skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post dude and i think i can relate to many of the situations you found yourself in. Hell every time i finish a module or feature on my current project i am always like ... What the hell ... It actually works. I do this because i remember not 5hrs or a day ago, i had no freaking idea what i was doing, the VIM screen was empty and had no idea where to start or how to solve what i wanted to do (specially if its a new language, new team or new technology your working with). Team always tells me to sit down and get back to work (jokingly) after i joyously get up and do fist pumps but i get happy when i have no experience in something but manage to stumble over things until i get it to work, cause the joy is not simply the thing works, its that i feel having no experience and getting something working no matter what the topic of concern is, is a big deal, whether its programming, math or traveling the world by your self when you have never left the house. It is a big deal ...

Right now though, i am working on a startup, just small, making some revenue to live of but finding it tough, very very tough, competition is aplenty, constant new technical problems ,design choices, no idea how to market cause just no experience (so far its been organic but we need a faster rate of growth)and i can honestly say this feels like it could be a particular case where i might not be able to make it out with a smile on my face. In all the other problems i had no experience with, i got this voice in my head that says, mate... you will do this no problems, you will get the problem solved but for this startup the voice is there but just not as strong cause its been told to shutup in more then one instance when things didn't turn out as planned. However, since I know in the past when i kept going things turned out alright I just keep going.

For a startup, there are just so many fronts that need some experience and as far as i can think back , I only ever had to face a single topic at a time for which I didn't have experience. Some examples have been when I worked on new math or programming problem or studying for any exam, solving a problem at work that is more inter personal, asking for a raise when i had never asked for one before, its all just one thing so its easier to focus all the attention on how to make that single thing work. But for a startup there are just so many fronts that experience would really help to make the event of starting a startup successful. Its painful sometimes ...

I guess this is the first step towards getting more experience :) and hey .. its fun
Will Apps Kill Websites?
Great note. Any chance you borrowed some of this from the Waking Life scene on existentialism?
I'd posit that gaming the system is more of a problem with investors (who already have bets in) than with other startups (they bet on themselves).

The term "jury of your peers" carries a lot of weight here.
No implementations yet? This took me about 12 minutes and 10 lines of python code:

def break_13(text):
words = text.split()
lines = [[]]
for word in words:
last_line = sum(len(word) for word in lines[-1])
if (last_line + len(word) + len(lines[-1])) > 13:
lines.append([word])
else:
lines[-1].append(word)
return '\n'.join(' '.join(line) for line in lines)

I like the larger point of this article, which basically states that the way humans do tasks is different than how we should instruct computers to do tasks. However, to me this point is undermined by the description of writing a procedure near the end:

> If you are good at abstracting, you’ll likely come up with three different scenarios for breaking a line. 1. you break it at the 10th character of a word if that word is longer than 10 characters. 2. You break it at the 11th character if that character is a space. 3. You look backwards from the 10th character looking for a space and if there is one, you break it there.

I think it is less valuable to break down your procedure into smaller pieces before given an estimate, and more valuable to have a good knowledge of what sorts of problems are hard and why they're hard. That way, you don't have to resort to glib phrases like "Write down a procedure to tie your shoes".
Make sure you keep the emphasis on "may" - I think it's important to note that this is not a hard and fast rule, it's just a theory.
I think it also helps to have (or develop) a high tolerance for ambiguity. You don't really know where you're going, and something may happen tomorrow that upends your business model. You have to be okay with that. I think experience with that process makes it a bit easier to focus on what you can control.
I've flagged Gruber in the past for posts that were contentless flamebait (in my opinion, of course).

I don't know what the story is with Thurrott. Because of the banning, it sounds like a special case that the mods of HN have ultimately decided on, not just the users. So I'm ok with believing that it's not just a story about factions and groupthink.
I've heard before that the huge rise in humanities degrees is responsible for this trend, and the data seem to agree:

* Highest unemployment rates by major *

1. Clinical psychology 19.5%

2. Miscellaneous fine arts 16.2%

3. United States history 15.1%

4. Library science 15.0%

5. (tie) Military technologies; educational psychology 10.9%

* Lowest unemployment rates by major *

1. Medical technology technician 1.4%

2. Nursing 2.2%

3. Treatment therapy professions 2.6%

4. Medical assisting services 2.9%

5. Agriculture production & management 3.0%

ref:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57325132/25-college-m...

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57324669/25-college-m...
Great read, not so sure why your page was awkward to scroll though.

Here is more about Heap Profiling from the horses mouth https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/he...
It's very easy to transform "I work hard, and am successful" into "I work hard, therefore I am successful," but this is a dangerous fallacy, as it leads directly into "That person is unsuccessful, therefore they aren't working hard enough."

