skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Making a living out of doing what you love will only work if you're exceptionally good at it or if there's plenty of demand for it. For example, there's plenty of people who love to play chess, but if you can't break into the top 100 in the world, forget about living off it. I know plenty of IMs and GMs who struggle to making a living. I think it's important to find a balance between doing what you love and doing what's practical. And if you develop the discipline to manage your non-work hours, there will be plenty of time for play.

By being hated, I guess the author wants us to stay true to our convictions. It's okay to be hated, as long as there are supporters as well. It's very difficult to stand alone, though sometimes we must. Even so, if we can be accommodating but still stay true to our convictions most of the time, that's the way to go.
I took that class from the other instructor, who had us use OCaml instead of Java (as I presume Aho still uses.) The Dragon book was interesting, but, for the most part, we were able to get on from the in-class slides.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having Discrete Math, Data Structures or Computer Science Theory as pre-requisites for PLT or a compiler class. However, I doubt the necessity of OO Programming & Design and (so-called) Advanced Programming.
Sure, I will share the results on a future post. I think the same way your high-school comp-sci teacher does, but this time I decided to break the line.

About the github idea, I like it, but my students are not familiar with git yet. I will try to blog about their main ideas and language syntax in the future.
Maybe you can register a domain or add a directory to an existing domain of yours where you create a project page.

You can blog about your progress, you can offer adspace on your page which might sell better than a name/company in the readme.
Letras traducidas
This looks like a nice idea, but I'm echoing others in wondering why this is necessary. Tools like RVM make it fairly trivial to maintain distinct versions of rails, associated gems etc.

The author might make this more compelling by sandboxing things like nginx, unicorn, etc. (in the path that MAMP and such have taken) that are a bit more of a pain to manage independently on OS X.
Really great. Thanks for sharing this. It's a terrific way to get parents involved, and a really nice explanation of what programing is. I'm curious about what the next steps would be for kids this age.
Successful GitHub Development
> ignoring the fact that if this blog post is a lie it has serious ramifications on her integrity.

Judging by some of the other posts about this "victim", I'm not sure her integrity is a concern. Supposedly she's done KickStarter before, and essentially just taken the money and not produced (Please, check these threads for the specific comments regarding it).

At the same time, keep in mind that when I first came to this thread, there were a LOT of comments condemning KickStarter, making an assumption. My goal throughout this has been to try and remind people to be objective. If your objective, that's great! I have no issue with you, or anyone else with an objective. I've been responding to numerous people throughout all this as well, so there is a good chance I might end up talking to more than one person in a single thread, and not realize it.
www.backupify.com lets you backup your gmail to another location
Without getting into the specific point-by-point refutation of this because, some of it is valid, I must first wonder why it is that people assume that every product should fit every person.

My first reaction is how horrible it would be to set up a Google+ account for my dog. I mean, my dog doesn't even have hands! Pulling that back a little bit though, it starts off with "my mom isn't big about the internet."

More to the point, there isn't actually any 'horror' in 'setting up a Google+ account for his mom'. By all accounts, the lack of horror in the actual account setup tells me that it was probably a fairly trivial affair, or even, uneventful. I was expecting something about real name guideline violations or switching accounts being an issue, but that's not the case at all, it seems.

Perhaps the most legitimate complaint (to my ears, your mileage will vary) is that there are non-circled posts added to your stream. The 'promoted' or 'hot' posts or whatever could certainly do with a toggle permission or something for the 'closed circle' types, and I actually thought that there was a way to keep people's stuff out of your stream.
A schema is essentially an API over the data.

For instance, if you have an API with the functions:

item# = add_item(description, price, color)
record_sale(item#, quantity, customer#)

So let's see what happens when you need to make a change. For instance, you might decide that an item could be discounted (a new feature); so you need to record the price at the time of sale:

record_sale(item#, quantity, customer#, price=NULL)

and if the price is NULL, you default to the current item price.

But you already have sales data without a price, so you need to migrate it by copying the current item prices over.

And if one of three applications doesn't support the new API, you need to offer the old API as well and it would just use the default all of the time.

That sounds pretty much like a schema to me. What's the difference?
JavaScript password strength estimation library
Probably true.

I do like the idea that someone is getting tired of Google's behavior.

