skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I try to take what I got from University. It's nothing new or special, but it helps me get along. I generally stick with a rapid-prototype design and follow through the (collective "ugh") waterfall approach. Start with your requirements, formulate an analysis, follow through with a a design and work towards the implementation and testing with focus on post-delivery maintenance. It's not new, and it's not in any way "productivity porn". But, for me it works and that's all that really matters.

Tools I use: I try to stick with an IDE like Eclipse. I know they're sorta frowned upon, but I like convenience. I use Git, personal preference. Some spreadsheet program for managing tabular data, like milestones, word processor for keeping a journal, and a scratch pad or whiteboard for scratch-work.

Tips I've accumulated after a while:

* Milestones help you focus your efforts for the "session"
* Design documents and whatnot sound like a lot of paperwork, and it is, but they are incredibly useful to have and keep around.
* Try to not intermix phases of development. Don't do design and requirements gathering or design and analysis at the same time. Do things in order. It keeps things clean and separated.

Nothing here is incredibly new and much of it is probably incredibly obvious to most people, but as a person who studied computer science, software engineering concepts were not stressed. This methodology keeps me going without getting stuck in "programmers block" wondering what-to-do-next.
The disclaimer page makes it obvious:

http://www.arpanetdialogues.net/disclaimer/

The wording is intensely verbose but basically boils down to: "We made this all up as an art project".
Ask HN:  How Do I Protect Personal I.P. from My Employer's Acquiring Company
A large software company is acquiring my current employer. During my very long stint (by Silicon Valley standards) with my current employer I've conceived of, worked on, evaluated, and partially documented some potential startup ideas on the side. I intend to continue developing these for possible future personal gain.

These ideas have little relation to my current employer's business, but a few of them are close to some of the larger company's product offerings. Close enough that a product manager with some imagination could see integrating a couple of my ideas into their current offerings. So ... what should I do to protect my past and future efforts?

I'll soon need to sign an Inventions Agreement with the new company, along with a Schedule of Separate Works. I will be listing in the schedule formal work I've done for previous employers, listing patents and patent applications, etc. I intend also to list a brief description of each idea I'm considering for the future and indicate on the schedule that the "company" with which I've done this work is my own personally registered Fictitious-Business-Name "company". Should this be sufficient? How important would it be to document these conceptions before formally starting employment with the new company?

I imagine working code would the best documentation, but most haven't reached that stage yet. Some of the ideas are just "sketches" in my mind and on random sheets of paper -- is it possibly already too late for those?
Redbox Instant headed to iOS, Android costs $8 per month for streaming and discs
Solving iCloud backing up of "cookies" using certificates
And that, right there, is the ratchet function which has shut the door on wikipedia.

Insiders can quickly undo anything. They are familiar with the tools and the procedures.

You might have contributed for the rest of your life. That potential stream of valuable contributions is now lost to wikipedia, potentially forever.

Now compound that over every single expert to whom so much was promised by the interface, and from whom the promise was removed by wikipedians.
Warning: Prospective questions are bad for your (business) health.
1. Sharpen your saw. Keep learning new technologies and programming methodologies.

2. Make an effort to use what you have learned from past experiences to write better code in terms of usability, efficiency, readability, maintainability, etc.

3. Read Code(good ones). Sometimes, looking at other people's code allows you to have a fresh perspective about coding style.

4. Contribute to open source. It will help you immensely in understanding what it takes to write code that others can read and maintain.

5. Help others on sites like stackexchange.
Wikipedia seem to "suffer" from the same issues that plague Google making their "community" do their support for them

In essence, the "most popular" community members think they own the services, not only because of unchecked "work"
Great points. My background growing up was similar to yours.

If it makes you feel better, in raising my daughter I'm trying to do things a better way. I do believe my daughter is gifted, but I spend little if any time praising for that. Instead, I talk about how things like hard word, perseverance, and practice are the key ingredients of success, and I point out and discuss examples wherever I can.

I'll let you know in about 10 years or so whether it made a difference. :)
Ok, all done. Ordered just now from london, never mind the 79 USD shipping cost.
Next I installed their iPhone app. Shocked to see that it's gamified.
I'm liking the mini precisely because I have it with me. It fits in my coat pockets. When spring comes around I'll probably have to start wearing clown pants.
Forum 2000 was hilarious -- virtual replicates of famous people (from Ayn Rand to Socrates) supposedly answered everyday questions poised by visitors (what really happened was that the questions were distributed to and answered by CMU college students). I think its creator shut it down to focus on his PhD in maths.
I couldn't understand someone who did that. If you're posting under an alias it's because you're worried that you might get caught. You're also assuming that the person you're posing as is going to be blamed. At this point - what would you expect happen? The accused is going to plead innocence. If it was a serious enough matter IP logs and maybe other forensics are going to get pulled out. Are you smart enough to evade all that too? If you get caught, the punishment is going to be even worse.

