skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked from home for a little over 2 years. I have a lot of positive things to say about it. While my experience was generally positive, there were a few drawbacks.

The most bothersome drawback to me was that I felt judged by a different standard than those in the office. If I had an unproductive week, it was assumed that I was goofing off, while the same standard wasn't held for those that worked in the office, presumably because their butts were in chairs.

For the last four months of those two years, my wife was at home raising a newborn. It was nearly impossible for me to concentrate. I won't work from home again until my child is out of the house or until I build a detached office.
This is getting really popular - could anyone explain it?
Ugh.

Portland is way to proud of a middling effort at best.

The city has no immigrants (I make a habit of counting the number of non white people when I am there... High score was 15.)

Also the tech scene is middling at best, for example if you go to the 'tech' coffee shop downtown, everyone there is updating their myspace pages and playing counterstrike.

The last big thing to come out of Portland was upcoming. (Although Aboutus just did a round of funding. (Wiki company)). HP (Corvalis) and Intel have huge offices nearby...

In short if you want to have a nice life and be a hipster for your twenties-thirties, move to portland. If you want to try and hit it out of the park, pick someplace else.
Ask HN: small projects to network with other programmers
I was having a conversation with someone on Proggit about a system (webapp?) whereby programmers would submit ideas for small projects (1-2 hours) with the specific goal of meeting others by working on those.

I know, of course, that you can work on open source projects (or startups! :P ), but this usually requires a larger investment of time. I also know of:

1) The "Six hour startup" project, for first-world meetups in the Seattle area

2) http://justhackit.slinkset.com/ (which I heard about on HN)

But the first one is a model for real-world meetups only, and the second one doesn't seem to have much momentum, and seems more designed towards one-time projects for which you're seeking a partner or two. I'm more specifically speaking of something which would propose new, small projects rather regularly.

Have you heard of something similar? Here's the thread on Reddit for more details of our ideas:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7shvy/q_is_there_a_good_site_for_complementary_skills/c07a5hg
Surely the best 'fuck you' would be to sell for millions. Closing the company will make the people who hate him happy - I say he's staying open...
I wish it actually worked that way in the real world, but it doesn't. Yes, you can quit and do a startup, but then you end up with pointy-haired VCs instead of pointy-haired bosses.
I tried proposing a nearly identical idea a few months ago on here or the irc channel, and it was generally not favored. People argued that if you just wanted to code, join an open source project.

If anything of sorts gets off the ground, I'd be totally interested.
A fine solution in a start-up or when you are in charge, but not so easy to accomplish in a large organization, where the pointy-hairs tend to accumulate.
Trends in Angel Capital, from Seattle Investor Geoff Entress
Hip-hop's evolution, gone collaborative and open-source
So giving a bureaucracy run by private companies a quasi-judicial power to punish breaches of the law is a bad idea? It was obvious to everyone else from the start.
Its sci-fi, but I have no doubt 2001:A Space Odyssey inspired many a hacker to go into AI.
Ironically, it seems you've not read past the headline of the article.

I continue to work from home because I think that, for me, it's a net win. This article is intended to point out its downsides, not to suggest it's a bad idea overall for everyone. I'm looking forward to writing about the positive aspects of working from home in a few days.
Surprised the IIci didn't rate a mention.
"Is P Versus NP Formally Independent?" (2003)
I can't read the article, but I'll put down $5 that it's a SME PED (http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4...)
Which shows that we're not dying out. Yay!
It's called human interaction - most people need this to survive. When sheltered from the world like a person with Agoraphobia, it becomes hard to relate to people no matter how much email or twittering you do.
This shouldn't be surprising given the massive growth that has been experienced. Mobile operators can only experiment so far with $0 pre-paid phones before hitting a wall of economic reality and/or limits of their (planned?) revenue models.

Growth typically cannot continue at rapid double-digit rates. At some point, we have to be able to deal with what's already been distributed so that consumers learn to work with what they already have.

Carriers have typically gravitated toward post-paid (especially in North America) because of the warm, fuzzy recurring/regular revenue figures that they can project against (investors love recurring regaularity).

This resulted in carriers subsidizing handsets and attempting to shorten the upgrade cycle in the hopes of keeping customers on their post-paid plans for as long as possible.

Customers can't afford to keep upgrading. Similar logic applies to pre-paid handsets. Expect to see a decline in "disposable" pre-paid phone packages, depending on how desperate your local/regional carriers become.
It's like comedians who replace comedy with a heavy use of "fuck", "fucking", "shit", etc.

For some of the screenshots, I wasn't sure what the problem and wished he suggested a solution.
Do you still have the link for the thread (if it was here)?

I might try to develop it if more people show interest. Of course others would be welcome to join in the development :P Btw there's no need for a general consensus: as long as enough people are interested, there's a "market" for it.

