skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously I never meant to imply that there were no programmers who are 50+. In fact, I work with some of them, and I respect them greatly.

I don't have any hard data, but I can say, anecdotally, most 50+ are not "techies" and they don't know their way around a computer system. I believe this belief is rather common.

I think some 50+ year olds would make exceptional startup founders. However, an older person who may be founding a "social, local, mobile" startup because he's looking for a career change is going to have a credibility gap because of the general impression that older people are not technically minded. If the pitcher doesn't have a strong compsci background or history to counteract that notion, he'll have to make up for it in the presentation.

We are all free to pontificate on whether this is a fair generalization or not, but I think it is clearly that it is commonly held and something an older founder will have to face and address if he wants to succeed.
Queries in information retrieval
What Facebook knows (data mining social graphs)
First I side far more with the second than the first, but I would say it's not enough to go for things that are interesting. It's important to work on things that are inspiring. In my experience and in the experience of many I have worked with inspiration can overcome all sorts of obstacles.

But on planning, I am a huge fan of planning. I think one should plan extensively and in detail but then shelve the plan and not even look at it during execution. The real danger with plans is that they are inflexible and cannot take into account unforeseen developments. However, the time spent thinking through the plan places one in a position to do so. As Eisenhower said, "Plans are nothing. Planning is everything."
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1702200
Did using LSD help make Steve Jobs smarter?
A Trip to The Future of What Our Industry Will Look Like
As I said, I read that line as an illustration of an obvious incongruity between the company the founder is trying to pitch and the perception of the background and qualifications of the founder. Age plays into this, and if the 50+ founder doesn't have a strong history in compsci/startups/whatever, the assumptions generally attached to 50+-year-old sales people will stick. As such, the founder will need to recognize that he needs to establish credibility with the audience before he can successfully sell them on his ultra-hip location-aware social tweeter app. Generalizations and stereotypes are a reality that founders must shape to their advantage.
Condition One and the Victoria Secret Fashion Show
Is anyone else worried about Apple's focus with maps?
FlyOver is a distraction from the flaws in their product.

Crying about it being in "beta" doesn't mean anything. Do we really think Apple can make a far better map solution in basically three months?

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ios-6-maps-screwup-2012-6

www.gizmodo.com/5918176/google-maps-vs-apple-maps-a-side-by-side-comparison

The Maps are bad.

Really bad.

Beta isn't used to LABEL OCEANS.

Is the app randomly crashing? Yes, lets fix that.

But a map that shows 1/2 of a massive body of water like a local bay? Just unacceptable.

Who tested this thing?

Google has had 10 years to get this right and Apple knows that they should have something CLOSE to that before they really try to supplement their own option. Having turn-by-turn means nothing if the maps lack readability or clarity.

This makes me also think...has Apple really ever given the sort of care and attention to something that maps require?

Google has shown the work what it takes to make premier mapping services and has gone through great lengths to preserve that sort of leverage. I also think having a desktop browser version helps since it offers a vast array of customizations and configurations.

Consider even the search logic used. Google's resources and ability to interpret even vague queries really makes you appreciate their map product even more.

Maps are a CORE part of smart phone experiences. Apple better not give us more FlyOver demos and thinks that this cuts it.

I really think they're making a graven error here.

I'm an iPhone user but I would greatly consider paying for a Google turn-by-turn option if they made one.
That's an impressively detailed simulation. This is tangentially related, but I made an html5 Apple ][+ emulator which, of course, includes a 6502 component. Mine doesn't simulate gates or anything that cool (and isn't even 100% correct yet) but it boots and runs a lot of different software (at full speed): http://porkrind.org/a2/
Denial of Petition for Discovery Surrounding Alleged Facebook IPO Fraud
The Mindset of a Champion
I don't know that a "fruitful life" is something that can be objectively defined, so I don't know that there is anything to measure statistically.

Also certainly talent matters, but inspiration (real inspiration) is important to long-term productivity. For example I have a friend who had serious issues working and typing due to old neck injuries. She became inspired to look into the connection of bows to Old Norse mythology and in the process not only typed a long written work (she's now working on a book) but took up bow-making and made several original contributions to my own understanding of some of the connections. None of this would have been possible for her if it were not for this inspiration.

