skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if someone developed a language where the compiler did Hindley-Milner type inference and was implemented in the language itself? This would make the inferencing available to IDEs, which could then automatically fill in type annotations for the programmer.
This is true for me in semi-rural Ohio, too.
What Was The Best Of The Web in 2008? A Voter’s Guide For The Crunchies.
It allows them to leverage your contacts for marketing purposes?
Hi. Thanks. Sure I will work on a solution for you.
As Malcolm Gladwell has recently highlighted: Of course Gates' family wealth helped him become a better hacker. That's how he got all that computing experience in high school. Before the invention of the microcomputer, far fewer high school students had access to computers. (I'm younger than Gates, but I do remember computer scarcity: I was among the last generation to experience it. In middle school, having gotten bored with BASIC, I taught myself Pascal from books, but I didn't get ahold of a compiler until three years later.)

But Microsoft's early success in dominating the microcomputer language market was not built on "exclusivity agreements" -- it was built on Gates and Allen's software skills, which allowed them to hit the microcomputer market early (before the Altair even shipped, in fact!) and then to hold their market position by porting their products to a lot of different systems as they came out. And if Microsoft hadn't cornered the language market on a range of early microcomputer systems, there would have been no reason for IBM to approach Bill Gates with that fateful agreement that brought the company into the OS business.
Haskell does this already. You can ask the Haskell runtime the type annotation for a given function. The Haskell's Emacs mode (http://www.haskell.org/haskell-mode/) can insert it at point.

Also, PLT Scheme's "Mr. Spidey" (http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/mrspidey/) looks like an interesting type-inference system (non-HM), though I haven't personally used it.
"Allow us to spam all of your contacts so we can 'go viral'?"
"You most likely have a place to live (parents)"

Lots of young people are turned out of home when they reach adult age. I wouldn't assume that any particular nineteen-year-old has anywhere else to live but a place where he is paying rent.
If that's what you think after reading articles like this, then you are absolutely right. Some people aren't wired to work for themselves, and they are better off being dissuaded from doing it.
Ok, so what about when the guy tells his wife "If you do not loose weight I will leave you"? How is that different?
I think that $75k would be reasonable. That's on the low side (25th percentile), but reasonable. Below $50k and I'd say you're begging to be audited. But I don't do this for a living or anything.

Really, your CPA and lawyer should be able to give you an exact figure. That's their business. It's a little odd to ask for that advice here when you are already paying professionals in the field for that advice. Your CPA/lawyer should have experience with what is safe. Use it.
Fair call. MIT is known to be hard and I know nothing about it, so I'll defer to you on this one. I was just listing it on the roster of "demanding colleges". Evidently, MIT is in a league of its own when it comes to being demanding.
That's a pretty normal time span for a laptop to fail. Someone working at Dell once told me that components generally start failing after or around 2 years.

My laptop rule of thumb: always buy the extended warranty.
isn't the "reasonable" compensation more about the max you can pay yourself, not the min? So that you can't set your salary at whatever your profit is, in order to avoid paying business taxes.
When you're selling the same content to others, perhaps it doesn't make much sense, especially when these others repurpose this content into RSS feeds with their own advertisments.
I don't see this as a repudiation of the 10K hours theory. Hannah Montana's fame is due to the Disney machine as teej mentioned. I'm sure the brand managers, agents, marketers and other pros responsible for her success have logged that kind of time individually and she is the product rather than the producer. I'm not a Doors fan, but maybe they had a stellar agent who spent countless hours developing relationships and promotional skills. Godin's better point is that it may take far less time to become successful in emerging media rather than mature businesses since there are no established benchmarks.
On SEO, a few small websites I own can fit a single page and still look good. I like having a single page full of content too, because it's really easy for visitors to find their information.

But I've been tempted to split up these sites into multiple pages just to get higher in the search ranks. Not sure if I should.
As an American who was born in the USSR, I can confidently say that this prediction is completely based on the typical Russian misunderstanding of the culture of the United States.

