skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeh that is a good idea! I think that was the major problem - the the images didnt disappear immediately when I clicked.

Kudos for posting a home-hosted site to HN! thats like the pinnacle of hackerdom :D
Paul, can we have a feature that when we save an application there's also a 'feedback' button, which sends the application to select YC alumni and others who have time to give feedback?
Neat idea - Valve have the content market well wrapped up at the moment so something genuinely new like this might have a chance of succeeding.
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For graphics its essencial to be great in math.

Rest of programing skills lies in pattern recognition skill.
Its like learning new natural language.

I would recommend You to learn esperanto (many good programmers known to me are pros in eo), latin some greek (my professors from univ told me so, i know little of them).

As previous speakers pointed out, logic is essential. I would say that logic is a base line of all success. Cooker like programmer use the tool - brain.

And good luck!
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You don't need math for programming web/pages or text-parsing. What you do need is a simple understanding of basic logic.

But as soon as you want to start on 2d (or 3d) graphics you'll need more math.

My tip is, learn programming first, and then use it as a vehicle to make learning math more fun. Build a simple vector graphics engine!
You do not have to learn maths unless you are going to start writing complex algorithms for encryption and other complex calculation may be like data mining and so on. At your age you should start by writing simple scripts and read books to understand the concepts. Pick one language and learn it. I am sure when you start learning let us say, Ruby or Python you will notice they hardly go over mathematical concepts.
Learn C to start with...not ruby or python
That seems a very heavy intro to the world of programming :)
Figure out a way to get on TheFunded.com and read every single thing everyone there has written (and realize that a lot of it is crap of course! :)).

Why should anyone waste time on reading crap? he suggests to read as much as possible, but will that not be at the expense of the time spent working on the start up. If much of it is crap, general opinions and subjective stuff, then why not just focus on the start up and find the lessons for yourself rather than waste time reading crap.
Perhaps more accurately, polling for updates in an event-based network is suboptimal -- especially since we have all this lovely packet-switching machinery available for use! -- but it's not completely wrong. Polling an RSS feed is equivalent to (a shitty form of) queue replication, and (slightly less closely) to TCP retransmissions, where event notification is equivalent to message delivery and to TCP segment transfer. The two approaches are in a sense dual. You can construct a message-streaming system from a state-replication system, and you can construct a state-replication system from a message-streaming system. Of course this still doesn't address when one or the other should be used: for that you have to get into the different scenarios for message replication. RSS/Atom etc are great when latency doesn't matter and you are multicasting, or when recipients desire (relative) anonymity. The cacheability of the polling approach can also be valuable.

Neither pull nor push solves the problem that SUP tries to address. For that, a layer on top is required -- essentially an embedded message broker with configurable private/shared queues and bindings. One very promising approach, once the transport is sorted out (which is what ReverseHttp is trying for), is to transplant the AMQP model (objects and operations) into the new setting.
Wordpress is the best example of spaghetti code I've ever seen.

You can compare any code you write yourself to it and you'll find your code better.

Last year I gave a conference talk at our local PHP web developer conference analyzing technical details of WP, Joomla and Drupal. I found WP a piece of spaghetti, Joomla a bloatware and Drupal somewhat cleaner than the other two and with some interesting ideas.

However if you look at the UI, you have to admit that WordPress really shines there. I haven't yet used anything that easy to publish a blog.

Taking all this into consideration I think the article title is greatly misleading. It really should be "Compojure 1, Wordpress 0". And the value of reading that article for me was zero.
Hackers forming a union? Surely, that would be like herding cats ...
It helps if you are going to deal with the harder stuff. Graph Theory tends to help no end, Complexity Theory (which you should get taught in a CS class anyway) is pretty essential, as is Logic and Sets. If games interest you then you will need to understand basic physics and calculus.

Solving hard maths problems will grow the habbits needed to investigate problems when googling doesn't cut it. Infact anything that forces you to concentrate and be analytical would be good, so if you fancy studying biology then you will pick up some useful skills there.

Besides programmers tend to be better when they have interests and expertise beyond the field of computing.

You can get by with arithmetic if all you want to be is a Code Monkey / Web Developer / Java programmer. Just learn to use the tools that are given to you. But if you want to create the tools that other people use, if you want to write new code, then mathematics is going to help.