Similarly when you look at people like Linus who can code all day every day there is a certain level of inspiration that's required to do this without burning out. I also know that when I am in an inspired mood even hard problems are easy, but when I am in an ordinary mood, hard problems can be hard......
Out of curiosity, why was the syntax in the current draft chosen over this?
Things I learned as a young, female, solo founder who can’t code
That's a terrible attitude to encourage. Accepting the status-quo as a junior is a great way to encourage them to never improve or question the more debatable practices.

Teaching juniors to care about software quality and software maintainability is hugely important in order to encourage an overall improvement within the software dev industry.
A good chunk of runes aren't available at 30, and you only have the full set at 60.

I know that my skill set changed pretty radically on subsequent difficulty levels, the same tactics didn't work terribly well.
Perhaps this is merely a difference in perception. I re-read nirvana's post I originally responded after reading your perception of it, and it comes off defensive and passive aggressive. In particular:

"Thus, given that we've decided your team is not strong enough to be investors in our company we're going to pass." <-- well if the VC's team is not strong enough to be investors, why were you pitching them for money in the first place? Seems to me like if you'd pitching them, then clearly you thought they were good, because you're trying to get something out of them. Therefore, a "you're not good enough for us anyway" response reminds me of the story of the fox and the sour grapes[1].

Perhaps also a difference in perspective, Josh suggested a solution at the end of the post - so to me, it's not justifying lying as it is merely stating that something is broken, and here are some steps to take a stab at solving the problem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
Great idea. Certifications and trust are an important layer of the economy to help both companies and customers make better decisions more easily.
Can you sit before your computer for 24x7? If not, please try http://acobot.com .
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Forgive me for kicking the hornet's nest, but is all this outrage about privacy or about the abuse of government power?

The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading an email about a friend passing away.

Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private? What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at work be completely private?

The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?
There's a game called Rejection Therapy[1] that's designed to reframe rejection as success. It also gives players the permission to fail and experiment with personal boundaries.

[1] http://rejectiontherapy.com
Rude and condescending.
Thanks for the courtesy of a constructive discussion. :)

Yes, that's a valid point, if you mean that smartphones have less resources (memory, CPU) to handle JavaScript execution. But keep in mind that a native smartphone app is a thick client; it has all of the view logic.

Perhaps I need to back up and explain my point better. Maybe people are misunderstanding me because they think I'm talking about what's going to happen in the next few months. Server-side view rendering is not going anywhere anytime soon. But it's on its way out in that it's an anachronistic way of thinking about the web; it's a relic of the past--of the time of web "pages"--and not of the future, of web "apps" and "resources". As long as you are serving content that's primarily to be "read", like articles, books, blogs, etc., server-side rendering has its place.

But look what's happening to the web. Native iPhone apps have to store their data somewhere, so they communicate to the backend via an API. Cars are reading Twitter. Thinking about the past of the web, only browsers consumed web content. Now non-browsers consume web data via APIs, and I see this trend as increasing.

I see a trend where more web apps will be like a "smart database in the cloud", meaning they hold data and business logic and communicate via JSON APIs. There may be a variety of client devices accessing this data in the cloud: native iPhone apps, desktop browsers, other Internet-enabled devices.

The main point is that clients are no longer only browsers. The clients could be a variety of devices running on a variety of operating systems. So it doesn't make sense for the server to render the view and send it down the pipe for the client to display. It makes more sense for the server to send data to the client and the client to decide how to render it.

I'm not claiming that server-side view rendering will go away completely; it has its place with articles and blogs. But with apps, I see a movement toward thick clients and I don't see this trend slowing down. It's hard for me to envision a world in 10 years with less smart phones, less devices hooked to the Internet, and people only accessing web apps and web app data with browsers.

Let me also put this in context of the article's original point, that PHP has a nice feature of being able to be embedded directly in HTML. Yes, this is nice. But my point is that if you are starting your web career and therefore are looking toward the future, the types of web sites that will use inline PHP will be more like content sites and less like web apps. And I expect a bigger demand, higher pay, and arguably more interesting work for web app creators than web content site creators.
Jiggy I honestly think I remember you especially if you played under this exact name. Anyways I was on the other side as a core myg0t member for a while. It was fun, and why I started programming.
Annie The Psychic Anteater Predicts the Winner Of The Heat vs. Thunder (VIDEO)
I take that back as my dyslexia kicked in. I knew. Jiggy2001
1. The value/measure of a VC to their bosses (their LP / investors) are whether or not they provide a good return. Period. Their bosses do not incentivize them based on great interviewing skills. There is nothing to be "called out" for here. They could have the crappiest interviewing skills, as long as they make their investors money. This is not a contest on meritocracy, or skill, as it pertains to interviewing.

