skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good question would be who learns more: someone who is an expert at one language and toolset, and continually uses it for investigation of new ideas, or someone who continually changes his language and toolset. Given it takes thousands of hours to become an expert at any combination of language and toolset, I would rather spend my time doing great things than learning new tools. Will you gain exponentially more programming skill by learning haskell or erlang, or should you invest the same time learning another domain (e.g. chemistry, biochemistry, finance etc), and solving new problems in those domains? I would suggest that the latter provides more brain expansion.

Another way to look at it is that programming isn't hard in and of itself. The hard part in any software project is understanding the problem. If all you do is practice programming, and ignore the real world it's likely you will be a great programmer, but make beginner mistakes when trying to solve problems. I have seen brilliant programmers get completely schooled by domain experts with excel macros when it comes to solving some of these problems.

It's the difference between programming for programmings sake or programming to solve problems.
"The only data that I have received thus far is that the FBI is investigating a company that has purchased services from Core IP in the past. This company does not even colocate with us anywhere, much less 2323 Bryan Street Datacenter."

For that extra little touch of incompetence, I'm sure this mysterious company's CTO is right now sitting in his back yard, scrubbing down the hard disk platters from all his servers with sulphuric acid and steel wool.
Thanks for the perspective on this; it appears I did misinterpret what you wrote in the originally linked post, likely due to the lack of context you mention.

The reaction I had to this was primarily due to me seeing in this post the stories of countless other developers who stagnate but then don't have the self-reflection to realize that they have, and don't have the motivation to get themselves out of the hole they've fallen into. While attempting to motivate the Lisp community to wake up and get working, in my mind you unintentionally created an anthem to all of them. Hopefully my initial response to this makes a little more sense. :-)
> The problem I see with talking about that attitude-from-birth is that it encourages complacency.

Whether a statement is true or false is independent of what it encourages. Let's assume that curiosity is totally hard-wired. Then is it really a good thing for someone to try to become more curious, instead of investing that effort into something else?
I worked at Amazon before - the real door desks have diagonal bracing :) The big plus about them is that since they're so cheap, you can request one at the precise height you desire, which is great for people of abnormal body heights.
Great job organizing this, I really enjoyed it.
I wonder if this is true. The 15 police cars and a SWAT team thing and the lines attributed to the FBI commander seem a bit over the top.

If this is true, this strikes me as wrong on many levels. The overall expense and damage to unconnected organizations when a simple phone call would probably have achieved the same result is saddening.

Edit: This hosting company seems to not have a website. Most of the Google references are to this incident. There was one link which suggests there actually is a business by that name though.
Tipping is not a city in China ... it's a lame business model
Yea -- I found Tech Crunches news very alarming and against the grain. I was at Twitter's office last Friday and their coo told us four times that they were excited to be growing, and to "check out their job board."

Additionally, Biz Stone was hosting the daily, catered lunch at Twitter and the team was having a blast. They were building rapport and looked pumped for the future. They also mentioned they'll be moving into a new office soon. A bigger one.

Why would they give off this vibe, hire 15+ more positions, and then turn around to sell off to google. Twitter is in it for the long run.
Make Money Staying At Home
The most important reason why women stay at home rather than going for a job is to spend more time with their kids and to nurture them properly. In most cases, this is the main reason, as most of the families do not have anyone else to take care of the kids when the parents are away for work. But whatever the reason be, the fact is that millions of resources are wasted this way. Home job is an exceptional way of making use of these resources and a solution to all these issues.
Yeah there is no way to tell if this is due to the leaked movie that 20th Century Fox leaked themselves. A month to go and it's the movie that everyone talking about from their target audience to grandmas(they may not be talking about but now they know about the movie).

