skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm self-referring 1,000+ clicks/week. Figured I'd share how.
Background: In June 2010, I started an email newsletter, Now I Know (http://dlewis.net/nik), which shares a 500-word story about an interesting fact each day, M-F. I've grown it to over 40,000 subscribers over that time period. I see the newsletter as a side project/lifestyle startup, not one where VC would make sense (or a $10mm exit possible). I'm always looking for new ways to get more subscribers, and what's worked best are endorsements -- basically, people telling others to check out the site. I've gotten a lot of subscribers from bloggers doing exactly that (and am glad to share examples if you'd like), and about a month ago, it occurred to me that I could probably put together a tumblr which would do exactly that.

Two weeks ago today, I started the sister project, a tumblr called Fact and a Photo (http://factandaphoto.tumblr.com). The concept is straight forward -- a photo and a related fact, published once a day. It's incredibly easy to upkeep -- I just need to keep dumping stuff into the tumblr queue whenever I find things. The tumblr is in the same "learn something new every day" genre as the newsletters.

Fact and a Photo is pretty minimalist. There's the photo, the fact, and on the top of each page, the title of the site. Below the title is a description of the site, and then, in the same-sized text "Want to learn more? Click here to learn something new every day." The last sentence links to Now I Know's landing page, and occasionally, a post will have a link to a relevant Now I Know issue.

In two weeks, I've sent 2,500 clicks from Fact and a Photo over to Now I Know, with 1,000 or so coming in the last seven days. About half went to my landing pages, and it looks like 15% or so are converting, maybe 20%, but regardless, that's pretty typical for a vague endorsement. In any event, I'm getting about 20 new subscribers a day from my own (other) site.

As a bonus, this accidental strategy works like any other decent blog would, hopefully building upon itself as it grows. I'm at about 800 followers on the tumblr, and I've had little success in getting links from that medium previously. So maybe in time, I'll become my own biggest referrer.
Why Can’t Google Books Sort By Date?
There's always VirtualBox for such things, but it might perhaps not run well enough on a slow, old PC.
Started with computers 32 years ago at a school computer club where my physics teacher brought his own home computer in and taught a few of us to program in BASIC during a few lunch hours.

Earning my living with computers for about 22 years now.
How is Mac a better plattform for audio? This is not a rhetorical question. I keep hearing this, and some say it's because of CoreAudio. But so far I haven't been able to find a thorough explanation that's not based on biased assumptions.

The Variety Of Sound stuff is what I'm missing on OS X. I use those a lot.
I'm 22, and have 'programming' since I was 6 years old. Professionally for 2 years.
QBasic -> Visual Basic -> Ruby on Rails
This is a great analysis. I would be very interested to see the standard deviation of Android revenues/device/yr compared with Facebook ARPU. Obviously this is laughably unobtainable, but it's fun to speculate about who has more upside compared to the mean. I wonder what the 95th percentile generates?

On a side note, has anyone thought about what Mail.ru might do before and after the Facebook IPO? Sorry if that's off topic.
Tim Cook is the most popular CEO of 2012
That's a realy mean question, I mean really. For me, it would depend a number of factors:

1. How much cash would I get for my self?

2. What kind of future do I think is reallistic for my start-up?

But I think 600k wouldn't be enough, if I'm not on the brink of tanking...
Windows at work, Linux at home. I voted Windows but if I weren't working on .NET I wouldn't be running Windows at all. I wouldn't have said that a month ago, I really like what's been done with Ubuntu 12.04. Windows is basically just a Visual Studio host for me. Once I figure out how to get paid to work with node.js Linux will be my primary OS and Windows will just be a virtual machine running VS. Unless I start working on iPhone apps.
Interestingly, as more government entities adopt linux and foss in general, they have a lot more incentive to provide support for that. So maybe in a couple years these government-issued software will target linux distros.
I have been programming since 23 years!
Does a blank profile somehow de-legitimize good advice or stories?