Statements such as the above are spoken from a position of privilege. There are many, many people out there who do work hard and yet do not enjoy success; the fact that you can adduce examples of the form "that person is unsuccessful and is not working hard enough" is not evidence for your claim either.
My pleasure, glad you enjoyed it :)
More like a postcard of a beautiful paradise island is placed in your hands. Without turning the card over to see where the island is located, estimate how long you will need to sail there.

[edit] And when you turn it over, it turns out it was really Gary, Indiana. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=gary+indiana&hl=en&ll=...
This is exactly how I took it.
We use Tornadio2 along with Pika (with the IOLoop sharing) for an internal project and it's been great.
Any observation/opinion is based on a collection of anecdotes. Studies are fine but I don't think they are needed to express an opinion on an internet board.
Real-time visualization of Facebook friend activity
Come, come. You know that all I'm saying is that you're more than just a gear in some deterministic machine. I'm not saying these statistics are invalid whatsoever. You simply should not use them to frame your chance of success.

I'll reiterate my central idea here -- your life is yours to create. I'm of the firm conviction that if you put limits on yourself, they will inevitably spread into other areas of your life.

However, if you'd prefer a more naturalistic explanation -- if you are unrelenting the Central Limit Theorem will work in your advantage. The most notable Scientists are not the smartest, they are the ones who have published the most.
I did it in seconds, but I cheated.

fmt --width=13 <gettysburg.txt
I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as a victim of societal forces

I think that's generally good advice, but potentially dismissive. A lot of the actual data around this has shown that the circumstances of your birth, as manifest in when you enter the workplace, have a huge lifetime impact. People who enter during downturns, on average, never catch up.

There's something that feels kind of distasteful about making it all about personal responsibility when the reality is far more complex than that.
Sorry, but I'm not sure I understand your logic. Using virtualenv adds extra complexity, but virtualizing the entire server doesn't? I mean, the only complexity using virtualenv adds is having to run the virtualenv process once. After that, you can still install to site-packages. You just have to install to a different site-packages directory.

Besides that, it's worth pointing out that using a virtualenv is not a security precaution. It's a precaution to prevent mucking up the global python installation for other packages that run on it. Using linux containers to achieve this seems like overkill.
I guess the point of the short comment was lost: How can anyone say that any of the current crop of OS's is "wonderful"? Wonderful? Really?

Whether you use Windows or OSX (or both, as is my case) you can probably rattle off a sizable list of how these OS's have gotten screwed-up by their respective publishers. Someone saying "<OS name> is wonderful" and then going on about the reason it actually isn't is very funny.

Again, the comment was OS agnostic even though the thread is about OSX.
discussion from last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877179

As I said then, it's worth noting that according to this analysis, we're at an all time high of 53% jobless or underemployed, but the all time low was 41% (right before the dot com crash). 4/10 vs 5/10. Oh no.

With only two data points (and some probable error estimates), I don't think we're looking at enough of a trend to hang a narrative on.

Also, as this article notes, it's suspicious that a significantly higher percentage of college graduates under 25 are unemployed compared to all people under 25, considering that without an age limit the ratio is close to 2:1 the other way. Without actual data and without a plausible mechanism of action, I'll remain skeptical.
All of this stuff is discussed in Being and Nothingness by Sarte and Fear and Trembling by Camus, which Robert Solomon extensively discusses.
Pros and Cons: Funding games on Kickstarter
You reveal a short-termist Anglo-Capitalist bias.

This is not how good managers are assessed in other forms of capitalism or business.

Consistent long-term business growth is far more important in some, e.g. in Germanic and Scandinavian countries.

In general, you could say a good manager meets the targets that have been set by higher management, whatever they may be.

Yes, I am a manager.
> but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure.

When I was 20 I used to laugh at of my friends for being this way. Now 5 years later, they're in the same position complaining about the job market and its getting kind of sad. None of them put effort into learning any new skillset no matter how much I recommend them to. And these are kids all coming from good middle class upbringing.

This is of course purely anecdotal, but I'm hesitant to believe that this narrative is about a bunch of kids trying their hearts out to get work and a job market that doesn't want them.

Maybe a certain percentage but more often than not I see a lack of motivation to learn a skillset society actually needs.
... and test it cross-browser. WebKit has a majority on mobile (around 75%) but not a monopoly. (Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201103-... )
Gallium is poisonous. Do NOT ingest it or handle it without proper safety precautions.
Neat. Works in Ruby, too.

def tree; Hash.new {|h, k| h[k] = tree }; end
t = tree
t[:foo][:bar] = "foobar" # => {:foo=>{:bar=>"foobar"}}

Probably more idiomatic to do it as a class, though.

class Tree < Hash
def initialize
super {|h,k| h[k] = Tree.new }
end
end

Btw. How do you post nicely formatted code?

edit - Thanks!
That sounds tied to environment or personal insecurity. Being wrong and failing can be okay so long as 1) you're okay with it yourself, and 2) the people who are relevant to you being successful are okay with it.
The main reason that nobody's really hit on is that it's super easy to get a college degree now.