2. I'm sorry, but your response isn't even relevant to my response. I wasn't commenting on the VCs interviewing skills at all. I was commenting on nirvana's response.

3. This is the real world. In a perfect world, every candidate would be interviewed by the world's best interviewer that can see past all our weakness and only see all your strength (interviewees would want that, no?) Unfortunately, you work with what you have - not with what you wish you had.

Cheers.
Ask HN: Serendipity and chasing what you love?
Hey guys, has anyone pursued education or training in something that you love that's worlds apart from your startup or day job? Have you had any serendipitous outcomes?

I've been doing IT since high school, graduated university in it, and have worked up a great career to date. Although it's an incredible industry, as are the creative and intellectual people it attracts; I'm sometimes floored by the intangibility of it. I'm 28 now, and am starting to pursue all those things I liked as a little kid. I've now been taking a lot of trade courses after work in welding, electrical, and have an earth moving and escavation course lined up in a few months.

All of this is based purely on interest, but I'm interested to know if anyone's done something similar that's led to unexpected outcomes?
Videoconferencing system that shows who's talking to whom.
The fact that I shrugged and said "meh, standard" when I saw these confirms that I really need to be looking for a new job.

I do tech support for a range of small biz and I expect to see something this bad once or twice a week. Easy.

Trying to convince clients that paying someone over time (so its completed out of biz hours) to "fix" something which "works" is close to impossible.
Well this is interesting. Third story from the top is about how Reddit is kickbanning a bunch of sites (e.g. the Atlantic) for nasty SEO, then a5seo submits an Atlantic story, his history is full of submits by the Atlantic, and he has steady stream of submissions with zero comments. Joke? Art? An SEOer not paying attention?
I am not part of the DoD, but as I understand it a lot of entrenched usage of IE6 these days is usually internal apps. So, perhaps they use IE6 for private networks, and use IE8, Firefox, et al for public-facing workstations.
Considering that we still vent frustration over IE9, it's good to see someone hit some people over the head and get them off this crap browser.
You don't need to convince me (like I said, I have a Asus Transformer).

I'm merely pointing out that it isn't likely to be a priority for Apple.
Ex-VFX guy here again. I feel like I have to comment on these threads because I'm thrilled to see 35mm film die.[1] The DRM sucks but....

> There are instances in the US already where some studios are refusing to freight 35mm film prints to cinemas.

Yeah, because it's crazy expensive. It costs ~$1500 to strike and ship a 35mm print[2]. Also, did you know that prints are delivered by some specialized delivery company? They're not just shipped around by FedEx. I can't remember the name of the company right now.

This incident sucks for them but I feel like this move to digital is great for the environment and a better moviegoing experience. I love the rock-solid picture with awesome contrast, and not to mention the lack of nasty chemical process in order to create it.

[1] - My original comment on "RIP Movie Camera": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3114120

[2] - http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digita...
The major problem I have with reddit isn't censorship, although that's certainly occasionally there. It's not even the increasing stupidity of the users and the move to the lowest common denominator. It's not the astroturf advertising that pops up every day. What bugs me most is the blatant support and promotion of certain classes of bigotry and hate speech by the owners. Yet I still keep coming back...
Yeah, I think OP owes us some explanation.
I generally make heavy use of both server-side and client-side caching. It really depends on the site. If it's just an internal company tool then I usually don't worry about intelligent caching.

I understand the danger of introducing PHP to CSS though. I won't be making database calls or anything like that from a .css file.
I'm a "highly skilled immigrant".

I moved to the US at the age of 17, to go to college (on full financial aid). I graduated and stuck on for a PhD in computer science. American private organizations (i.e. Williams College) have spent $200,000 on my education. The NSF (which indirectly through my advisor's grant funds my graduate education) spends $80,000+ per year on my education. ($160,000 so far, and counting)

Let's leave alone the stupid fact that my visa (F-1) is explicitly a non-immigrant visa (if I say that I have an intention to immigrate to the US someday; I can be deported or denied re-entry or visa renewal). So time spent in the US doesn't count for squat. If I hypothetically wanted to stay in the US, I would have to go to the "back of the line" and get an H1-B.

