skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Vim - Putting arrows to use
I've always preferred using Windows alongside OS X in a VM, unless it's a graphics intensive task.

Any reason VMWare is explicitly mentioned? I've always used Parallels and they've had the bootcamp integration for a while now.
> or maybe SO should just expand to encompass that sort of FAQ function?

Some of the tag wikis do this:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/java/info

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/c%23/info

So Cletus' post might make more sense as the tag wiki for, say:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/database/info
Have you looked at Udacity, Coursera, and MitX/EdX? The courses in all of them are graded, although by computer rather than by human.

I haven't taken any MitX/EdX courses yet, but for both Udacity and Coursera there have also been forums for each course where students got additional feedback on their work. For instance, if you didn't understand something, you'd ask in the forums and other students, or a teaching assistant, or sometimes even the professor, would reply.

Knowing if your education is correct is not a problem with these courses.
The founder Dileep George was a founder/advisor at Numenta. I believe it was his paper on HTMs that led to its founding. He left in 2010, but curious as to how Recursive Cortical Networks differ from Numenta's product, which is moving waaay more slowly than they would like.
Teach this class: http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/
Twice Raises $4M (IA, SV Angel, CrunchFund) For Secondhand Clothing Marketplace
Old-style marketing is where you run around to meetings and conferences, build relationships, convince people one on one. Old-style marketing is dead. I say this as an old-style marketer.

Why dead? Old-style isn't repeatable, it doesn't scale, and you can't train for it. Old-style is expensive, and doesn't mesh with developer culture.

Growth hacking has replaced old-style marketing. (google it!) Growth hacking has super-scale, repeatability, measurabilty. Growth hacking is code-driven - it is developer culture.

IMHO the best approach is Steve Blank style customer development, followed by product development and growth hacking. Developer culture top to bottom.
Now the OP just need to teach himself programming in ten years [1] ;)

[1] http://norvig.com/21-days.html
It's pretty common to subsidize employee equity because employees having equity are incented to work, and because common generally is discounted to preferred by a larger factor very early in the formation of the company. It's reasonable to simultaneously treat employee equity as $2mm valuation and investor equity at $5mm valuation, especially with a note.

In this case, though, I think the way to win the negotiation is to walk. A competent engineer is more like $150-200k total comp in the bay area, and doing that as $100k + 100k of equity/yr in a real company is pretty plausible.

A more plausible story is offering $50-100k and then equity levels which ramp up rapidly as you go down to $50k. Someone taking $50k vs. $60k should get more than $10k x 4 of extra equity. Maybe something like 100/0.10 90/0.15 80/0.25 70/0.40 60/0.6 50/1. Then, if you need to prioritize candidates, absent other factors, the 50/1 people have a plus mark.
I have been reading HN for years, my account creation date is irrelevant. However, I agree with you; my comment was terse, snarky, and didn't allow for any real debate.

However, I my stance doesn't change one bit. Six months is not enough time to learn enough to be a good software developer, period. I am a self taught software engineer, but it took a long time before I was capable of writing production quality code (certainly more than 6 months) and I am of course still learning.

We don't need more people like this in the field. I interview enough of them and I can't stand it. Great, so you can write a basic website propped up by a massive framework.

Do you know how to troubleshoot performance problems? Can you diagnose non-trivial issues, perhaps relating to the underlying hardware? Is your code maintainable? Does it account for edge cases properly? Is it robust enough to withstand serious use?

Probably not. I am 100% behind anyone who wants to learn how to program. I am not behind hiring them at the size month mark. I used RoR in a pejorative manner because it is kiddie stuff. Anyone can teach themselves to use it pretty quickly, but that doesn't make you a good engineer ("programmer", whatever.)

Our industry is full of incompetent people, we don't need more of them. I work in a systems group and I don't see this problem in mechanical or electrical engineering. Sure, there will always exist people who are in the lower ranks of their respective field, but in software we are inundated by people who simply have no clue what they are doing beyond the most basic of tasks.