Sir Ken Robinson (check out his TED video on creativity) talks about how there's academic inflation. Now most jobs require a master's whereas 5 years ago a bachelor's was enough. With the rise of vocational schools and online ones like Phoenix University, the number of college degrees has gone up, but jobs have not gone up proportionally.
This is from 2010, and the landscape has become quite a bit worse since then:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-m...
This is pretty good. I prefer the name I used when I needed it, though.

dicts_all_the_way_down = lambda:defaultdict(dicts_all_the_way_down)
Undergrad: US History, BA (<5 years ago)

Graduate: Library & Information Science, MA

Guess I'm a lucky one. Currently employed as a developer outside of both fields. :D

EDIT: any academic/education-focused startups interested in poaching a developer should contact me at reveldave AT gmail.com
Jump to the Current Playing Song in iTunes (From Your Keyboard)
I always get this kind of response whenever I say that. I know you can make a profit with open source code but that's just not my thing nor has anything I've worked on lent itself to that kind of model. I suppose I could have left that phrase out as it really doesn't have much to do with what I was saying and can definitely be taken the wrong way.
Thank you, we love what we do, and we can't wait to keep doing it. And it really is about the community, that's one of the biggest reasons why so many of us are choosing to move to Chicago.
I have certainly been afforded no privilege in my youth, although I understand that you reason this is post-hoc sophistry -- it seems like you're setting up an impossible goalpost for my position.

But in the interest of fairness, I'll speak plainly and say I know a lot of people who work hard, virtually all of them are successful by their own standards. I know a lot of people who don't, only some of them are successful.
To be fair, this is a direct result of the cultural zeitgeist of "get good grades, graduate college = worry free middle class livin!" that is deeply embedded in American thinking, from parents to educators and constantly instilled in young people. You can't really blame kids who are brought up through the meaninglessness doldrums of public education with the constant reassurance that all will be well if the Good Grades are achieved for not actualizing self-independence or even figuring out what that would entail. Besides "societal forces" are real. We're not living off our own land anymore. Policy decisions in e.g. China very much affect whether or not American college graduate A gets hired. So between the reality of economic dependency and the model of dependency as dominant doctrine in America, it's not completely fair to blame abysmal youth labor stats on kids being lazy video game addicts.
Ask HN: What would you do to monetize this?
I have a health site. Every year for the past three years when I announced I cannot afford the webhosting and it will be shut down, I got enough money to pay the webhosting, but no more (edit: I mean no more money than just enough to pay the hosting). I have serious financial problems and serious health problems. It would be best for me to make money online to protect my health. The site currently gets about 800 page views a month. My attempts to promote it on email lists have been met with ugly open hostility. My sites grew out of demand for the info or they wouldn't exist. But I need an income. If this were your site, how would you a) promote it to get more traffic? And b) monetize it?

Ask me anything about stats, obstacles, etc. I need to either turn this sow's ear into a cash cow or shut it down and move on. There is clearly still interest given the reactions I get when I say I will shut it down. How do I turn that into something I can work with to make the site profitable instead of merely a thorn in my side?
I wouldn't say that.

Dropbox is good because is ridiculously simple. I've been using Windows 8 + Skydrive full time and well, it's not a sunshine.

It's buggy, and just upload files (not folders) and I don't believe it will get so much better after the official launch.

And yes, Dropbox is probably screwed. I've been using SugarSync just because it gives me more free space.

If google drive is just as good as dropbox, well, you know the drill.
I've meant to finally put my dotfiles into a repository but the one thing keeping me from it is that I haven't yet stumbled upon a script to symlink everything into it's place that I'm totally satisfied with.

I don't use ruby and don't want to install rake on each machine for something that should be possible with a simple shell script, and didn't like the scripts I saw so far. Everything had a medium or large aspect that kept me from using it.

Maybe I just need to write my own thing.
Nice. My friend made a fork along those lines as well:
https://gist.github.com/2012439

As for code in comments, see:
http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
I see your point, but I suspect there's more to it. For example, here are some college majors along with their growth relative to the overall college population. So, for example, 107 means the field has seen 107% of the growth that the overall college population has seen. I'm comparing 1970 and 2008 because that's what I've got...

First, a few items that probably support your thesis:

Area, ethnic, cultural and gender studies: 265
Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities: 584
Mathematics and statistics: -41
Parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies: 2,044

On the other hand, take a look at these:

Computer and information sciences: 1,644
Business: 222
Engineering: 59
Engineering technologies: 222
Security and protective services: 2,143
Legal professions and studies: 663
Education: -47
English language and literature/letters: -15
Health professions and related clinical sciences: 416

Anyway, the point is that kids are clearly studying things that are supposed to be able to get them jobs. The stories you hear about unemployed kids with $100,000 in debt and degrees in Underwater Basket Weaving are outliers, not the norm.