Ok the above maybe inaccurate but the leak if not a pr stunt is a pro for this movie.
Hoping to Make iPhone Toys as a Full-Time Job
They can spin this any way the want, at the end of the day, they're trying to do one thing:

find programmers dumb enough to work for free.
This is going to change the world, sadly, only 9 points in 4 hours.
Why would you want a door without a doorknob hole? That's where the cables go through, dummy!

Furthermore, filing cabinets make for much sturdier support than untriangulated 2x4s.
No Backbone As Google Bows To Korean Government And Bans Users With Fake Names
"What's the point in Google portraying itself as company with strong principles when it won't stand up and defend them? What would it be losing if it refused?"
Are you being sarcastic?

edit: I mean, there have to literally be hundreds of other possible explanations.
"which makes it "2.5D""

You wasted all those words to say what I said... it's not 3D. :)

PS: I know very well how 3D games work since I co-wrote a commercial 3D engine in 2002-3 and used to teach computer graphics course at a university.
We use the following paid services: Dropbox, Wufoo, Github, Slicehost, Skype, Google Apps, Uservoice, Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker
That link being

http://www.manta.com/coms2/dnbcompany_05g9zf

Company Name:	Core Ip Networks, Llc
Address: 8641 Glenturret Dr # 200, Red Oak, TX 75154-5864
Location Type:	Single Location
Est. Annual Sales:	$460,000
Est. # of Employees:	5
Est. Empl. at Loc.:	5
Year Started:	2005
State of Incorp:	TX
SIC #Code:	4813
Contact's Name:	Matthew Simpson

I'm just posting this information because it seems the site wants you to register to view info if you refresh the page, and having it can assist in gauging the credibility of the allegations.
http://www.dotomator.com/
Sony Ericsson K800i Cybershot Mobile India: Price, Features, Reviews
The USP of the Sony Ericsson k800i is its Cyber-shot digital camera with 3.2 mega pixel resolution, auto focus, built-in Xenon flash, image and video stabiliser function. Infact, the BestPic in the camera option gives you nine chances to capture the precise moment you want. Pick the one you want, and bin the rest!
Yes, lets sanitize and PC everything, instead of calling things like they are. Read all the other comments in this thread.
Well, either WiMAX or LTE could become widespread in developed countries by 2011 - 2013, thats what I read in pre-meltdown reports (summer 2008 and earlier). Now it's probably going to take more time. I believe WiMAX will stay as a niche wireless broadband technology, even if Skype-based WiMAX phones appear, while LTE will be used mostly on cellphones/smartphoes/whatever since it has considerable support from the telco/gsm industry.

To answer your question, I think the main factor holding down deployment of broadband mobile wireless networks is uncertainty wrt which standard will win - no one wants to invest millions into building a network that will be based on a technology that may never become popular (and you really want interoperability in such networks, like it is the case with GSM). Also, telcos are big oligopolies (simple economics explains why they are reluctant to change).
No, I was being completely serious. Thanks for asking.
S3 for data backups, storage. Bunch of EC2 instances with EBS for crunching data and running web crawler.
Broken windows theory & online communities
Is there something that links this story with the X-Men leak, other than reddit comments?
This worked for me when I was looking to get some press with a project in Chicago: I got written up in my local alt-weekly. It's easier than getting in on the tv station or newspaper door, and also, the reporters at those tv stations and newspapers often read those alt-weeklies, and if they see something worth biting on they will bite. They bit, and I had articles in the Chicago Sun-Times and a Toronto newspaper, as well as interviews with four or five radio stations, and a talk with Playboy magazine.
It's a Depression
Mothers, Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Game Developers
http://www.dotomator.com/
http://squurl.com/
http://domai.nr/
No problem guys... this should work out well for each of us. I'll send an email with my info.

EDIT: Scratch that. Looks like I'll need your email addresses to refer you. You'll each get a $25 credit and I'll net $20 total. Not bad.

My address is brian at firstblogmedia dot com. Drop me a line ASAP.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Is-Wolverine-Leak-Investi...

This was linked off of the Dallas Observer blog here: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2009/04/so_what_l...

