both), wrote an article once about how you should always understand your business at a level of abstraction lower than what you actually deal in. If you write in C, know what a C compiler does. If you sell clothes, know something about your distributors. And so on.

Does anyone else think this may have all been avoided if investors had followed that rule? If you trade C.D.O.s, know what they're made of; if you trade mortgages, know who they're sold to?

Or maybe nobody knew this because it was deliberately hidden. I'm just assuming that on this vast a scale, it's more likely incompetence than corruption.
A 50% dropout rate may be a sign of health - it means the courses haven't been watered down. I'd be far more worried about a 95% graduation rate. States universities are less selective with general admission, so the engineering departments have to screen out the students who aren't up to the challenge. MIT pre-screens everyone so it's not fair to compare it to state schools.
Every time you post an update, change all the fonts to Comic Sans. Every day, change one of the fonts back.

That's realism for you: one step forward, 14 steps back. =P

(Note: please do not do that; I would cry)
Interesting about upmodding something you don't agree with. I find that upmodding a post gives me the psychological fix I need to feel like I contributed to a conversation. Without that fix, I still feel compelled to get my own voice in, even if my comment will be redundant. So I find upmodding someone else's post that I agree with prevents me from adding noise to an existing conversation.

I naively assume (hope?) that all discussion will be intelligent, so I don't see any need to reward it. Consequently, I rarely give or take points away from a post.

edit: I do rarely updmod posts I disagree with if I feel they are valid, and have been unfarily downmodded. I do this out of a desire for fairness.
Most of these seem like wastes of time that are not worth the effort-to-reward ratio unless you start out doing them for fun or as a hobby.
I really like the idea. The interface is very nice and friendly. Your presentation is excellent, which motivated me to test out the functionality ...

It doesn't work?
If I understand the idea correctly, I am supposed to use the site to find a product I want at a lower price. But when I click on the tags, I am led to a mix of various loosely related products. I clicked "wii" expecting to find the best price on a wii, but instead i get a billion wii video games and wii accessories.

I understand the drawbacks to folksonomy, but ...it undermines your entire concept.

I feel like I'm just browsing a bunch of items, which is pretty boring.

There also needs to be refinement on the product lists. It might help the vagueness problem if you had links that filtered by brand or model. Also there are lot of products that are the same price, so you might need to batch them together.

Overall a useful concept, but tons of work left to actually execute.
I explained this in my blog a few posts ago. You write programs to focus on some particular aspect of your programming that you want to make better. I think it should be obvious. You use functional programming idioms - write programs that have using functional programming idioms well as their only purpose. You use regular expressions - write programs that only exist to make you better at regular expressions. In other words write a bunch of regular expressions and make them as good as you can.

In the Ruby community we have the Ruby Quiz. I'm pretty sure that's copied from some other community, I think Perl. Every programming language community has practices of this nature.

It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. How many times will you write a regular expression in your life? There's no element of repetition there? The literature on deliberate practice cites Mozart, Bobby Fischer, and Bill Gates. Body memory has nothing to do with it.

The feedback comes from sharing with others, as in the Ruby Quiz, or benchmarking your code, or posting it on a blog. Another form of feedback would be seeing if your programs run at all. ;-)
Well said. I think that, rather than attempting to make a system for attracting people's attention, it's better to try and learn to make interesting, well-informed comments and messages. That way you end up getting attention, but you do it the fair, honorable way, and everybody goes home happy.
Nice, though I prefer the Objective-C (and J) bracket gang sign:

http://log.scifihifi.com/post/37683353/me-throwing-the-objec... (that's not me)
The nice thing about exceptions beyond setjmp/lngjmp (in C++ at least) is the destructor semantics which you can use to guarantee that resources are cleaned up on error. There are better ways to handle such things, such as scoped resource allocation, but exceptions do an ok job.
Debt Consolidation Information: Debt Consolidation Companies
Yeah. Every time when someone tries to make a case for memchached they bring in Facebook and LiveJournal.

