skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing beats seeing what you do works. I'd choose Python (available on most platforms, easy to learn, very complete) and a good book. Also try to accomplish individual tasks: reading and writing from a file, downloading a web page, printing a document, executing another program, sending a email, parsing an XML file, creating a CGI applicatin, etc.
I pulled this trick in my entry-level calculus class in college. They were so generous with extra credit that my marks should have meant that I got an A. But I didn't do any of the homework and the TA decided to punish me with an A-. I suppose I should have fought, but I'm epically lazy.

Lesson: if you're going to do something like this, don't assume that the people on the other end will hold up their end of the implied bargain. Either fight or do some token tribute.
Seems that the tech incubator LaunchBox Digital does not only incubate tech startups...

http://www.launchboxdigital.com/about-us.html
(About us, Founders: Julius Genachowski)

Which chair for pg?
Rails: Here's a kick-ass hammer, a kick-ass saw, a kick-ass measure tape, etc...

Oh, and if you need them to be different from the default, you can modify them as you want, but we think the default works for most people.
Titan, a Rockefeller Sr. biography by Ron Chernow, is great book.

http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller-Sr/dp/1400...
"and using open-plan designs can save 20 per cent on construction"

That's all? Doesn't sound right, if you put people in offices each person gets a lot more space, so you'd need a bigger building, etc. I think it's a lot more than 20 percent.
Actually yes, now you mention it it was Open Office XML. In any case you still need a library to help you out, its really not that easy to go straight to the XML (at least for the casual user - I guess for implementers its another matter).
I agree. There was however a nice paper showing relationships to trader performance and testosterone/cortisol ratios last year, and there have been studies showing testosterone:finger length correlations as well. Obviously more work is needed.
>But then again, it's much easier to criticize with hindsight than to design a system that becomes popular.

Indeed - ant came about when XML was popular for far more things then it should have been used for, and java wouldn't make a very good declarative build language (which is what ant was targeting).
It is important to realize that different styles suits different programmers doing different things. Wil Shipley works better with being more careful and spending more time analyzing before coding. I remember reading about a programmer who writes hours of code (or was it days) before compiling. Or TDD where iterations are shorter and focus on incorporating unit tests. Etc.
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BTW "it's dirty here" was not translated correctly.

The soldier was being sarcastic when he said it. It's more like "apparently it's dirty here" (said sarcastically).
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Fundamental programming skills are the same in any language may it be Ruby, PHP, or C, so if I were you I'd learn Ruby (or maybe Python; I prefer Ruby though) in those 8 months and then take a good programming class in collage to advance to Java/C. For a average startup a low level language such as Java or C will be pretty useless, you'll do 99% of things in something like Ruby, Python or even PHP.
That's atrocious. I think it's probably illegal in the UK - and we have 20-30 days of paid vacation!

I'm surprised you managed to stay awake with mono... I remember I stayed in bed for about 20 hours out of every 24, for about 6 weeks.
NEW YORK NIGHT CLUBS 1
Agreed. I think they mean on the cost for building the building, not the cost per employee housed in the building.

I.e. a closed-offices building might cost $1 billion and house 10,000 private offices with 10,000 employees, whereas an open-plan-offices building of the same area and volume might cost $800 million and house 50,000 employees in a bunch of open areas with a few meeting rooms peppered around.
Wait, people get more than 7 hours of sleep?

Typing this at 5:22 am after pulling an all nighter
>I don't think you have refuted my speeding analogy.

My point was that you analogy doesn't apply. Pointing to ice on the roads is completely missing the point: that the analogy doesn't hold in the first place.

>I do not think you have refuted my claim that regulation leads to people suspending critical judgement about risks.

I did not say this! I said that specifying a reserve requirement does not reduce bank reserves. Please keep this argument to reserve requirements, not general regulation.

>If you don't buy my argument then you probably believe that people are so stupid that without regulation banks would hold $0 in reserves.

The UK does not have reserve requirements and they don't have zero reserves. But they did not raise their reserves to safe levels either, refuting your original point.

Incidentally, it's you that's arguing that regulation encourages banks to hold lower reserves than they would without reserve requirements. You are constantly conflating reserve requirements and general regulation, moving an argument about one to a conclusion about the other.

You then go on to talk about TARP again, illustrating my point.
>> "The behavior I just described makes `this` is almost useless in Javascript closures"

Hmm??

e.onmouseover = function(c) {return function() { c.dosomething()}}(this);

Then in the dosomething function, "this" references what you expect...

