skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for such a genuine, articulate endorsement of Dev Bootcamp's process. I was one of the students of the Summer 2012 cohort that met with you this past Friday, and can really identify with your thoughts. I was weeded out of my Intro Computer Science in the freshman year of college. I had never been exposed to programming before, and was overwhelmed and intimidated by all my peers who had been coding for years. I've spent the better part of the last year trying to make my way back into the technical world. I'm intelligent, motivated, and passionate about coding. While I lack experience, there is no reason why my liberal arts background should preclude me from gaining a development position. As we prepare to enter the workforce as junior developers, I know that my fellow Boots and I are most excited to keep learning!
I'd also imagine the average talent level is higher in the Bay (by quite a bit).
How NASA will defend Earth from a deadly asteroid (video)
If Earth is ever in danger from an asteroid, would we be able to stop it?
So any pitch day attendees who didn't like this, you know what to do: while they didn't get caught in the act, pretty sure posting on HN will allow you to press charges as they've confessed to the crime. My recommendation: the judge should order the culprit to work 6 months at a non-social-media startup with a real business model.
Tesla Museum Gets Funded
How Paperbacks Transformed the Way Americans Read
thanks for the link, its fascinating. That does give a whole new meaning to linking and compiling :)
I disagree with you here - PC makers list specs because it is technical specs, rather than user experience, that set their product apart from competing PC makers.

I mean, you compare a Dell laptop to an HP laptop, or a $500 Dell laptop to an $800 Dell laptop for that matter, they're all running Windows 7. How would you market one product over another without admitting their differences?

Admittedly, PC makers might be wise to stop fighting one another for market share and instead focus on fighting Apple for market share.
The Worst Job At Google
I have a week off with no internet connection coming up. I sure hope they ship this soon!
What I find most interesting here is that they apparently overworked him so much on all this horrible content that he became unable to actually do his job and tell the difference between acceptable and unacceptable.
You could try adding objects with the date in their names to a 'backup' bucket rather than create separate buckets for each backup. S3 also supports object expiration, so you can set your daily backups to expire after 7 days and weekly backups to expire after 4 weeks, for example.
Good thing we have the SEC to protect us from soliciting the need for investment in a startup! ....?
Disclaimer: I think Dev Bootcamp is awesome. My friend went through it with zero programming background and is in love with programming now, and is as employable as many a fresh 4-year grad.

But this particular line is horrible: "For me, classes like algorithms and compilers were really hard because I just didn't care." And he goes on to characterize those who would be interested in such topics as engaging in "pointless optimization".

God help us if the future of our industry lies in blithe ignorance.
This is plan B if the affiliate marketing thing doesn't work out.
So what you're saying is, game development is waiting for tools that allow producing high quality graphic games more cheaply.
Surprisingly you would find this isn't necessarily true. The reasoning goes like this:

Pool of available jobs is smaller, so the competition is fiercer, so the mediocre talent takes itself out of the game and all your are left with are the stars who don't want to move. I know lots of engineers in N. Carolina around the Research Triangle Park area who are way more talented than some folks in the Bay Area but they don't abide the culture that is Silicon Valley and so they don't move here.
Gitit is really nice:

http://gitit.net/
I didn't think to doubt the validity of the story when it first popped up in /r/Minecraft, even in the comments section of the forums people don't start to get skeptical until later.

Why would someone hoax this? What would they gain from it?

Does anybody know what version of Minecraft the experiment took place in? That could explain certain mechanics that will make sense, it looks like it was before enchanting/potion making.

People seem to underestimate the power of grass, grass + bonemeal means seeds for wheat, if the factions kept raiding the other players it seems very possible they looted the players from all wheat and seeds they might have had, the original forum post also details that factions keept stealing saplings from other players, thus allowing the possibility of wood for becoming very rare.
Because they scare off the experts who post the really useful (i.e. practical) answers.

If too many of them leave, the site becomes useless.

The people who answer (and upvote) questions like "What's your favourite programmer cartoon" do not think this through - they just see something funny and click the upvote button. People have argued "but this got upvoted so it must be good" since the site started, but it just isn't true.
Except that the changes you propose would take all of the fun out of the game for those of us who -do- like the idea.

Though in fact, if there was UK shipping I have a feeling I might've bought the Graphic Love T-shirt just because it's clever.

However, it seems to me very much like you really don't find the concept entertaining and thereby end up feeling like it's trying to rip you off rather than entertain you; I don't think the site's owner can solve that without destroying the things that make it potentially interesting to other people.
Ask HN: Lack of Wisdom in Posts?
Has anyone else noticed a general decline in the wisdom of HN posts over the last 6 months or so? As a hacker, this has always been my goal:

1. Create something clever that draws a lot of people and is interesting enough that they spend money on it.

2. Collect enough money to free myself from the constraints that society (especially non-forward thinking people) places on me.