He seems to think that the United States is exactly like the USSR in 1990, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Just look at his map. Its hilarious.

The USSR was a conglomeration of formerly separate countries who were culturally distinct, constantly bickered and fought. This was was mostly because the USSR wasn't around long enough for people to forget what independence for their country was like.

So yes, at the first sign of weakness of the central government each previously independent country eagerly broke away. They even had their old government systems to dredge up and fall back on when they wanted.

The 50 states, on the other hand, have never been separate countries (with one or two minor exceptions).

The Texans, while they might complain about the Californians, do not consider themselves a different ethnicity.

And the map's ideas of what countries will control what parts? Is he kidding me?

How can China possibly control the west coast? Its insane. The language and cultural barrier is insurmountable. And Mexico controlling Texas and the south east? Are you kidding me?

This shows a complete ignorance of the cultural issues of the region.
"In some ways, this is a restatement of the Dip. Being the best in the world brings extraordinary benefits, but it's not easy to get there."

Not The Dip... ... the devil's in the details, which The Dip has nothing to do with. If you cast a wide and fuzzy net you can claim you said a lot by saying a little.

/I read that book and am not entirely unabashed about it. If anybody wants that book, just to find out why, let me know. Geographic constraints apply. But don't shell out howevermany dollars it is at the bookstore. -_-
Florida, the Next Hotbed of Venture Capital?
The names you listed read like the definition of "outlier". If you paid attention only to the salaries that are often mentioned in the press, you would probably see these four, and a handful of those infamous Fortune 500 CEOs who see compensation on the order $30+ million.

Taking an average from that sample, I guess you'd want to pay yourself $15,000,000.50.
"Hawkins says fear of failure is a big issue for his adult students: "We don't want to be seen as incompetent or struggling with a task, because we are so competent in so many areas of our life. We do so many things well, so to start with something we don't do well is a real challenge.""
OK,

The article indeed shows what the Hindley-Milner algorithm is. The discussion is similar to a google techtalk I've seen. The discussion seems straightforward and I can see the connection to automatic theorem proving and prolog. But the article doesn't particular say why the algorithm is cool. I mean, one could embedded some logic problem in the types of the functions one used and get the answer to the problem using Hindley-Milner but it would be easier to just use prolog or an automatic theorem prover. Further, not all programming problems are easily amenable to being put into the form of a logic problem.

So I'm waiting for the article that shows why this is cool, I.E., what concrete problems the Hindley-Milner algorithm would be useful for.
Time Savers
There is actually some good research behind the number, which is just given as a rule of thumb. The other rule of thumb figure is 10 years, which is much easier to conceptualize. 1000 of productive hours per year.

Basically it encompasses a jumble of things that includes passion, patience, practice, and persistence. The 4 Ps is a coincidence.

Of course it's not a magical threshold, but when you can do something (in a focused and conscious manner) for 10 years, it's not hard to imagine that you have reached mastery.

The crime of fluffy writing (dunno about Gladwell's new book; didn't read it) is taking rule of thumb numbers and citing them as precision numbers as a way to seem exacting and scientific.
Apple: The Dream iPhone Pro
Joel is right. Software is a great industry and programmers, as a fundamental part of that industry, enjoy great benefits as a result. Professional, clean, safe work environment, good salaries, benefits, smart peers, growth opportunities.

But it's everyone responsibility, including programmers, to take ownership of their career. They need to work on their craft, grow in their roles, learn other parts of the business, and take responsibilities that are aligned with their long-term goals. My gut feeling is that the people who feel stuck in "sucky jobs" are treating their jobs as just that -- jobs, rather than opportunities to grow, learn, and eventually be better than their boss is. The latter requires significantly more time, of course, far beyond the average 9-5'ers habits.
Sorry, but I disagree. Of course it helps to be under the Disney name/brand. But to say she's a "product rather than the producer" is plain wrong.