It might even be some extension of JustHackIt, since the goal wasn't so far away, but I think Slinkset is a bit limited for the purpose (for structuring contests etc.).

Thanks for your reply.
I think the creator Jonathan Edwards has realized this. He released the source here: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=160

... and he also said here: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=177

"I have realized that this is not going to happen inside Computer Science, at least not at first. The idea with Juncture is to build something that might be really useful, and is complete enough to allow other people to extend it."
I installed web 3.0 but it crashes whenever my hyperspace drive goes into warp mode so I downgraded back to web 2.6 until the service patch is released.
Filmmaker Giving Away Movie Soundtrack For Free To Promote The Movie
Make aMap Of Your Best Arguments
Lets imagine for a moment we throw open the borders and allow the domestic labor market to reach equilibrium with the the world market, will we not have a lot of new Americans? and will we all not be much poorer in the near future?

Lets imagine for a moment we allow the free trade phenomenon of American exogenously financed consumerism to continue to global equilibrium, how much wealth will the country have left?

Many prominent American investors; notably Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Jim Rogers; vocally oppose these ideas.

Academic theories are good fun, but we ought to slow down and act pragmatically. A perfectly free market is just too ugly.

One wise measure of pragmatism may be to adjust the H-1B quota downward as the domestic labor market contracts to maintain the status quo (as far as I can tell this is what the discussion is really about.)

edit: Also, I feel the immigration question is more nuanced than the "classic make-work fallacy," which is a lot closer to breaking something with a hammer and feeling good about creating a job for the guy who glues it back together.
Interesting, I was worried about that the last time I was in Europe (Sept. 2008). When I got my bill from my American provider, I had no extra charges for data. It looks like, for now things might work better as a non-European phone user in the Europe, as far as data goes. I'll see what happens on my next trip this spring.
I'm actually working on a language of my own with a graphical editor, and I had the same idea of using it as a teaching tool. When I started making it, it was so much fun making that I thought others should be able to have fun programming too. So I had the idea of releasing it under the guise of a puzzle game (possibly with no reference to programming at all) in the hopes that it would rub off on "real" programmers.
Callbacks, Redux - Making Rails filters faster
Unimpressive by todays standards. Try looking at them from the standpoint of the year it was released in instead.
you can't read it? hrm. well, the article speculates about what it is he might be using:

"The security analysts speculated that Obama will use the Sectera Edge, designed by General Dynamics Corp. and L-3 Communications, because it meets the government's highest security requirements. It runs on Windows CE software, not the BlackBerry operating system, and it presumably would not rely on an e-mail pathway through a network operations center outside of the U.S., as the BlackBerry does, with NOCs in Canada and Europe."
DOT
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1956839705/
Not if ever carrier did the same, which is the case in the US of course.
My ads are running through the site, and it doesn't appear that my credit card has been charged yet.

Apparently all the coupon codes are expired now, if you follow the directions the only part that works is joining the VISA small business group to get $100 of advertising.

So far 67 people have clicked on my ad and landed on my site, http://slackerfactor.com/ , but none of them have signed up.
I thought about "Matrices" but decided that there was only one Matrix (in all senses of the word...)
$2bn in sales a high score for games
I was bitten by something like array(1,2,3)[0] once. I got especially mad because it is the php parser that throws up. That thing must be full of special cases.
> We just experienced a decade with robust productivity growth along with steadily declining standards of living.

This sentiment always confuses me. Granted, my experience is limited (memory only serves me for about the last 15 years), but it seems like things are getting better all the time. More people have more televisions, air conditioners, dishwashers, etc than ever before. Life expectancy is steadily increasing, food supply has become more or less a non-issue, etc. In what material dimension are we noteably worse off now than we were 20 years ago? I'm not trying to pick a fight, I'm honestly curious. The only thing that remotely comes to mind is the cost of higher education, which has been increasing in cost faster than wages grow.

> If those who think that the median citizen will benefit from increased immigration, make that argument in terms that addresses that citizen's self interest.

Just because incomes have "stagnated" (which also seems to depend on how you slice and dice the numbers), doesn't mean standard of living has gone down. The constantly decreasing prices of material goods plays just as much of a factor. My wages could be cut in half and I could still afford the same amount of TV screen as two years ago. Granted, not everything gets cheaper at the rate consumer electronics do, but cheap immigrant labor has a huge effect on the prices of stuff you buy all the time, which benefits you as well.
Child labor is but one of many issues. My point is that there is a progression to modernizing a country, and that certain evils need to be tolerated while progress is being made. Do I agree with child labor? No. But I do believe that, in certain contexts, it is unavoidable and needs to be accepted temporarily, for the alternatives are certainly worse (e.g. condemning a large segment of the population to perpetual poverty).

