skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dude, I'm guessing you're only 18, so please take my advice: do not choose your college 'cos you're chasing some girl. By the time you graduate both you and she will be different people. And you're going to meet a ton of interesting people over the next 4 years (and I know you don't want to hear this right now, but so is she).

There is nothing wrong with UIUC, that's where NCSA is. Stick to your original plan. Heck, stay with the business program too and learn to hack on the side and maybe take some CS electives if you can get credit for them. Graduating with a ton of debt in what it looks like the economy's going to be ain't going to be pretty.
Better not to sell iphone apps to non-English speaking countries to avoid poor ratings?
It's easy to imagine someone with poor English skills giving an app a low rating simply because he/she did not understand the description.

Then again, one could argue that non-English speaking countries would probably not have that many people trying out your app anyway, so even if the ratings are lower, it may not make much of a difference.

Would you sell your app in Japan for example?
Well, those benchmarks are over a year and a half old, and the JS engine in webkit has improved by probably a factor of 10 since then. iPhone 3.0's JavaScript will probably be a mere 10 to 20 times slower than Obj-C, which is actually pretty trivial for most iPhone apps.
Ah, Jon Harrop pushing F# or Ocaml again. He has a long history of trolling in various newsgroups, so I would take everything he claims with a grain of salt.
(Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of Devver, one of the TechStars 08 companies)

I think that some of the variables will likely need to be adjusted (for example, 15 hours per week seems high to me), but I think the fundamental idea is interesting, although it's clearly not for everyone.

At 15 hours a week, it's clear that a volunteer developer is not going to come close to replacing a technical founder or a full-time employee. Any team that tries to primarily rely on volunteer developers will suffer for it.

I can imagine this appealing to developers (including those in college) who are strongly considering doing a startup or working for a startup, but want to learn more about the process and want to make great contacts (both technical and business).

There may very well be problems with the quality of some applicants, but assuming the application process doesn't filter them out, I would guess things will work themselves out during the summer. That is, the so-so devs will be a net drain and teams won't ask for their help, while any talented hackers won't be donating their time for long - they'll quickly get snapped up by the companies they help out (either during the summer for all equity or after a funding round for salary + equity).

Of course, this is all speculative. Maybe it won't work at all. But I suspect that connecting a group of hackers with teams that will, either immediately or in the near future, want to hire hackers could work out for everyone involved.
Ask HN: How to validate billable hours?
For companies that outsource, how do you validate billable hours and know whether n people are working on your (time and material) project.

For e.g. if you have outsourced to a company for 10 developers working full time, how would you know whether 10 developers are working on your project and how would you roughly validate the hours billed?
I believe soon we will have web sites which block visiters coming from shortened URLs, as sites will not be able to distinguish natural traffic from spam clicks.
That's strange, I never said anything about the speed of Smalltalk libraries.

And actually, I know that some Smalltalk routines have run faster than the same routine implemented in C. By 3% actually. This was over 5 years ago, and it was a block cipher -- yes, low-level bit slinging. The DLL was the RSA reference implementation. (1)

Also, you should be careful about reasoning about benchmarks as if they applied the same across the board. Anyone who knows a little about them knows that they are very contextual.

BTW, in the Smalltalk community, spelling the language name with a capital T is considered a mark of the PHB.

But if you want a Smalltalk library that's much faster than Ruby 1.8, there are a variety of benchmarks around. Just take some of that code, and declare it to be a library. QED.

(1) - This is the magic of generational GC. if you know what you're doing, this is like getting a Buffer Cache you didn't even have to implement. Also, the implementor got the help of the VM engineer, who provided primitives for handling 32 and 64 bit arrays.
Thanks for your comment. Really enjoy the dialog.
The caveman spike is correlation, not speculation. It does correlate very closely, the news stories for the time period even other platforms like YouTube, trend very highly for Caveman around the same months... but you're right - I don't know for sure.
Where did you get your CTR stats? Those are intriguing. Our experience is very different. Thanks again!
After looking into this for about 15-20 minutes, using basic google scholar and some other academic sites, this appears to be something that is actively being debated in academia -- whether intelligence testing is valid as a predictor or not, and there seems to be competing recent research in both directions.

Unfortunately, without access to the full articles, its pretty hard to gauge anything since abstracts are pretty trivial.
i was thinking along the same lines, except voted for the service
DevCentral Top5 04/03/2009
"I'm in an unpaid internship right now and I love it."