Well guess what: you aren't Facebook. You don't serve 21,000 requests per second. And you never will. Go and look at the size of your MySQL tables, then look at how much RAM your server has and what percentage of it is allocated to filesystem cache and how many real I/O reads/writes your hardware RAID does per second. Then come back and tell me again why do "we need to switch to memcached"?
In my search for better pictures, I came across this... http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/05/29/geek-gang-signs/
you would not be the first.

drupal has a memetracker plugin. http://drupal.org/project/memetracker

its a little wonky
This sounds like another offshoot of the housing bubble - one that hasn't yet burst.
Wait here, we know that "engineer" is not a euphemism for "computer programmer", right?
The language is quite overcomplicated, yes. But there are many mitigations making the whole thing quite appealing.

C++ template libraries are cleaner, easier to improve and adapt, and often faster than the C counterparts (when there are counterparts!) A good example was how OpenMP was added to the basic types in the STL (on GNU/gcc/libc++) by a quite small group of people last year.

Another example are the regular expression libraries.

I'm not an Stroustroup/C++ apologist but this language is the absolute best in several traits. I like to code in Python the most but C and C++ are still fun and make sense in their own way. I hate languages that make programming hard just because they follow an overcomplicated paradigm and don't give you anything useful back from that (like Java, IMNSHO.) In particular all languages with multi-million dollar advertisement campaign just piss me off (the language, not the tools.)
seems to me that you are just grabbing the amazon and ebay feeds. The whole "submit a link with price" thing doesn't seem to work...and if it did that'd be ripe for abuse. PS3 for $1.99 linking to lemonparty
Credit to jwilliams for starting the list.
Like? (No sarcasm.)

I tend to see all major projects end up doing things their way: OpenSSL, Apache HTTPd, GCC, Linux, BSD, for example.
crystalline aluminum is ruby, which macs now have much better support for =D
I saw that. Is it live anywhere?
I wanted to see a demo before I start looking at in greater detail
Thanks for the feedback- sounds like we have some work to do around communicating the concept.

I'd suggest a use case where you find a product online somewhere and fill in the three large fields on the home page with its details. This is really key to the whole "beat my price" concept.

The tags are really just an overview of current popular search terms and aren't meant to be the focus of the functionality.

In your "wii" example if you adjust the 'target price' slider you should see different results depending on the price of the item you're after. E.g. accessories versus an actual Wii console.

Anyway, appreciate your feedback- definately take it to the team.
On a related note, I would be interested to hear what parts of your company's product you have opened.

Funny you asked. I happened to work for a startup that got acquired by a big&evil corporation that specifically prohibited our engineers not only from opening our code, but even from contributing to existing OSS projects, which, partially sparkled my original post.

BTW, there is only one item on your list that qualifies as a valid answer to my question (for obvious reasons) and that is webmin.com, which is by far my favorite YC startup.
No, it doesn't.

I'm in no way trolling here, but if you think about it, most of the guys working on startups are also producing lots of bad code fast. The only difference is that most of them are aware of it, and will improve the code based on the requirements from the market.
I agree. I happen to use instant messengers a lot (both for work and personal use), and absolutely love the 'lightness' of the GTalk client. The quality of voice chats is of the highest order, and if you throw in the browser based chat feature, plus this new video chat, the entire gamut is very impressive.

It is one of the few applications for which one might like to become paid customer wholeheartedly.
Assure you it does work, just the database does not reflect user submitted prices in real time.

We've considered the potential for abuse- the same concerns were voiced for retailmenot.com when we launched that too.

Thanks for your feedback.
You should look at PCI DSS, the new requirements for processing credit card purchases. I haven't looked into it very deeply, but according to the reporting about it you'll no longer be able to use a simple form on your own site to handle credit cards - you'll have to go through an external payment processing site (or implement it yourself and have it audited - expensive!).

Compliance with these new rules will be mandatory beginning next year.

