skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yup. The $1,000/month comment is only to show that it can be done, not that I'd want to only have that level of income. But it provides flexibility by letting you start small. I need to keep my day job for a while because it will be a long hard slog before my side business can come remotely close to providing me the income I need :-(

The stuff I build is industrial monitoring devices, so I purchase off the shelf Bluetooth-serial interfaces and incorporate them into my products. Google the Sena (Parani) and Roving Networks products. They are easy to use and reliable. Being able to monitor a process without needing to run cable to it is a killer app waiting to happen!
This is one area where I think MS gets a bad rap. If they didn't keep adding new stuff, everyone would complain that they were stagnant and falling behind the times. So they add popular new features to C# like lambdas and such, and now they're bloated.

4.0 will not essentially be a dynamic language. They're making it much easier to interop with dynamic languages by adding some dynamic constructs, but it's still as statically typed as ever. 'dynamic' is a shortcut to save you time, not re-invent how you work with C#.
That was once true, but the "Express" (free) versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server all but completely negate the cost argument.
One important thing I think is being missed in this conversation is the vibrancy of the .NET community, much of which is C# focused. There's a very active community of .NET devs out there that aren't doing things the Microsoft way, creating useful and popular open source libraries and sharing that information with other devs. The Dev Div at MS is extremely active in the community as well. If you look at how the new ASP.NET MVC Framework is being rolled out (open source, multiple rounds of community feedback) and the inclusion of jQuery AS IS (not extended or modified) in the MS stack you'll see a big difference from the MS you think you know.
I think the author addresses the point about value decently enough. He says that you'd better build an app that's worth what you're charging, or you're going to og out of business.

The comparison between iphone apps and desktop apps is strange to me. I don't think anyone would actually want to have photoshop on an iphone. Desktop computers and mobile devices are obviously used in different contexts and thus their software have different criteria for usefulness.
Which test are you talking about?
Thanks for the submission :)
Yes, learn C# OR Java, where OR != XOR:

TRUE == OR(TRUE, TRUE)

When it comes to programming, be language, platform, vendor, and ideology agnostic.
I'm sure the writer would be quite satsfied with a 99.9% accuracy.
If nothing else mac mini doubles as a nice litle media center or a file server.
The final not I think is a goal that OCW is working towards. I doubt the first three will ever be goals.

* MIT is not the University of Phoenix. You have to attend the school to get an MIT education.

* OCW is a project to provide open courseware. It is not a school.

* MIT faculty have their primary responsibility to enrolled students and their research programs (and not necessarily in that order). It doesn't scale (e.g., is impossible) for OCW to grant access to them.

MIT is an excellent engineering school, but there are many others. Among other things, I think some of OCW's goals are to offer/help provide a superb curriculum for those schools -- where, if enrolled, you would be able to get an education, degree, and faculty access.

fwiw I have a masters from MIT, but no involvement with the ocw project.
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Visual forward digit span, test 7. While the numbers are flashing, the cursor changes to a text cursor, but once they're gone, the cursor changes to the hand icon you get when you hover over a link.
Well, Windows has Flash preinstalled but not Acrobat. I have a lot of friends who can't read PDFs; I can't, when I'm on Windows.
No you don't. If you were paying at all attention to the context of the post, he was listing sites were are successful but who's ideas had already been implemented. Facebook may not be as successful as Google, but it needn't be, and your assumption that your comment is in any way relevant to the discussion suggests a severe lack critical thinking skills.
In many cases it simply is not physically possible to do a course justice just through web materials. Of course, the obvious example is that in some classes the labs and lab equipment. However, it should also be noted that a lot of the value of some classes (whether they be MIT or somewhere else) comes from group projects and other group activities that either wouldn't be reasonable for an individual to complete, or wouldn't be nearly as helpful.
Nope, you need a Mac. I have a mac mini and it runs the xcode SDK perfectly.
You are saying that like the world uses only Google. You should do a reality check
Attack of the Twitter Clones: A look at their traffic, funding source and revenue models.
i recently had to be the middle-man for a pc user with an iphone that paid someone a few hundred dollars to have his idea transformed into an actual iphone app. i had to do all of the work as far as generating the certificates, managing all the stuff on apple's iphone developer site, building new releases, and e-mailing him binaries so he could try them on his phone.

the entire process is laborious enough with a mac and xcode, i can't imagine how any of it could be done on windows. if nothing else, you will need xcode just to be able to cross-compile and sign your app with the necessary certificates to be able to transfer and run the app on your phone.