Just think how much you'd love it if you were getting paid!
Reddit's PyCon 09 keynote
Thanks earl for your comment. I'm not that silly to assume no one's watching the adword buy, but I also know from experience that clients blindly take a 'better than the benchmark' as a sign of success - especially in the keyword space. Thanks again.
Garry, how quickly do you release new features? I think I suggested one-every-five-days before, but I was being facetious. Either way, you guys have added more features every month than most sites I use do all year.
I'm going to have to completely disagree. Sure these loans are pretty bad, but if you need cash at a moments notice and have no other options it can be better than not having it. As for drug laws, you are very misinformed -- I don't want to get into a long debate, but US drug policy is horrible and in fact harms the bottom of society.
I can see the problem if you're doing everything with EC2.

One point, however:

> You can't switch server hostnames or IPs without potentially affecting your git users.

Yes, you can. Computers should have:

* One or more IP addresses.

* A hostname that is attached to that computer, and only that computer, such as thor.example.com

* Hostnames that are attached to services on computers, such as git.example.com, mail.example.com, www.example.com, and so on. You can change these to point where they're needed, so as to not cause any interruptions or problems for your users.

> And we're haggling over the price of github, here. It's dirt cheap.

Sure, but I'm cheap, and for my setup, it's money I can save, and it just seems weird to pay for something that's so easy to set up.
Work Sample tests

I've always liked hiring processes that involve producing a sample of actual work. I usually fare well in such processes when I'm seeking jobs I would enjoy. Alas, some jobs are harder to boil down to a sample than others.
Attention those of you only skimmed the article or haven't read it at all: pay attention to this piece at the end: "Gerald M. Bradshaw of Crown Point consults with students on how to gain admission to selective colleges, universities and law schools." In other words, the author of the article has a tremendous interest in making you think that SAT and other scores are important, and he cites no hard data indicating the growing trend he alleges he exists. Those of you who voted this up probably didn't read PG's essay, "<a href="http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html">The Submarine</a>", which covers just this kind of thing.

Stories like this make me wish I could vote articles down.
If your intern does work that you charge your client for, then of course it makes sense to compensate him or her.

At my unpaid internship, I came in with no programming experience. They basically paired me with sr. programmers so I could learn how to program efficiently, but was still too inexperienced to give me actual client work they could charge for. Believe me, I wouldn't want to charge the client either for the crap that I put out initially. But their investment will eventually pay off because when my skills strengthen enough to meet their standards, they'll hire me.
Ah yes...there's something magical about hackers that means they can learn business, but "businessmen" can never learn the mystical arts of hacking.

Give me a break.

Actually, rather than repeat myself, here's my comment from a couple weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515978
SATs are taken as an approximation for a person's IQ, which is illegal to use as a hiring metric. IQ (and its legal proxies) is a crappy hiring metric, but unfortunately, it's better than pretty much everything else that's used (GPA, interview, resume).
Honestly, this isn't all that far off -- modern Intel and AMD chips have essentially nothing in common with the old 8086 line, and in fact use microcode heavily to "emulate" the classic instruction set.

Of course, it took them a few years longer than he thought to get there, but the basic idea is sound.
Is this investor at all experienced in funding technology startups? There is such a wide variation that there is no such thing as "similar". At year 3 Google was $50 million in the hole with no revenue in sight.

The question is silly, but it's not useless. Think about how much you will charge for this thing, or how much traffic, etc. Make up a good per-unit revenue and multiply. Save it so that in 6 months (let alone 3 years) you can pull it out and laugh.
I think your comment underestimates developments in 3d hardware and software in the last 15 years or so.
Prevents? No. I didn't say that. But being poor usually means you don't have access to the same levels of education. Read the comments in this thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520836
My comment apropos Hacker News is that this kind of hiring process might provide a strong incentive to form a start-up and become the boss rather than one more guinea pig for some other company's human resources process.
Building some mobile syndication thingy is by no mean comparable to designing the first mac.
You can't. That's why you shouldn't outsource an hourly project to someone you don't trust a lot.

The federal government (US, though I imagine it's the same everywhere) has forms and standardized time sheets that their contractors fill out, all employees on the job sign their timesheets, and there are big penalties for faking them and getting caught. But, unless you want to spend hours dealing with the paperwork that your contractor produces, you probably don't want to go down this path. And, of course, you almost certainly do not have the legal clout of the federal government, and so even if you "catch" your contractor in an overage, there's probably not much you can do about it.

I generally get per-job quotes (or at least estimates, with a requirement that they get my sign off on more than 10%-20% overage), rather than per-hour. For very large projects this is not possible...but it's probably worth trying to break the project down into many small deliverables with mostly preset prices.