I don't see why you need a library to construct a simple closure.
Java applets? eek ok,
I think that's true of all technical books. Before I part with my hard earned money on some technical tome, I ask myself whether it's a classic (Knuth springs to mind, K&R C), or at least I'll get some value out of it for the next few years. Otherwise, there's tons of good online resources that don't require you to kill a tree.
My (twitter related) app was approved in 5 days. The following update in 2 days. I had expected worse, so I was pleasantly surprised.
But don't bother checking for the spring mechanism that retracts the measure tape in case it breaks or the power supply connection point on the saw if it stops working.

Those bits just magically work!

:)
I'd much rather concentrate on eliminating energy waste. Try to get companies to use less energy in the first place.

As a company, if you can reduce my energy bill by 20%, I'd be overjoyed. But if you're asking me to spend extra money just to say that I'm contributing to renewable energy, why is that of benefit to me (Apart from having a badge)?
10 Smart Javascript Techniques For Manipulating Content
cost-benefit analysis ignores all [externalities]

Not if the externalities are internalized (tautology).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities#Possible_Solution...
When I was still working as a game programmer in London, there were ~70 people working in what was effectively one big open-plan office. (it was somewhere between L and T-shaped, so not everyone could see everyone else) I used to come in well before everyone else, around 8:00-8:15 (most others came in ~9:45) because I was so much more productive in the 1½ hours with nobody around - it probably accounted for 50% of what I got done in a day.

Of course, come crunch time, I had to stay in just as late as everyone else, so my 8am starts quickly disappeared, and productivity along with it.

The communication argument for open-plan never made sense to me: if you want to talk to someone who isn't an immediate neighbour, you need to get up and walk over anyway. And you can still talk to your neighbours if you have shared 2-4 person offices, which are a vast improvement. (I prefer being on my own altogether, but maybe that's just me being a misanthrope)
Everyone seems to be forgetting that students that stop attending usually drop the class -- so that they won't fail.
Synergy. Relationship. Feedback. Allowing smart people to meet each other today so that they will build the startups of tomorrow.
It just seems weird to me...

1. I could install solar panels, wind turbines, optimize things, require less servers, energy saving lights etc, reduce my energy bill, and save money.

2. I could pay CO2Stats money, to buy renewable energy certificates, costing me extra money, and not reducing energy usage.

Why would I choose 2 over 1? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
There must be hole in the spring mechanism testing procedure
I used it to visit the south of japan and it was a really nice experience...
I kind of like the more voluntary less commercial atmosphere of the community at couch surfing.
Fantastic, I just had one of those AHA moments. This finally made me get why we use set-associative caches: the initial lookup by set index is the key. Somehow other written material and various lecturers failed to communicate that to me so clearly. Diagrams FTW.
Putting (YC S08) after company names is awkward and only intermittently done.

If part of the problem is labor-intensiveness, I would suggest automating, or semi-automating (where a suspected YC-funded name gets auto-flagged for tag-approval), the tagging process. (Alternate name spellings could be added continuously over time to the auto-flag-list.) This might achieve uniform display with minimal labor expense.

I agree that a different color could reduce the display awkwardness (though I often wonder in such cases if colorblind users will miss the information).
This is the sort of thing that hypertext should be good at. You write a page explaining how to use monads for IO, a page explaining the list monad, a page for the Maybe monad, blah blah blah, and a page explaining the Monad typeclass (probably another page explaining do-notation too). And they all link to each other as appropriate.
I have been in the same situation a few months ago and after much thinking and hand wringing, I decided to create the website but focus on markets in other languages.

Since then, from developing my idea for the japanese market I got a completely new idea that is easy to develop using the same code and for which there is currently no competition.

So, I think that you should try to develop your site and try to see if you can differentiate your site by either targeting another market (other countries) or create a spinoff for a different kind of field.
Pick something, and build it. Learn what you need along the way, to make it.

* Write a game
* Write a text editor
* Write a webapp
* Write an irc server

Just choose something that looks fun, and do it. Start today!
Heinlein on bailouts
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

- Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939

[See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-Line ]
I'm surprised no-one mentioned SXML, Kiselyov's representation of XML in Scheme. His paper, "A better XML parser through functional programming", can be found here: http://okmij.org/ftp/papers/XML-parsing.ps.gz.

