skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe "How To Design Programs"? (http://www.htdp.org/) I'm not sure if "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" qualifies as a beginner's text, but that's also available online (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/).

There's also "Scheme and the Art of Programming" and "The Little Schemer".
Thanks, fnazeeri, this study actually is helpful and does provide some useful data, I think it will be very helpful to have a professionally done compensation study if necessary to show the tax man.
In the world where a non-hunting home-maker (ie. woman, as you posit) found a better hunter when the hunter she was with didn't do well, the hunters probably didn't feed the women when they stopped being useful. Hunters most certainly fucked everyone they possibly could, to maximize their gene transmission. Marriage prevents this. Hence the expectation that your SO sticks with you when the times are tough... Especially when the times are tough.

Even murders can be 'justified' by evolutionary biology but the court tends to put an end to further propagation of that gene :)
I worked a couple entry-level (i.e., menial minimum wage shit) jobs and I never had to ask permission (even when I was a cashier during lunch hour at a popular local fast food restaurant) so I have no idea where that came from.
If I understand things right, it can give you static typing, and the benefits that entails, without all the "Foobar foobar = new Foobar()" crap. It just figures it out for you based on how your code is written. Maybe I'm wrong though...
I love the idea behind this, and the site/implementation feel solid-- but it's a productivity nightmare.

I dunno if you've read Harrison Burgeron (by Vonnegut):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

It's a dystopian future where everyone is equal by bringing exceptional people of any kind down to the lowest common denominator. To make smart people less smart, they put buzzers in their ears that went off at random intervals to disrupt concentration. That's pretty much what you're doing.

There are a lot of productivity studies that support this... Showing that ANYTHING that takes people out of the "zone" (when they are in it) makes it likelier that they'll shift to something else than if the distraction didn't occur. This includes IM, phone calls, knocks at the door, email dings, whatever.

Would be interesting to run RescueTime at a business before and after-- you might actually be doing less damage than you cause (i.e. time saved reconstructing time, nagging people to do time entry, etc., might outweigh the distraction/derailing that you're causing).
Some years ago I made a New Years resolution to email my extended family weekly with updates on my nuclear family's doings. Life was so busy I couldn't keep up. I hope you're more successful. I found success since then by implementing http://ourdoings.com/ and encourage anyone who wants to chronicle their doings to try it, regardless of who the audience is.
Based on the screencast, I'd suggest replacing the category field's "are you sure" dialog with autocompletion and fuzzy matching, like Firefox's address bar. This would still prevent the accidental creation of new categories by typos, but with the advantage of not breaking the user's flow.

Also, I was annoyed by the need to request a trial key by email before I could even get a whiff of the app. I'm willing to endure this kind of bureaucracy when I'm evaluating something like an IDE, but for a $25 time-tracking app it feels excessive.
The Science of Shopping: Here is what retailers know about you.
I thought this was interesting not because of the results, but because it lets you have a look at how the thing is put together and modify it:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=2d3d8f5b375297570...
OLPC's creepy and inappropriate John Lennon ad
Doing something to be able to say "I did that" is a goal in itself as far as I'm concerned.
What I did in college was to run the guitar through a digital effects board and then into my cheapo computer speakers (which could be set to reasonable volume levels) or into headphones. Sound quality isn't as great, of course, but the digital stuff doesn't really care how loud you play and sounds about the same at all volume levels. You could get some pretty decent tones out of the higher-end effects boards, too.

If you want sweet tube amp sound, you're basically out of luck. That's caused by the power tubes and speakers distorting (not the pre-amp tubes), so you've gotta crank them up to 11.

There're also some products available that cut the power ratings on standard amplifiers. When I was into this stuff around 1998, your options were basically limited to YellowJackets (which let you substitute 18W EL84 tubes for EL34 amplifiers, like 50W and 100W Marshalls) and the PowerSink, which was an induction coil that would bleed off excess power as heat before it reached the speaker. Both of these would only cut the noise level from "will blow your eardrums out" to "will annoy the neighbors", and so weren't really suitable for apartments or dorms. Since then, I've heard that a bunch of manufacturers have wised up that there's a huge market in low-power tube amps, and it looks like you may be able to find 1-5W tube amps out there now.
Migrate nurses to Australia, nurses placements, nursing     training and bridge programs.
Nurses to Australia is the way in assisting nurses who look forward to start their career in AUSTRALIA. We are recruitment consultants specialized in placement of nurses and health care workers in AUSTRALIA. We provide best serviceof international standards.
You don't know what you're talking about. If Bill Gates couldn't program, he couldn't have negotiated and monopolized like he did. Furthermore, the Beatles were indeed considered an excellent live act. Listen to live recording audio as evidence and hear the overtures of enthused screams in the background.
For once I think Arrington has a valid point. What success criteria do we apply to startups? It seems like Business Week sees VC capital as success. The article TechCrunch points to (http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/106341/Most-Suc...) has the startups listed by order of funding starting at $90m through to $30m.