3. Change the world (do something important like revolutionize technology, build a new type of rocket, put money towards curing a disease, etc).

4. *Pay it forward (the most important step of all - help other hackers make a meaningful contribution, not for your own personal pleasure or profit, but for the good of the world).

I'm still stuck on step 1.

Right now I'm seeing a preponderance of "how I did such and such and got L33T" or "how I sold out and got VC money" or "how this generic tool is better than this other generic tool".

The comments have also devolved into seeing through the lens of capitalism-driven startup building. There only seems to be pure mathematical strategy now, which tends towards sociopathy. The rare comments which go a step beyond knee-jerk reactions tend to fall through the cracks.

I'm concerned that this is creating an environment akin to objectivism, which I can sympathize with, but is at odds with creating a future that nurtures and embraces humanity. If we continue down this road, the one that considers facebook and dropbox to be innovative because they make their owners rich, then I don't even know what it means to be a hacker anymore.

My prediction is that this post will fall off the front page due to lack of interest. We seem to be stuck in a geek tragedy of the commons, where our crusade towards our own self-interest will inevitably undermine our achievement.
I wish minecraft had to pay royalties to dwarf fortress.
Finding the Next Mark Zuckerberg
As it's sponsored by CloudFlare, I suspect it makes for a good Case Study for them.
Sure, if the app is in its respective store. It's awfully handy to be able to grab a new ROM download, or an APK that isn't in the Play store by just grabbing my phone and waving it at my screen. Saves me the steps of having to copy and shorten the URL, then type it in on my phone.
Uh, he said tcp over dns, not dns over tcp.
I'll reject your democratic requirement out of hand, as democracies haven't proven particularly stable. There was that trial-run in Athens which lasted 501 years (508 - 7 BCE, with interruptions). Other than a few small/outlying instances (most notably the Althing in Iceland, it didn't re-emerge until the short-lived Corsican Republic (1755), and of course, the United States (1776).

Japan (660 BCE) and China (221 BCE) have both had feudal / bureaucratic governments exhibiting very high levels of stability. While dynasties and eras are marked, the overall states persisted largely intact.
I don't use anything beyond 5(with the exception of 0 because that's fairly easy for me to hit). 6 and 7 are the hardest to hit. 17k for me just becomes 15kkk, for example. If you ever find yourself needing to go 50+ up or down, you should be using one of H, L, or M to take out a good chunk of that.
"If you down-vote you ought to be required to provide an explanation"

Here is an idea:

- require downvoters to provide that explanation.

- Use some simple automated method (e.g. run the text typed through a language recognizer, and see whether it thinks it is English) to prevent simple key-banging as a response.

- by default, do not show the explanations, but do show a 'has downvotes' indicator and a 'show downvotes' control (could be a single UI element)

- when showing downvotes to a user, do not show author names.

- allow users to flag downvotes as inappropriate.

- let the powers that be manually check flagged downvotes (hopefully, there aren't many), and take appropriate action against either the downvoter or the flagger, or both.
Homeopath is a job title that exists and has a wikipedia page.

I'm not sure this qualifies Nutritionists as "real" for any value of real I personally care about ... then again I haven't clicked, because I don't really want to know about people who'll likely all hate me for eating too much steak ;)
I'm an Android user, so I can't really comment on the iOS experience, but for me it's as literal as "hit barcode scanner, point camera at QR code". The app detects the QR code, decodes it, tells me what it found, and asks what I want to do with it. In the case of a URL, it pops open in my browser; in the case of an app URL, it opens in the Play store app, etc. It's very quick, easy, and painless.
The other feature that's great about CrashPlan is that it will allow you to backup to other systems running their software. I backup my laptop to both their service and one of my dedicated servers. That way if anything ever happens to their online service I have a second remote copy that I control.
Parallel Universe founder here. Those white papers are coming!

In the meantime, we invite you to take a look at the technical paper we posted on highscalability.com yesterday, discussing Galaxy, our open-source in-memory data grid: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/8/20/the-performance-of...

Also, you can check out the Galaxy "under the hood" series: http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/tagged/galaxy-internals

And the SpaceBase benchmarks are coming, some of them probably as soon as next week!
grin I just might have to do that. :D
Maybe http://octopress.org/ fits better? Never really used it. I was just playing around with it.
QR codes contain nothing but text. Any barcode scanner app is going to ask what you want to do with what it found. It's not like pointing your phone in the wrong direction is going to give it malware.
Things You Notice About App.net
I so wanted to buy the bicycle one for my girlfriend.