however, the integrated debugging with gdb that xcode offers is invaluable. being able to use your computer to step through the code running on your iphone while it's running is very useful and was required to fix some problems with this app i was dealing with. without it, all you get is your iphone closing the app with no error or warning. xcode also allows you to watch the console of the iphone and see errors/debugging info that is being printed that you wouldn't normally be able to access from the phone.

that said, you don't really have to switch to a mac to do this. buy a used macbook or mac mini just to do your development on it, while still using your pc to do everything else.
True. Though it seems like there's a fine line between "being better at your competitor's core competency", which is a great business plan, and "being just like X except with an extra Y", which isn't.
I should of said global average rather then minimum. Too late to edit.

The world has changed that drastically that fast before. It only takes one generation.

Figure out how to really educate kids to a maximal degree. Post-religion anti-indoctrination memetic inoculation. Get everyone on the planet food. No anxiety around sex. Pain medication for anyone who needed it. Smarter technology. Less people living lives of quiet desperation. If all that stuff happens, people could get smart fast.

I think another shift the scale of widespread literacy is possible, and it might push the average center of gravity above the geniuses of the 20th century. Not the minimum. Oops.
The textbox is supposed to get focus once the digits stop flashing and the "enter your answer" prompt appears; if not, if you click the box at the point, input should work. You can contact me at fun at cognitivefun dot net if there are further problems.
No, the latter does matter.

If a system's performance significantly degrades under load, it doesn't scale.

Quoting the wikipedia article:
'its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.'

The first clause is performing well under load, hence the performance requirement.
There are some pirate half-assed ports of OSX for the PC that I've heard about floating around on the net somewhere. I heard that you can get OSX marginally working on a stock PC, so I'm guessing that if you can get that far, the SDK probably won't know the difference.
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Majority of Kids Are Computer Savvy
You need a break
you can install Mac OS X on some PC's, my Dell laptop Inspiron 1420 can run Mac OS X perfectly
I think you can use Google as a counter-example to pretty much any business generalization out there.
This is a deep question; I think the answer is a mix of economics and philosophy. Depending on how interested you are, consider maybe "History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell.
Microsoft is pushing (relatively) fresh ideas into the mainstream, but in my experience the overwhelming majority of .NET programmers aren't interested in new things that don't come from Redmond. caustic said it more generally: C# has some nice language features, but Java has a more sophisticated and open-minded community.
You're wrong now. FB's market share is almost certainly below 50%. They're a tad larger than MySpace, and there's also Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, Ning, Friendster, etc.

And their market share in the developed world isn't even in first place, and they're not even growing significantly faster than MySpace there.

Also, Google makes more per pageview by far than their 2nd place competitor, Facebook makes substantially less than MySpace. If anything in the social networking wars, MySpace is Google.
If anything, Facebook's growth is more impressive than MySpace's. MySpace did it with no real competitor, Facebook did it with MySpace in existence.
I wouldn't mind owning any of them.
Off the top of my head, there are four criteria I can think of that determine the value - to myself - of something I'm doing professionally: how much money it'll bring me, how much I'm learning, how much I'm enjoying it, and how beneficial it is to society as a whole.

If I'm not getting at least 2 out of 4, then it's probably not worth doing. Learning might be the only exception.
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Fighting Traffic Jams With Data
He has done that already: "For the record, I ... code in c, c++ on the day job."
If you don't want to install it directly you could always try using vmware. May or may not be legal...
My team consists of 13 contributors, wich is knd of large for an agile team. In order for the team to function, we all need to be completely invested in high-bandwidth communication, and we need more meetings than a 3-5 man team.

For us, this means at least the stand-up every day. There are frequent code and technical design reviews, at least 2-3 times a week. Requirements clarification will typically involve 1-2 meetings a week with the partner, to ensure we're on the right track. Add on the bi-weekly demo and iteration planning, and you're looking at more than one meeting a day. Not all of the developers are required to attend all of the meetings, but because I'm the ranking dev/technical lead, I need to go to most of them.

Also, almost half our team is offshore, so I spend plenty of time drafting emails. If communication and human interaction is your bag, this is a pretty good place to be. That said, I tend to freak out once a month or so, and lock myself in a dark room with the code base for a week. Somehow, I still manage to be the single largest contributor to the project....
We are actively working on removing the 'nots' at www.nixty.com. We believe that using open educational resources, faculty at other institutions, and an open accreditation process can go a long way towards providing a person a meaningful education.
Exploring Erlang's gen_server
"We would do better to set this money on fire rather than using it to keep these dying firms on life support"

That is probably the best quote I've read in a very long time.

