skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with that threshold. When I was younger I thought it made sense: I was put into gifted and talented, and I developed an insane elitism that I used to denounce pretty much everybody around me for not having the same intellect. As I got older, I realized: it's not like that. People are very rarely stupid. Most people are very bright and just don't care to apply themselves.

Again and again, as a kid, I'd come across situations with bullies and go with the lie that the bullies were stupid and jealous. Then in high school, I'd realize that some of those bullies were very bright, clever, and talkative, and that my own actions towards other kids could be perceived as bullying, when to me it was more a good-natured hazing. I started to realize that even the stoner deadheads that I thought were entirely mindless were in fact intelligent people who knew they were ruining their lives and just didn't care.

From the people I've seen, the idea of exclusive intelligence is not as true as most people think it is. I've met people with higher IQs than me who seem less intelligent than I am, because they weren't raised in the way I was, and so went around laboriously working on schoolwork without ever once finding their own interests. For me, that was the height of unintelligence: doing things without asking why. On the other hand, I know one or two people I used to think were stupid going out and doing some pretty impressive things, not because they were particularly bright, but because they kept at something longer than other people did.

The line about genius being 99% perspiration keeps coming up in my mind during this conversation. Most people have good ideas: one statement I read says everybody has three million-dollar ideas every year. We've all thought of cool things and then seen somebody else making a fortune of that cool thing. The difference between that person and the rest of the people with that idea is that that person knew what to do with his idea. The idea itself wasn't uncommon, but its realization was.

Most people don't do great things because most people don't care to do great things. They never try once. Look at the startups you see here. Most of them are interesting, most of the coders have good things in mind. But how many would you call great? Even the really good coders rarely take on anything monumental.
must be designed and built to meet the deadline

I do the best I can

Then we agree.

The analysis for the app was incomplete (for whatever reason). I'm not looking to place blame, I'm just saying that a well designed data base by definition must handle the wear and tear of the app.

Some of the worst crap I ever had to maintain was originally considered a success because it met its original deadline. Sigh.
Given that the death rate used to be 100%, I find it really exciting that the death rate will now be halved.

Downside: all the zombies.
Does the gov't use "child safety" as a way to unfairly regulate the web?
I remember reading - probably in comments here on News.YC - that different screen resolutions could be a downside of the Android platform. How is it possible to get to "within days of shipping the product to customers" before deciding whether inconsistent resolutions are acceptable or not?

My only guess is that Kogan got the run-around from Google and decided to take the risk and go ahead with development rather than wait around for a clear answer and launch too late. If that's the case, this seems like a very bad play from Google.

That's only speculation though. Does anyone who's been watching Android more closely have some insights?
Global Music Sales Fell 7% in 2008. (Is this business dead?)
I just hope I don't get to see a day when certificates for C/C++, Python, PHP! start to exist and people start cashing on it! Some things are meant to be free from certifications, projects and work speaks of better quality than a certificate. Where ever money and tag starts coming into picture, there corruption too starts sneaking in... thats evident when I see my colleagues clearing CCNA papers and Sun certifications with help of google.
Circuit City to Liquidate After Sale Efforts Fail - Who's next?
Ah, okay. Thanks for explaining that. I didn't realize it was possible to get into single user mode without the password for any Linux.

Is the same true for BSDs, Solaris, et al?
> I spend 100% of my time writing "database apps." I'm not saying I'm right, but I use the database to store data, and my app to maintain consistency and provide logic. You can't see the future, so why pretend?

The weird thing about that is in some organizations (like my own), databases are considered easier to change than the software. Hence the push by management to move the logic out of the view or controller layers and into the "model" (i.e. use of stored procedures, constants fetched from the DB instead of in config files or headers, etc.) Where I work, they only pay one person to do database work, but three to write code. Yet the DB guy is always crushed by work, since he gets change/reporting requests all the time.
Neat tip. Keep in mind that with all the modern email server "cloaking" and anti-spam measures this is not an absolute test.

If the server rejects it, you can be fairly sure the address is invalid. If it accepts it, you cannot 100% sure that an email actually sent to that address would get delivered all the way through to a physical mbox.
Good article. To add a few things:

1. PHP doesn't require routing. It's done for you by Apache to the PHP file at that location. Sure, you can go the way of nice frameworks like Cake and add routing for nicer URLs, but it's not required. PHP has some solution built in.

2. Deployment. The author touched on having to restart when using mod_perl, but it's more than that. In most cases, uploading files is enough. That's why it became so popular with shared hosts. Anyone with a little knowledge could do it without the host having to give them permissions to do stuff.