Expecting a 3rd-world country to act like a 1st-world one, when it clearly isn't, does not work. In the same way that the US often forces American-style democracy upon other countries without going through the requisite social changes beforehand, so do Western nations force first-world labor standards on countries that are simply not ready.

What we, as modernized nations, should be doing is not unfairly punishing these countries, but rather establishing a roadmap to eliminate these evils through economic development. This may take years and decades, but at least in my birth nation child labor and sweatshops are all but eliminated, with the help of the US government no less. To try and play it black and white is foolish and solves nothing.
Why is it a good idea to charge the 2B+ people around the world earning $2 a day the equivalent of a week's wages to enroll in a class and the equivalent of a month's wages to take a test?
1,800-year-old marble head unearthed in Israel
It's true - the iPhone and iPod now makes up the bulk of Apple's revenue. That being said, sales of their laptops are still growing by leaps and bounds (well, until recently anyway). There is still a large market out there for high-end laptops.
I think I've heard of the guy who wrote that software-for-making-online-stores stuff. Its Paul somethingorother...
Swordfish.

Yah, that was a joke...
It's supposed to be undergrad, which is like that at Caltech (and for that matter, many physics departments).

Real Genius is a terrific movie, and it leapt to mind as being definitive. :-)
GHC actually moved away from using C as a target language. They call it a dead end for whatever reason. (They seem to be going to C--.)
ClickToFlash - WebKit/Safari plug-in to prevent automatic loading of Flash content
Agreed. And most the time the people that are offended are the outraged people who always like to be outraged about something.
Introducing Malicious Code Reviews
Type-Checking in the VM? One would have to think hard to accomodate a diverse range of type systems on this level.

(And the Haskell guys keep expanding their type systems all the time.)
While I'm generally all for the change you propose, you have to be realistic and realize this could be abused.

I could set up a company that would, in exchange for buying $3000 of my plastic toys, hire someone and let them resign a month later. I can even let them do the month's work from their new home in the US. Then they can go off and do as they please.

Granted this is just an enforcement issue, and enforcement is part of whatever system we have, but I think you could save a lot of effort by just instituting some kind of entrance exam system to certify them as a 'knowledge worker'. (At which point they can enter and leave freely, with full job mobility.)

As an added bonus, you could administer this exam to citizens as well as a form of professional certification, which would probably be more useful to employers than the existing degree system.
Swordfish; if nothing for the totally cool monitor setup he had at Gabriel's place.

Alien; the original- the next couple of movies in the series were okay but the first I think is a classic in form of technology and all that good stuff. If you watch it, it may seem a bit old-school for our time, but for their time that was pretty cool! Finding a solution to space travel at light-year speed? Come-on- that's awesome.

Stargate; another one for space travel, but overall it was kind of corny- I just liked how the Egyptians, or whoever, discovered a way to transport across galaxies.

Enemy of the State; cool NSA tech stuff.

Deja Vu; the ability to go back in time only four days earlier or less... I like their setup and how they explained the plausibility of the technology actually coming to fruition.
Hammer time at Yahoo under Bartz
What's next, "I'm Not an Asshole if I Blog that I'm Not an Asshole"?
"This work was funded by the National Science Foundation through a BIO Research Training Group in Ecological Complexity (NSF 9553623)."
> They want people to switch,

Who do you mean by "they" in this sentence? There are lots of people involved in building "Linux", and certainly not all of them want or care about other people switching to Linux.

> All Linux gives is problems and headaches.

Not true. Linux gives me personally much more than that: high-performance comes to mind, and a good development environment out of the box too. There is much more, but since you are just trolling, I won't bother to make a bigger list.

> What really kills linux is just the arrogance of the developers.

It doesn't really make sense to talk about something that "kills" Linux - but assuming you mean something along the lines of "small adoption on the desktop" I will point out that Linux usage has been steadily increasing.
I'd certainly start with his annual letter:

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter
Apollo 13 has some great hacker scenes. It has, in fact, my favorite hacker moment from any movie.

"We gotta find a way to make this [holds up square peg] fit into the hole for this [holds up round peg] using nothing but that [points to random assortment of crap that they know is on board].": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNDuGuerpf8
First time I've seen a blocker design for visual confusion, but some existing leg pad designs do incorporate this kind of visual trick to attempt to make the 5-hole look bigger.

Here's a long list of thumbnails of pads: http://www.hockeyworld.com/catHome.ihtml?catID=30&shop=0...

Note that while some just try to look cool, there is a common pattern of diagonal stripes from the inside of the knee to the outside of the foot - when you go down into a butterfly, the idea is that this makes it look like your knees are bent more than they are, and the five-hole is bigger than it is, because the insides of the foot and shin are white like the inside of the crease.

The Vaughan VPG 6* look the most like they're trying to fool the eye. Interestingly, others come close but ruin it by letting a dark pattern repeat right at the inside of the toe.