The introduction covers the difficulty of parsing XML fairly well, which is another way of saying that XML does have a fairly complex "model" behind it that Lispers often ignore.
The short story wasn't considered a legitimate literary form until Edgar Allen Poe...to each his own I suppose.
Summary:

"Sleeping for under seven hours a night greatly raises the risk of catching a cold"

Considering the very high degree of genetic variability in humans, and the effects of food, sunlight, sport and in general life style, I suspect a much larger study would reveal a very large standard deviation around the claimed 7 hours.
All possible online. No? For example, a lot of HN visitors interact here primarily to meet founding partners.
Watch 24 season 7 episode 4 online
I was really excited by Chrome's announcement and very disappointed by the delay in getting a Mac version. I think the delay comes down to two things:

1. Mac users are already using standards compliant, fast JS browsers. That means that Chrome's gotta bring something else to the platform, whereas on Windows it's already so much better than IE.

2. Google ultimately plans on dumping a lot of money in the laps of OEMs to get Chrome installed as the default browser. That's not going to happen on the Mac.
Two different programs that use the same XML Schema - that write to the same interface specification. It's just an API. No, not magic pixie dust, but it helps. I think we'll get standard XML Schemas (like the per industry efforts), for specific purposes. It's not really the XML that helps, but the standardization of the interface. But even that's hard. However, there's a lot of money to be saved and agility to be gained, so this (or something like it) is inevitable. It's a worthwhile endeavour.

I was mainly addressing your comment elsewhere about people who like to lock things down, and specify them upfront. For interfaces, you really do need to agree on some things, and be strict (within those tolerances). Someone changing an interface on you can be pretty frustrating.
I like the explanation that the metaphor is only valuable if you have other stuff pre-loaded that it can sit on top of.

I think people learn different ways. This writer seems to approach the world in the way I do, but I'm not sure everyone is like that. I've had friends who can start of with the abstract and just suck it in. I think there's a correlation with people who can do this with those who can easily remember things 'for the test' at school even if they can't put the knowledge into context.

I've never discovered how to tweak my brain to get it to buffer knowledge like this with a faith that it will be useful in a minute - I find it exhausting and I still don't retain.

I sat down to write a program in iolanguage the other day. Even though I've read lots of tutorials and feel like I know it now, it was very exhausting to connect that with a practice of do this, now do that, etc. I remember a similar feeling when I started java which I overcame by writing a program a day that started off with static void main(String args[]).

A big hurdle with conceptual ideas is getting your brain to twist the right way around to them when you encounter a problem that could be solved by them. I think this is the difference between raw knowledge and what Heinlein used the word 'groking' to describe.

One game that sometimes works as an alternative is to example-based learning something through a context of documenting it. This can be difficult though if the barrier between this knowledge and other topics isn't well-defined.
I just did that! Here's how I did it.

I had a job working as a marketing director, but I got bored, so I quit my job. Then, I started working on www.trailbehind.com in April. Now, I have angel funding and know a lot of javascript, python, and CSS.

There's no book, or method, or realization that will make you a programmer. You just have to start programming something.

Once you have programmed a thousand line system that does something cool you are a programmer. At least that's what my buddy told me.
They don't magically work. You'll understand the mechanism when you know a bit more about how to build a measure tape and a saw. Also, all the so-called magic is extensively and automatically tested, and so an order of magnitude more reliable than your own custom-rolled spring mechanisms.
My sarcasm detector is flipping.
MySQL employee Australian Visa refused for unfair competition?
Do you seriously imply Psychology, with all of its schools and subfields, has no scientific validity?
Escort
The transmission of illnesses would be greatly
reduced if companies gave decent sick time benefits.

Is transmission of illness a bad thing? By getting constantly a little bit sick it builds you up. And there's that whole thing about allergies from enthusiastic immune systems, etc.

Also, often diseases are contageous before you are aware of them. I think chicken pox is like this, maybe common virii also.
Interesting, thanks. Would you say this "malleability" issue would be addressed if the XML could be bound (databinding) to arbitrarily different object structures?

BTW: I meant that specific problem you mentioned (which was a non-conforming xml document) - how would JSON/sexps make that specific one easier to solve?
11,000 Attend Virtual Wedding
I also started using it in December.

I hadn't known of it before, and read (perhaps on here) about it and figured that something that could do for blogging what tripit had done to my itinerary was just about perfect for me.