I'd sign it but I hate the idea of having an account with the White House. Probably dumb on my part. I just have a distrust of politicians, regardless of affiliation.
Sure, I will blog about that in the future. Stay tuned :)
How most Flash games insert highscores and why it's not smart
Being Evil with the Facebook SDK
The really awesome part is that there's an element of fun, e.g. controlling your parent, to the whole thing that adds to the experience. If it were a game or something else, it'd have a lot less interest and appeal at that age.
Are there any repercussions on choosing more courses and then dropping some after a couple of weeks? I guess it will be hard following more than two with college semester coming to an end, but I like at least 4 or 5 of these online courses and I'd like to see how some of them are going for a few weeks
These are just some thoughts that were running through my head. I knew that Facebook provided a lot of information about users, but I never really put it into perspective and what the real dangers are of this.
Social networks act like them sometimes. If you get everyone using your network, it becomes so valuable that its almost impossible for a competitor to break in.
Understanding the WHOIS protocol
Recursion best practices - Carpe diem (Felix's blog)
There are not much design patterns on functional programming. I hope these guidelines can be a start
Great idea.

I was thinking about creating my own post for a YC hacker house, but I'd rather not deal with organizing and getting a landlord on board with something like this.
There are not much design patterns on functional programming. I hope these guidelines can be a start. Discussions are welcomed :D
Awesome idea. I once used the idea of using each kid as an instruction (we had the instructions written on 3 x 5 cards) and did the 'towers of hanoi' problem by lining the kids up and then having them go up, do their instruction and then go to the back of the line.

I agree with Shank though, the idea of being able to drive you parent around is really a great kid hook in this case.
Don't miss the interactive comparison between the original and the copy: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/14/world/europe/N...
her mother also sent out a pleading email begging people to "stop hurting Rachel's fragile self esteem. You don't know what she has been through."

later emails revealed from her own Mother? He mother stated that a crazed Cuban nanny in the mansion (Rachel Mendelson's father was Paul Mendelson who was Janet Reno's top prosecutor for the state of Florida, state assistant DA!) ... well this nanny chopped up Rachel's labia with scissors when Rachel was three years old. This is what her mother states is the origin of all her "mental difficulties."
I had the same fun when I created my own language during an also mandatory course on compilers :) Even though my goal is to enhance my student's skills about OOP, I hope they have fun creating a language.
Just to add to the "working musician" profile: there are lots of opportunities for paid live performance, whether in clubs, with live orchestras or bands, or for events. Most musicians I know make most of their money with a combination of live performance and teaching, rather than with session work, which has largely dried up everywhere except LA. Even here in NYC there's very little money in recording anymore.
You can bet that if AOL had the ability to, eg, dictate the terms of access to particular websites, their business model would start to resemble that of the big media companies. Making sure the internet industry resembles Big Media as little as possible is one of the reasons net neutrality is a big deal.
Behind Fez: Trixels in Depth
What other kinds of "marketing" have you done for the app? Do you think those 11 buyers were random app store surfers, or did they come in via a link?
mandatory reference to stanford commencement address by Steve Jobs, for that one person who hasn't seen it yet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
I've been reading Rand's Atlas Shrugged and found it pretty boring and naive. OTOH after a friend of mine reminded that Rand was born in Russia and experienced the beginning of its transition into the Soviet Union in the 1920's, I kind of understand her points of view.

At that time, some people probably had a very strong belief in communism, not having seen the really dark sides of it yet. And also, some other people probably saw any kind of social democracy as a threat and considered it all the same as communism, not yet having seen the future of increasing economic inequality, the 1% vs. the 99% and all that.

It's probably good to hear what Rand has to say, but it should be put in the right context (of more than 50 years in the past). Nowadays our western economic systems have different kinds of problems to tackle.
Also, 1.8.7 EOL is so close that you should not choose it for new projects.
"I’m not sure who decided that three months was a magic number for accelerator programs."

That's kind of funny to read. I never thought about it before, but I suppose the others must not emphasize the origins of their features, which must in turn make them seem rather arbitrary.

The 3 month duration comes from the fact that YC was originally meant to be a summer program for undergraduates
(http://ycombinator.com/start.html).
Demoscene: The Art of the Algorithms (documentary)
Those are very cool, but they are "development platforms".
I don't want/can't design and produce my own hardware.

I want to buy a little box (around 50-100 USD would be still good), attach an USB camera, and with software make an interesting project.

In other words: Wifi and Linux (and its drivers) would make a great automation platform (having to connect to AC being the only problem left).

For example, I could put one of those in front of my water meter (http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01373/water-mete...), with a little bit of OpenCV software to parse the numbers I could have real-time water usage monitoring.

(This just reminded me of Bunnie's Chumby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby). If Chumby has died because cellphones haven't left any market to it, it could easily be repurposed to compete with Raspberry PI, it seems.
Having just gone through the winter batch, the closer you are to YC, the easier it is going to be.

Between dinners and office hours you wind up going there frequently. Traffic is a big pain when trying to get to the dinners on anything other than surface streets.
Good points, but I read the "Be hated" differently.