At that point, it is probably easier to just study, learn the material and do it yourself.

I just cannot fathom how people could be truly pulling off these sort of stunts and can sleep soundly at night. At some point if you're an idiot you have to accept it and either do something different or buckle down and work harder.
I think it's the best way, personally, at first.

Investors don't care how many founders you have if there is traction.

Noah Kagan and Mark Suster seem to think so as well:

http://www.founderly.com/2011/08/noah-kagan-appsumo-1-of-2/
Can't find link to Mark Suster, but i recall it from avc.com
Certainly. I should have mentioned earlier about frameworks. I am using Python Flask framework already.
Something similar to this was attempted with the Linux kernel once: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/linux-backdoor-att...

I say similar because it was not a trusted contributor going rogue but someone actually hacking the public CVS repo.
Relevant graph:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusio...
How to get Viral content for your site (The bootstrap way)?
Facebook moves from democracy to Zuckerberg dictatorship
Also mental health -- I always find it to make something when people are expecting it.
This is something we're debating. If suppose data was to sync with a folder on your Dropbox, we can't guarantee its integrity should you decide to remove or move it, whether accidentally or intentionally. This isn't unsolvable, but definitely something to think about.
This interesting, i am especially impressed by the debugging stuff... however I contest the assertion of good performance. If you are using the Objective-C runtime then, in my world, you are dog slow. Sorry.

Anything that stops doing 10,000 nothings from compiling out is dirt to me... too easy to screw your performance by accident with Objective-C messaging and objects. (don't get me wrong, I enjoy their enormous power, I'd just like to only pay for it if I actually need something that dynamic - which is almost never)
The value is not in getting the answer. The value is in the mental exercise of figuring out how to get the answer. Supplying your professor with the answer is merely a token you provide as evidence that you have done so.

As far as whether any "lasting measurable value" is imparted by these sorts of exercises, I can say that at my workplace I've seen more than one freshout who clearly hadn't made it through college without significant assistance from Stack Overflow and other people's blogs. None of them lasted very long.

Perhaps knowing how to solve problems for yourself isn't necessary to get a college degree nowadays, but it's surprising how useful it can be in a career where you solve problems for a living.
If someone has enough access to a computer to install a keylogger, they probably have more than enough access to just read whatever is being "typed" using the on screen keyboards. Inject javascript, read it out of the browsers memory, whatever.

Of course you could be using such a system to defend against a hardware keylogger, in which case I'd be thinking long and hard, trying to decide who I pissed off.

Edit: Just realised you /were/ referring to a hardware keylogger. My apologies.
> screen volume
But isn't it ironic that blackhats bent on data theft so rarely cause system outages?

We have no way of knowing this. If a blackhat smashes your system to crap, you won't know what caused it. Maybe things just broke. I once permanently lost a machine to the ping of death (the hard reboot was the straw that broke the camel's back) and only knew about it because the entire dorm got hit by the ping of death. If I had been targeted it would have just been the machine dying on me. Which happens to me anyway. [1]

But if the whitehat scans your system at 4:52AM and your system breaks at 4:52AM, then you will know exactly what happened.

And knowing exactly what ports are open is information that is really valuable to a client. An external audit can find what insiders are too busy to pay attention to.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4900688
>That would be very expensive. Looks like at least $30 per copy.

How do you reconcile this with your previous comment[1] in this thread:

My target market is people who are serious about web applications. In an industry where it isn't hard to charge $100-250 an hour for design or development work, $200 for everything included doesn't seem like a lot.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4910124
Yes?

Are you saying that you would go online and look for answers? If so, why do you believe that's an acceptable way to conduct yourself? If not, why do you believe that the professors students are any different?
The funny bits are the Ayn Rand lines.

Rand was a philosopher-writer. She wrote two famous books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which codify her philosophy, Objectivism. Objectivism has Man as a divinely rational, self-interested, high-achieving capitalist at its center. According to Objectivism, this is what you must strive for, and society must not get in the way (Laissez-faire). She also has a special take on gender relations, for example all her protagonists, both male and female, are single rich genius capitalist workaholics who don't have children since they have no time for such matters.

Although her books (and philosophy) are somewhat simple and two dimensional, it's still interesting to read and ponder, so she became somewhat rich and famous. This led to her ego going into orbit, so eventually a cult around her formed, and apparently she became a bit difficult, casting out members who didn't agree with her, including her lover(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
The funny bits are the Ayn Rand lines.