I've barely used it, but I've already evangelised to others about it. It just makes things simpler.
It really depends on the type of work you're doing. For jobs that require a lot of collaboration, open areas holding around 10 people can be good. Some jobs would benefit more from having offices that hold 2-3 people each, and for jobs that require you to be on the phone a lot (sales, marketing, support, etc.) private offices really are a better option.
I could install solar panels, wind turbines [...] and save money.

How do solar panels and wind turbines save money?
Nationalism and Peace (1)
Crazy. In Australia we get min 4 weeks annual leave, 8-12 sick days, plus long service leave as early as 10 years (depending on state).

My company actually has a problem with presenteeism, that is, staff coming into work half dead instead of taking a couple of days off. Usually we send them home, but occasionally someone will take out a whole department with some bug or another.
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Information security company SafeNet has developed a data protection encryption and key management security service for retailers still struggling to comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard.
Flickr Stock - The Way Stock Photos Should Have Been
Knuckle down and study MIT's SICP course: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

You can find the book here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

Finish this course and you'll have a better grounding than many of today's professional programmers, and will be able to teach yourself pretty much anything.
Possible but not as good as when you interact directly with people (in my view).

Direct feedback with teachers is far better than a lot of email exchanges, or than videoconference.

Spending a lot of time with other students on the same projects, in the same room and everyday at the university give you the opportunity to know their personality, and how they work. A lot better than doing a project in common with Internet.

You also have more opportunities to meet people from other horizons (i.e. non geeks).
While RK is asking - has anyone had contact with those glass boards that Joel wrote about recently?
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A Breakthrough in Imaging - Seeing a Virus in Three Dimensions
I suspect that the amount of content that ships with the app is a factor: all text, images, sounds, etc. presumably have to be reviewed. I've never dealt with the iPhone app submission process, but you have a similarly arduous validation process with video game consoles. Except they've been doing it for decades so they've probably smoothed out more of the kinks.
Ask HN: What is the big deal with Virtualization?
I have been hearing this term a lot in the news, mags and blogs lately. While I understand what virtualization is and I myself use Vmware occasionally, I cannot seem to understand why everyone is excited about the technology.

Why do you think virtualization is important in the present and coming times?
Holy schneikies! I've been gay all these years and no one ever told me!
Direct feedback with teachers is far better than [...] videoconference.

Wouldn't that depend upon the quality of the "videoconference"?

http://www.google.com/search?q=telepresence+%22eye+contact%2...

-

in the same room

Kind of like ... HP's Halo?

http://www.hp.com/halo/introducing.html

Halo gives the sense of being in the same room together.
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Seth's Blog: Beauty as a signaling strategy
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Building an elastic environment requires elastic infrastructure
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Cory Doctorow: One Laptop per child - what went wrong?
Or put in the infrastructure to allow someone to work from home.

I'm rarely sick enough to not get out of bed, but since I get to work on my bike every day, in the middle of a winter, a little cold makes it pretty difficult to make it to the office. On those days, I simply head into the home office and put in my time. And others have pointed out, I tend to be more productive at home.
touch type (10 fingers + numbers)

vim

newlisp

jquery
I think he means this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9932346/Incubator-RoundUp-SeptDec-...
Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer With Perlbal/Heartbeat On Debian Etch
Ask HN: Using Really Simple History Properly
I have implemented the RSH library for my website www.trailbehind.com.

This lets me change the hash of the URL and store data when someone surfs around on my maps, so that I can provide links within the map and back button functionality.

However, I'm worried that Google and the other search engines aren't going to take kindly to these links.

I realized that Google wouldn't do things like index my page titles and other content, because they are generated when the DOM is ready via javascript.

So, for now what I've done is maintain the hard links. For example, these two URLs generate the same content:

1. http://cabin.trailbehind.com/#get_map_from_name/Yosemite_National_Park

2. http://cabin.trailbehind.com/park_map/Yosemite_National_Park/

I think the problem with this though is that if people link my site, they will end up linking the hash URLs, while Google will only check out the hard links. And thus, people blogging about me won't help my pagerank.

Has anyone ever dealt with anything similar or have thoughts on this issue? Google rankings are very important to TrailBehind, and part of our strategy (which is already working) is getting listed for the long-tail of parks and forests.
Google Talk: Tips And Tricks
In this post you can find list of tips and tricks about Google Talk. Google Talk is good application for voice and instant messaging, but it can be better. Using these tips and tricks, fix Google Talk disadvantages and also improve it.
A Problem of the Brain, Not the Hands: Group Urges Phone Ban for Drivers