skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apologies in advance if this is rambling.

I'm an IT contractor (never done web for money). My opinion was formulated based on my experience managing an IT division over 5 years or so and also doing various PM and architecture roles.

You can more-or-less validate the first 50% of my claim by giving a bunch of computer literate people some brand new boxed PCs or Macs, and an internet connection and telling them to go for it and set up their environment. They'll be able to get things up and running, and if they have a little bit of nous they will usually come up with something workable.

Of course, it won't be engineered. I did some work for a fairly big manufacturer about 10 years ago that opened a small office on the east coast of Australia. The small office got absolutely no IT support as it was off the radar, and because of the corporate structure Finance left them alone too.

They managed to brew up the essentials of what they needed using Access for sales/marketing, MYOB for the books and corporate webmail and hotmail. When IT found out, they went spare and "fixed" everything. The office suffered in both performance and morale because instead of their terrible (but working) homebuilt CRM and accounting systems they had to use a set of ancient AS/400 apps that were about 1000ms away (no problem for interactivity because they were on 5250 screens, but very slow turnaround). The PCs were useless too, IT made them log in to Netware and do file/print over an 8kbps CIR Frame Relay connection.

Government (and to a lesser extent business) exposing and unifying APIs and SAAS probably means that in 2009 situations like the one I messily chronicled above will scale, because the IT development and infrastructure component just isn't required. Someone somewhere else who knows all about scaling, security, DRP and backup has done it for them and is happy to charge a per-user-per-month fee.

If this happened now, they might have used a 37Signals product and Salesforce for example (no idea about the ERP side).

My current contract is a guerilla finance project to build some analysis tools for SOX compliance that they haven't been able to get corporate IT to deliver on for 3 years. We built a small app in Python with a web front-end (Django). It was quick, it worked, and it's a manifestation of people realising that IT has become commoditised and that IT doesn't have to be hard. I guess IT wanted to do something like build some ABAP programs in SAP using consultants that charge £800 a day on a 2 year timeline.

There's a lot of law firms, design offices and small practices that just go out and buy some macs and never even call in IT help. It's going to happen and keep happening, and it's difficult to see how the shift away from corporate IT could happen if you're focussed on changing the VAT rates in FORTRAN, applying PTFs to the iSeries, or keeping the active directory backed up. Shifts aren't usually obvious when you're in the thick of it.

I don't think the quickest typists in the typing pool ever thought that the managing director would type his own memos 30 years ago, either.
Enclojure - an IDE for the Clojure programming language
I've recently started using the Pomodoro Technique (which was linked to on HN a few months back), and I've found tracking the time I spend very helpful for my self-discipline--preventing myself from getting into that fugue state where I'm looking at the browser, going click, click, click, click, and then realizing that six hours have passed and I've accomplished nothing.

But I absolutely would not want my manager to use this kind of information to evaluate my performance.
For a startup, money doesn't solve problems, it just changes them
A Blog-Based Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator
My problem with the "going to bed when tired" suggestion is that I've found that the most effective way to manage my ADD is to do most of my productive work after a long day because by then my brain has settled down enough to allow for extended periods of concentration.
I addition to books, I recommend getting an account with Google App Engine, which uses Python as its de facto language IIRC. You might not ever use the platform itself again, but it would provide a sandbox to play around in (assuming you don't already have a server of your own).
Once unleashed, in 1978, DIY brewers revolutionized the industry.
Wow, I work next door to E Ink and never had a clue what type of products they made. Its interesting to find out they are involved in making the Kindle a success.

Has anyone here purchased a Kindle 2 yet? Anyone willing to offer their personal experience with it so far? (I trust HN reviews more than reviews elsewhere)
Ask YC: Adobe Flex in practice
A Flex Haiku:

it's more than just flash

enterprise level big apps

not just eye candy

swivelmaster had an excellent idea to try to bring together the Adobe Flex developers who frequent News.YC and learn from each other. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494732)

I've been working with Adobe Flex since mid-2007, off and on. I curse Eclipse sometimes for the minutes every day that it taunts me with 'Building workspace...Building'. Adobe Flex, for all its flaws, is a decent RIA platform that we have successfully built a major application on.

Perhaps this thread can be a persistent discussion area for Flex hangups and tips. I'll be cross-posting the ones that I have posted on our internal Confluence wiki. (I just read the guidelines again - I think a discussion of this sort is allowed - and will adjust/stop if prompted). I prefer maintaining my semi-anonymity (for now) so I will not be divulging too much about our product.
This is really insufficiently complex and/or interesting to belong here, is it not?
Ngpay: 1st Indian firm to win WEF tech award
I've created a 'Discuss YC: Adobe Flex' thread. Perhaps we can use that as an anchoring point for discussing Flex on News.YC (I read the guidelines - it seems to be not explicitly dis-allowed)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495872
Tip: Subscribe to the mailing lists flex-coders, flex-components, and flashcoders using a Gmail account.