3. PHP was very big on re-use in the large. Basically, re-use in the large means creating a calendar app. Re-use in the small is more like creating a framework that makes it easier to create a calendar app (ala Rails/Django). So, when you're starting up, it makes it easy to show friends something really working fast. And that builds mindshare that continues on as programmers do more things.

4. Loose typing. This is probably one of the huge ones. Many languages are dynamically typed, but if you're developing in Python or Ruby, you have to cast between types. PHP says, "don't worry, I know what you mean!" I'm personally not a fan of loose typing, but I can understand why it helps PHP gain followers (esp those new at programming).

However, I kinda disagree with the author's thesis. The author argues that PHP's community backs the language so well. I'm less inclined to agree with that. During the day, I'm often working on PHP stuff and I'm constantly finding the code already written to be sub-par. Part of that is that PHP is accessible enough for those who don't understand program design to convince themselves that they're a good programmer. And so many things written in PHP might be from people who wouldn't be able to answer "what's the difference between a binary search tree and a linked list and give an example when you would use each." Not that data structures are the only thing to judge a programmer by, but you get a lot of people in the PHP world that use the guess and check method. So, the community isn't worth as much to me because I don't have such faith in their code (while I find the Python modules I look at to be of good quality).

PHP will continue to be a dominant web language because it's easy to pick up. However, I guess I'm looking for something else.
I was a fan of warrior till the day she made a blog post on her first day at cisco, with her heart swaying the other way within hours. How can any passionate individual swing their strong opinions in hours, ofcourse it is just projected and fake. I lost the respect for her that day.

Her blog on motorola was extremely popular. Motorola took it down when she quit. Why would any large company do that unless there was huge amount of disconnect and disharmony with the leader who quit.

I was a fan but it all fell like a landslide, guess in reality she had captured many in a charm. I feel she is an impressive self promoter, probably a strong techie but weak at strategy. My cousin worked at Motorola and from what I hear, she probably was one of the key reasons why motorala doomed in the mobile run. She apparently predicted iPhone would be a massive failure when moto let the popular Razr phones die.
Mozilla Top News Site
"A naturopathic "doctor" does not even attempt to use science, at least not consistently. Naturopathic medicine is feel-good mumbo jumbo. Some of it works (your guacamole example), some of it is utterly wrong (homeopathy) but still used. Naturopathic medicine does not, even in principle, attempt to use science-based medicine."

First of all, naturopathy and homeopathy have nothing in common except for that they sound kind of similar. Kind of like java and javascript.

Second, naturopathic medicine is science based. Of the four naturopathic schools in the country, two rely almost entirely on the same set of peer reviewed literature that traditional medicine relies on. The only difference is they are primarily interested in the effect of plants, not specific chemicals from plants.

Also, you may well be right on the stats, I haven't studied them closely.
And unfortunately 35,000 is just another number in this economy - does it mean anything anymore?

It's like the war: 7 killed in roadside bombing, 25 killed in rocket fire. Just number that start to lose their meaning.
But that's always been the case with such accessories.
I have been an ER/Critical Care nurse for the past 15 years. I went to nursing school right out of high school, because it was "a good steady job and you can help people." I administered narcotics to a patient before I could drink legally.

I had always wanted to be an engineer, but I believed people that told me I wasn't smart enough.

I remember writing QBasic when I was 9 years old. I begged my father for a modem for our computer for two full years. And, finally, when I was 14, he got me a 2400 baud Hayes smartmodem. After weeks of mucking about with the configuration and connection settings, I was at long last able to connect to my first BBS. I thought I was in heaven.

I mucked around a bit on that BBS for an hour or so, only to have my father try and make a phone call while the modem was connected. That's when it all came crashing down. He was furious and forbade me from ever using the modem again. I still don't know why it upset him so much. I think it had something to do with the movie War Games that had come out a few years earlier. I think Dad was scared I was going to hack into NORAD or something.

So, for years, I gave up on computers. I'd day-dream about being an engineer, only to have people around me tell me I'd regret it, that I would hate it, that I was too much of a "people person" and that my life would be a complete waste if I spent it in front of a computer screen.

But, when I was 30, I finally decided to get back in touch with my inner geek. I went back to school two classes a semester for 5 years. My work schedule as a nurse constantly changed from nights, to days, to evenings, to weekends, which forced me to go to school online. I kept plugging away at it and after 5 long years, I finished the engineering program at the University of Maryland this past May. I still have some General Ed. credits to take, but I finally finished the classes I'd need for their CMIS/software engineering degree.

This June I started to pick up web development and Django. For several months, I thought I really sucked at, and I thought it all might have been a huge mistake, because I could never get things to work right with Django. It wasn't until 3 months later, when I went to DjangoCon, that I learned that the release of Django that I had been working with for 3 months had been broken in the lead-up to the 1.0 release.