I think his point was that if you do something important, it's likely that some people will quite energetically oppose it. This shouldn't stop you if you really think it needs to be done. In fact, take heart: if somebody hates you it's likely that you are doing something important. It's ok to be disruptive.
Add option for project owners to approve/moderate comments. Problem solved. (the kickstarter problem at least)
Revision 2011 Seminar (Demo Scene tech talk) Videos
As a programmer, I really enjoy the idea of creating my own VM and make it able to interpret/run a language I designed. Surely some people got excited about that :)
Other YC alumni that I spoke with felt the same way, which is a big part of why the final location will probably be in or near Mountain View.
When I returned to Rails after a couple of years away from it, I had to piece together a few different blog posts about setting up Rails 3 with Ruby 1.9 on Mac OS X to get my toolchain working, and even then I had to troubleshoot version-specific problems not covered in the blogs. I believe most beginners would have been deterred from continuing. I don't really use Rails on Windows much at all, but tried RailsInstaller on Windows 7 just for fun about a year ago and was delighted it worked so well and would like for beginners to have such an easy experience on a Mac, my OS of choice!
Have you seen Jeremy McAnally's Railcar[1]? It might be worth a look since there seems to be some overlap in goals (even if maybe not in how you get there).

Edit: Here's a link to JM's blog post explaining his choices for Railcar[2].

[1]: https://github.com/arcturo/Railcar

[2]: [1]: http://omgbloglol.com/post/20783445544/on-railcar-an-isolate...
So does this mean that the major publishers have to re-disrupt Amazon's disruptive business model? That seems ironic.
I am about to graduate from college and there are so many people applying to jobs that society thinks are "cool". The great majority of these people aren't doing it because they are passionate about their job, but they are doing it for the money. The author writes "Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working." I am all for this statement however the big question is, how do you find that obsession? I really have no idea. Some people say its what you do when you procrastinate, others say that it comes with time and creating experience "working" many different jobs. I think the biggest sign that you are doing something you love is when you can do it for free but then again, I have to make money to live.

I recently watched the documentary "Jiro dreams of Sushi". Jiro is 85 years old and still works at his restaurant in Tokyo making sushi. He has won three michelin stars and could retire any day but he keeps coming back to his restaurant. Jiro says "you have to fall in love with your work". This is a statement that one constantly hears and it is so often ignored however I really think its true. I look at Jiro and hope that I also never retire because I am doing what I love.
Sharing 5 Worst and 5 Best Ideas - My first 2012 Blog post
Google has some inner conflict here. The marketing strategy is "more private than Facebook" but the obvious way to measure the success of Google+ is by how much oversharing people are doing. Optimize for that and you get pushy UX like the one described. Hopefully they can figure out a more nuanced metric.
Interesting. This is similar to an idea I've had for a privacy-sensitive version of Facebook ("Faceless"?) that uses public key encryption at the client to prevent the servers from being able to read anything posted.

When you post new content to your friend list, your client uses your private key & your friends' public keys to post a separate encrypted copy of the content for each friend. Thus only they (and you) can read the content.

Note before people point out all the flaws in this idea =)...
I'm aware that this would have problems on the key management side of things, plus one-encrypted-post-per-friend would get computationally (and bandwidth) intensive as your friend list (or "circle") increased in size. I'm also not convinced people actually want this - Facebook has made it abundantly clear that most people don't care about online privacy.

I would use it, though!
Hosting Common Lisp web apps on Red Hat's OpenShift
You don't trust who the client says they are

I shouldn't trust a hashed username and password? How are server-based systems more secure?

you don't trust what the client says they can do

That's a non-issue if it's handled by ACLs on the server.

you don't trust what they're giving you

Like I mentioned before, though, for most applications you can trust what they're giving you. Sure, Amazon isn't going to ask the client how much an iPad costs and WoW isn't going to ask the client for the player's stats, but why should an application like Facebook care to verify whether you want to modify your own settings or send a friend request / wall post / whatever? If you attempt to perform an unexpected action (say, post to the wall of someone who's blocked you), the other user's client application logic (which is beyond your control) can still handle the junk data gracefully and simply.

Also, later on (when you have more developer time to spare), if you want to for whatever reason, you can easily just deploy a server-side "garbage collector" of sorts to regularly clean up the database without disrupting client-side flow.

It's not something you bolt on later.

It can be, provided that it's only in the form of new features rather than fixing something which was insecurely implemented to start with. (For example, maybe the MVP is free but the next iteration is freemium and requires server-side price validation.)
So did the other accelerators simply copy your model?
Good to see the Demoscene is alive and well in Europe! I haven't dabbled in the Demoscene since way before I left the continent.
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK there's a broad spectrum of "professional standup", from people playing 10 minute slots at comedy nights for £50 a time, through people touring small theatres and arts centres with 100-200 seats, all the way up to people playing arenas and doing TV.