They are fairly high volume; I don't read the messages but occasionally I will do fancy boolean searches using the power of Google on my "database" [20k+ messages since early 2007] (something like label:flexcoders + scrolling + invalidate).

And it will very often find what I am looking for and/or point me to what I should look for.
FDIC's Failed bank list. 3 in 2007. 14 so far this year.
The only you-sentence in the piece was:

"I have many skills, high standards, and can assume any roles necessary to help you succeed."
Should have proof read this.
Well it's on the front page
On installers
Ft. Benning report on Big Dog robot field tests
Vanguard's index fund has averaged 9.7% a year for the past 32 years.

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0040&...
My first thought as well as soon as I saw 'popular'. That's really all it takes to rule Opera out of consideration. I really doubt many outside of a tech environment have ever even heard of Opera. I still am surprised at those unaware of Firefox.

And something they need to learn, even if you have a superior product, a business requires superior marketing to succeed. Relying on anti-trust lawsuits and 'call to actions' are not really going to advance them to where they want to be. In this case, they come off appearing weak (and starting a wikipedia entry on it, oh please, talk about where factual claims are not going to be represented).
Giant stingray Photo:biggest freshwater fish
I submit my own posts from time to time, and I've only had one killed (to my knowledge). And that one was easily explained: somebody else had beaten me to submitting my own post with a slightly different URL!
Jobs, who turned 54 on Tuesday, was not at the meeting. At one point, investors stood up and sang "Happy Birthday" to him, at the urging of one shareholder.

Am I the only one who thinks that's extremely freaky?
$ python -m this
Personally I'd still take this kind of article any time over the "why [Twitter | Facebook | etc] is the [next Google | biggest failure ever]", "5 timeless principles for [ building startups | coding | marketing] I just thought of, having done it for almost a year now" or anything from TechCrunch & co.
Is it just me or is there a total lack of input validation? mysql_real_escape_string isn't going to protect you from code injection...
Twitter on ABC's Nightline
I don't read anything into this. If they need to change Steve's plan to return, they can't show they know until there has been an announcement. Having that information, but waiting until someone asks for it, would be failing to disclose it. If the plan changes, they will announce it, but not as an answer to a question. He punted and referred to what they said previously.

If there is a change to the plan, given how they have handled this so far, I would expect it to be announced shortly before Steve is due to return.
> As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream.

I'm rooting for Twitter to succeed independently (e.g. not acquired by Google or Facebook).

I think I started suspecting Twitter was reaching out to the mainstream (or at least the younger generation) when I would click on random public timeline and/or summize search result rows and find people who had 40-50 followers, talking about what was going on in their life (e.g. normal, average people not social media cultists)

The power of Twitter is that is like a cocktail party laced with real-time search capabilities.
That's exactly what makes me wonder whether it will succeed in mainstream despite the advent of Facebook statuses and antisocialites like myself.
State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4 -- The Languages
Pirate Bay Trial Day 9: BitTorrent Is Not Evil
Three things you need if you want more customers
Howard Lindzon and Friends Launch New Investment Fund for Social Apps
Technically both "unphased" and "unfazed" are phonetic spellings. The latter still actually looks incorrect to me.

Not very hard to believe. Nobel prize winners spell words wrong. Mensa members spell words wrong. Harvard professors spell words wrong...
Get in touch with your school newspaper (if you have one.) I wrote for mine throughout college and I know that editors are ALWAYS looking for articles from people like you. Trust me, the campus wants your voice, you just have to be proactive about it.
Don't underestimate the amount of reading done by factory workers. An average page turner fiction will use words like unfazed, and the person reading it will know what this word means, but will never use it in actual speech.

American tabloids? NY Post? I don't know, I'm not American.
I'm curious how the advent of the printing press, widespread written language affected the speed of language change? My guess would be that fixing words to text would slow it significantly. Anyone know of any studies on that?

Another thing I'm curious about is what the world's first language was like. Would it have been spoken by cavemen, would it have been simpler? What would be missing, future tense, abstract concepts we take for granted? What if you go back further? Did some of our words come from non-human ancestors?
content taken from Youtube

Stealing from the stealers?
Loading A Database Of Everything Into A Star Schema
Yes, it's fantastic. It's not, however, a money saver or anything like that. You pay for the convenience. That's the same thing I said about the Kindle 1, tho. Kindle 2 is just better, smarter, faster, etc. :)
That's very interesting... and a little creepy. It's like you are taking dictation from yourself.
I believe that widespread writing is responsible for a lot of the grammatical complexity of European languages. Most languages that were not widely written, or that did not have a central source for correct writing, tend to have simple Grammer, but the cultures that wrote a lot tend to have very complex grammar. This is just my personal observation.