How legit this is, or how credible Dallas Observer is, I have no idea.
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WTF is with modding people down for saying they took a guess, were wrong, and now learned something? Does that in any way add to the discussion?
fodder
It's basically a random guy on the internet claiming the datacenter raid and the movie are connected. http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/Is-Wolverine-Leak-I....

That makes it his word against the FBI, who have no comment. There aren't that many who can call in an FBI raid seizing millions of dollars worth of computer equipment causing millions of dollars worth of collateral damage to the economy. But Rupert Murdoch can. Two days ago, a pre-leak DVD copy of http://www.google.com/search?q=x+men+origins+workprint+torre.... arrived on Rupert Murdoch's desk. Rumor from a random guy on the internet alleges the Rupert Murdoch incident. When Rupert Murdoch is angry, the FBI suits up and smashes your shit. Maybe RM really leaked it and wants to make himself look less suspicious.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/89vm4/if_you_run.... Reddit also eventually concludes that the connections here are all rumor and possibly an April Fool's joke mixed in somewhere.
As I said, Kay has invented a lot.

My comment was based on his general writings, not Smalltalk.

However, I agree that it's possible to have an insightful understanding of the commercialization of ideas, and to have contributed greatly to one stage, without having done all stages oneself. In a way, Alan Kay + Steve Jobs complement one another.

As an example, one might see the stages of commercialization of the desktop metaphor as: PARC-->Apple-->Microsoft. Note that here commercialization means making money by getting something into the hands of more people.
Good Office Chairs for Every Budget
> We have entrepreneurs like Jawed Karim(Youtube), Steve Chen(Youtube), Marc Andreessen(Netscape), Thomas Siebel, Max Levchin(Paypal), etc. (Geni, Yammer, Yelp, etc)

You _had_ them. All of them came out to the bay area to actually do their startups. That might tell you something :)
LG KU990 Viewty 3G, 5MP CAMERA, TOUCH SCREEN (Unlocked)
Lg has upped the ante with the KU990, a phone that features the tried and true design of the Prada phone but adds substantial aspects that the most jaded cell phone user will appreciate.
Half of the argument for all this time and effort seems be around the fact that it costs $140 new. I also just got an ikea desk, except I just went on craigslist and waited two days for the exact item to come up and got it for 1/3 of the new price. The desk was right near by (Ikea is also far away from me), cheap, already built, no brainer. $140 isn't a good argument for a company especially when you (and a friend) spent the time planning, getting supplies, and building the desk. But if the job was to make a blog entry...
It completely reminds me of Cryptonomicon. Anyone have an EMP-gun?
You are right. Bay Area is a good place to start a startup. But, he is going to study. Not starting a startup. What I wanted to say is: you don't necessarily have to graduate from a bay area university to start your startup.
Not to be "that guy", but that isn't really a regular expression unless you are searching for nan.com, nano.com, nanoo.com, etc. I think you want:

^nano\w+\.com$
Bank takes TARP Money; Saves Small Businesses
My response to this has turned into something the size of the Lord of the Rings, so I'll blog it instead of clogging this page.

I need to get back to practicing the banjo. Perhaps one day we can hold a jam. The fiddle is awesome; I recommend the works of Darol Anger, and if you're near the Bay Area watch out for his concerts. Get on the Freight and Salvage mailing list if they have one. (I miss that place, although they have plenty of equivalents in Massachusetts.)
Personally, I think your attitude is laughable.
Why should I use 3rd-party APIs?
I don't even have the time to learn them, because I'm too busy debugging by own private programming language, tool chain, and operating system. I'm surprised I'm even posting this on the internet that everyone uses, as opposed to my completely solipsistic one-person internet. It's really heaven, trust me.
(Previously, the headline implied that the raid was part of an investigation into the leaking of the X-men movie.)
> I've never learned Perl, but I've never learned how to run the deep fryer at a McDonalds either.