I'm from India, so unless I qualify for an EB-1 visa (i.e. I get a tenure track position at a top research university) it's 5+ years on the Green Card waiting list. During those 5+ years on the waiting list I am tied to an employer. This, obviously, decreases my negotiating situation. If I get fired, I have 2 weeks to find a new job or get deported. If I switch jobs, the green-card wait time can in some conditions be restarted. I am at the whims of a ridiculous bureaucracy at all times (the few times I've dealt with USCIS for employment authorization for internships have been a nightmare).

The H1-B is a poor option. Forget startups.

In contrast, due to my youth and education I am eligible for a work-permit not tied to any particular employer in Canada, and qualify for permanent residency in a year or two. Same with Singapore. The UK used to be the same before the Conservatives came to power and halted all immigration.

To the xenophobes, I'm not saying I have a right to enter your country. I'm just asking whether it's in your best interests to severely discourage me from entering. I probably will leave when I'm done with my PhD. No. I certainly will leave, because to state otherwise risks deportation under current immigration rules.
While I generally use sed sparingly because of testability issues, I agree with the general point. The UNIX console tools are extremely powerful for text processing and graphical IDE's don't even come close. I have never found a graphical IDE that could match even VIM in text processing.

Sure maybe it adds a file browser or a couple of menu commands for building and running. But in terms of actual coding, VIM rules (I am sure EMACS fans feel the same way about EMACS and for similar reasons).

The selling point of an IDE is generally that it's "integrated" whatever that means. The selling point of UNIX or Linux is you can string the tools together, loosely integrated, to accomplish a better job, but it's not integrated in the same way out of the box.

I don't think there is any question that the UNIX approach leads to better productivity in my mind. The issue is that like all high productivity tools, it has a learning curve.
Ask HN: Service that sends 0-day security bulletins only for software we use?
Staying up to date with vulnerabilities is proving to be a difficult task. Not all software has security mailing lists, and some do not even have forums or any discussion thread thereof. Lastly, operating system package updates are not always fast enough to protect against targeted attacks.

Is there any service that will keep track of the vulnerabilities of all popular software and will only tell us about the software we care about so that we can patch the software the instant a vulnerability becomes public?

If not, can you make one tptacek?

Thanks in advance,
neotux
It's certainly not the entire DoD. Firefox is explicitly supported on most new sites, with specialized plugins available that simplify security setup (install certs, CAC access).
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OpenIt4Africa : hackathon for new tech for Africa
You couldn't have given a better example of a defensive, immature response that discourages actual dialogue. It's also a little pathetic, in a "sour grapes" sort of way. If you had the ability to turn down VCs for these reasons, you wouldn't be facing this kind of rejection.
Site uses facial recognition find pornstars that look like friends. [NSFW]
The story links to an "https" URL, which is odd for several reasons,

1. Since when does a blog need to be secure?

2. The certificate is issued to "*.wordpress.com", which is useless. Each subdomain under wordpress.com should have a distinct certificate since they have a distinct author. The certificate should be specific to the author, not the host.

- I realize it is not realistic to assign unique IP addresses to each wordpress.com subdomain. I just don't like it.

3. The page loads insecure content from gravatar.com and googleservices.com, which throws up annoying errors.
I worked with the Tech crew in my high school theater department for a couple of years. There we explicitly removed network connectivity from from the sound/lighting computer to increase stability.
It depends what you are trying to do. If you are only targeting browsers, and especially if you don't need a lot of responsiveness, it's much simpler to just render views on the server side and optimize your server for speed. It takes a lot of effort to write a thick client.

But if you are targeting a browser and a native iPhone app, the view logic lives on the iPhone app. It used to be that you could just serve up a web page and assume that your client was a browser. Not anymore, and that's my point. And my point is that the trend will continue: I think we will have more variety of non-browser clients in the future, not less. Your car, refrigerator, geranium, etc. will all be hooked up to the web.

Keep in mind that I'm not talking about whether you should create your web app in Backbone.js today, but I'm looking years into the future, anticipating trends.
I was quite skeptical, but I just realized- you know what they are not doing when they are at the movies with friends? Committing crimes.
Regarding #1. The author of the essay left out that he and the other VCs have learned to identify behavior in the interview that equates to ability, or lack of ability, to make money. For example, the fidgeting he observes in response to a certain question indicates that the founder is less likely to make money because of an unaddressed problem, possibly unaddressable due to the founder's character or way of doing business.

The essay jumps straight from interview behavior to a decision to not fund, leaving the reader to work out what is the assumption. There is simply no other reason the VC would consider such behavior important.
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