This is a problem, so when I see "How to get a developer job in six months" it makes me cringe. It trivializes what we do and no one is ready for prime time after six months.
A holistic view of products and product management
I'm not sure what this critique has to do with the point of the article. This is, I think, a more careful (and lucrative) negotiation process than 99% of engineers are apt to us. The point of the post was to explain that process, presumably in the hopes of benefiting other startup employees.

Do you disagree with the methodology? How? Let's talk about that, and not what you think about the blog author's personal life.
I'm not sure I agree with this fully. There are compromises made in software as a result of lacking resources, with these resources now available some of these compromises can be avoided. For example, lets keep more resources in memory at all times, lets use more resource hungry algorithms that just was not feasible before, etc.
Yeah, it completely changes the dynamic of the situation. I can't imagine many other people are really going through a salary negotiation with their fiance as the other party.
Every time I have had to call up Microsoft I have gone through the automated process and it is pain since the voice recognition doesn't work. Then at the end it dumps me to a human operator where I have to answer questions (largely accusing me of being a thief), read out all the damn numbers again, and then eventually get a set to type in.

This is especially a problem if you end up with a faulty motherboard or similar, and so can end up doing several (re)installs trying to work out what the heck is going on. Thankfully it has been a while since I last encountered a faulty board.
It's tough work. Not sure I'll ever be good enough at it to be a marketer, but hats off to you lot. It's tough.
Plivo, a scalable API for voice, says: ‘you’re going down, Twilio’
FundersClub gets the gold medal.

PG should ban social startups in the next batch just to rise the level a notch or two.
Our industry already contains far too many "engineers" who don't understand what their code is doing at a basic level. I have absolutely no problem with people teaching themselves how to program (I did). I have a problem with said people expecting a job after six months of practice. If you want to work with people like that then feel free to hire them, I won't.
a GSM module requires you to deal with cell phone companies for service though, right? i'd much rather integrate with twilio than with bell.
Any idea/paper depicting this "recursive cortical network"?
Interesting, I picked up some BS SEO tips along the way. Thanks for correcting me.
Great Example Of A Company Blog Entry Relating To Pop Culture
Former Presentation Exec Claims Steve Jobs Promised Him Employment For Life
We seriously considered Last Invention as an alternative name, and actually still own lastinvention.com. For a bunch of reasons, we decided on Vicarious instead. :)
So true. Why hasn't this worked yet? Surely with Kickstarter and crowdfunding becoming increasingly popular it's only a matter of time before it crosses over to the Facebook-friends network. But why hasn't it happened yet? Is it because online payments/transfers are too expensive for the current market that's just waiting to be tapped?
A worksheet for creating value propositions
Either format can be pretty printed. If you need signposts to figure out where you are, it is a simple manner to add dictionary key names to things.
I would have to say that everything you described as a positive for Win8 can be done now in Win7. Well, unless they introduced new keyboard shortcuts. Not to discredit your opinion on Win8 though, if you like it then that's cool.
You're welcome! Articles like yours encourage me to learn to code and become a more well rounded marketer.
Ah, gotcha. That's a branding advantage that disappears a little more every year as consumers get more internet savvy, but it's certainly still a factor.
You clearly know little about the field if you have never talked to a bird researcher (neurobiologist, ethologist, psychologist) who would question the cavalier application of the word 'consciousness' to more-or-less arbitrary bird behaviors.

The behavior you are talking about is not 'latest' or even new. But I can point at any behavior to indicate anything, if my concepts do not have any real relationship to explaining how the behavior is produced or its evolutionary function. Which consciousness doesn't.

You are hand-waving at "latest research" to solve an actually insoluble problem: of nailing down what consciousness is, and also of developing philosophical consensus around that concept. Apparently you think that a random committee vote will do the job. That is the only recent development here, and it isn't scientific.

