skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 10k figure is a nice rule of thumb, but it's not very informative if you're counting them. "10 years to an expert" is also a good rule of thumb (which comes to 10k hours, for 3 hours a day), but it's also uninformative to count years.

For the average person who diligently hacks away, 10 years seems about right. But some people are ferociously quick at improving and that's just how they are.
My maternal grandparents are in their 90s, have been married for 68 years, and are still going strong. (Okay, so I'm proud of them.) They relate a story of how they were called up once by a guy doing some research on why couples stay together.

My grandparents rightly noted that while people are constantly doing studies on "why marriages fail", hardly anyone ever looks at the long-lasting marriages and asks why they work.

They told the researcher that theirs worked mainly because they never considered divorce an option. That's a reflection of their culture and morals, but also their desire. They expected to stay together, and they did what it took to stay together. I've only been married for 4 years, but I certainly want that for my own marriage too. (And I blow raspberries to statistics -- I was married when I was 23 and my wife 19. :-)

The article had several good points. But I wonder at this: "If people are miserable together, the shrink's position is to help them separate and live happier lives apart." Why can't the shrink help them see ways to be un-miserable together?
Strange, I can't think of a single friend of mine who lived their lives according to what their parents wanted. Not one.
I don't fully buy into the arranged marriage concept, but won't deny that many of them are successful. I think one thing that probably helps a lot is that "older, wiser" people are looking at attributes of compatibility that younger people can't see in each other yet.
Perhaps Google should use the 200 sales and marketing staff that they are about to lay off

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/changes-to-our-sales-...

... and reroute them into some sort of review team so that these kinds of errors don't happen again to what looks like lots of people over several Google products?

That's one way to keep their "do no evil" dream alive.

Clearly you would think sales and marketing people would have the skills to deal with people.
I assume people with analog TVs are exempt.
Where does reading a book on a Kindle fall? Its a computer-like device, but focused on books and reading.

Who cares? You don't need to do whatever some guy with a blog tells you to do. Tomorrow is a normal Sunday. Do whatever you want, it's your life.
Absolutely phenomenal find there c00p3r. The paper in question is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_Stone">here&....

Any more pointers on the psychology of programming would be nice, folks (I know there is google, but I want to crowd-source that searching and vetting ;-)
Dive into history, 2009 edition
We're free as in beer, but we'd be happy to open up our code for some improvements!
I read it at 18...
I found this title a bit ironic. Although MS should have gotten it right, keeping time is an inherently complex problem.
Don't think it was intended as a judgment on a particular lifestyle; or I didn't read it that way anyway.

Taking a day every week out helps me a lot - recharges the batteries for sure. Might be different for you, but it's the case for most people I know.
How we created a Twitter viral: the ePenis story
Well, you ain't contributing anytime soon. Always replying in a sorta let-down, quick off-the-hook fashion.

What's up with the telephone book nonsense and then insinuating that I haven't read Norvig's paper, which isn't that technical btw? This is just noise.

The comparative study of failed nations does arouse my curiosity though and I think there are parallels to be found to the U.S. system. But again, this is still exploratory and requires some real work ahead. Peace.
I think because I wasn't from an organization that could serve as a guarantee of good behavior. E.g. if I came from IBM and told the students to try heroin, I'd be fired, but as a random individual there was no limit to how irresponsible I could be. (This was before YC.)

It wasn't because of the content of the talk. The authorities didn't see that. The only thing I've written that was turned down because it was too controversial was:

http://www.paulgraham.com/divergence.html
I don't think this study speaks to anything about criminal persecution. This study was about the effect of one expert against a person's own judgement. What you're talking about is the effect of the opinion of two competing experts (persecution and defence).

My hunch is that having two expert opinions would be similar to having no expert advice, in terms of fMRI activity.
Joe Liemandt: Trilogy - why you should dropout from college.
Yeah, I was just going to say, that's already a holiday in my personal theology... (and one dedicated to the celebration of analog pleasures, to be sure!)
Oh I know. I'm not nearly submissive or meek enough to not do something simply because a picture online said not to. It was just a bit of sarcasm (poorly expressed) mixed with idle curiosity over the two things clashing.
It’s not so much about computers being outside natural lifestyle as it is about taking a break from your usual routine. I work with computers day in and day out, through out the week. Taking a complete break once in a while is a nice aberration.
I would say that the world's privileged have a digital addiction problem and that many people should unplug themselves and go out for a walk more often than they do. But if I go analog tomorrow it will be a self-directed decision not because I feel some need to imitate a diarist who hopes to coin a holiday.
"Socratic method" FTW!
don't worry too much about numbers on a website.
Back when I went to school (mid-90s), our computer lab was a bunch of orange-screen vt220s connected to a Vax cluster. We didn't have fancy NCSA Mosaic like UT, we had Lynx and gopher. We learned C on a VAX with a broken scanf. Students dropped CS because they couldn't figure out EVE and EDT (visual editors). Our internet connection came through a narrow tenuous pipe from UT Austin. When it went down, I'd do a traceroute and then give "Mordac" over there at UT a hard time.