To be honest, I don't really pay attention to usernames and profiles. I just pay attention to individual comments. Less anonymity might even change comment quality, since people might not post comments they consider controversial.
You're not offending anyone, but I can tell you that my Masters in CS was far less useful in the real world than my Bachelors in CIS.
Today is my first day at Destroy Today LLC
Cdr教程
I did pretty much the same thing, graduated with a masters in mechanical engineering. Taught myself to code and switched careers. Lots of cross over skill. (and engineering is very boring...) :-)
The formatting itn't always preserved perfectly when going back and forth with presentations. Text moves or runs off the bottom of the slide, etc.

Also need to make sure to explain about file formats, or chances are pretty good that they'll try to send a LibreOffice file to a MS Office user.
I started with Integer BASIC on an Apple II the summer of 1978. I went on to Applesoft BASIC, and then Apple Pascal.

When I went to Texas A&M in 1981, I started in Electrical Engineering, and took courses in FORTRAN and IBM 360/370 Assembly. I enjoyed those so much that I changed my major to Computer Science. We used PL/I for data structures class, and in the Programming Languages Survey we focused on Ada and Prolog, with brief mentions of other languages. I did a little bit of work for an Engineering professor in Turbo Pascal.

For my senior project, I got to use the CS department's new VAX 11/750 running BSD Unix. For my project I taught myself C so that I could assist a grad student on his "syntax-directed text editor" project. I've been in love with Unix and C ever since then, but didn't get to use it at work for several years.

My first real job out of college started June 1985, and it was programming interactive training systems running in a proprietary courseware design system on Sony CP/M Z-80 computers and Laser Videodisc players. The courseware system was buggy, so I talked my group into using C instead, which allowed us to be more responsive, have less crashes, and put more content on a floppy disk. The Z-80 C compiler was produced by BSD Software, which stood for "Brain-Damaged Software". It was so named because they didn't support floating point math, but that was ok because we could get by with various tricks and get done what we needed to do.
You can say that about the gold market as well, no ? It takes you back a hundred years and you can corner and squeeze it.
http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Superathletes-Greatest-Vintag...

There is a whole book written about this. There are several conversations in the book with this same professor. I would definitely say this book has changed my life.

In more than a few places, I was pretty sure that book was written specifically for me. My dad was in the process of getting knee surgery right when I picked it up. There was a section that detailed a doctor visit the author had, where the doctor told him his only recourse was to have the same surgery my dad was having. Two years later, the author (who didn't have the surgery) is still running barefoot around central park, yes on asphalt and concrete and any other substrate you can imagine. My dad is not. My dad used to come home and run for hours every day after work. Now he doesn't run at all.

Just thought I'd share some points in the book that I love and find relevant to this discussion so far...

Not mentioned in the article but Lieberman talks about it in the book, is the fact that all four-legged animals can only breath one time per stride. A running cheetah operates like a large bellows. When he extends, his diaphragm (which is attached to the pelvis) pulls back and forces the lungs open, forced inhale. When they stride, all their organs literally slosh forward in their horizontal bodies, compressing the diaphragm, forcing an exhale. Humans standing upright allows us to breath whenever we feel like it while running. No other animal can do that.

Also about the Man vs Horse race. Unless the dude sitting on the horses back is a sumo wrestler, it probably doesn't count for much. A horse that is 1200lbs of muscle has a 150lb man sitting on his back. That's equivalent to wearing a 10lb backpack. I'm not saying you wouldn't notice it, but you can't blame the backpack for losing the race. The real reason is that a horse can only outrun a human for 10-15 miles, at which point the horse has to slow down to a maintainable pace, or die. Humans have no such restriction.

And as for running on asphalt - we have the best shock absorbers science has ever seen...they're called knees. Air cushioned soles and arch support, pronation and supination control, torsion bars, built in computer chips to monitor your (incorrect) foot strike and adjust the shoe on the fly are all awesome - if you won't be needing your feet ankles and knees in old age.

I don't recommend many books, but read this one. Even if you don't run, hate running, have never run in your life. You will love your feet when you're done.
I think back to the GW-BASIC editor with horror, but that was my tool of destruction for several months. (Epson 8086 here.) Wait, I can only edit one line at a time? And I can't see the other lines while I'm editing this one? ???