It's so true.
Somehow, I still manage to be the single largest contributor to the project....

Rock on, that much interaction would kill me. I am not a people hater but I just couldn't deal with all of that. Somehow you do it though; my hat is off.
{EDIT: Congrats and good luck with the twins.}
Sure. I don't think it's easy or as good.

There'll probably always be an advantage to going to a physical university. But there are online Universities that provide an education, degree, and faculty access at widely ranging cost points.

The first two might be possible to offer free. Maybe.
The last one would be difficult to provide free. But maybe some sort of guided community support could give a 90/10 solution that could scale.

The goal of an MIT level education & certification available to anyone with the intelligence & time regardless of citizenship & economic situation comes with a huge amount of utility. Economic, social & otherwise. I believe it may also be very strategic in terms of world security & stability.

But an MIT level is not absolutely necessary. A tier 2 or 3 university level might be sufficient. Maybe as albertni mentions, they aim to provide a piece of the puzzle which can then be topped up with elements from other institutions. For the above to be goals, the whole thing doesn't need to fall on MIT's back.

Coursework can scale pretty much indefinitely. Certification, (i believe) can be made to scale quite well but MIT is probably not the place to go for this. Between those two, you don't seem that far from a free education. At least for the very driven students.

I was never a great example (or a great student), but for me these were the centres of gravity. Interactions that were important were mostly with tutors (mostly phd candidates or later year students) & other students. These would be harder to solve but maybe not impossible.

The point is that traditional, physical universities have not scaled. A minority of those intellectually capable have access to them.
it is simple to fix global finance with one simple rule going forward:

IF YOU SOURCE A LOAN, YOU SERVICE IT

by that i mean there is no reselling debt. when a lender resells debt (aka "securitization"), they have no real incentive to make sure the borrower can repay the debt...repayment becomes someone else's problem. the only incentive is to make as many loans as you can sell. so this is why you have mortgage brokers finding "innovative" ways to get $800k loans to people who pick lettuce for $30k a year...or put a thousand such crappy loans on a big back, call it a "SIV" and convince a pension fund that crap*1000 is safer than crap.

admittedly dropping securitization would put some fetters in the flow of global capital, but that would be the price of safety. it would really just be an issue of turning back the clock to the days when the banker who made you a loan to buy your house was the same one you mailed the check to each month
it doesn't matter that much if the pie is growing or shrinking right now anyway...the point is that the way the pie is sliced up is turning into a winner-take-all economy, with the overwhelming center of gravity being google. in ten years 95% or more of all ad revenue will be flowing to google if the trends continue. you can even see this from other established ad placers like aol and yahoo...every quarter, google pulls more share from them.

this was to be expected. the web ad market is nearly frictionless and google will be placing ads everywhere. the non-google web is going to move to a cable-tv model (monthly fees)....its the only way people will survive.
Perhaps it is a result of the fairly liquid and rapid moving environment in silicon valley. People change jobs frequently, and trying to figure out what to pay someone can be challenging when age is not a proxy for ability/experience. It's not exceptional to see someone on a team with 30 years of experience making $75K/year, whereas another contributor, with perhaps 8-10 years of experience, making $130K. The interview is so short, you typically only get 5-6 hours of conversation with the individual, and you want to make the right decision. Salary numbers are only one component of that deciding factor, but a useful one.
You can't really lie about your salary - too easy to get caught, particularly in Silicon Valley. And, if you claim to be a $130K/year Network Engineer, but are really a $85K a year Network Engineer - you'll not only get caught, but fired for poor performance as well - there is just no upside in lying about making more money. Their might be some incentive to claim a _lower_ salary, but most people just say "I made way too much money at my last job X$, I'm willing to work for much less"
I don't really have any specific recommendations beyond what's in the Kohn book I referenced. (I don't endorse everything in that book, but it's a good starting place because it at least asks the right questions.)
Interesting... the ones that charge seem to be doing the worst -- even if they add value with the cost.
I dunno. I re-read the article after I read your comment, and I came to a different conclusion: It is very possible we are in one of those gaps in time where if you have put in your 10,000 hours, you can leverage them. You can be one of those lucky ones.