The general rule of thumb here is that you can make a comfortable living with ~15,000 twitter followers - just enough fans to make a tour viable.
Introducing PasswordLib - A Library for hashing passwords in PHP
I hadn't. What I want to make though is a sandboxed environment that doesn't use rvm, etc and that provides everything you need. I also want to make an interface for beginners to easily run the server, execute commands, etc.
The complaint is so vague as to be meaningless. Let's give a specific instance in which google has acted unlawfully, not just that they deleted your account an you're pissed, which is what this sounds like.
I have a number of students from Zimbabwe who over here in the UK for 'political reasons' in my classes. I think once the country is back on an even keel, we will have to watch out.
Any chance you'd throw the code on GitHub for some critique? :)
I think you need the money to get past "This software is not ready! I'm still working out some major problems."
They're still reacting. But they've finally woken up and smelled the smoke from their burning walled gardens, and they're trying to form a bucket chain.

The trouble seems to be that 19th/early 20th century anti-trust law, from the era of the coal and steel and oil monopolies, is a really bad fit for modern service industries. Not to mention moving too slowly. And taking aim in the wrong direction. (Such as the DoJ ignoring the $48Bn goliath with 85% market share and taking aim on the half-dozen $1-4Bn corporations trying not to get squashed by AMZN by sucking up to AAPL.)
This was a interesting read and the OP makes a good point. But couldn't the publishers just make a deal with e-book reader makers (which are struggling against Amazon too) and create a DRM "open" standard?

By the way, I'm almost only buying ebooks from Amazon lately and, despite the convenience, this does make me pretty uneasy.
Wow, I have never heard of this. What is triggering the transformations?
Brad Cox is the original creator and has two very interesting books.

Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach - this one covers an early version of Obj-C http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Programming-An-Evoluti...

Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier - economics of software components - http://www.amazon.com/Superdistribution-Objects-Property-Ele...
Another good mental technique is to think about the work week or period ahead of you after doing something you enjoy. If you find that the thought of it makes you irritated or unhappy, you need to immediately stop and figure out why. Is it the project you are working on? Is it your manager? Is it your team? Is it the company?

Whatever it is, it always warrants a serious conversation with your manager. Ideally, it is something within your or your manager's control.
>I'm friends with Rachel and the stalker dude is real

I would keep in mind the possibility that she herself is sending out this stalker material. If she has a history of generating drama, as has been suggested by others from communities she's been previously involved in, creating a stalker is the perfect device. Her account of the stalker's tactics is quite extreme: I've never heard of any case where a cyberstalker has taken things as far as she claims this stalker has. Some evidence would help her case.

As an aside, just to let you know where my perspective comes from, I've been involved in the past with noise/industrial music communities and have met some extreme, sociopathic individuals. I also currently have a friend who claims he's stalked but my best guess, after years of knowing him, is that it's a psychological manifestation. He has lost at least one creative deal by sending, out of the blue, abusive electronic communication. People can act in unusual ways, even intelligent, articulate people that are normally personable.
Didn't congress already do this?

http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=3d90...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20109630-93/eric-schmidts-o...
> everyone is desperately seeking the "one database to store everything" -- rather than carefully evaluating trade-offs

Agreed.

> Think about what you're building, and pick the right data store for your data.

I partially disagree. Most businesses adapt considerably over time, and data projects almost always expand as far as the engineering team can take them. Even small businesses have a lot of different kinds of data, all held in different systems and spreadsheets, and there is a lot of value in bringing that data together (often driven by accounting).

So, at the beginning, you don't know what your data is, you just have a vague idea (unless you are an early-stage startup with very specific data management needs).

(Aside: your queries are at least as important when choosing a data management system as your data).

Traditional RDBMSs have been designed and have evolved over a long period of time to offer pretty clear answers for the business data needs of most "normal" businesses. It makes perfect sense to start with a general solution, and try to pick out the special cases (e.g. "I need faster response on these queries") as you go.

That doesn't mean that traditional RDBMSs are the only way to make a general-purpose data management system. Maybe another architecture or model will come along that will prove superior; or maybe it's already here and it's just not mature enough.

But I would give very similar advice in most situations: start with a traditional RDBMS, and then pick out the special cases as needed. Not all cases, of course; a key-value system might be great for caching, or you might need to do analysis that's just not working out with SQL.
Yes. I think he meant: I'd advocate (Jade over Haml) and ((Stylus or Less) over Sass)