Rand was a philosopher-writer. She wrote two famous books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which codify her philosophy, Objectivism. Objectivism has Man as a divinely rational, self-interested, high-achieving capitalist at its center. According to Objectivism, this is what you must strive for, and society must not get in the way (Laissez-faire). She also has a special take on gender relations, for example all her protagonists, both male and female, are single, rich, genius, capitalist workaholics working as solitary inventor-engineers who don't have children since they have no time for such matters.

Although her books (and philosophy) are somewhat simple and two dimensional, it's still interesting to read and ponder, so she became somewhat rich and famous. This led to her ego lifting off and reaching orbit, so eventually a cult around her formed, and apparently she became a bit difficult, casting out members who didn't agree with her, including her lover(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
But will they have a web player that doesn't require Silverlight? To me, that would be a huge differentiator.

I'll also be interested to see if their performance is near as smooth as Netflix, which may be some of the most reliable software I sue.
I remember talking to a previous boss saying, "I've been thinking of starting skunk works project 'X'. Where 'X' was introducing an ORM, JQuery, or cleaning up some old code/modules. And the answer was always "I'd rather you work on the backlog [of features]."

IMHO, he line of thinking where employers want you only grinding on today's problems rather than additionally incrementally honing the skills to innovate is a broken methodology and does not work for software. The barrier to learning these skills is too low to expect people not to want to do these things and it keeps getting lower.
Changing the fundamentals at the core is what I'd like to see.

This code has to work right down to ie6.
wikipedia should be like github. I should be able to clone it, write whatever I want in my branch, and you can merge it into your branch if you want, or not if you don't. End of story.
We're bootstrappers and don't mind serving a niche if there's enough value to be generated (and reaped).
Best Gaming website game giveaways 2012
Uh-oh, my bullshit buzzer went off at "Retina displays aren’t disruptive". Didn't read the rest of the article.
Understanding is a Poor Subtitute for Convexity (Antifragility)
For language-specific operators I could understand ... but to me, the cognitive load of the parentheses is worse than having to think for a moment about this particular set of operators which have the same precedence in every language I've used (and the arithmetic operators which I've had to know the order of since early grade school).

Maybe I'll eat my foot some day, but

(a == 1) && (b == 2)

or

(2 * 3) + 1

is nothing but code smell to me.
The U.S. looks bad compared to other countries because we have more poor children than they do. If you compare our middle-class and upper-class children to theirs, we look a lot better.

The U.S. does not have an education problem; it has a child poverty problem.
How many downvoters really think that making bug-free software is effectively impossible? (I suppose we must leave some meta-uncertainty about the truth of math.) Sure, many programmers would be out of work if they no longer had a large bug database to work on, but there are numerous areas in hardware and software design that have incredibly low (or 0) bugs. NASA's work is usually brought up in these conversations, for instance. Does everything need to be designed and constructed so carefully? Probably not. But I would love it if a standard web browser was, given how important the browser is.
TL;DR "because they test really heavily, or because they don't test much at all. Wait, what? There's got to be some causation here somewhere."
>"Anyone stupid enough to cheat is stupid enough to use their own name."

Darn. You'd think if there's anyone who could be trusted to not affirm the consequent, it would be a math professor.
I will gladly accept the bet if you can find a trustful way of getting that data, because honestly I can't think about one.

And you overall do have a point, but is not as strong as you think it is.
But also rather immoral, since they were abusing the site. What if someone else came along later and thought those answers were real?
an idealist. There's nothing wrong with wanting to improve the status quo.
Do you have a steady job? A mortgage? A family?

Watch your spare time for awesome compilers go down the drain when you acquire one or more of these.
Hacktivism? Has been the next big thing for quite a while actually.
You clearly don't know how cutthroat some of these universities are. There are students that will do anything to be number one.
Here are some people fooling with history visualization:

http://waxy.org/2005/06/wikipedia_histo/

(I have no idea if anything still works, just had some vague memory of it floating around)
The best way to be productive is to focus more on actual work and bare minimum on management. This is what I do :

1) Take one project at a time.

2) Make a vision document, basically what features I want in full fledged version of my application - Plain text document on my desktop.

3) Reduce the number of features to minimum required for MVP and make a to-do list for MVP - plain text document on my desktop

4) After 2 & 3 is done focus only on actual work(coding/designing) ticking off to-do items one by one.
The Pope posts his first Twitter message
> "Do people use iPads standing up or something?"

Not much, because it's too heavy to use standing up. Or rather, in the usual stand-up use cases (e.g., on a bus, boat, or train) you usually want to one-hand the device, and its weight prevents you from doing so.

> "The amount of time I spend using it while I have to hold it unsupported is minimal."