I can't begin to imagine working on larger programs using it. Discovering Q-BASIC and especially Pascal (and Borland's editor) was the transition between crafting my programs on paper to punch into the computer and crafting them on the computer.
By default, the next version of OSX will only allow you to install software from their app store. In 3 years, (or whatever their release cycle is) they might decide to remove the option to disable this restriction all together. Obviously, this will be broken very quickly. However, for corporate users or people who don't want to void their warranties, "Free as in Speech" might very well become synonymous with "Getting Stuff Done".
I was copying out the example BASIC programs from the back of manual of the C64 I got for Christmas 1991 when I was 11. I have vague recollections of LOGO on the BBC Micro before that. 20+ years then.

Still so much to learn ;)
With these kinds of `hooray linux´ articles, I always wonder whether they included the cost of reduced productivity they included when moving everybody from MS Office to LibreOffice and stuff like that. The difference in quality, stability and features is pretty big. I've worked with LibreOffice only for about 8 months, and I can tell you, it's not just a matter of "getting used to". There's simply a whole bunch of bugs (layout screwing up in Writer, Ctrl+Z not perfectly going back to the previous state, etc) and limitations. The time wasted fighting these tools costs a lot as well.

Take 12000 civil servants losing one hour a week on fighting the tools, and you get to 11.7 million pretty fast.
Now that's funny. (and maybe scary? :-)

I learned C (from the first edition of K&R) about 24 years ago. And had no one to help me, so I had to understand everything myself and debug my own rampant pointer issues. Eeek! That was a wild ride!
It's working for me.

Buy me a burrito - http://hipbucket.com/buckets/kAg-tvBORlLKsnzWaQoEVg/payments...
If you want to try this out, you can use bank account 55779911 & sort code 200000
Http://www.putarianatv.com/2012/04/tchutchuca-de-sainha-rebolando-bunda-e.html
My preferred UI is the Awesome WM so I know how you feel but I think Unity is going down the right road for several reasons:

+ Composited desktop means a X11 artifact free experience.
+ Keyboard shortcuts for most tasks
+ Unified experience for different apps/programs
+ The windows key is no longer a dead key
- Custom key bindings are hard
And much more expensive :-) and if you want 100% Office comapatability for work by a PC.
Hmm.. it's still working for me.

Were you trying to access www.hipbucket.com or hipbucket.com? The former doesn't work.
If I think about the best investments in startups ever, I think about Andy Bechtolsheim's investment in Google. The meeting lasted about 20 minutes then a check was cut. Peter Theil invested in Facebook after a 1 hour meeting.

Maybe some investors and founders want to date for a bit, but the biggest winners in history got in bed together without even dancing.
Except Node.js isn't a framework for building websites/web applications.

Also from the article: You'll not have headaches regarding concurrency (at first), but you'll have them when dealing with callbacks. For some cases I almost ended up with one callback per line, that's crazy!

People that write stuff like that are very ignorant and are probably trying to write Javascript like they write their Java.
I get layout screw-ups between versions of word, especially mac->win and vice versa.
I'm not an expert by any means, but I've scanned the literature using what tools I have, and the impression I get is this: (sorry, I don't have all my references handy)

* Running (with shoes) is not a predictor of osteoarthritis (see http://www.jaoa.org/content/106/6/342.full). Elite athletes (running vastly more than typical recreational runners) do exhibit more signs visible in X-Rays, but do not report symptoms at a higher rate than any other group.

* Reliable predictors of acute injury are "too much, too soon", history of past injury, and, oddly, old shoes. (See http://www.time-to-run.com/footwear/mechanisms.htm). Matching the type of shoe to type of gait (as running shoes stores often attempt to do) has never been shown to reduce injury rate.

* It is possible to run with shoes and without injury. (I did it for 10 years; my old coach for 30+).

* It is possible to run barefoot on concrete and asphalt without injury. (I've done it for 5 years; others have for longer).