ODesk allows you to peak over the shoulder of your contractor. But, I can't even imagine the sort of person that would take a job with that kind of intrusive requirement. Good contractors are in it for the freedom, rather than the high pay, and so if you can peek over their shoulder while they work, you're probably getting a corporate cog at independent contractor rates, which is not a good deal.
Bookmarks Bar with Frosting Sprinkled with Social
In 11 years of Smalltalk IT consulting, I have never run up against the message send being a performance issue. For me, it's accessing the disk, the database, middleware, poor design with regards to network latency, or poor algorithm design.
I am pretty sure what Micah means by "great sysadmin" is "already skilled enough at managing services X,Y,Z so that you can do them with 0% chance that a 5-min thing turns into a 2-hour or 8-hour thing".

I could manage all of that stuff directly, but I shouldn't because I don't do it all day long which means that either I'll a) do it wrong or b) have to do several hours of research to make sure I don't do it wrong or c) routine multi-hour interruptions when things break or d) combine a+b+c because that's what will happen in reality.

It's because of this that we outsource the following things that we could do ourselves:

* Email hosting (Tucows)

* DNS servers (Tucows)

* VoIP (Vonage)

* 800# (Onebox)

* External system monitoring (Pingdom)

* General server sysadmin (a friend of mine)

* StreamSend (Email Marketing - not that good, but dealing with RBL and email deliverability is worse)

* Payflow Pro (credit card gateway - BAD customers service o/w OK)

It costs some REAL money, but saves much more in opportunity costs, headache, etc. Plus our services improve as these companies improve offerings.

We only directly manage things that can save us TONS of money or are strategically important. Here's the list of those things:

* SugarCRM

* RT (bug tracking. was outsourced but too $$ so we moved in house)

* Internal system monitoring

* Hosting (we run our own systems since we have tons of custom dependencies)
Sorry to reply to my own post, but this relevant quote from The Submarine is worth considering:

"A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients." In this case, however, I'm not even convinced we're getting the truth.
If this is actually true, it is yet another consequence of the infamous court decision banning IQ tests in the hiring process:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Company

Want to know why you had to go up to your ears in tuition debt? That's why. College has become an expensive IQ test. And now, even college is in the process of being watered down into meaninglessness as a qualification.
I've never been to Illinois, but the Bay Area is pretty much guaranteed to have better weather and nicer outdoor type stuff, if that matters (it does to me, a lot).
So you'd rather see someone get fired, because they don't have the cash for some repairs to the car? Sure the price of the loan may be high, but in general these are risky loans and can be used when a person is in a tight spot.
Tru2way is a crock of shit.

True, but at this point it's the only way to watch HBO On Demand on Tivo/Moxi.

For third party apps the Intel/Yahoo widget platform is supposed to be the answer although I'm not optimistic about it either.
My overwhelming bias when I give advice on this subject of choosing colleges is to go as far away from home as possible, because that causes personal growth. (I didn't get that personal growth until AFTER college, when I lived overseas.) BUT, money does matter, and you are talking about a substantial money difference.

Now let's be clear: are you sure that you must take a financial hit to major in computer science at UIUC? Or can you major in business and still take quite a few CS courses anyway?

What is the assurance you can get into CS at Berkeley at all? I thought that was an "impacted" major there.

Good luck deciding. If the money were closer, it would be a no-brainer to go to Berkeley, but the money is not close, so there is much to be said for staying with Illinois.
Really, CNBC? You're going to have an article with a famous name in the title and completely ignore the spelling? It's Mark Cuban.
Just something to consider - there were at least two TechStars 08 teams that had summer interns that they have hired as employees. Granted, they worked more than 15 hours per week (and I think one of them was paid, but I'm not sure). In any case, if HackStars can successfully make more matches like these, it'd be a good program.
Why? What I said and what you said are unrelated.
That's silly, you don't turn someone away because you can't properly fit them into your metrics. "Unknown" on a traffic graph is better than just cutting out that piece entirely.
Freshbooks for invoicing, etc.
Anonymous inner classes aren't really closures in the more traditional sense, since they require that the captured variables be final; that makes them more restricted than closures generally are in other programming languages. That might not be a problem for Erlang given its write-once variables, but it is a problem for other languages.

We've been working on generating JVM bytecode for our in-house language, which does support a less-restricted version of closures, and we work around that by wrapping closed variables in one-element arrays, though you have to do for both the initial declaration and on every reference to that variable, even outside the closure, which gets really annoying when the closed variable is something passed onto the stack as a function argument, and probably in other cases I'm not thinking about right now. It's definitely workable, it's just messy and incurs more overhead than is ideal.
Behind the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook App
I actually used this app to remove ten friends and got my free whopper certificate in the mail. The idea is brilliant.
Investment banks and consulting firms almost always ask for your SAT scores when I was coming out of college. It's just another filter to "guess" how smart you. It's unfortunate that most firms assume high SAT score = high IQ.