When checking out my cart, it didn't allow me to choose another country than US, and I'm in Europe. Too bad for me (and for her) (and also for you, who lost a sale ;) )

Great post, great idea, though ! Keep it up !
I haven't played Minecraft in a while so things may have changed, but I recall that animals would only spawn on grass. If you wanted pet wolves or animal products, you'd need grass to spawn them on. And if someone repeatedly raids your fields, you can run out of wheat seeds. Grass is the primary way of getting more seeds.
I have been programming since about 1969, but my life as a non-academic software developer started only slightly pre-internet, 1988. In those days, I was using a very early version of C++. The system I was working on was an object-oriented database system, and we were highly dependent on memory mapping and network APIs. (I mean OS APIs, not these new-fangled web APIs.) Some impressions:

- We built nearly everything from scratch. I was working on collection classes and an OO query language, and started with very little beyond libc. We did buy a cheapo B-tree implementation (free floppy with book!) that we stuck with far too long.

- There were many varieties of UNIX, and we had to support all of them. We spent a huge amount of time porting our application, and building up our portability "layer". As time went on, we also had to deal with object layout differences across compilers. Porting to all these platforms and compilers consumed unimaginably huge amounts of development and testing resources. We also ported to OS/2 (remember that?), and even Windows 3.1. Different industries and customers had different OSes, and we had no choice but to support all of them. It took a very long time before we decommissioned our first OS.

- The OSes and compilers were buggy. At one point, the brokenness of mmap (on SunOS 3.something, I think), was a real problem for us.

- CPUs were buggy. One of our engineers found a CPU bug in a 68040 because one of our features was failing in an odd way, and he kept diving lower and lower until he reached the CPU.

- I'm pretty sure we wrote Makefiles by hand.

- Source control was a nightmare. I don't really remember what we were using early on, but it was a tolerable pain. After a year-long project we switched to an early version of Clearcase which I found mind-bending and non-intuitive. It did amazing things, but it was torture to use. Oh, and it sprayed random bits all over our source repository, (due to a bad interaction with an early RAID driver, if I remember correctly), and we had Clearcase engineers in house for maybe a month trying to rescue what they could.

- Everything cost money: OSes, libraries, development tools, source control. My company was a startup, and several of the startups we were friendly with or potential customers were doing development tools.

- Anyone know what Reed Hastings, founder of CEO of Netflix, used to do? Anyone? Bueller? He wrote the Purify/Quantify tools. These were the absolute best memory corruption and profiling tools of the day. (I'm pretty sure that he actually wrote Purify himself.) Expensive, wonderful tools.

- Research involved going to a library or talking to people. No google.

Good times, good times.
Unfortunately, the story is not so cool, the website and especially the template used to generate portfolios is an OBVIOUS gross ripoff of App Cubby website.

Evidences ? Sure :
https://twitter.com/drbarnard/statuses/238032311961137152
https://twitter.com/drbarnard/statuses/238033908988538880
https://twitter.com/drbarnard/statuses/238034285905473536
https://twitter.com/drbarnard/statuses/238037462688075776
The word 'tamper' can seriously be applied to checking if a door is locked and causing no change whatsoever? I hate legal speak.
For anyone not familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraHLE#The_HLE_technique

Here's hoping the brain is implemented in C ;-)
This is seriously worth checking out. For it to be really useful for geeks, the keyboard shortcut interface has to be masterful (ie: worth learning). Or, like others are suggesting, at least replicate significant portions of vim. Doing 95% of the main ex/vim commands would be super easy. Emacs in the browser has probably been done by somebody somewhere, too, but... ugh. A big chunk of vim would be more than enough for a good app. Plus vim is more hip these days anyway.

If there's source available, I'd love to run a hosted version of this for myself. Unfortunately, I couldn't use this for work-related tasks, because any meaningful task list for me is going to liberally reference details of my company's IP.

Edit: Idea: Defaulting to HTML5 offline storage if available would be much better, with remote storage required to use sharing features. Don't take your user's data if you don't have to, right?
Not really. Someone launches a hot-new-startup-you-just-have-to-see every 20 minutes. The time I have spare to devote to looking at new things is super limited, so, much like with that old adage that "first impressions count", I start to filter things based on what are, in many cases, trivialities.

In this case, though, I don't feel that it's entirely trivial. Quality is something that happens top to bottom, I believe. Think about Apple -- while I dislike a lot of things they do as far as the walled garden goes -- I feel that they have a quality experience through and through. Every step along the way -- visiting the store, buying a product, even the packaging is well done.