From the point of view of most people here I think we would regards that much VC not making a good startup in most cases.

I'd be interested to see a good framework for measuring success in startups that could be used by VCs and the media alike.
It doesn't matter what alternative platforms he decides to port to, just that he does it and actually releases the game so people can play instead of whining about people stealing ideas and how he can't show off too much gameplay until Nintendo does something. Even if the game is awful there is still going to be an absolute ton of people wanting to try it out because of all the publicity it has received.

And frankly, I don't think this is any better than online petitions, I actually think this is worse. He wants Nintendo to pay attention to him and he's doing so by locking himself up in his room? That's not the best of attitudes to convey. It's like the complete opposite of being at least somewhat professional..it sounds a lot like what some of my baby cousins do when they're mad at something. :\
Then it is even more surprising, at least for me. I had Russia associated with strong families, people sticking together and so on.

And it doesn't even seem to be a recent phenomenon. It looks like already in 1970s divorce rate in Russia was very high (40%):

"Even in Communist times, the unhappiness of Russian families was hard to hide. The divorce rate in the 1970s was 40 percent; now it is 51 percent. In the past, sociologists blamed Soviet life, its regimentation, oppression, and lack of individual freedom, for men’s alcoholism and apathy to work and family. Today, the major factor appears to be an economic free fall that humiliates men who cannot provide for their families, to the point where they just walk away with little social censure. An estimated 15 to 20 percent of all Russian families are now headed by a single parent, 94 percent of whom are women."

http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/IES/russia.html
Believe it or not :) there are other uses for servers than web hosting. I can see why amazon publicise these stories, but it's probably not the idea use case.

If you're doing number crunching, where you need 100 machines to get results in an hour, and then you're going to spend 3 days thinking about the result, then EC2 is perfect - the key is that there is not cost difference between using 100 servers for one hour, and 1 server for 100 hours. Slicehost doesn't offer that.

Of course for this to be useful you need a problem that can use 100 machines in parallel, but if that's the problem you have it's perfect for EC2.
#users/traffic, and if they've had them for a while, revenue.

The only thing cuil were successful at was getting well known. Unfortunately they got well known for returning terrible search results. So now they have twice as much work to do. Or I guess they could just pay some naming company to come up with a 'rebranding' campaign.
> to data-mine the child's developmental and health history from these accounts for medical and statistical purposes.

Your post went from adorable to scary very quickly!
Maybe Business Week just did this to try and cover up the shame of them and other msm relentlessly talking up and covering Cuil before its launch and epic fail?
Plan Your Wedding on FaceBook
Facebook has always been a usefull tool in coordinating real life social events. One can send messages about an upcoming birthday party , anniversary or meeting. Weddingbook is a Facebook application that extends this particular capability of Facebook.
"Also if you're using a language/setup that isn't too efficient, then AWS may be a second best option to switching language/framework etc."

What? The monthly cost of a server is equivalent to a few hours of dev time. That's money better spent on making new things, not premature optimization.

I'm all for easy fixes that speed things up, but you rarely need to switch language/framework to do it. Doubly so because slower languages like Python and Ruby make it easy to plug in bits of fast C. More likely than not, someone has already done that, and you just need to start using a better library.
> As a commenter on Joel's blog mentioned, Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of everything is crap.

As I asked in the other thread too, are we prepared just to accept this as a truism. There is a fine line between fundamental law of the universe and self-fulfilling belief. Because the result is the same, you won't know whether to look to see if the latter cause is culpable. Is it possible that 90% of everything is crap because 90% of what we believe to be true, and thus act on, is crap.

>Start your own company or even try working for someone else, use your crappy source of steady income to look for a better job.

I might be getting the implication wrong, but I wouldn't advocate starting your own company just because all the other options suck worse. Do it because you are driven to, not because just want to avoid the other options, but are apathetic otherwise.

> If you truly look at code as art, then digging ditches by day and writing beautiful open source code by night, might be preferable to churning out crap code for pay.

What stops you from churning out code during the day, and then churning out other code later on in the evening? And why the assumption that the alternative to crap code for pay is ditch-digging? Perhaps the alternative is advocating for good code? Robert Martin has a whole section in Clean Code where he argues, and well so in my mind, that crap code is our fault as developers. To bail to ditch-digging is a tacit admission that it isn't, and that we were made to write crap by force. Which brings on a more general thought.