Is that because tablets naturally don't have "unsupported" use cases, or because the current implementation fulfills said use cases poorly, and therefore you don't use them that way?

> "Do people find the weight of hardcover books difficult to hold for long periods of time?"

While standing or one-handing it? Yes.

> "Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is about twice the weight of The Hobbit."

And how many times have you seen someone reading a book that size on the subway/bus/ferry? ;)
If you like Objective-C but not Apple's runtime, you should check out ObjFW: https://webkeks.org/objfw/
"Every Apple user" didn't downplay 7-inch Android devices. You already didn't like Apple and needed a justification to complain about Apple and their fans, like some tablet platform warrior.

Most Apple fans are the opposite of how they're portrayed. Rather than accept everything Apple does, they over-analyze and complain about nearly everything. If Apple slightly mismatches the color of a button, it will get mentioned in a whiny thread on the Apple support forums.
As far as I know (I was born and live in Germany, but please correct me if I'm wrong) the German education system is known for a great variance in performance of pupils.

This means there are some pupils that perform very well, but also some that perform very poorly. These extremes are more pronounced than in comparable countries.

Many people say that the education system is cementing the social hierarchy: if you are very well educated, your children will mostly become the same, but it is rather difficult for children to move up the social ladder if they have poorly educated parents.

Because there are many top performers the German economy has enough skilled personnel to be competitive (what to do with the less well educated is a much-debated topic - because of the distinct German health and welfare system the status-quo leads to less social tensions than it would probably in the U.S.).

TLDR: it is plausible that the U.S. is ahead on average. The German education system is probably better on the top performers and worse on the bottom performers.
Coding challenges by Peter Norvig
This is a useful method if you need to rely on anything being device unique.

I'll be going over how I did this (in Ruby,) alternative methods, gotchas, and some other practical uses and considerations at Boston.rb in January http://bostonrb.org/presentations/month/January-2013 (it'll be live streamed over Google Hangouts)
I've got a soft spot for the Z80 and they were considered out of date by the time I was born. A few years ago I found a great book on how to build a simple microcomputer based on the Z80. I learned a ton working through that book and that little chip brought me a lot of joy. I've still got a couple Z80s in my part drawer... you know... just in case...
Why? They make shit that works with huge investment when the rest of the world makes do with shit that doesn't work properly for very little investment.
I wouldn't be surprised if their result set was filtered on the same rules used for Google Suggest, which do filter out terms presumably linked to controversial file sharing websites (Pirate Bay) and adult entertainment.
I often do the same thing as you, where I get up early (6ish for me) and do a couple hours of work before the start of the actual workday.

The most important part to me is to make sure that I'm only doing things that actually matter. So when I'm thinking about adding a feature to my product, I first try to see if that feature should actually be the highest-priority thing, or if my customers can live without it. And it helps to zoom way out, too. Often, programming is not the wisest way for me to spend my time. Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to spend time on, say, marketing, or on education, whether that be programming-related education or something else. Abraham Lincoln said, "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax." A lot of the time, sharpening your ax is the most effective use of your limited time.

I've found the following books helpful when it comes to time management and overall effectiveness. In order of how strongly I recommend them:

- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

- First Things First by Stephen R. Covey

- Getting Things Done by David Allen

- The first 20 pages or so of The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

I use a combination of tactics recommended by GTD, FTF and T7HOHEP. After reading GTD, I wrote down everything I could think of that I would have to or want to do, ever. Examples: do the dishes, email Steve, visit Europe. Later, I captured most of these items in Evernote, and then later, I graduated to Things. I suspect that the developers of Things have read GTD.

Now that I have all of my to-dos captured in Things, I try to take one day each week (usually Monday) to plan the rest of the week. Reality never matches up with the plan, but I don't think that means I need to throw out the entire process. It's still helpful to have at least a high-level idea of what I want to do with the week.

I still find Evernote valuable for capturing ideas, but Things seems best so far for capturing to-dos. I also still use pen and paper to plan on a day-to-day basis. If I go by Things only, I forget, so I usually transfer my daily Things to-dos to paper at the beginning of the day. As unexpected things naturally pop up throughout the day, I add them to my daily to-do list and/or Things, depending on how likely I think it is I'll get to that item the same day.

Hope that stuff helps.
But boring things are where the money is.

Never, ever, ever underestimate the role of MONEY in your career choices. Not everyone has the heady mix of extreme intelligence and bloodyminded foolhardiness it takes to keep their feet in the startup world. For the rest of us, a steady comfortable position in ERP implementation/customization or somesuch will keep your head well above water in this shite economy.
If you are an ad company or a company that relies on ads in some way for revenue, what possible reason would you have for respecting it?