I think it is much less important which language you use, than what you create with it. Otherwise you have a shed full of brilliant tools that have never been used.

I've noticed that the people who actually create things tend to be less dogmatic about languages.
Thou shalt not mock Lisp or be in any way associated with one who does:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=545859
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=545851
Whenever I worry about losing my personal freedoms in the US, I just look to Europe where they never even had them. Then I don't feel so bad.

But really, this is not a problem. For 5 EUR a month, you can pass all your traffic through a VPN in some other country that doesn't censor the Internet.

(Of course, then they can block the VPN providers. But censorship is a big game of whack-a-mole, and the moles always win. I don't know why governments bother, but I guess cutting off file sharing is easier than solving society's real problems.

The amusing part about all of this is that cracking down on sharing TV shows has made it much easier for people distributing child porn and planning terrorist attacks to hide themselves from law enforcement. I am amused... but sad at the same time.)
From Simpson's information, it is fair to assume the raid was indeed not in relation to the X-Men leak. A search and seizure as illustrated would at the very least require a standard search warrant, of which, would specify the nature of the search. Now according to Simpson, the FBI refused presentment of such, a prerequisite to the search, unless there was reasonable evidence data would have been destroyed. Either way, at some point, some one would have been served, unless, of which is a reasonable assumption, is in regard to suspect terrorist involvement or another of the various other scrupulous 9/11 subsequent clauses.
DJB says patches are always legal:

http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html
Reads like a late april's fool joke.

So this law not only allows ISPs to spy on our traffic, it requires them to do it?

Technically this will obviously be circumvented within.. well, it probably is circumvented already. But the direction our "representatives" are taking here is worrisome.
The cheapest chair in that article is $200...
You are very passionate about this aren't you?

I went to graduate school. A Ph.D. program is like being an unpaid intern for six years.

(And, yet, in some ways it's better. There is some pay. And a Ph.D. is a regular old-fashioned apprenticeship program: The bad news is that you're a slave, but the good news is that your adviser has a fairly strong incentive to help you graduate. The commitment goes both ways.

And, of course, if you've got an apartment and a web connection you can teach yourself to be a professional programmer -- especially if you already have a CS degree -- but you can't say the same for semiconductor engineering.)
More censorship, here we go.
XChat is different. XChat is free software (GPL), and the "official" windows code is a completely separate add-on with code that has never been released. The freely-available windows builds use different code, and as a result there is no licensing controversy whatsoever. It's a GPL'd derived work of a GPL'd project.

In fact, the author of XChat is likely violating the GPL by distributing the Windows version without full source code. Since he's accepted third-party patches under the GPL, he has to distribute all derived works under the GPL (or remove all the code that isn't his). This means that currently his closed-source Windows version is a GPL violation.

I know that if I had code in XChat, I would be upset by this.
There is a parallel to this in music called Gear Acquisition Syndrome; when you crave new gear in hopes of stoking inspiration or improving your sound, even when this is a dubious proposition at best.

People with too much GAS tend to be much like language weenies. They will go to absurd lengths to defend the "pure/fat/warm/etc. sound" of their favorites, an ultimately pointless endeavor considering that after a certain minimum of instrument quality, playstyle and post processing effects will both have far more impact.
Sears to Sell Eco-Friendly Men's Suits Made of Recycled Plastic Bottles
The Wolverine leak isn't just according to a random person on the internet- its been leaked and is out there for sure. I'm positive you know this though as your description looks basically like a torrent file header, so I'm not sure why you would attribute this to just some person on the internet.

I agree with you as well- that these events are likely connected, but as far as I understand it is just speculation at this point.
This is indeed odd. youtube.kr is a US-based website hosted in the US. I don't see how Korea thinks it has jurisdiction over all websites using korean characters. (If they can demand that youtube.kr require real names, why can't they demand that youtube.com require that? I can log into youtube.kr with my .com account, which is definitely not using my real name. In fact, I am automatically logged in.)