More info at https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/
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You can actually use setjmp()/longjmp() to implement that kind of thing, it turns out. Here's but one example:

http://www.on-time.com/ddj0011.htm

I'm almost tempted to make an analogy with scheme's (call-with-current-continuation) here, but I think that might be pushing it.
Right on timr. I have an MS in engineering and it took me 17 years on the job to figure out what a joke my degree was.

Earning a degree in engineering is the functional equivalent of buying your way into slavery.
Well that should have a lot less impact on the economy than GM laying off 25% of it's staff.
It should be, but usually it is just user base. Microsoft has the advantage of everybody sweating hard trying to make their things work. Their beta users are in the millions, and mostly are experienced users or even developers.

I see Linux developers talk about regression tests but couldn't find where is the central repository of this (is there one?) Regression tests IMHO should be distributed with the source code so everybody can run them. (I understand testing a kernel is not like testing any other user space program.) The BSDs do it, for example.
Actually, if you're looking to "make money in a start-up", you'd join a start-up that you believe has growth potential and ask for an appropriate equity stake. As a trade off, you yourself accept a below market rate as a form of an investment.

If one is not seeking money in a start-up, but rather experience, environment and personal growth it would make sense for them to ask for a market rate salary (which is a valid concern if they've got a a family to feed or a mortgage to pay). Before you say "but isn't the experience/environment worth something" - yes it is, and the trade offs they make to gain that experience would be working longer hours, less job stability as well as lack of chances/challenges/opportunities/perks that only a big company could provide (e.g. if you're looking for a great UX/UI person you are probably competing with Yahoo, who has a really strong UX/UI organization; Yahoo offers its developers the challenge to scale a web application to thousand node deployments and billions of page views, you would never be able to do that).

For an employee applying to your start-up, taking a higher salary may as well be a smart thing to do, as judging by your posting (again, I may be wildly off track here and I mean no offense) you're building yet another LAMP webapp - not anything that's going to be wildly different from what there is on the market - in other words, you aren't building the next flickr/delicious/twitter much less youtube/facebook (and of course not the next google/yahoo). That's fine and there are always the above mentioned reasons to join your start-up (experience, environment) but the equity may not end up amounting to much (you could build a viable small business, but you wouldn't have a spectacular exit, especially for employees holding 0.25-2% equity which would be typical for a lead engineer).

Another point: if an employee sells themselves short to you (e.g. less options, less salary) how do you know they won't sell your product short (e.g. write worse code to save time; or purchase inferior hardware/hosting services to save money -- or even literally, sell your product for less than it's worth if they're a sales person).

So in short, your choices are either to expect an employee that matches the compensation you give them (below average comp. - below average employee, "market comp" - average employee, great comp - great employee) or convince the employees that their equity will amount to something. That's not always the wrong way to go: if building customer facing web applications isn't your company's core competency you don't need a great UI hacker - but that clearly isn't your case.
Damn! You guys make beautiful designs! Do you guys have time for any commissioned work? I will have a need for a couple templates to skin my application (worth a try).

Anyway, I did what you suggested and entered a product specifically. So I do see the difference! The only thing is it seems likely that all products will likely be lowest on ebay.I submitted amazons page for an 8gig ipod touch and the first 10-15 results are all ebay... wouldn't this be the case for tons of products? Maybe filter auctions from standard pricing?
Awesome design - no doubt about it.

But seems broken and useless in terms of functionality..

Searched for the Dell Inspiron Mini...
The first result is for a wireless PCI card.
And the next 15 results are links to Dell's site with prices at or above what I asked.

Searched for Logitech Z-5500 Speakers...
Results were relevant and did find cheaper products..

But some questions and problems:

1) How is this different than the tons and tons of other (much more comprehensive) comparison shopping and deal aggregation web sites?

2) Why is the page needed for the searching? The same results came without entering a web address.

3) Having to first go out and find information to bring back to your site is extremely annoying and seems pointless. You could just go to another shopping site once and do it all there. This seems like it would only (maybe) work as a browser plugin.

4) What API(s) are you using?