Seriously, until you know which area of computing you want to work in having the maths will offer you more options. Just remember that most of the fields of professional programming did not exist until a few years ago. When you graduate who knows what technology will be available, organic computers, optical computers, quantum computers? So learn the maths to the best of your ability and keep your options open.
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Yo mentioned only one side of the deal and it sounds as though you are here purely to help the US.

When did I imply I am here to help the US?

People who are ambitious and want to achieve face many obstacles. If you are really serious, you jump over them, work around them, crawl under them, move ahead and work towards your goal. Obstacles won't stop people from realizing their dreams.

If one of my obstacles is the law, then arguing that it should be changed is one way of trying to overcome the obstacle. There are other ways of trying to do the same thing, which I am pursuing. Your assumption that the only thing I am doing is sitting here and cribbing about immigration policy is just that - an assumption. The article about is about immigrants and immigration law, so I commented about the law.

I see your larger point about not thinking that the country I am in has to be a constant instead of a variable and I am not.
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Check the term "holmgang" for an insight into how life was in the bad old days.

I'm not an expert but from what I've read, research implies that the "ting" was more regulating/discussing the clan quarrels/warfare than judging as we define it today. (No reference saved, sorry.)

Afaik, traditional societies before a central violence monopoly were generally, well, violent. Iceland was a hard place to survive, so the population might have had to work more and "play" less.

(You can make some form of analogy between the old times and present international interactions; there is no police force to stop violence -- and clans with mutual support agreements abound... Ask an expert.)

As a hard line atheist, it is not an easy thing for me to say that Christianity seemed to be an improvement. :-)

Anyway, there is an old joke that the problem with anarchy is that it is too unstable. The time before a central state wasn't fun. I believe the tribal areas of Pakistan is a good indication on how it worked in Scandinavia.
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I'm all with you for the first two paragraphs.

In the third, I think you're making the potential problem seem worse by failing to acknowledge that there would be many currencies, so a failure would be contained.

In the fourth, you're showing the reasons for your own error: "huge problems with monopolies: the banks": each of the "monopolies" you cite, you do so in the plural. "Banks" clearly can not be a monopoly, as there are many of them. I think what you're getting at is the "too big to fail" rhetoric?
OK. I direct my comment at xach (since I can't edit it any more).
The title is slightly misleading. Olson discusses how the economic growth of countries slows down through the process of accumulating interest groups ("economic sclerosis", if memory serves). However, I don't think he has an example of economic growth going negative.

"How Young Countries Age" fits better than "How Rich Countries Die".
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I don't fear change. I fear change for the sake of change.
... and either way they leave a mess that takes a generation to contain/cleanup/hide.
Fantastic thread, you guys. Gnaritas, in my opinion you've got it absolutely right. There are some strange memes in America, such as that it's the richest country on earth, socialism is bad and anything government touches turns rotten. The problem is that the truth is rarely found in extreme locations.

America is certainly not even a contender for richest country, and as you state, many countries, especially in Europe, are showing that socialism works quite well. It's the reason we're moving to that model with healthcare.

> the measure of the success of a country is how happy it's people are, not how much money it cranks out

Exactly. And countries with more smaller gaps between the rich and poor are almost exclusively much happier. I've been to two countries which are very similar (I won't state which to avoid offending anyone here), but Country A was depressing and sad, old women drunk in the streets -- I couldn't leave fast enough. I went to Country B and, although it was poorer, the people seemed much happier. It was much more alive and upbeat. I found out later that Country A has a huge disparity in wealth, Country B very little. I credit this with being the single strongest contributing factor to the quality of life in these countries, and a huge factor generally in the quality of life in any country.
I assume he's playing off of the usage of 'literally' regarding a metaphor.
Wouldn't blogger.com count? I'm sure they're making a fair amount from slapping adverts on it, not to mention all the user data harvesting.
Where have all the agents gone?
Agreed. Too many apple-to-orange comparisons. But categorizing by genres will require some amount of work.

How about having an option "can't compare"? That the user can indicate they saw both but cannot compare. With enough data, maybe you can cluster more frequently compared movies together or even making categories automatically?

(Downside is more complex UI; it's better to keep UI simple, so I'm not sure).
I especially didn't like the rant about the "horrible boilerplate array declarations at the top of the Wordpress plugin". That array looks like it provides some declarative information to the backend on how to display the configuration UI. So the 226 lines of PHP code plugin does incredibly much more than his ~25 lines of code: It has runtime configuration settings and it provides a HTML UI to set said configuration options.

All that in addition to the actual functionality.