"She wrote eight of the ten songs, credited by her birth name Destiny Hope Cyrus." (wikipedia)

People generally don't blindly buy music that sounds rubbish just because it has the Disney name on it. Give her some credit at least... Perhaps you dislike the particular genre of music, but that doesn't mean there isn't a large amount of talent there. Especially for a 16 year old.
Sure, but that bandwidth is very flexible also; you GET 800GB bandwidth mentioned in the above plan, but what if you just need 400GB...or 1600GB? AWS will scale from your launch day till the day you go IPO, or at least are at the stage when you can buy terabytes of bandwidth in bulk, cause you know you'll use it.

Really don't agree with the last part though...unless your code is really slow, a rewrite is only going to waste your time and focus your attention on the rewrite rather than developing your business. Defiantly improve as you go...most of us are geeks, we'd have a massive grin on our face if we saved a few milliseconds from each request, but you should only do it if it's actually worth it! :)
the irc group on freenode has some groupies there who help. I have it installed, dont bother with debian, use a clean install of ubuntu

here are some notes to get started from a clean install (replace your own vars)

install Ubuntu 810
apt-get update
apt-get install subversion
adduser --home /home/bleu bleu
su bleu
svn co http://svn.scrapy.org/scrapy
mv scrapy-trunk scrapy
ls scrapy
branches tags trunk
sudo root
as root
apt-get install python-twisted
apt-get install nano
su bleu
source ~/.bashrc
pico ~/.bashrc
#add this to end of file:
export PYTHONPATH=/home/bleu/scrapy/trunk

python
>>> import scrapy
quit()
scrapy/trunk/scrapy/bin/scrapy-admin.py startproject myproject
I would love to teach - I have a B.S. in Computer Science and I have 20+ years working R&D in the tech industry. I approached our local school board to see if they could use my services (free of charge) to teach programming/technical skills in their new computer lab. I was told to basically come back after I had a MS in teaching. The very next day, I picked up the local paper which complained that they couldn't find any qualified teachers. The problem is not that they can't find qualified candidates, its their outdated qualifications that are a letting down our children
or, we could all just continue to say "Practice makes perfect" to each other.
Don't incorporate in the United States? Does the law still apply?
I would highly recommend against just paying yourself just cost-of-living. A low salary and high dividend is a big-time audit flag for the IRS... if your salary AND your dividends are low, then there's no problem.

You state that your company is profitable. In this case, if you pay yourself a low salary and get audited, the IRS can (and will) retroactively adjust your salary to whatever THEY feel is reasonable and comparable for a CEO of a successful small company. Then you will owe back taxes, penalties and interest on whatever amount they determine you cheated them out of. The process isn't very democratic and getting audited is a HUGE pain, so I'd recommend going with something reasonable in the 100K range to avoid scrutiny.
My first thought about this was wow, 5 years of e-mail backlog is a lot to get caught up on ;^). Actually, I think it will be a wonderful gift your son will cherish for his entire life. It used to be rare for anyone to get any insight into what their life was like when they were very young, save for possibly a few photos/videos and memories of family members, but now the technology is such that everyone should be able to have access to these kinds of views into their early days.
Yeah. I didn't get the joke at first; the explanation was worthwhile.
Lets Go Deep - Vegas Vacation?
>Most plumbing work that needs to be done is pretty small. I call the guy. Talk to him, if I like the attitude he gets to do a job. If he is good he gets a second bigger job.

How do you arrange this short of sabotaging your plumbing after the first job? Major job are rare enough that I've never needed one in over a decade of living on my own, and in 3 different countries at that.
Links to startup anecdotes (poor man's Founders at Work)
Those words should never leave her mouth - only the worst of relationships involve threats of one side leaving. You either hang in there or you split, threats to get things done don't do any good, and are indicative of a very, very wrong relationship.