I think that is it..
I was going to post something along the lines of "hopefully the mobile industry will follow Apple's lead of removing the power from the carriers" then realized Apple just transfered the power to themselves. Though I would consider them the lesser of two evils.
Please elaborate why you think that. (e.g. style, interdependencies, or maybe compared to something?) :)
Oh yes, and how is this at all people powered?
I have no idea if this is or isn't better/smaller/faster -- but, the branding seems awfully flawed. Why hinder your growth by making it hard for people to remember and refer to you?
Sorry, way to busy for outside work. We'll definately take the compliment though! ;)

You can easily hide ebay listings (or any other merchant)- hover over the merchant name ("EBAY.COM") beneath the product title and you'll see what I mean.
One feature that doesn't show up on either the downloadable or the GMail system - only on the Flash one - is the ability to post URLs to YouTube, Flickr, and Picasa and have them automatically embedded in the chat window. I think it's an incredibly useful feature - similarly to how Facebook does that for posts - and I wish more IM clients began adding embed support.
I'm not a style-nazi, any of the basic styles is fine for me (e.g. indent and keep the same style in all source.)

My dislikes are more pragmatic, no good comments, packing multiple complex operations in a single line, and not making clear what is what (OK this last bit is style but every single coding style for C out there defines this!)

[Again, I'm playing a bit Devil's Advocate as I'm a Linux user myself. There are many things I love from this team.]
I think what he is trying to say, is that knowing how your database stores and accesses the data, can help you make better decisions in writing SQL statements.

The example he gives is that a stored procedure for a large query used to take almost 1GB but now it takes only about 1MB because he is "cooperating" with the way the database slings data around.
Look again. I kept adding.
If your whole society is formed by a bunch of ego driven leaders who don't accept change because it threatens their power, then you're going to grow up a pretty frustrated person, anxious to do anything that will fix things - even if it is really more of the same problem.
Interestingly this is not far off the original inspiration for the webcam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot

Do any of these do the job?: http://www.download.com/1770-2001_4-0.html?query=webcam+publ...

Red5 & Flex would provide a way of doing this, but it would seem like overkill. (Red5 is an open source alternative to parts of Adobe's Flash Media Server product group)
I didn't say it would keep people from downmodding based on their opinions :)

But having it said officially probably would not hurt the situation. I agree, though, that things rarely get out of hand - why I love HN.
Minerals and all are good, but they are a more indirect benefit than technology that gives people more living areas and sources of food.
Justin.tv is great...but it's not your typical engineering job.

I think that a lot of the appeal of startups to young engineers is that they represent the opportunity to do things differently. Rather than tethering your future to the MBA bean-counter at corporate, you can have the chance to be corporate. That's a critical difference.
It's bad to focus too many resources on the wrong goal when there are other more pressing needs.
You don't need a degree for any of those things.

While 'Engineer' is a set that may overlap 'Open Source Programmer' (what you described), it's definitely not an equivalent set, and I wouldn't even say it's a superset.
If you aren't an extremely talented designer with nothing better to do and/or aren't working to work at developing country rates, look elsewhere.
Indeed. I apologize for posting this. It consumed a good 2h reading for me if you include the jumps to searching and reading about concepts or names I wasn't familiar with. :)
The Olin program looks pretty similar to what Harvey Mudd College has been doing for decades.
You are comparing apples to oranges.

A policy discussion with Barack Obama (or any other national leader) is an altogether different matter from getting Michael Arrington's attention.

Barack Obama is the next President of United States. The matters he deals with are vastly different and affect people and nations differently.

Michael Arrington is not a leader. He has some interesting points but in most cases, he only uses the power he has built up to favor his friends or thrash the efforts of others who he takes a dislike for.
The stock-market generation game and how to win it
Hi jwilliams.

Just a suggestion from a pseudo-newbie here. This blog post from Inquisitr doesn't add to original posts, maybe it would've been better to submit the original links? (Please don't take this in a bad way!)

http://valleywag.com/5083534/digital-dealmaker-and-a-dozen-o...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10094014-93.html
You know, with some polish and maybe less clicks (somehow), this is downright intuitive and quick to do. Nice work!