The creole and pidgin languages are what happen when you strip English or French of the artificial complexity imposed by layers of centralized rules.
Good news! It doesn't matter because that 7% interest has been wiped out anyhow!

In the past ten years I've been able to sock away nearly nothing in retirement due to the amount of time I've spent unemployed, and I'm currently 30. While I'm as affected by the market issues as anybody else, one side effect of stock prices dropping back to 1997 levels is that all the interest I thought I was missing out on, it turns out I wasn't after all.

Man, I wish I were twenty and had a good job now, buying my IRAs at the bottom of the market like this.
300mhz ARM5 != 300mhz Intel Pentium II in performance. I work with a 900mhz ARM11 and it's pretty weak. Seems like a lot of ram though.
It's not just you. They don't use htmlentities at all.
I think use in formal writing slows it down most; the biggest changes from other Germanic languages such as loss of gender for nouns happened when English was a peasant language used under the French-speaking Norman aristocracy.
Here are some tips that are more relevant for the semi-recent job market (I graduated in 2007):

1. If you aren't doing an internship or working a job that's related to your field (like doing systems administration / development for the college or a local company), you are behind, even if you are on the Dean's List. These days, employers seem to be able to find enough people who have done something parallel to their education, so if you don't you will look just as inexperienced as if you had no degree at all. The bar got raised and it's possible no one has told you.

2. I am probably biased towards the job market in my area, but hardly anyone wants entry level, and as I said above, no one wants "ground level" (just a degree) unless you are gunning for a helpdesk / PC tech position. I figure this is because the hiring pool of experienced IT workers is large enough and their quality versus fresh recruits better enough that they feel they don't need to look for junior staff that they plan on training.

3. As others have said, you will only really use a small set of the skills you learned in school. Work will remind you more of your job / internship / side projects you had during college. This is probably why employers scoff at degree-only graduates.

4. All of this advice is of course just my personal experience, and many employers probably have different beliefs.
From the article

Oldest words: I, We, Two, Three

Words likely to become extinct first: Squeeze, Guts, Stick, and Bad
There's huge potential here, especially if there's some sort of even imperfect high-level 'glomming'. How often have you written a clever turn of phrase, an insightful paragraph, or a poignant witticism, gone back and removed it to fix flow, and then re-wrote it, not getting the phrasing quite right?

The ability to fix those types of changes, or to revert back to a paragraph "somewhere in the middle" would be huge.
California must be really expensive.

$40,000 seems to be standard here (North Carolina).
A Formula for Startup Success: Miller High Life and 12Seconds.tv
There's a formula emerging in developing the right kind of relationships if you're an internet start-up that can escalate your platform rapidly and successfully. See how Miller and 12Seconds.tv missed the boat.
Top Ten Most Famous Hackers of All Time
Reranking Results in django-springsteen
Same here! I put $2000 in a Roth IRA in '98 and never made another contribution. Now it's worth $1800. Of course it would be nice to have $18,000 at 30 instead of $1800, but there is some redemption. Now, about the $5000 in credit card debt...
Do people really need to be told this? Calories == Energy. If you kept putting more gas in your car then it uses its gonna spill out all over. If it could store the overflow, like the body does, your just gonna have more lying around.

Despite what the diet book cartel wants people to believe, energy production and usage by the human body is not all that mysterious.
I'd like to put a plug in for doing gravestone rubbings. If you've never tried it, grab a box of crayons and some paper and maybe a date and head over to your nearest cemetery. I've only done it once or twice but I've found some really cool patterns and textures both times.
When the hive mind works, it's a beautiful thing.
Microsoft plays with small, sleepy servers
The best measure of East Asian creativity is probably through patent studies

You're kidding right?

I am at a huge corporation now which has literally hundreds of patents, previously I worked for a startup with no patents. Would like you to guess which has the BY FAR smarter and more creative employees?

Patents are a profoundly stupid way to measure creativity.

IQ is by far the most parsimonious explanation

I think you are kidding, or at least trolling.
> You wrote an entire book on legal pads?!

How about an entire trilogy of books.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495491
ISPs in China have done this for years (3 years, as I can recall). Now, they found a more efficient way: intercepting http requests and injecting Google Adsense click in any web pages.
This article perpetuates one of the most common errors that new startup employees make. Namely, referring to a share or option on stock as a value that can be estimated.

The FIRST thing everyone needs to know about stock options is how many there are, and then look at possible exit strategies for the company, how much more funding will be needed, and what the valuation is when your options are granted and what they were for the different funding rounds. In essence, it's more important to know your ownership percentage than an absolute number of options.
The moral: better content wins.

Better content for who? Some people love having a channel where 10 of their friends see the stuff they put up. They're winners, because they get to do something they couldn't before.