What you have is some fairly arbitrary experiments with a note attached to them saying 'consciousness!' The issue of consciousness was never about this.

"Parallel evolution" implies that the feature at issue was not present in the common ancestors, and probably isn't present in all the descendants of those common ancestors. This is a deeply weird assumption for which there is NOT scientific evidence. Yet it made its way into this hokey little document, making it abundantly clear that its claims have not seen any serious kind of review.

Your complaint about "conflation" is the tip of the iceberg - consciousness is such a vague concept, and so well detached from observables, that you will never see an end to such problems. In the "best" case you will choose some behavior (such as preening in a mirror) and flatly assert that it is consciousness - while you will get others to agree on the preening you won't get them to agree on the consciousness, leaving you with a pile of data concerning just plain preening.
Thanks!

I have some shirt info at http://getnifty.com/shirt/info, but agreed it should be more prominent and detailed.

And pushing out copy change to 'Sign up for weekly sale notifications' as we speak.
I think this is more or less the formula for calculating monthly costs (corrections welcome):

0.01S+max(0,7.20*(R-0.0017S)/4)

S is number of GB stored

R is biggest retrieval in the month

4 is the average number of hours a retrieval

For an example with 10TB storage (replace 10000 to change): http://fooplot.com/plot/4pu7u2gpox

x is biggest retrieval in GB, y is $/month
I assume this should have an "@" symbol, but HN's rules for titles have excised it.
The model of the atom was testable - that's how they knew it was faulty in the first place.

> Science is about trying to collect information that is as true as humanly possible

No, that's history. Science is about collecting reasons why things happen, or at least the exact cause effect relationship. It is NOT about collecting "what happened". Simply recording what happened in the past is history.

> These two things are one and the same: a human-ordered list of natural phenomenon.

Not even close. Human ordered? The periodic table is not human ordered. The periodic table is fundamental to the structure of the universe. Taxonomy simply records that this thing happens to be related to this. The relationships are historical accidents, not fundamental properties.

I'm quite surprised that you think the periodic table is human ordered. That shows a very large gap in your physics knowledge. If you skipped physics it's possible you were never exposed to how science should really be done, and all your experience is with what they call "soft sciences".
Giving great technical support at a small software company without being swamped
JSON is data. XML is markup. JSON won.

Move on.
>People who get the full retail version tend to do so by buying a new computer

nope, new computers come with OEM licenses, which have the same single-physical-machine restriction.

I can't think of a single situation where a full retail license of Windows is the actual license that somebody would need. It's for somebody who isn't building their own computer, isn't buying a new computer, and isn't upgrading an old windows computer. Mac Boot Camp users, maybe? I think the primary point of the $199 SKU is to tell people how much they're saving by purchasing a different version. they might as well price it at $999.
I'll admit: my issue here comes down to hating sliding equity/salary scales like this one. The rough amount of skin you want a team member to have in the game should be a part of the role definition, not a detail of the comp plan.

There have to be better ways to account for sub-market salary than a salary/equity scale multiple percentage points long. Ick.
$20k/year over 4 years = $80k
Good for you, keep it up! Produce some cool things, then learn some new tools, rinse and repeat :)
An Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation
She'd only get 1/4th of that equity per year, and the salary is given in a yearly amount.
I am fulfilling the orders myself (with help) via USPS and FedEx until it gets out of hand.
It's good to be exposed to this sort of thing as an engineer. What it teaches you to do is how to make an impact--you can figure out that feature X, despite seeming boring and uncool, will dramatically change your business. That's a great skill to have and will definitely help your career in the long run.
I really dislike sharing links of future products/projects to my friends as it's like "recommanding" something I haven't tested yet. So even if the incentive seems great (1$ per referral seems almost too much for me) I don't think it would make me jump ahead and forward it.

The problem is that you seem to target a specific kind of people that might think like me and not immediately provide a referral link on the FB/twitter/whatever profile to have as many people as possible to signup for.