Those last two anecdotes don't speak to long-term injury, but I'm not terribly worried for two reasons: The first is the lack of correlation between running in shoes and osteoarthritis. The second is that the foot-achilles-knee is a spring-like appendage with vastly more play than 1/2 inch of EVA foam. Anecdotally again, I feel no pounding when running barefoot on concrete.
I use Windows at work, and OSX at home.
Beginning Tips to Picking a Merchant Services Provider
I've got a cheap Asus K50, and it's been my friend for a long time. Good keyboard, audio, and brightness settings, and enough processing speed for my needs. The best part about it is that if I drop it in the bathtub I'm only out ~600 for a new one (I do my best programming in the bathroom, it seems).
The Cell processor was very different, architecturally. I can easily see games originally designed for the PS3 to require significant effort to port to the 360 and PC. (While the 360 used a PowerPC processor that actually reused assets from the Cell, it was architecturally not that different from typical x86 multicores.)
That seems great fun. Could you elaborate on it? Or maybe it's too long ago..
"The parallel between PHP and Node.js is evident."

Just because you say something doesn't make it true. I found nothing in the article really linking the two other both being used for "web stuff". Everything else was either a design choice or still being evolved (nothing is magically perfect on day one).

PHP did something great for web development in a time when most people just wrote static sites. Node.js did something great by allowing people to write high concurrent/websocket apps with ease (or at least bringing this to their attention).
Started in 1983 on Apple IIc, writing text-based adventure games. I was 13 years old then. First professional job in 1991.
I recently purchased a <$1000 HP laptop because I couldn't bring myself to pay the Apple tax (basically double) for similar hardware. I'm currently having a hard time with the feel of the machine. The worst part is the trackpad - multi-touch scrolling is flaky, and I either get unintended clicks or enable a "palm check" that turns off the trackpad when typing.

I'm deciding laptop ergonomics are really important (but $1000 important? cringe)
6 years, 35 attempts and then $180 million, overnight
But HN is not reddit!
I spent a little bit of time trying to become an OS/2 fanboy. Remember that this was before Windows NT (and Linux was a gleam in Linus's eye) so a PC that could walk and chew gum at the same time seemed like a miraculous feat for anyone used to DOS. It was a pretty sweet development platform for the time, since you could run multiple DOS and Windows 3.x sessions -- I even set up two Windows sessions to communicate over null modem to test a game.

However, there were defects both large and small that didn't seem to get resolved -- from missing files on the custom Windows installation to filesystem corruption when the swap file filled up (this last one was the final straw for me).

Still it's interesting to think how its shared DNA is in Windows today, just as NeXTStep is in Apple's products. In fact many APIs between Win32 and OS/2 are similar (I once made some OS/2 API bindings for Borland Pascal).
I've been programming ever since I got my first computer when I was a kid. I only took it up as a career about 8.5-ish years ago. Could've tacked on a few years if I went to university but I was convinced in my youth that I was going to be a rock-star and producer. Turns out I'm a geek. ;)
You got a barbed wire wrap around tattoo after 1994? Ouch.
This example comes from a popular library https://github.com/christkv/node-mongodb-native/blob/master/...
What benefit is there to knowing the background?
No, the next version of OSX will by default only allow you to install signed software. It doesn't cost anything to get a certificate for signing.
I was doing development with PalmOS around 2003-2004 timeframe, and the SDK had tools I have yet to see in other platforms to date.

'Gremlins':
Automated fuzz testing within the emulator. Still waiting to see this make an appearance in other SDKs

'Debug ROMS':
I've seen some SDKs including debug ROMs, but the ones on the PalmOS were actually useful. The ROMs would actually tell you what functions needed to be invoked before the current one (PalmOS needed memory pointers to be locked before any writing/copying operations could be allowed)

Agree with you on the memory starvations. We were porting another application from Symbian, and we had to jump through many hoops because the default code segment was limited to 64k.
I've tried PowerShell a few times. The thing that puts me off every time is not being able to bind keys. I find it so painful not being able to use emacs shortcuts at the prompt.
I'm not sure if these two aren't just outliers. The investors were pretty well known after all and had a lot of experience.