Dan Lyons went from being one of my favorite bloggers to being one of my least favorites at a sickening pace. He's smarmy, overgeneralizes, and generally a prick overall. It was great when he was Fake Steve, because part of the joke was that he was so unlikable, but now he's just Dan Lyons, writer at one of the magazines that's quickest going into decline.

Hulu is using an old ad scheme. Online, a new system will have to be developed, because right now things aren't as profitable. That doesn't make YouTube a failure, though, considering it's managing to break even despite being enormous. (Also note that each visitor to YouTube is likely watching far more videos a month than the average Hulu user is watching on Hulu.)

The moral of Hulu is that beautiful, efficient web sites are a good thing, and that even companies can make them. There is no moral here about old media versus new media. Youtube is still enormous compared to Hulu, because people like having the ability to constantly post videos. Furthermore: Hulu is new media. If it succeeds, it does so because people prefer it to TV. The fact that the content is the same doesn't change that Hulu allows instant access to a wide library for free, that it allows rating and comments and embedding. That's new media, not old.

The best part is that Hulu's parent companies don't get it. They're trying to restrict Hulu, rather than give it freedom. Old media is the largest thing holding parts of Hulu back.

The sad part is that if it weren't for blogging and new media, Dan Lyons wouldn't be working for Newsweek. At Forbes he was a nobody: he only became famous after his blog kicked off. It's sad partly because Lyons is good at playing a blowhard because he is a blowhard. Now Newsweek's banned him from blogging and their tech writer's a blowhard. Everybody loses.
Non-Disclosure Agreements are for young losers, not old winners
I agree, I'm an obsessive editor and usually make multiple revisions to comments I leave on various blogs, HN, forums, etc. I should probably get in the habit of writing in a doc first, but I don't really feel like putting in the extra step for stuff that's usually rather trivial. If I was an active blogger, I would likely try to use this tool on a regular basis and link to it at the end of every post.

Thanks for sharing, very awesome to watch. My only request would be the ability to adjust the playback speed.
"Devastating?" Why would you say that in particular? They look superbly logical but dated to me. I'm more instantly attracted to the speakers and radio, for instance.

I'm guessing you've got more design experience than I do, so care to explain what it is you see when you look at those calculators? I'd love to know.
I love that this board is intellectually curious enough to vote up articles like this. (I'm a word wonk, so this is especially interesting to me.)

FWIW: If anyone is interested in the history of language and how we got to talking this way, I'd suggest you check out John McWhorter's lectures from The Teaching Company (teach12.com).
I remember seeing this article a while ago and I've mentioned it in conversations several times but could never find it. Thanks.
All the Texts on Financial Engineering You Could Ever Want
But Chrome uses WebKit and Apple contributors were the ones who got WebKit to pass Acid 3 first and released a proper build long before Chrome came around. :) So, again, as mentioned before, depends on your criteria. As somebody said, this is usual Apple — agreesive marketing, but some of these are true or partially true, so it's not as bad as that forum post makes it seem.
I would say everything on this list rings very true. One thing I wish I had done sooner is to take advantage of rewards on credit cards. These days you can buy almost anything with a credit card so you might as well get something in return for it. You have to do your homework but several with give cash back, free hotel rooms, free flights etc. These perks can add up over time and save you some money. Additionally using services like Mint to track your various accounts will help you see where you spend most your money and give you a big picture of your total networth in one spot
J. K. Rowling did most of her draft work on lined paper:

"There is only one thing that annoys me about living in Edinburgh - well, two, but I'm pretty much resigned to the weather now. Why is it so difficult to buy paper in the middle of town? What is a writer who likes to write longhand supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realises, to her horror, that she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag? Forty-five minutes it took me, this morning, to find somewhere that would sell me some normal, lined paper. And there's a university here! What do the students use? Don't tell me laptops, it makes me feel like something out of the eighteenth century."
-J. K. Rowling

Source: http://www.writerswrite.com/wblog.php?wblog=410061

According to Wikipedia, she did the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone on a manual typewriter.
It's weird how Seth Godin usually has a good general point, and then manages to pick the worst possible examples to illustrate it.

A service aimed at creating videos for bestselling authors

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9448156...

And a counseling service helping people cut back on Big Mac consumption

Um..Weight Watchers? Jenny Craig?
> There are even countries where Opera is the most popular browser.

I'm having a hard time believing this. Any stats?

> For example I can run Safari 4 beta on a very slow machine and technically it won;t pass the test.

Hixie, who's pretty much the guy behind the whole test-suite and the authority on Acid 3, said that the reference machine is MacBook Pro. So, no, you couldn't run it on a slow machine and say it doesn't pass, because that's not the machine it has to pass on. :)
You mean 'losers', not loosers :)
A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert (Abu Dhabi)
Two Quick Words About Microsoft v. TomTom: Think Bilski