Eight weeks ago, I cut down to part-time at work, so I could focus on boot-strapping startups. If all goes well, I plan to release my first web app in a couple of weeks. My plan is to keep bootstrapping startup after startup until something takes off.

It's been a long, hard road, and I still have a long, long way to go and a lot to learn. I've thought many times that I wasn't smart enough, or too old. Things never really go according to plan. I get discouraged and frustrated a bunch. But, the only thing that can really stop me from chasing my dreams is my deciding to give them up for dead.
As a pilot, I've often contemplated this myself with some sense of sick wonder. Flying a plane is trivial compared to surgery but overlooking something important has equally dire consequences, so all pilots everywhere are taught to always use checklists. It works wonderfully. I just can't imagine going into something so life and death with a "I'm pretty good at remembering everything" attitude!
Palish seems to be conveying the local customs in a kind way.

"But we're hoping that, as in past influxes, the new arrivals will with some prodding from the existing inhabitants learn the local customs." - pg
$6 billion broadband infusion in House appropriations bill
1974 and 2008, Graphs That Lie (Or do they?)
pg actually. HN usernames are case sensitive.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PG
You're conflating "scientific studies" with "FDA-approved studies". The former proceed at whatever pace makes sense for medicine and for patients; the latter proceed at the speed of molasses.
It wasn't just accessories. DVD players, TVs, etc. everything was WAY high.
Enterprise RSS - the State of the Industry
...Except the 'fixes' you've given aren't fixes: They're patchwork on-the-spot kludges which let you ignore the problem until it crops up again. A few years of that will give you spaghetti code that is a nightmare to maintain.

How about that user who has two locations? Sure, you overlooked that in the initial design, but a permanent fix needs to be made to ensure the system will accommodate the next one which arrives.

A profile for someone located outside the US? Pretty likely you'll see that happen again if the system grows. Why not account for it correctly rather than rely upon duplicate data or another such hack?

Your urge to 'fudge and hack' is natural but the professional solution is to resolve the root cause by correcting the data model, not fiddling with the data to 'just make it work'.

After the initial glory of creating Software v1.0, much of the remaining work involves fixing the system to better reflect reality. The reason mature software takes 'exceptions and outliers' in stride is that it's been coded to do so after a great deal of trial and error in on-going analysis and discovery.

Ignoring those exceptions and working around them rather than fixing them permanently leads to madness.
What's success? What does it mean in and of itself?

Certainly, they can be successful, but at what? Not likely anything great.
The number of false positives you will get with this trick is truly disgustingly high. Blame the spammers who were using this upwards of ten years ago (!) to validate their spam lists.
Tumblr v5 Released
Germany solved their hyperinflation problem in the 20s by backing up the currency with land. I wonder if Zimbabwe will have to do the same. That would be ironic.
Self doubt is healthy.

Getting depressed and/or discouraged because of self doubt is not.

And your situation is by no means unique.
It is VERY hard to catch your first break as a professional programmer.

That is just how the industry is, the best way to get around that, is to do what you're doing.

You don't HAVE to work for free but if there's no other way it's OK.

Work, produce code, make it open source, bring a sample of of your code to your next interview.
When listening to music, your brain is ‘moving’ even if you are not
It'll be worth every penny.
Great! This works for gmail also.
Well said and this is a super hard choice too given the complexities of combining a nation, technology and politics.

A team of advisors would have sufficed but I guess the president needs someone more accountabile and of course lesser headache while ensuring this sector and its value spread across the rest is taken care of.
Is Django itself now fast under load?
The correct fix for the guy with two locations was to remove the location_id column and create a join table from People to Locations. The correct fix for the guy outside was to alter the Location model to accomodate that, which included making US postal codes optional.

Your urge to 'fudge and hack' is natural but the professional solution is to resolve the root cause by correcting the data model, not fiddling with the data to 'just make it work'.

We agree again, that's why I wrote that they're "like freezing a bottle of water, it always grows and breaks worse in the end."
> I'm just saying that a well designed data base by definition must handle the wear and tear of the app

Impossible. This is pure theory and has no ground on reality. Name me one database that was designed to handle Sarbanes-Oxley needs in the last decade.

Business requirements change, and so does the app and the database.

Tell me how you would deal with this situation in your current database designs: A few years ago, a born male person here in Brazil got his sex legally changed to female (also had a sex-change operation). So, s/he's a female for most of legal concerns, but s/he's got the genome presented on males, which means:

1) He needs to be a "female" on your employees records;
2) She needs to be a "male" on your company health insurance records;

Sorry if I sounded abnoxius, I can't argue softly in English :p
See also this Newsweek article, "It's Survival of the Weak and Scrawny", which is about hunting elk and other large game.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/177709
See, but you treat "success" and "great" like objective things. Everybody thinks different things for them.