Anyway, I love the idea, this kind of shirts are 90% of my current clothes so I'll signup for it right away.

What prevents you from trying with ONE design first and see how it goes? Maybe rely on another t-shirt design shirt for your first go? In France http://www.lafraise.com/ is pretty well-known or websites like teefury.com could be a good start!

How will you handle fake accounts and people trying to game your system? Most of the time, the 1$ incentive is tied to "someone signing up AND ordering something on the site" first, no?

EDIT: Some additions, the email you send right after signup is nice but I think the first part should be on your website! It describes clearly who you are, why you're doing this project and also why your design would really be better, it would be great along with your examples.

EDIT2: Why not have part of the website already done? I have to "pretend" I sign up in the launchrock page to know wether anyone used my referral link? Why not have a "normal" login system and a detailed page where I can see who accepted the referral link? To avoid spending too much time on the websites first you could use something like www.dailycred.com to handle signups properly (this was shown on HN a few weeks ago).
Stylus is nice, but I'm just not comfortable dropping the colons yet. Maybe I'll give it a go for a project and see if I come around.
Confessions from the Most Corrupt Apple Store in America
You are mistaken. Free upgrades are not illegal. The Apple OS is not even a competitor of Windows because they dont run on the same hardware. MS got into trouble because they tried to use their dominant os position to force out competitors of their other products.
Did you build that Wordpress theme on Starkers? I love it!
I felt similarly disillusioned. In the fine print there is also an inactivity fee if you don't use your simple account-- feels very counter to their ostensible philosophy.
mainly haven't tried the Parallels method, prior experience with Windows 7 using Paralles always end up running out of memory. I found VMware has a better integration in terms of VMware tools that comes along.
Reputedly, Stanislaw Lem thought Philip K. Dick was the only good American sci-fi author, while Philip K. Dick thought Stanislaw Lem was a KGB conspiracy.
Thanks! Good points, CG.

I know the "Give a man a fish" adage, but trying to teach my students to be Global Anglers hasn't worked well for a decade (given our students, numbers, faculty, and facilities). I'm not shooting for trade school either, just something that's very mindful of your iceberg analogy.

Tip:
- Come, learn some skills, peek at the landscape.

Iceberg:
- Go get a job(s), learn the rest of what you need to build the solutions that keep your company/manager happy.
It was due to the way Apple had been accounting for OS upgrades, not due to competitive/monopoly concerns.
Makes me think back to UltraHLE, and how that was a quantum leap over existing N64 emulators when it came out. Similar approach - UltraHLE didn't emulate every detail of the system. It took a higher-level approach.

Obviously not the same thing as emulating the brain :-) but just what came to mind.
It sounds like you want to seperate software engeneering and computer science. Computer science is a different course material.
Oh, right. Of course. See, I was crazy.

Thanks!
Updated with pictures of cats!
Yes, this is definitely a course type on the radar!

It echoes some other responses, and also some of my thoughts.

MIT Press makes it that much cooler!
The server market is almost as stagnant though. Multicore CPUs are important because of server virtualization, and it's always nice to be able to put 1/4TB of memory into a system, but there's a dearth of reasons to upgrade short of EOL or support being discontinued.
I'd probably have a range for the req (based on budget), and make an offer with two points (specific to the employee). The market is weird enough now that if you wanted to hire an SSL protocol expert, you might end up hiring someone with 2-3 years of general security and dev experience who has read the book, or someone who is EAY, and even the first option might be better than no one in many roles.

I've heard Palantir does three offers, and taking the top cash one is a bad signal.

Also, I think employees undervalue equity, and there's a weird signaling/etc. effect where shitty companies give out equity freely, good companies don't. Cash is cash, though.
Her twitter account says she's an engineer. What makes you think her role is Office Manager or QA?
I am really interesting in ML, but have only recently been diving into it. I have watched all of the videos for Andrew Ng's Coursera course (and most of the programming exercises), but just looking over some of the Kaggle contests I think I would be quickly out of my depth.