I think that closing a deal too fast can be as bad as dicussing it too long. Either you get a fast decission or not, brickering around to much about unecessary details is IMHO a sure sign that it takes too long. Not being asked any questions and just being thrown money for being part of a YC batch is, on the other hand, a sure sign it doesn't take long enough.
I still maintain that

- Start -> Run -> notepad
- <html>Hello, World!</html>, Save As "hello.htm" on desktop
- double-click it and watch it appear in a browser

Is 1% of 1% of the effort it took to program an 8-bit machine.
Tried both. DNS record probably not propagated to my DNS server (Norway). Can anyone supply the IP address?
Music Upstart Songza Co-Founders On Battling Pandora, Spotify
My first encounter with a computer was the Pong game ('78). Second encounter was a time-shared Star Trek ('79) at our high school (and my first year in US). I distinctly remember not making/having any distinction between OS and the game application and that has always left me sympathetic to newb users - we take so much for granted and to be "obvious" when they really are not "obvious".

First computer and first programs followed shortly ('81): TI-99/4A and ("16 bits!") "Extended" Basic and mostly sprite based games. Sampled CS in EE school -- punch cards and assembly. Usual EE type Fortran programs, but nothing 'systemic'.

First paid work was working for a startup in my senior undergrad year building a jet engine turbine CAD system (I did the UI framework for picking, menues, etc. -- this is before Windows ;) The other project was a Fortan to C translator which provided the opporutnity to learn (fairly serious) C while contributing to that effort. ('86)

I code (compulsively at times) to this day.
I would recommend not trying to teach for loops etc... Show them how to tie a function to an image to make it move across the screen as a building block to make a game and they will find it interesting. Maybe start with flash/actionscript so they can see (click image > write code for image > image does stuff)
Bayes Language Detection of Twitter w/ Python - Better than Google Chromium?
What's up with all these polls? I don't understand the significance of this poll, besides being an icebreaker/conversation starter. HN seems to be stuck in naval gazing* mode.

*navel gazing.
I'll start off with a question; what's your label?

A resume should echo what you are passionate about.

Some people write up a resume per interview specifically tailored to the need of the company. (I see you plan to do X, I have skill Y)

Saying 'I can do everything' doesn't imply 'I can do everything well'.

If you market yourself as a .NET programmer, then that's the job you'll get.

It's nice to have the occasional additives (languages/frameworks you rarely use) just in case of referral (being asked to interview for something that's not your speciality). But be sure to weigh your primary and secondary skills differently.

Be sure to provide social proof to back up your claims (ex. I used X, Y, Z to build A, B, C for company N to accomplish E, F, G). Interviewers/potential employers also want to see what your responsibilities were at your previous jobs/projects.

Don't be shy to mention hobby projects if your portfolio in regards to experience is a bit thin - also try to keep it less than 4/5 pages (think menu, not memoir) :)

Good luck
Dad bright home a 110bps acoustic-coupled printing terminal, dialed into the Honeywell mainframe, and had me type in a 3-line BASIC program which printed a sine wave. I was 10, and I was hooked.

Soon after, he handed me a book that taught assembler programming by directing the read to hand execute instructions in the corner of each page, flipping pages to find the next.

A couple dialup terminals later, we assembled a ZX-80 kit. 1KB RAM. Built a sound card from scratch for it.

Long story short, 20+ years as a developer and teach programming part time. That today's students start with high level 3D GUIs and gigabit networking makes it hard to drag them back to the binary basics and build from there.
I did the same thing (ComputerEng, but more of a EE focus), mainly because there wasn't a job market that was interested in me when I graduated. I suspect this is more common with engineering grads than most others. The barrier to entry for programming is much lower than that for engineering, which requires taking the FE, getting licensed, apprenticeships (in some locales), getting relicensed, and still no guarantee of a job. Knowing that, and needing a real job after years of no interest in "my field," I took the meager programming skills I'd been mostly ignoring since the 80s and made a go of it.
The title smacks a bit of link bait