His point is, then, how do you know you aren't coming of age during a lucky time, when the old goes out the window? It is quite possible this is that "garage electronics" time when nobody has any money and some of us figure out unique ways to save and as a result, make millions.

You can bet, SOMEONE will. We are going to hear, in about 4-5 years, of someone down and out who "did it" during 2009 after they got laid off and were living in their parents' basement. Instead of shooting their employer, they proved everyone wrong and succeeded.

I am one of the jaded and cynical, however. This is just a "glass is half full" perspective.
Right. :-)

The _best_ references I can get for a candidate are the dozen or so people that worked with him/her for the last five years. If I read you correctly, you are suggesting I roll the dice and not contact them.

More specifically, you are almost _never_ working for your current employer in Silicon Valley - your contributions and abilities are typically intended to impress your executive team, manager, and colleagues to position you better in the _next_ company - which is where you really see a strong stock and compensation package.

No Sr. candidates are hired without a strong combination of listed and back door references. And, the valley is strong enough that no candidate who has worked in the valley for 8-10 years won't have at least half a dozen colleagues in common with me.
Only the Good Buy Young
The logical way to fight generational risk is to borrow money to make large, regular investments in stocks while young, then use a proportion of later savings to pay back the loan rather than to pile into the stock market in middle age. That sounds risky, but it is, in fact, exactly what people do in the housing market.
Hey, I'm not complaining. I would have killed for this type of high quality information aggregated in one accessible place as a kid.

They are doing a benevolent thing with this project, but it simply cannot scale to accomplish the first three with any reasonable chance of success. I'll take what they have offered, which is plenty.
Having everything on the application form just makes life so much easier. I realize for the candidate that getting to the point of being hired is a major event, that happens only once every 3-4 years, and so providing references is a big deal. On the other side, we're doing reference checks, even in a small company, with around 20-30 references/month. Keeping everying on an application letter means that we don't have to delay the process and do (even more) back and forth with the candidate to track down their references.
"Most of those places (ad agencies, local web services) charge a nice upfront premium for this -- a handy new cashcow. Good luck getting them to drop it in favor of a free google solution."

Sounds like an area ripe for competition. Can't beat Google's potential price point of free.
well its always illegal, but using it only to develope iphone app you should not feel bad about it, you're doing a favor to apple. And its not like you'll get arrested for doing so.
Don't you know that magicians take numbers as names (crowley was 666), RAW and 23?

g94b is obviously a black magic name. Obviously it's the number he was given by Satan when he sucked Satans cock and drank blood to gain power in a skull and bones bilderberger convention. You have a superficial explanation for what is obviously a flag for other black magicians as intent on evil as he is. 94 is the number of children whose blood he had to drink to get power. That it's related to the year was synchronistic. The other black magicians called him 94 long before that.
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The more I learn the more I realize I know very little. A few more sites like this and I won't know anything.
For local advertising the answer is an online solution that facilitate offline advertising. Think of ways Joe the Pumbler can use the internet to manage his offline advertising efforts.
I suppose that despite the relative lack of women studying computer science at universities (I didn't), universities do tend to be ideal places to find kick-ass women doing both the job thing and the family thing. That sounds great to me, and I think I'd much prefer baby talk over the geeky alternatives.

Only one person on our eight-person team has kids. As for the others, I'm not sure if some of them have ever been on a date. Dealing with frustrated young men is... frustrating in and of itself. I'd just like to see some more balance and worldliness from my coworkers.

Despite the lack of other women, I have been lucky to be in a pretty egalitarian workplace. I generally feel respected, and many of our executives are women. That said, I have had less than tactful coworkers take a two minute break near my desk to stare at my chest and stuff snacks in their face, like it was some kind of show. That was fun. (<-sarcasm)
You better not be thinking of closing the money hole. People like throwing money into the hole. It's an American Tradition.
Macs aren't "trendy", they are better.
I've signed up for your beta.
I'm not complaining either. They are doing a great thing?

I'm just wondering how far this all can go.
Suddenly,everything old is New Deal.Franklin D. Roosevelt, F.D.R. is in.
Yes indeed, we can be sure PR will guarantee that we hear about such a thing.... heck! We can even hope it actually happened!
I think timr's point is that you'll only know AFTER the fact that you're lucky.

To try and extrapolate a single (and dubious) data point in history to the present time, and then conclude that this is the right time for 20 year olds to be lucky, is IMHO wildly misplaced optimism. You can't "time" luck... maybe it'll be the elderly who come out of this lucky...