If you're like me and think that greatness is a few-times-in-a-century thing, then look at the people who achieve it, you'll be astonished. Some of my big-list people aren't people you'd expect at all. Bill Watterson, who was by all accounts keep-to-himself in school. Samuel Beckett, who entered college as a cricket fiend and slowly gravitated towards writing.

Nobody tries to be great. There's the limit. Few average-minded people will attempt anything extraordinary. Few smart people will, for that matter. And if you don't try, you don't do it.

That said, none of the great works I've seen in my life are things I've felt to be beyond me. Do you feel otherwise? Do you look at things and feel like you could not, at birth, have entered a path of life capable of producing those things?

The things I think are beyond me are beyond me by choice. I won't ever write virtuoso piano music, because I don't want to spend 20 years learning to play the piano well enough to write that stuff. But if I really, really wanted to, I could, given enough time.

The problem is that few people realize that. They see something complex and decide they could never do that, not realizing that the more you know the simpler it seems.
Here is a concept.

Your friends don't need to share the same interests as you and you can still be friends.
Also, PHP runs everywhere. right now. Nothing to install in most cases. That's one of the reasons it is winning the open source code base wars (SugarCRM, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc.).
I'd guess it's http://www.uuorld.com
Quite alarming.

"Unlike, say, wolves or lions, which target the smallest, weakest members of a group", that too because we are equipped with artificial power. However I wonder why this phenomenon did not happen with herbivorous chain. I can't comment if rabbits and elephants would pick the smaller plants or the healthier ones. But it seems intuitive to pick the healthier ones here. May be that is why I am the evil human.
Whoopsies, ignore me, I'm stupid. :-)

EDIT: wait, does that mean there might be a ghost Unalone out there making me look bad? Suddenly I feel the need to register a hundred permutations to stay safe.
Yea if you want higher quality, I wouldn't use youtube. I still recommend XVidCap for linux... I find it much better then the others (like RecordMyDesktop). The quality will be very HQ and you could easily convert to FLV and host it yourself.

The quality will be very high, but youtube will ruin it, I agree.

Here is a higher quality version done with XVidCap: http://overtrainer.com/render.ogg
Yeah I've been following the guy for a while, the site is cool and I've used it once or twice!
PowerShell ABC's - R is for Runspace
I don't, but people won't die if my software doesn't work.
Circuit City was one of the companies featured in Jim Collins' book "Good to Great." So was Fannie Mae.

He got Wells Fargo and Walgreens right tho'.
I got my first paid programming job at 25. I've never found age to be a problem.
http://ask.searchyc.com

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Courtesy of chengmi, alaskamiller and epi0Bauqu
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=dual+monitors+ubuntu
Circuit City Closes Up Shop Once and For All
Agreed. As soon as people making 40k per year were able to buy 500k houses with little to no money down, my sirens went off.
Ever since I started taking flying lessons, I have been tempted to use checklists for everything else in life.
> The idea of putting any logic in the database never did make much sense to me for these exact reasons.

I'm a big proponent of enforcing business rules right into the data model. Constraints such as not null, reference constraints, or even conditional unique constraints (yes, there's such a thing!) should be enabled wherever possible.

Just remember, your app will not be the final app that makes use of the data. Your app comes and goes, along with many other apps written by many others. But the data lives "forever."
Reverse Evolution?
Tumblr is a great example of a startup which follows the 'tribes' principle by Seth Godin. They came up with an idea, began with the product, and let the tribe dictate where it goes next.

It's expanded to much more than a overly simple blogging interface, now it's a full fledged blog app. V5 looks amazing and the video demo does it great justice.
Agreed. What's sad is that it's the same old story - the CEO flew the company into a mountain, and gets rich for doing it. A responsible board of directors would have showed him the door - sans bonus - when he fired all of the experienced sales staff to cut costs. Unfortunately, there aren't many boards in the U.S that are looking out for their shareholders.
Americans adults reading more literature, for the first time in 25 years
Verbs (i.e, actions) can be very ambiguous, especially the common ones (to be, to do, etc.) and to parse a phrase you must first resolve this ambiguity using the context of that phrase. This context comes from many sources, including prior phrases and things like social and gestural cues, but mostly from the subject and object of that particular phrase.

I'm not sure how relatively important the subject is versus the object for resolving ambiguity, but I'm hypothesizing that by putting the subject as early as possible in a phrase, SOV and SVO languages take advantage of priming effects (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=257117356) to speed the parsing of a sentence.

(Edit: As a side note, I'm curious about free word order languages such as Russian -- with what frequency and under what situations do they use the various word orders?)