Through all of this, I have yet to find anyone advocating for the other option besides either putting up with crap or getting up and walking out of your current employer and perhaps the industry as a whole. It seems that the unspoken assumption is that speaking up and being assertive where you are now is an unavailable option. This leads to several questions regarding the validity and basis of that assumption. I understand it is common wisdom to shut up and get back to work, but I've not always found common wisdom to be that wise.
That is very inspiring and yes, it does seem like a great way to connect with your kids and at the same time teaching them the value of hard work (when I was little, I remember thinking my parents just knew everything, with little thought to how hard they worked to gain that knowledge).

On a separate note, are you any good? Are you better than your 5 year old?
without all the "Foobar foobar = new Foobar()" crap

Exactly. You will spend less time restating things the compiler should be able to figure out by itself.

Vanilla H-M type inference (as in SML and OCaml) requires you to write code which the type inference can completely resolve, however. This tends to lead to compilers that seem really strict until you learn to work with rather than against them, but are excellent at catching several entire categories of bugs at compile-time. The type inference also works with complicated higher-order functions (where the full type signature might be several lines long!), not just trivial examples, and rapidly determines what code will be affected by any small changes, but it can add a little more friction to rapidly changing code, and every once in a while you will still need to do things to appease it.

Whether or not this is a net plus or minus depends on your programming style, the project, etc. (Dynamically-typed languages don't need type annotations either, but they have different trade-offs.)
Most on this list aren't websites, so your metric isn't going to fly.
Why Not Start Your Weekend on Wednesday?
"Granted AFP is not a newspaper"
Ding ding ding. Newspapers, shaky though their business model is, make money from advertising, and only indirectly from the actual news. News wires, on the other hand, make all their money from the news itself.

If Bloomberg had ever been insane enough to provide live data over RSS, would it also be a "step backward" for them to come to their senses?
It's all about the status.
It's a great idea. I might just try it myself. My dad is turning 63 and I wish I still had with him the kind of bond I have now with my 4 year old son. I'd try anything to keep the relationship strong.

The skeptic in me wonder though how sustainable it is. Credentials can be lost, accounts can be wiped out, or you may just stop contributing after a while.

A service such as one you described would be essential to support this idea. Perhaps a non-profit foundation.
I'm involved with a business that does quite a lot of work in Russia and neighboring countries (or did until credit markets collapsed there this fall). What I've learned is that Russia fundamentally misunderstands the US, and the US fundamentally misunderstands Russia.

Our biggest mistake is that we both project our own experiences on the other. This article is a great example of this, as lionheart points out. In the other direction, we were wrong in thinking that the most likely alternative in 1991 to Soviet communism was US-style democracy.

While this guy's ideas are laughable, I understand how they could spread. I can imagine a similar book being written in the US about the Muslim world - playing on our fears, outlining some crazy scenario for the Middle East with no real basis in reality, and completely misunderstanding the differences between Iran and Egypt, Palestine and Turkey, etc.
It's time for an Apple tablet: Where's my iPod touch HD?
I learned the cello for one year when I was 7 (ah, free music schools in the USSR, one thing I do miss about that country...) I've had a renewed interest in learning it since one of my favorite bands is Apocalyptica. But for now, I don't have the time or money for private music lessons.
I've heard Cornell and Swarthmore are too - those are other colleges with a "throw work at you until you break" reputation. And Harvard is if you want an A, but 80% of Harvard students get Bs anyway, so most figure they'll just settle for that and work about as hard as any other liberal arts college.

Amherst was usually about 20-30 hours/week between classes and homework, except when I took Quantum Mechanics or OS Design, each of which required 20-30 hours/week by itself.
Money isn't an end goal, it's a means to something else. Who said the goal would be buying crap? A better use of money is financial security for raising a family, having free time, buying things you really value, retiring early and enjoying life. Money is an excellent motivator, but it's indirect, the real motivator is your values and your life.
*algorithm
Toyota engineering feat: The amazing shrinking car, 7 seats in a compact
As a matter of practicality, any number in the $80K+ range will be fine, though you may feel better about paying yourself $100K given that the spread in taxes is under $1K/year (from 80->100). You can go below "normal"; you just can't go below "reasonable". I'd also set the comparable position as "web developer", not "CEO", as you can make a strong case that your primary function day-to-day is more akin to web-dev than to captain-of-industry.