I would've had said "get a job or get some business, your choice". The concept of divorce should never be hung over anyone's head to spur them to action.
That's exactly the thoughts that I had. The map looked like it was logically partitioned by geography with the map maker unfamiliar with the local cultures in those states. I can't see Arizona siding with California over Texas (or any of the other western states except maybe Oregon and Washington). The same goes for traditionally southern states of South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia all opting to join the EU?

I can see an economic collapse and the fall of the USA as the most dominant super-power, but I don't see the country fracturing along the lines given in this article. One does not necessarily lead to the other.
Your first goal is a great one. The third may be also. But the second one? It's impossible to determine how good a video is based on the views it receives. The masses generally don't like the top-notch high-quality videos, they like bland-and-generic above everything.

When I was 13, I got together a group of friends and released a video on Newgrounds that hit 100,000 views - quite a lot back then! The video itself was terrible, though: the fact that more people have seen that than anything else I've done online is not exactly a fun thought for me. And when you look at other popular videos, very rarely are they really smart, clever things. At best they're "cool." You don't have many instances of people creating something thoughtful and enlightening and getting half a million views.

While measuring goals is a great thing, possibly figure out how to make a more useful goal for the video. Possibly even just "make X videos." The more you make, the more you'll learn about making them, and the better you'll end up with.
Yeah his ego is really a big turn off.

"I did this pixel by pixel, beautiful isn't it?"
"One time it took me 3 days to draw this tree."
Read HN only on Saturdays (or some other fixed day of the week). I can easily waste 2 or 3 hours a day to "keep up" with the news, this is ridiculous.

Trying to learn something truly worthwhile by reading the news is a bit like trying to learn by watching TV or trying to get rich by buying lottery tickets: sometimes it works, usually it doesn't, and even if you succeed it's not quite as edifying as doing it the right way (ex: learning useful knowledge by reading books or getting rich by starting a company).

I'd be interested to know if there's some day of the week where the stories are usually the most relevant.
Why not just sell it to the NDS homebrew community?
You make some interesting points, but the biggest casualty in "being offended" is comedy.

In this case it was being used in a comedic tone, as is most often the case. Some people just see the word, and not the context/back story, and assume it's offensive.
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It's a marketing strategy on his part.
The editor dilemma
Microsoft contemplating pay-per-use PC model?
I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I have made a decision recently.

If I'm going to continue consulting instead of working on a startup next year, on the side I'm going to work on something technical and fun, like an automated .NET Ocaml-to-YUI Data Access Layer. Something where I can learn and create a framework to use in a startup later on.
That's a "specially designed for Googlers with a 'droid' on the back" G1!!
You could resell it on ebay, et voilà, you'd get your bonus!
It's a great thought. I'd love to see more from my childhood (sadly a house fire about 15 years ago has reduced pictures from my childhood to a couple of dozen). My own son has about 30K pictures of him already and he's just 2.5. Right now I have everything stored on my network at home, but soon that will run out of space and the odds of it surviving 30 years is low (particularly given my own experience!).

A while ago I bought the domain iCapsule.com with the idea of creating a digital time capsule that you could periodically put digital content into (or stream it for that matter) and the subscriber would then buy an insurance policy that would fund the repository for a generation. I originally was thinking it'd be sold to people who by the cryogenic storage so that they can have a backup of their life just in case. But then I experienced what you've seen that, particularly first time parents, are really into capturing lots of pictures, video, etc. of their kids.

There are a lot of services like this already that do backup (i.e. you pay a monthly fee and they store a copy in the cloud). Even Amazon AWS does that. But no one has created the "generational delivery" thing and marketed that. I think there's a business there. If anyone is interested in noodling about it, contact me on my blog (http://www.altgate.com/)...I think that would be fun.
I don't think she's particularly talented. She's decent in a field where everybody else is worse, but I've seen young actors that blow her away.