I would even go as far as to say that rebuilding all the Wordpress functionality in Clojure would not take significantly more or less lines of code than what WP already has.

Or in other words: If I only need a small defined subset of Wordpresses functionality and if I have the time to actually write a blogging engine from scratch, then it will always have significantly fewer lines of code than WP - regardless of language.

Once I add features, the line count will increase - regardless of language.

This article is comparing apples to oranges: It's comparing a small, custom-built solution to a configurable out-of-the-box solution designed to satisfy the needs of the whole blogging community.

Of course that's more complex.

But it spares you the procedure the author later describes as "When I find a bug, I SSH in, re-attach to screen, fix it in Emacs, hit C-c C-c to recompile just the functions I need to update, and then detach from screen again.".
Virginity rates among students by major
Consider:

What satisfaction does the user get from voting? Why vote or visit more than a few times? Why would they recommend to their friends?
I too would pay a flat fee for limited time access.
I'm missing some visual feedback that a new set of movies is loading. Nothing really happens when you click -- according to Firebug it took 13.6 for the next set of movies to appear.

I'm not sure on the statistics, but maybe you'd be better off showing X movies at a time and asking the user to pick 2 of them; that might generate preferrence data faster. That way, when some of those X movies repeat, you would get more reliable ranking data. you could also ask the user to order the movie as it's common in studies, but that would potentially take too long.

Some kind of "progress" to show to the user would be nice too, e..g "you rated 5123 movies", even when not logged in.
Clever idea - these guys must have great PR behind them to plant a story like this.
6,000 small firms flock to Twitter every day
What the new Facebook should really look like
The U.N. D.P.A.
Ask HN: Recommendations for website monitoring tools
Having been burnt this week by portions of our website going dark, and us not noticing for several hours, I'm after a service to do periodic health checks of our website; check various pages are up & serving appropriate content; then email/SMS me if not.

A quick google offers no end of people offering such services, but I can't find any useful comparisons of features or reliability, so I thought I'd try the combined wisdom of HN.

From my brief review http://siteimprove.co.uk look fairly reputable, but a touch more expensive than I'd expected.

Personally, UK-based sites are preferred, but I'm interested in all recommendations.
"The same developer who wasn’t quite the team player is now the one who management elevates to the head of the pack."

actually what I see the most in EVERY company I ever worked on is quite the contrary: the incompetent are the first to be promoted to heads of the pack...
No you do not need to learn mathematics, just like you do not need to do anything to 'get by'. But I recomend not satisfying with just 'getting by'. Try your hardest to learn everything which can increase your skill set and it will help in aspects of your programming. I have not benefitted from a well grounded education in mathematics but I constantly have to retrofit my knowledge, you have the opportunity to start from a good base.
The text is okay, but it feels a little odd he keeps saying "you guys". Too much of that.

There's also one thing I could argue. Personally, I feel like I'm half entrepreneur half hacker and I wouldn't trade one half for another. So, being hacker usually means a lot of work and decreased socialization. This really makes it hard to connect with others as much as the author suggests. But still, we all know examples when this works. Maybe, those are weird exceptions and we should still try to be more socialized and sacrifice our work hours for that, I don't know. Probably I'd love to do that, but for now it feels like it's more important to come up with a good idea and build a product than to talk about. That could be a mistake, but it doesn't feel like a mistake right now.
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That is true - it is the same with space. They put a man on the moon 40 odd years ago and now they are still struggling to launch a shuttle without it blowing up.
Java as Legacy Language
How To: Implement Facebook Connect on the iPhone in 5 minutes
Cell Phone Updates
Passenger is a big win. I once ran nginx + mongrel_cluster, and while it probably had less overhead than the equivalent Apache + Passenger setup, it was more than cancelled out by the effort necessary to babysit the mongrel processes. This was also more of an issue with MRI-era Ruby and its associated memory leaks.

With Passenger, I set it and forget it. Time is money.
Don't worry, you will not need them at the begining. When you find some problem where you need maths just learn about it (the wikipedia is nice place to start). The problem is to identificate which maths fields you need to solve de problem.
I think that programing is a good motivation to study maths, for example I didn't care about graph teoric, trees or logic until I found that they are a great tools to solve problems.
Just learn maths by programming.
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We've been branching to a 2.x tree and slowly adapting to the latest stable release (up until yesterday 2.2.2). Surprisingly plugin compatibility was not the biggest issue we faced (and we use many plugins) - most problems caused by plugins were solved by installing newer version. Our biggest problems come from subtle changes in HAML syntax, which causes syntax errors in a myriad of views. As you can imagine, it's rather tedious to hunt down those incompatibilities, as our application is rather large.
Steam has been already doing this for a while, even if most games aren't sliced apart the the quickest start-to-play time.
Do you need to be "good at math" in the typical sense? Certainly not. Learning away certain mathematical concepts, however, helps.