Another important thing to keep in mind, depending on your forecast need for credit: you may find it easier to qualify for a mortgage, to refinance, etc, if you have a higher base salary. Any amount by which you can get more favorable terms on a mortgage will likely BURY that $1K/yr in taxes. Sure you can substantiate with 2 years of tax returns, etc, etc, but that's going to invite human scrutiny, and in the current credit situation, I'd want to have the skids as greased as possible to have my application "look normal".
Ground Zero

I think he means 'square one'. One of my pet peeves.
Speaking from experience: any doubts you have in your mind are inconsequential. Go for it! :)
Great idea! Ive been toying w something like this and came to similar conclusions over a website or a blog, so I found your email idea great.
Also, do you or other HN people have any recommendations on sites or forums to talk about this kind of things?
I haven't met a person who thought hacker meant criminal in 5 years now...
<devil's advocate>Your second kid's going to resent kid #1 for his entire life</devil's advocate>.
Contact me through my blog http://www.altgate.com/ and I can share more detail (or you can track down Noam as I mentioned in the post).
just buy a second hand cello. You'll be surprised how much you remember, and while you may have lost the rapid learning ability you have at 7, you might find you now associate practising more with fun than homework :)
Did Pownce make the list?
FAT16 and FAT32 Systems: How to Add Mass Storage to Your Embedded Applications
Simple rules for creating iPhone applications
When working in the embedded world there are some chances that you will come across an application requiring greater memory storage space than is available in most microcontrollers and even external EEPROMs. That's why SD or MMC cards are great.
In other news, I've now invested 100% of my money with this nice guy Bernie Madoff. He beats the market every year!
Heh heh... well... I find we go back and forth, although I would imagine there would be some inflection point at which she'll start rapidly getting better than me.
...the Aji (pronounced ah-hee), a Peruvian chili, which "ripens to bright yellow, with a strong lemony taste when fresh, very zesty. When dried it picks up a banana flavour."

Being peruvian, I am just a bit biased, but the Aji Peper just tastes great with anything. I remember Sundays back home when my mother 'd cook a simple chicken soup to which I would add some Aji and make the perfect soup. Something so simple, yet so good. It is a taste I have never had again outside of Peru.
I feel like a tool for asking, but when I typed my username and clicked login, it logged in without requiring my password. Just wondering how this site did that and if it presents a security risk.
Great design and nice idea!

Only one thing I will not use this application because of its disruptive functionality. I understand it is part of the tool; I just don’t handle interruption very well especially when I’m working.
Keep it up and good luck.
It didn't actually log you into twitter. There's no security risk.

However, it is possible for anyone to "log in" under your user name and play the game -- possibly maliciously lowering your score.

When OAuth is available, I will use it.
Everything worth doing is stressful. Try making payroll.
Hindley Milner type inference in 112 lines of Haskell:

http://github.com/nostrademons/eve-language/tree/dc33a5a187b...

I'm working on a constraint-typing algorithm now (like Haskell's) that has records and polymorphism. It's quite a bit harder, but vanilla Hindley-Milner makes it impossible to have any sort of subtyping or ad-hoc polymorphism, both of which are pretty necessary for practical programming.

If you're into this stuff, I'd check out the paper "Typing Haskell in Haskell", which presents a full implementation of Haskell's typechecker as a literate Haskell program.
Then that's like saying you're motivated by food, water, shelter. I see money as just one resource that I need in my life to maintain my lifestyle, like I need food/water/shelter. It would be nice to solve the money problem once and for all by doing something to accumulate a large pile of it, but only so that I can stop expending my energy on generating money and move on to the things I really care about.
The point of the video is the page views. One of my philosophies is this - I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart?

If my goal is to create an intellectually stimulating video, then I would work on that. While that is a worthy goal, it's different from trying to create a video that has a lot of hits. I'd actually say that for the average user on this site, considering that most of us have university degrees, it would be much harder to create something that appeals to a person who only has a very basic education than it would be to create something that would be appreciated by people that went through the same educational system that we did.

It's great to be smart, but that does not mean you should insulate yourself from the human condition. It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures.

If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think.
Joel on Software: The new Fog Creek Office
It doesn't look right on Mac OS X.
I hate this framing: supermarkets are using black magic to trick me into buying things that I don't need. For me it is the other way around - they arrange the goods so that with minimal effort I can buy lots of stuff and I don't need to go shopping for a long time. Shopping is an effort for me - they make my work easy and efficient.
Consulting is not the only way to "work for yourself". Income from consulting scales linearally with the time you put into it. Considering there are only 24 hours in a day and that you need to sleep every so often, you tend to hit a wall with respect to income. This is why people want to avoid consulting; it is an endless march of death. There is no way to get ahead.

Anyway, making a product is the way to scale past $WAKING_HOURS. I have only written a book so far, but even that provides some income. It is nice to see royalty checks a year and a half after I've written the book. I would almost call it free money, and that's the best kind :)
Shouldn't you be asking your CPA and your lawyer what "reasonable" means in this case?