Would I be wasting my time attempting these with such a basic level of knowledge?
Yammer's CEO points out 4 problems:

1) Have escaped the attention of major Internet companies.
2) Cost less than $5 million (the typical seed plus series A investment) to prove and launch.
3) Be protectable from being crushed by big companies.
4) Be defensible from patent-infringement claims.

and asked "How many ideas like that are left?”

In my opinion, 1) and 2) are not a problem.

3) and 4) are the difficult ones, and they're what VCs and investment is supposed to solve - get injections of capital to grow before the big bad slow companies get you, and have money to defend yourself from lawsuits and generate your own IP.

Marc Andreesen said in his response:

"An infinite number—human creativity is limitless—which doesn't make it easy, but does mean the opportunity is unending"
Whether or not this particular anecdote is real or fantasy, Minecraft seems like an excellent platform for running studies in e.g. experimental economics. This sort of reminds me of the plague in World of Warcraft, which although the byproduct of a game bug, yielded actual data about the spread of epidemics. Nifty!
Cryptonomicon benefits a lot from being a theoretical comp-sci and/or crypto nerd.
NodeJS ninjas wanted for ground floor local/social commerce startup
Hackathon at Soundcloud produced Hovercraft
I strongly agree with the last part of your comment; I think that nails my uneasiness about this particular offer.
Unforgettable Road Trip Advice?
I've always loved the California coast. I've been to LA, SF, SD, Monterrey, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, I love them all. My GF got some time off work, and we are planning a trip from Aug 31 to Sept 6. I thought that taking a road trip through Cali (or even Washington or Oregon), would be a fun way to spend the time. The only thing I need to plan around is that I must be in Las Vegas on the 7-9th for my friend's bachelor party.

If any of you have taken some unforgettable trips on the coast or in the countryside, I would love to hear your suggestions. Thanks!
Is the Traditional Corporate Website Dying/Dead? - Part 1
I am interested to know how your web application pushed the performance limits of Python. You should be able to get thousands of requests per second, even out of a laptop running a pure-Python server. (I'd defend Ruby the same way but I don't know its details - I doubt it is very different, though)

The bottleneck in almost any real web app is going to be the database, not the programming language.

If you can't scale horizontally then your language choice is not your problem. If you can then what performance metric is going to show the inadequacy of Ruby or Python running on a few servers?

Add the caching that you should be doing anyway and even slower Ruby/PHP/Python frameworks can perform quite adequately.

I don't dispute that Go is a cool language but this seems like FUD.
I'unno, you haven't captured the hearts and minds of nerds yet, I guess. At first glance I thought you were selling that first example of a crappy tee, and was a bit put off, but I really like the B-tree design. More examples would be good. Put it on reddit, on a smaller subreddit.
> The real question is what does the function do, and how does it accomplish it?

Precisely, and this is where git's simplicity shines compared to other systems. After one takes some time to learn git's data structures, it's trivial to understand exactly what effect each command has on your repository. No need to mentally model your source control system in leaky abstractions, the reality itself is simple enough to handle directly.

> The first thing that struck me about git is the apparent use of SHA1 hashing as a basic foundation for the whole system. Maybe that's not even true and no doubt there is much more to it.

Yep, it is true, and that really is all there is to it. For a quick overview, see: http://gitready.com/beginner/2009/02/17/how-git-stores-your-...

> I was not aware that there were many implementations of git.
I'll now be looking for some other implementations. On github of course.

Github itself runs on a proprietary Erlang implementation of Git.
Agreed!

But I'm looking for a hybrid. I don't want to abandon my theoretical roots, but I'm missing more than I'm hitting, with my students as of late.

Plus, you can have Computer Science without Software Engineering, but the reverse isn't true.
Is the Traditional Corporate Website Dying/Dead? - Part 2