Oh yeah, there was a PC lab. Running Windows 3.1. That was a place to type your paper. You couldn't do real CS there.

And I had to bike uphill to class both ways in the Texas heat. :)

I think if you can take busted up hand-me-downs and backwards old crap, make it work & explain how to others, and learn how to sidestep a lazy/stubborn/indifferent IT (build your own stuff in ~/local, etc.), you can adapt and do fine anywhere.
"Why do people use emacs or vi rather than a proper editor?"

If this was meant to be tongue-in-check, then the writer really needs to do a better job of conveying sarcasm in his writing. However, if this line was meant to be taken seriously, then it displays a shocking level of ignorance regarding fundamental tools. Emacs and vi don't make editing harder, they make it significantly easier.
Peer to Peer Photo Sharing with Web 2.0 features
FWIW, not paying attention to the date I didn't realize PyCon was in-progress. If memory serves, videos usually don't end up online till after PyCon has completed, though I could be wrong.
The Mathematics of CDOs
If they are from the US, isn't the FCC trying to find them? :)
There has been much criticism of MBAs lately- especially MBAs from this school in particular. Hopefully this video shows people that the material taught is indeed rigorous and important.
To be fair, developers complain about salespeople selling features that don't exist yet and promising delivery by a certain date without consulting us. That kind of thing makes our lives hell and makes us write terrible crap that undermines all of the company's software assets.

Selling features that don't exist is ok, just check with the guys that have to deliver on your promises first.
Institute for Creation Research tries to award Master of Science in Creationism
Both this, and kailashbadu's, are good points. But so much of this rings of my mom telling me to "get off the computer and go play outside" (nevermind that my friends and I biked all over the city regularly, ran cross country in high school, was in the Boy Scouts, worked at the city library, worked at day camps, and participated in my community's summer youth programs--so it was more stereotypical mother complaining than legitimate concern) and the view that "computers isolate us because there's less interpersonal interaction", a view I know my parents and grandparents generations have had (and most likely continue to have). And of course, that was back before the Internet, where the majority of time using a computer was largely isolating. Today, not so much. I mean, we're having this conversation right now.
Having a bugtracker or not is a tough decision. You have to keep your ways of communicating limited to a few channels. You _will_ need to address the social aspect of your project in one way or another. It's probably either a mailinglist or a bugtracker. Having both means one of them is probably heavily underused.

What you see a lot with projects is that everything happens through a bugzilla. New features, feature requests, bugs are posted there, some invalid because the user doesn't understand a program. The 'bugtracker' aspect forces you to put your message in a certain style.

With mailinglists like git@vger you get a mixture of posts. Some are from newbies that don't understand the system, some are comments on the current system and most of them are patches or status updates. Having a mailinglist allows a user more freedom in the form in which he wants to communicate, which lowers the barrier. You also get a nice mixture of users and developers on the same channel, by which you get better feedback.

The flipside of that is that you don't have any overview. You'll have to manage bugs yourself. If you want something fixed, you'll either have to make a patch yourself, get somebody else interested or just keep bringing the bug to attention.

Now compare this to a bugtracker. You post a bug there and nobody will look at it until you make a patch yourself, get somebody else interested or keep bringing the bug to attention. See the difference? Exactly.
Spending the day with Mary Jane can count towards the "Spend the day outside with someone you love" bullet point.
For an easy +12, I recommend the "simplecv" LaTeX document class -- it's included somewhere in the full TexLive distribution. That Computer Modern font on a resume or CV, combined with judicious use of small caps, looks deadly serious.

http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/simplec...
Dude, it is like 34 and sleet here. Not going outside.
Sorry, I've got dollars to make. I read daily (not out of habit, but it's the best entertainment) so no drama there.
At 18, you're a grown man. At 15, you're pretty close. You probably shouldn't short-change yourself by saying you wouldn't have "gotten" it just because our college-bound society tells you that you're a baby if you're under 25.
And be completely ignored by the non-US people who're more interested in clue level than an atlantic-away university.

And the non-university people.

And all the people who ignored nicknames changing colour.

But I'm sure it'll impress everybody else :)
About psychology behind programming - there are very interesting parallels - almost everything in psychotherapy is based on the usage of the language and direct communication. This means to choosing a words carefully, paying full attention to the order of the words in a sentence, simplicity an unambiguous of the sentences and adapting to and reusing the client's vocabulary.