I thought that this was a Patrick Roy innovation, but couldn't remember where I read about it first.
JazzScheme beta publicly released
Side-effects are evil [1] and it's good that TDD encourages you to minimize side-effects.

[1] That's one reason why functional programming raises productivity.
I saw "Hackers are people too" recently. I is a very good documentary about Hackers and the culture.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1279942/
I would go for some documentaries -

Triumph of the Nerds,
Hackers : Angels or Daemons
History of Video Games

another one on hacking from National Geographic, i can't recall the name

Antitrust too :P
What struck me about the article was the attribution of the concept of cyberspace to Vernor Vinge instead of Gibson. After some wikipedia investigation, it's clear that my sci-fi history knowledge is lacking - True Names came out a full 3 years before Neuromancer.

However, Gibson is still credited with giving the name "cyberspace" to this artificial world (Vinge called it the "Other Plane"). I'm wholly disappointed with my sci-fi professor now for leaving out this bit.
Not a defence, but hey, Adobe started it. With their crock-tastic installers, their updating of updated updaters, everything to do with Acrobat and Reader, app bloat, market segmentation gone nuts, rip-off pricing for Europe, vulnerability-inducing setups (like bundling a needless, insecure copy of Opera) and launch times measured in aeons, they've treated their users like dirt for years.

That doesn't engender politeness.
Steps To Protect The Admin Area In WordPress
from what i understand from an employee-friend, the pogue comment is correct and they are preparing for the release of grandcentral 2.0, which would make this article completely false speculation.
It has been released on the Intertubes apparently: http://www.torrentbox.com/torrent_details?id=29078&filel...
As an MBA (and hacker), I can say that I would absolutely prefer a PDF to a word document. If you really want to make comments, just made a comment in the PDF. Adobe Reader, though I prefer not to use it, lets you easily make comments, and this is the program most people will be using.
Get to the root of the problem if you want to fix it
could you give an example of what you mean by a small programming project? Also how would you choose who you work with or would it be like playing yahoo games where you can "sit" and "stand up" from projects? Maybe you could also watch people coding/conversing as an observer? Would there be a web ide or an automatically generated svn repository? Would all the projects be unique/for charity or more on a project euler/code golf level or what?
This is a wonderful paper. The Razborov-Rudich theorem, in particular, is a classic result, up with the unsolvability of the halting problem, and Goedel's incompleteness, in my opinion. It's described in section 4 of this paper. The rest is also well worth reading.
Sadly I tried to download this a while ago and it turned out to be fake... its another (not-so-interesting) documentary on the internet.
"And populist talk like this is often the first step towards that end."

As usual, it will backfire in the most predictable way: Microsoft will close offices in the US and invest in hiring skilled people for its foreign offices. And so will all major US corporations that feel the heat from this kind of misguided discourse.

It's that simple.
Here's a good Paul Krugman column that addresses this:

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

Also, you should take into consideration whether the US as a country should be in the business of telling other countries what to do.
Project Ardvark about a group of interns at Fog Creek Software

EDIT: The actual name is Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=984060502281891679
Thats been one of my favorite scenes since I was a kid!
"Yes, that's John _____ Smith. Yes, five underscores. Yes, I know. Yes. Ok, thanks for getting that straightened out."
Clojure: Genetic Mona Lisa problem in 250 beautiful lines
Real world meetups for joint hacking are better than online collaboration. If the goal is to learn from other programmers, you learn a lot more by sitting next to them. A lot of it is incidental stuff you would not have thought to ask, like tricks in vi and emacs and etc. Another reason to work with someone is it provides a kind of social discipline, you feel you have to get something done on the project on a semi-regular basis. A weekly hacking session at a coffeehouse or someones apartment provides that regular discipline, and because the hacking sessions inevitably end, physical meetings can keep a side project from growing and taking over the rest of your life.

The "just work on a open-source project" advice isn't that bad, but you should pick something that you would benefit from improving. It is still a good idea to solict others to help you in a physical meeting, however. Find people who would benefit from improvement in the same project.

I think rather than a website or webapp, what you are looking for is a computer club. I go to a weekly meeting in Austin of ALE, a linux users group. We meet 7 pm to 11:30 pm, and we are an "experimental" group, in that we never have presentations or a planned agenda -- people bring computers with problems and we fix them, new people show up asking for help learning linux, etc. There are about 5 people there who come regularly with programming issues, ranging from side-business startup sites that are in php and mysql to hobbiest robots.

If you are really serious about this, find a place (possibly your house or apartment) and have a "Saturday afternoon hack-a-thon" every week or every other week. If you provide food and coffee people will come. Your main problem is likely to be keeping non-programmers from showing up and just talking.

If you have trouble finding a place to do this, see if you can locate a co-working or "jelly" type place in your area. A co-working place might let you use the area during non-business hour such as on weekends, and the jelly people probably know all the good coffeehouses.