If I were less cynical I would make some comment about this being an April Fool's joke... but it's probably not.
Why Economics is such a popular major
Urmu:Üç günbəz
Protesters Beware: "Non-Lethal" Weapons of the Future
For decades military R&D types have been desperately searching for the next big thing in "non-lethal" anti-personnel weaponry. From gay bombs to foam guns, every conceivable (and inconceivable) avenue has been explored in the quest to circumvent international human rights laws and rules of engagement in order to exert control and suppress dissent both at home and abroad.
This is great! I'm not a graphics designer, but some of the information in there (color theory, for instance) is very useful outside of graphics design.
Ask YC: I want to become a filmmaker.
I'm a good programmer. But I'm also a creative person and interested in filmmaking. Any good suggestions on becoming one ? I know this a hacker news..but I would like all of yours an unbiased opinion of following one's passion ? If there is already anyone like me who is into movies...I would appreciate for any suggestions.
I meant that a random guy claimed that a copy was sent to Rupert Murdoch two days before the online leak.

Also that a random guy claimed it was connected to the data center raid. Different random guys, of course.

I edited my post above to make it a little more clear, I think. Basically nothing is known about what happened except that the FBI offered to speed up their analysis of the machines if the corporations contact the FBI.
As an ex-SAT tutor (horrid job, but while in school it seemed like a good idea...), my take on the matter: high SAT scores don't mean a damn thing, I've seen absolute fools hit high 700s across the board, but low scores can be telling, especially in math (verbal is a lot more variable, from what I've seen, and also easier to game through prep; math is harder to "fake").

Someone going into a technical field should be able to do well on the math section, and I would not want to work (programming, at least) with someone that could only manage a 450. I've never met a person that couldn't get at least five or six hundred points on the math section that I would consider even remotely qualified to go into a science, math, or programming.

Frankly, the best people should (and usually do) do even better, at least on math. The material is just too close to what you've spend years doing in school to use the "bad at tests" excuse - if you have any aptitude for quantitative reasoning at all, you will not do poorly. Most of the smartest people I know (granted, mostly acquaintances from physics, so it's a biased sample) hit 800 with ease.

So overall, I can see some use for the SAT as far as trimming bottom of the barrel candidates. But the difference between a 650 and a 700, or even a 750 and an 800? Meh...that's maybe three or four questions. A person's score varies by that much between different tests, so it's utterly irrelevant as a fine discriminating factor. The difficulty level of the test is _far_ too low anyhow to discern a good candidate from a great one.
IANAL, but I believe a strict literal enforcement of minimum-wage laws also prohibits founders working for their own corporation without salary. (Equity doesn't count for minimum wage calculations.)

Much of the bootstrapped-startup culture we celebrate may thus rely on lax enforcement of these laws.
Speculation on the behavior of Rhino equals mocking Lisp?

Wow; who knew?
I think this is closely related to ones identity and many people bring some artifact very close to their hart just to be get a feeling of belonging.

To talk a little about myself, I'm a die hard libertarian, and I've spent countless hours being quietly angry about all the collectivists out there that wants to ruin our planet. Recently I've noticed though, that this rock-solid conviction of the superiority of a libertarian society isn't really productive for me in my relationships with others, and made it harder for me to intellectually appreciate good ideas from people who doesn't share my view.

I think the reason for this rigidity in my beliefs was that in my late teens, I felt as if I didn't belong anywhere, and getting an ideology to die for gave me a (false) sense of belonging.

I can't speak for this Lisp guy or the musicians but I can only assume that we perhaps share some similarities.
It's possible that there'll be two new iPhone models that debut in June: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/03/more-evidence-aris...
"Someone should port Rails to Scala :-)"

You can run Rails on JRuby today and get many of the same benefits.

Would like to know if the Twitter guys even considered JRuby.