The same ideas should be applied to any texts (source code, documentation, marketing) that we're creating, because these texts, and especially the source code, are being written not for the compilers or interpreters, but for the people, same like you.

It seems like XP, Refactoring and other good ideas which are based on readability and simplicity of the source code is just the reflections of the thousand years old ideas. The old sages, sutras, and stories were survived because they are easy to understand, remember and modify when necessary.

There are some hints - not psychology but worth to notice: Ruby as a programming language which was developed by Japanese (East, Symbolic) mind, the 37signals which is trying to adapt Zen principles in project management, and a brilliant philosophy behind Python - simplicity but imperfection.
I generally agree, but I'd like to point out that there are actually technology certification courses out there that are impressive if you've passed them. For example, having CCIE on your resume will certainly grab my attention.
I don't see how this does a better job at increasing security beyond the built in anti-malware/phishing stuff in Firefox.

Sure, you might have more people reporting stuff but you don't have credentials for any of those people. If they went to 20 sites in the last hour and now have some malware, are all of them going to make the correct decision on which of the sites it came from?

After reading this from the privacy page:

=====================================================

Background information such as age or gender is used to provide statistical information about website preferences. This statistical information is stored without any personal information.

=====================================================

I think that someone might be selling website demographic data...

I can't think of any other reason why you'd write a Firefox extension that competes with a built in feature of Firefox, especially when the data coming in isn't vetted in any way.
It depends on the language combination. A lot of people told me to study Chinese -- economy of the future and all. My feeling is that there are a lot of Chinese people who speak acceptable English.

However, in a major metropolitan area like Nagoya, you could fit all programmers who are functionally bilingual in a room the size of my kitchen. (It might have actually happened once. Three in one place, crikey.)

There is a certain benefit to having one token white guy around who speaks Japanese, too, but I've got higher ambitions in life than being the token white guy. Besides, every organization only needs one token white guy, but e.g. my employers would hire twelve clones of me for bilingualism if they could.

[Edit: which reminds me. Here's my algorithm for ranking language choices for anyone looking for career prospects: sum(trade between your country and of all countries speaking that language) / sum(number of Americans who speak the language better than you + number of relevant foreigners who speak English better than you speak their language).

The languages that consistently top this heuristic are Korean, Japanese, and maybe Chinese. If you're looking for employment in government, Arabic and possibly Russian are good bets, too. I'd stay away from Spanish for career purposes. I love being able to speak it, don't get me wrong, but you're asking to compete with literally millions of natively bilingual American Hispanics and competing with millions is not the point of the exercise.
I'm all for good, original ideas, but I have to send a big 'who cares?' to this one...
Its more of a viral marketing experiment. I have a strong disdain for viral marketing because instead of being able to ignore it your friends make you use the application.
This really does not surprise me, as stupid things are known to hit the viral spot. On Facebook for example, most things that go viral are applications where you can throw sheep at your friends or pick your top 5 beers - I haven't yet tried a viral FB application that has been useful, it's kind of sad.
Probably they came to know about the asteroid from another source.

"Oooops, Russia/China/India space agency say they saw asteroid XYZ, why didn't we?"

Or some math/cosmological models say there are X asteroids floating, but they can only really observe X - 18% (which is a huge margin of error)
Brain Rules (video)
Rebuilding The British Bombe Which Cracked Enigma
Any possibility of hyper linking the footnotes on all of the old essays? I'd rather click a link than search [1], [2] etc :P
There's another important step:

Drive customers to the site AND make sure they are the real market your targeting before taking their feedback.
Nice, but they should give the measurements in inches as well.
But the uni is for CS right? I think your uni has made a lot of good hackers :).
moderncv is also nice.
I liked the part about long hours, in my experience the long hours crowed are only wasting time.

You come to work, you code, you leave that's as simple as that!
Weinberg Psychology of Computer Programming recently published in 25th anniversary edition:

http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Computer-Programming-Silver...
I've recently had to look over hundreds of resumes for recent job postings and I must say this is spot on.
As someone who spearheaded something stupid last year I'd like to share some metrics on just how far stupid can get out of hand.

First, screenshot from Google Analytics of the period

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...

That was from time the domain was registered (I actually reg'd it on oct 3) to the time I stopped caring about it. I sold it sometime later to recoup the server costs (and got a little cash on the side). It was hosted on mediatemple, and version 1 of the site used way too much of their alloted monthly GPU usage. Here's another graph of the first day which I screenshotted at the time.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/gpu.jpg

I ended up using about 2x the monthly GPU usage over the first 18 hour period before I took it down and the site iterated from a PHP version of the voting script to a JS version to try and distribute the processing power a little bit. If I recall correctly there were about 34 major iterations over that month period and countless minor ones just to keep several steps ahead of MTV.