But put yourself in their shoes... if you receive 500+ resumes per school, and you only have time to interview 24 candidates in the first round, and 50% of them have 3.5+ GPA, what do you do to narrow down the interview list?
This investor, a friend of mine, represents non-tech savvy high-net-worth individuals. Mainly financiers.
(My advisors recommended I not shop for tech-savvy investors until my product is more mature.)

How can I estimate traffic?
Hand-waving and wishful thinking.

At least, that's the method I've seen most folks use, and it seems to tacitly accepted by the VCs that believe in what you're doing. There are all sorts of weird human foibles that make us poorly suited for dealing with large numbers, probabilities, and rate of change as it applies to money. Engineers turned VC might be more skeptical, but I wouldn't bet on it. Of course, the best VCs have highly attuned BS detectors...so, you might not be in great shape if you don't believe it yourself.
I meant it in the other way: sure, people with AS are biased towards intellectual work. Yet when we see people with AS who are successful at exactly that kind of work, we shouldn't just automatically assume "oh, they're just good at it because they have AS".

There's a lot of stigma of "oh, I could be programmer too if I was willing to be a nerd".
Ten times the iPhone traffic on AT&T starting in June? How come?
There is much truth in this reply. I don't know that I buy into the assertion of the late Richard Herrnstein that all employers of ALL kinds of workers would do well to screen job candidates by IQ tests, but the law now in the United States is that they can't. Absent a specific validation study for a specific job, employers have to take care about having hiring requirements with "disparate impact" by ethnicity. Requiring postsecondary education that is not strictly necessary for the job gets a free pass, legally, but requiring a threshold IQ test, even if the threshold is low, is legally suspect. So now indeed many young people who are barely college-ready have to go to some kind of diploma mill college, often at great personal expense, to maximize their likelihood of getting jobs that don't really even require a college education.
FreeRisk: Crowdsourcing Credit Ratings?
Do you absolutely need his money to launch?
they just want to see how much you enjoy doing the work.

Here's what I'd say to that: "I enjoy doing work that adds value. If you have something valuable for me to do for your company, pay me what it is worth. If not, I'll be happy to sit in your air-conditioned office writing free software that has value for me. And then you will be able to see how much I enjoy doing that."

But you probably shouldn't say that out loud. You're not in a very strong negotiating position, after all.

This illustrates another reason why unpaid internship is pernicious: It doesn't teach anyone how well you add value. Because your time is unmetered and unpaid, you have no incentive to spend it wisely. And your employer certainly has no incentive to track it -- at least not out loud. (Imagine the conversation: "Wow, last week you worked 10 hours for free and saved the company $100k. Have a muffin!") What, exactly, is either of you learning? I guess your employer is learning how much value you can be coerced to add, for free, without you noticing or complaining. And you're learning how to look and act like a model employee.

Onward. "You can decide how much you want to work?" Yeah, I guess. I could also "decide" to live in a cardboard box and save on expenses. If I have a family, I could "decide" to never see them because I have to work two jobs instead. If I've got elderly parents I could "decide" not to take care of them.

But, more likely, an unpaid internship requirement will tend to select for young people with no family and a lot of time to spend at work. How convenient. Especially since overtly screening your employees for these traits is against the law.

Do you see why I'm tempted to call this "unethical" yet?

Anyway, none of this is to suggest that you're doing the wrong thing. We have to live with the hands we're dealt. Congratulations for finding a way forward, and good luck with your jobs.
I hope you're not trying to imply that Gould isn't a hack.
The descriptive ones are nice. http://tinyurl.com/Do-Tiny-URLs-Suck gives a little more information than http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=545565
You have done something more useful than voting the article down by expressing precisely why you think it is a suspect source. Thanks. I submitted the article figuring I would get some well-informed replies about its accuracy here.

After edit: Note that some other replies are indicating that some current employers ask job candidates for SAT scores. That has never been my experience, which is why I wanted the reality check on the submitted article. In some hiring processes, I could have gained ground against other candidates if SAT scores had come up in the hiring process.
I don't know too much about LLVM, but the JVM has a ton of advantages: it's pretty much universally available on all platforms, it uses a fairly trivial set of instructions that make learning the instruction set and using it fairly easy, there's a ton of information out there about it covering everything from GC algorithms to VM flags to bytecode instructions and memory models, and both the Sun and IBM versions have been heavily optimized over the years. It might not be the best fit for every language, but it's a pretty impressive platform to build a language on.
If it's using Mechanical Turk, then it'll be like the Kindle's NowNow service, where you'll get related info if not the exact thing.
Good list - and indeed, a lot of those things I would rank as something I'd be more likely to pay for before github. Others, like DNS, you can get good services for free (everydns) unless you really need something fancy.
YouNoodle.com? For all it's failings and dubious accuracy, it's basically exactly what you're asking about.