When you have 30 seconds to make an impression on the people that might make or break your future, "that startup that littered a bunch of cars with dead trees and didn't even get someone to proofread" is not the kind of impression I'd want to be making.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. Thanks!
Kevin Rose's Top for YC Demo Day
Bummer :(

I would really really like to ship to Europe (and everywhere), but as a 1 man show right now, I can't logistically make that happen for some time.
Second paragraph:

"Yesterday we announced the much-anticipated sequel to Plants vs. Zombies. That’s very exciting. A lot of people have been asking about it. The game will come to fruition in the spring of 2013."
Gamification is the method of adding carrot/stick mechanisms to actions in order to drive behavior; it's a trivial application of game theory, which is about asking how people make decisions in (very contrived) situations.
Former NHL Stanley Cup Champion Joins Startup
While your Site is SFW I did have some apprehension about visiting dickey.xxx while at work.
At 50/1 for a company just out of of an accelerator you would have to think that you would be better off jut starting your own company.
I don't think my answer falls into the two options you presented. Also, I'm not sure how we even measure success/failure anymore. A site can be a huge success and still be a bad investment. Ask anyone holding Facebook stock. (yes... horrible, horrible example... I know... but you can see where I'm coming from... right?) I'm not sure what about 9GAG stands out among all the many, many other lame sites just like it. I find most of those sites to be trash, but to each their own. One man's trash is another man's treasure. I don't know how any of them make any money. But I guess the people who pick the winners see something here.
I mashed this down into a tweet a few weeks ago.

:%s/startup/website/gi

https://twitter.com/reustle/status/224870973923532800
> Free-to-play, social and mobile games have exploded in popularity. That happened fast. Surprisingly so. The change in consumer tastes requires us to reorganize our business and invest in new types of games on new platforms.

I wonder if this is really a “change in consumer tastes” or it’s just that it’s much more lucrative than the previous, $2–3 per app model due to universal human behaviour.
The Business of Apps
While I can't speak for him, my take on the kind of lame grammar sniping that sw007 was referring to in the post that kicked off that shitstorm[0], is posters on HN using irrelevant, petty criticism to dismiss and shit on others' opinions and arguments, in informal discussions internal to the community.

The grammar mistakes that fabricode (the guy you're responding to) is criticizing are in user- and investor-facing advertising copy. If superficial presentation matters anywhere, it matters there. And I feel like since this was something so bold, and those flyers and this post are probably going to be the most attention this company is going to get unless it takes off, the stakes are even higher. While it was maybe (maybe) a little snarky, no other top-level comment has pointed these mistakes out, and I think such cosmetic topics are fair-game to discussing things like this. If it's not already there, that criticism is pretty close to constructive given the subject matter.

-----

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747
Well, I have to agree. How you go to market depends on your business and industry.

But to the extent that you can align your business with growth-hacking style marketing, the better off you're gonna be. IMHO.
I don't consider this creative, personally. People have been littering my car with leaflets for many years. Every single time, I get annoyed and throw them away.
Don't Get Stuck in the "Work" Trap
I never said I liked it, I just thought that's where we might be headed. =/

As far as that goes, Google's 2-factor auth mitigates this a bit, with its "keep this auth instance valid for X days" option. (They also have a new "permanently auth this computer by adding it to a trusted list" option, which IMO defeats the point.)
Ask HN: How do you really learn a new language?
I mean really learn it. Master it, I mean.
Well, it really is different this time.

It is a big data local social gamified MVP'd pivoted to-do list built on a distributed paxos consistent lock-free real-time column-based k/v persistent memory grid.
Nice piece - as a coder turned entrepreneur, the sales and marketing side of things has been exceptionally hard for me. It's a battle everyday, and if I could turn back time I would have ensured I worked in a marketing department, or with people skilled in the area before embarking down my current path...

That said, I'm in the hole now, learning as fast as I can, solo. Can anyone make some current/and also seminal marketing book must-haves?
What about the next person who received the email that was a Java Engineer and is in New York?
It may have changed their life.

It takes a second to click delete.
Tech Bootcamps don't work.

Well, let me rephrase that... they may work now, but not for long. As an industry, we've been down this road. There are limitless dime-a-dozen bootcamps that will get you all kinds of certifications (remember when those mattered?)

When I got my first tech job, doing support for Windows 2000, the training class was about 50% people who had attended various Windows 2000 MCSE "bootcamps" and were all certified. Unfortunately, they didn't know anything about Windows 2000. There was no understanding that people like me had gained from actually USING and WORKING with this stuff. While they were quietly led away to the Word Support team, the rest of us marveled at the hilarity of a "bootcamp" that taught very little real world knowledge.

I think 4-year schools, while mostly being terrible at producing people who can code for a living, do provide a depth and reach of experience that no bootcamp will ever supply. If someone goes into a "Ruby" bootcamp and already knows how to program in Java/PHP/Whatever, then sure, that will be valuable. Otherwise, this is going to be another training bubble similar to the training bubble of the late 90's early 00's.
MIT Tech Review blasts ICANN / new top level domains.
Mass Fusion Review (Nutrabolics)
10 top government grants for start-ups: Start-up Finance
It's not really a random sample, because you can choose which 5 posts to use your votes on.