MTV's traffic to their UK site went through the roof at the time

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/mtv.co.uk

This can be confirmed as I actually had someone inside MTV (who reached out to me first) sending me statistics of what was happening internally on their servers. Here is one of the screenshots (of many) I was sent from within MTV about the actual stats from their servers.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/ema.png

You'll notice there is a point where there was no traffic, that was a few hours in which they took down the voting backend to make some changes to handle traffic. They actually took down the systems several times over the month (at one point a whole weekend to add another server - which was misconfigured and we ended up telling MTV about it so they could fix it... heh, misconfigured Apache)

It got to the point where MTV wanted to interview me about what was happening.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/didwewinyet.jpg

And being interviewed by Wired was the high point of the whole thing for me.

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/rick-astleys-on.html

But basically, the moral of the story is that the "smart people" on the web are vastly outnumbered. I think we often tend to forget that we're in the minority.

If the mantra is "make something people want", then one of the answers is "make something stupid"

EDIT - lots of edits to clarify and add metrics/screenshots.

There were many screenshots taken over that period as I catalogued everything I could when I had originally stated my intentions here on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323248
I graduated from UT with a degree in CS a couple of years ago. Those Dell machines are God-sends compared the the Solaris ones they have. Last time I tried to use the Solaris machine it didn't have ls installed on it.

I totally agree with you about the Linux setup. The first time I start fvwm2 I was like wtf is this. That actually encouraged me to figure out what a window manager was and how to start a different one.

You are wrong about the overnight jobs (at least when I was there), you can only run them on certain servers that are designated for overnight jobs. For most cases you did not have to get permission.

UT has enough money and computers that each student should be given their own vm.
Exactly - the conference is being taped, but videos won't go up online until after things wind down.
The thing is that actually very little of this is unique to Django. The types of tools you need to deploy dynamic-language-based web applications don't differ depending what the "P" in LAMP stands for.
I know what you mean, I've been the developer in this scenario more than once :)

In the end it's a matter of balance between sales and development. Unlike the common "10 things you must do" stories on HN, there aren't really any well-defined rules for this. You just hope to have smart sales people and developers, good communication between them, and have neither side controlling the company.
My impatience is showing again. Working now, please disregard the question.
Programming Language Selection (from a technical and a business perspective)
Is it just me, or does everyone else get the feeling that there are two Twitter communities out there? Personally, I follow friends, one or two announcement streams, and an influential figure or two in the Ruby community. Essentially, I use it as a quick tool to keep up to date on what's important to me.

Then it seems like there's everyone else who just discovered Twitter in the past month or two. These people seem to be either one of "I can follow my favorite celebrity! It's like I'm almost touching them..." or "I'm going to be huge and have lots of followers and feel important for it..." For them, Twitter is just the latest fad like Facebook, MySpace, Geocities, etc. before it.

I guess, even though I've been on Twitter for a while now, I still don't get it. Maybe I'm elitist? Maybe I'm becoming out of touch?
I don't know whom this is actually making fun of -- if I were hiring, I'd consider the presence of a cover letter with my name on it to be of far more informational value than a resume typeset in LaTeX. The cover letter would actually show me that the person made some modicum of effort to apply to my company; the LaTeX wouldn't give me anything I wouldn't be able to tell from the rest of the applicant's resume. And there's no way it's worth more than "started own company".
Its not exactly original.

Back in the 1990s a bunch of us sysadmin types created an identical website where it graphed everyone's unix machine uptimes in a similar way (with variable length ePenises).

But back then, it wasn't twitter, it was just a small joke shared on IRC amongst friends. I had no idea back then we were 10 years ahead of the curve, and no idea that this sort of thing would reach global proportions and even start to be picked up and shown on TV.
I was about to go to UT Austin, but after this story, I'm glad I came to Georgia Tech instead. The lab computers are pretty good, and the ones in the College of Computing are just thin clients that VNC you into Red Hat or Windows, which you can VNC into from your own laptop. On top of that, the Wifi network is fantastic.
Reading it now. :P
Also, it's just bad taste. It's plain ugly.

I wish someone would write a PHP parser with a Ruby-like syntax. Obviously the more powerful features of Ruby would still be missing, but just having a more readable syntax would be a nice improvement.
the periodic hand-clapping while talking was annoying. good talk nonetheless

"it's so much better to be lucky than right"

"3 months later, we got a call from HP and we're trying to figure out how much to charge them... we're like: 'what's the biggest number we can think of?'"