Her voice, too, is good but not great. Again: there are young singers who are incredibly better than her.

She's not terrible. But she isn't exactly good, either.
Why Orthodox Economics Fails
A Floating Backbone for Internet over the Ocean
This is unlikely to occur. The main reasons:

1) The cultural reason. A lot of politics is cultural; most people have a self image, and pick a party to fit that image. The self image of Obama's party: smart/educated/cultured, not to mention altruistic. Providing education is viewed as a morally virtuous act ("give something back", with "in return for money and excellent job security" being unstated), not merely a professional choice.

De-emphasize education? Sacrilege. It's like suggesting a religious conservative should de-emphasize traditional hetero marriage. Good luck with that.

2) It goes strongly against the interests of Obama and his party: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/select.php?ind=W04
Map of Travel Time to Major Cities: A global map of Accessibility
God bless Greenspan, patron saint of pool skatin’
I have decided to focus on personal growth. I made this list some days ago.

Personal qualities

Goals:

- Non needy

- Non pleasing

- Give value

- Accept other peoples value

Method:

- Be faithful to own values

- Base in own self recognition, not others opinion.

- Accept the importance of signal values

- Don't do or say things that undermines my own status.

Excercise:

Goals

- running, cycling, swimming, workout.

Method

- Sign up for several amateur races (running, cycling, triathlon)

Professional:

Goals

- improve self promotion

Method

- Blog, Network

Startup:

Goal

- Launch my project

Method:

- Keep on working? (I've rewritten it two and a half time)

- Freelancing pays the bills

Friends:

Goal

- Keep old friends, but focus on making new friends.

Method

- Actively engage in other people lives, don't need "invitation".

Dating:

Goal

- Date more girls, or meet potential long term girlfriend

Method

- Dating sites, Social activities, Bars

Sailing:

Goal

- Participate in as many regattas as possible (I bought a sailing boat last year)

Method
?

Happy new year!
how can i get a more respectable job title?

Well, you can found your own company and give yourself whichever title you want. But that won't fool anyone for long. ;)

The tricks for improving your resume are well known and are covered in all the books. Learn something about the business you're in, whether that's design or publishing or manufacturing or finance or retail sales, so that you aren't just mindlessly doing what the "domain experts" tell you to do. Do work that demonstrably adds value to the business and be able to describe how it does so. Learn the fundamentals of accounting so that you know how people keep score when evaluating a company -- that will help you to articulately describe how your everyday activities lead to higher revenues or lower costs. Learn to write and speak so that you can better sell your stuff. Learn to teach and hire and manage and direct so that you can improve your leverage: Why settle for being a better programmer when you can command a small platoon of better programmers?

Or you could always take the (ahem) short cut: Found a company, make scads of money, cash out, and change your title to "mogul" or perhaps "playboy". ;)

Of course, doctors and lawyers and accountants and architects and graphic designers may do all of these things while retaining their job titles. But once a programmer starts doing these things she will probably be referred to by some other title [1], no matter what fraction of her day is composed of software work or how much her programming education informs her day-to-day decisions. That's my point.

---

[1] She will probably want another title. I've chatted with designers who are experts in Drupal and who are heavily invested in the notion that, until you actually type an original PHP function definition into a text editor, you are "not a programmer". They'll sit there, constructing the equivalent of enormous SQL queries with the GUI-based query builder, building mind-blowing spiderwebs of relational structure with the GUI-based model builder, copying and pasting and modifying PHP, typing in custom CSS and even writing original jQuery code, yet all the while maintaining that they are not programmers and that what they are doing is not programming. To suggest otherwise is to commit a serious faux pas. It's like accusing them of being day laborers.
I'm more meaning that changing architecture/language may mean you can run the entire thing on a single server, rather than 10.

Doing that sort of optimization helps a lot with scaling later on.
An iFund Applicant's Response to the December 2008 KPCB iFund Data Breach