To answer your question more precisely, I'll ask you a question: do you code in any high level language (Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP)? If so, chances are you're using 'associative arrays', 'dictionaries' or 'hashes'. How do they work under the cover? What is special and unique about them (A: hash tables and hashing functions).

Now, can you use the concept that's used by the hash-table primitives in your language, to sort an array of size N in a time proportion to N? What are you giving up to gain that speed advantage, how can you offset that by giving up slight speed advantage?

Now if someone is studying the same mathematical topics without having already programmed they won't have the same appreciation and attentiveness. To them "hash function" don't immediately click with programming techniques right away. Essentially my advice is start coding anyway, so the relevant topics in maths will "just click".

This is also a very different kind of math: it's largely discrete and even the continuous portions of it are elegant. This isn't sitting for hours and doing symbol manipulation or number crunching. You don't need to know what continuous and discrete mean: just pick up a discrete mathematics textbook and see how far you can work through it.

Attempt calculus, if only thing, just because the first elegant example SICP provides deals with a tiny function to compute a derivative of another function at a point.

http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/03/not-lisp-again.html

If you decide to pursue computer science in college (which isn't strictly required if you want to program), this book may be of help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Mathematics

Addendum: for certain applications of programming you do need certain mathematical knowledge that goes beyond abstract concepts and notation; but even with those topics, don't let "not being good at math" deter you from trying.
Not all application requests are created equal
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First of all kudos to all Rails contributors, this seems like a great release.

I agree the template feature is great, though at the moment not surprisingly a bit immature (template_runner.rb changed a lot in the last month, we'll see were it goes from here). I've been working on a template for a few days now (which will provide out of the box authentication with authlogic and sensible defaults for most things we usually use, like I18n, application wide settings, ubiquitous gems and plugins, SCM setup). I can see this feature saving us a lot of time on smallish projects.
Apple Introduces iPod Shuffle: World's Smallest Music Player
None of the movies seem to be loading.

A problem on my end or is the site unable to handle all the traffic?
Amen to that. The best programmers I've ever been around both get the problems solved, and leave a legacy that can be followed, adapted, and replicated.

Could be that it's my context, (which is dull and businessy), but 99% of the programming I'm around is NOT flashy or "revolutionary", but rather providing a solution for a customer.
> Yesterday it was comparing the US today with the Weimar Republic.

He comparing two economic systems. What wrong?

> The great cathedrals were built as tourist attractions.

Yes, that is right. ( s/tourist/believer/ ) Attractive church gathered tons of gold.
As others have mentioned, you don't strictly need that much maths to be a programmer - and almost none for web development, for instance. It does depend a lot on what you do.

I'm an interactive designer, and certainly not a good mathematician (not to mention truly awful at mental arithmetic), but the maths I use mostly - trigonometry, vectors, matrices, some basic calculus - I mostly picked up while I was working on things.

There are things I wish I knew a bit more about no doubt, but considering I left school at 16 with a C in maths, I think I've managed pretty well so far!
Some of the gems worth checking out (you can find most of them on github):

* authlogic for authentication

* openrain-action_mailer_tls for using smtp with tls with ruby <1.8.7

* mislav-will_paginate for pagination

* rspec/rspec-rails/shoulda for testing

* settingslogic for application configuration

* haml/sass for templating

Also some useful plugins:

git://github.com/Bertg/i18n_action_mailer.git (i18n support in mailers)

git://github.com/iain/i18n_label.git (translate labels)

git://github.com/thoughtbot/limerick_rake.git (lots of useful rake tasks)
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Well in the end, he was actually comparing compojure to wordpress, which is still wrong, but a little better. Clojure is a pretty nice language and if you need to do anything related to concurrency, it's probably the best fit. For example, I recently wrote an app that would handle a request, and executed heavier background tasks in a java executor pool using just 20 lines of clojure in compojure.
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Be more reliable than Amazon. I know thats hard, but it would be great to not think of my 'amazon portal' as an Achilles heal :)