In fact, many of these kids are being intensely pragmatic. Frankly, even some of the things that appear in the upper section are questionable. For example, "liberal arts and sciences" probably includes things like Physics and Chemistry, which this community likely views as quite valuable.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_282.asp?...
How do you index from craigslist? They are notorious for sending "cease and desist" orders to companies who try to index them. Do you have some special agreement with them or is a matter of being a small enough fish they haven't noticed you yet?
I'll save the potentially lengthy discussion and direct you here -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877585
شرح برنامج تشارلز charles بالصور والفيديو
Transliterated English is actually very useful for learning Korean, even if the meaning is a little twisted sometimes. Fully 25% of my Korean knowledge is transliterated English. It helps that Korea is probably the country with the highest English-fever in Asia.
Do these people have no clue about technology? My post was aimed largely at developers with some sense of reality, lol.
Interesting, but is this really more reliable than a simple IP comparison? Probably not.
As someone who has only dabbled with Obj. C but has 10+ years of traditional web dev experience this looks v. attractive. What am I losing by not learning Obj.C/xcode to build native iOS apps?
That's what I feared. Unless you are willing to commit time/effort to really learn the language, I fear the usefulness of this is limited to impressing friends and staff at Korean restaurants.
Surely an IP comparison achieves everything this does, and is probably more than 90% reliable?
The Google UK Homepage
Great for them, what does it to for the end consumer?

I'm guessing this is the natural tilt after they (effectively) defeated AMD using their slimy tactics through out the last decade. The customer always loses when the monopoly decides breaking the law (and paying off the judges + any fines) is more profitable than competing fairly.

I can't wait for Intel's mobile reckoning to occur. I still don't see their tech being anywhere near energy efficient to compete with ARM. It's a matter of time before Apple, Google, and Microsoft have effectively cut Intel out of the processor monopoly.
High tolerance for ambiguity is a wonderful way of putting it. The people who can't play with abstract ideas and concepts simply can't do this.
An interesting article, that Galt is a linked financially to the Panavision company which is getting its clock cleaned by RED needs to be considered when reading it, but the discussion points about just what your eye can see, vs specsmanship are well made.
If you're still in college (or about to go to college) and reading this, I have one bit of advice:

It's much easier to get a job as a college student with no experience than as a college graduate with no experience. If you don't do some work in your field (PT, internship, volunteering, summer program, whatever) you've wasted a one of the best opportunities you'll ever have.
How to Make Inexpensive DIY Home-Built Solar Panel
The Seed Signaling Problem That’s Not Being Talked About
Also, tor + privoxy as a rule-of-thumb when your scraper IP is getting banned.

And - I know, it is (now) so old - memcached as a good place to store things.
You cheated, yes, but yours is also the only sane solution, and the only one you would consider using in the real world where time spent developing has an opportunity cost.
A Practical Guide to Non-blocking IO, Coroutines, and Concurrency
If you use web technologies you can build for more than just iOS devices.

The Phonegap project (now called Apache Cordova) is maybe a bit better because it supports more platforms:

http://incubator.apache.org/cordova/
Developers, Take 10 Seconds to Respond When Your API Evangelist Reaches Out
I can understand calling Esperanto a "failure" since it didn't achieve its goal of becoming a common international auxiliary language, but how has Klingon failed? Its purpose was to be the language for a fictional sci-fi race.
Well, the only honest answer I can give to such a question is, "Ask someone who knows something about that." Alas that person wouldn't be me. User DiabloD3 seems to have given it a good start, though.
Very Good Point ramabk!!!
Seems like it may take a little more than one line, this errors for me:

>>> a = tree()
>>> a.__getattr__ = a.__getitem__
I'm guessing you were in Seoul? Down in Daejeon, nothing was in English, and my Hangul-reading ability was not the best.
Spoken Chinese is much easier to learn than Japanese or French, in my experience. Coming from English, I find that the grammar isn't that difficult while word order is very relaxed. Since most native speakers have an accent or dialect anyways, there is no pressure to speak in a standard way (I find I'm more understandable when I talk as casually and loosely as possible).

I gave up on written Chinese a while ago. I can text well enough and do some simple IM conversations, basically my writing mirrors my oral skills fairly closely. But I can't read a sign, a notice, a newspaper, its almost another language and I'm not so interested in putting the effort in.
I have the same issue. This is unacceptable.
Money Makes Money
It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Indeed. I've for years been impressed with how sophisticated McMaster-Carr's e commerce operations are. That, and I wonder if not having a "Big Book" will hinder Amazon at all. I've lost days of my life reading MSC's catalog...
MIT Student hack Tetris onto a Building
There's no way that this is real. The activity is way too fast. My friends aren't even close to this interesting.