skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is another reason why I hated undergrad education. You have a bunch of teachers positioned as "experts," and they ask you to accept counter-intuitive statements under extreme time pressure and the threat of not passing the class. The most natural thing to do is turn off your brain and accept what they tell you, to pass the test.

Even if what you've "learned" is correct, you've disengaged yourself from the actual process of thinking and learning.
Yet when it comes to coding, you generally want to follow exactly the opposite advice - "lazy" programmers tend to be the best, because they figure out how to get the most work done in the fewest lines of code/hours of work.

The difference in context is crucial, of course: the laziness pg is talking about is the decision that you shouldn't even try something because you don't have the "stuff" (genius) that you'd need to do it. When coding (and in a lot of other areas, too), you've already decided that you're going to do the job, and it's just a question of how to bang it out most efficiently.
I see the implications of this are enormous. The first example that comes to my mind is criminal prosecution.

The second are software salesman. I have seen a lot of smart people who bought from Vignette, Oracle, Microsoft... Now they have an excuse...
This is very common in the apparel industry. You make a few samples and a catalog, then see which stuff in the catalog gets the most interest before having it manufactured.
Yeah the quotas are ridiculous. I don't think we had a bandwidth quota in the labs though. 200MB seems pretty extreme. In the dorms the quota was like 10GB a day.

I just logged into my account (I graduated more than a year ago but I guess they forgot to deactivate my account...) and it looks like they bumped the storage quota from 100MB to 200MB. Yay.
When I first read about Wasabi, I kind of wondered. But then in a previous lifetime, I was with a company that wrote its own compiler. A few years after that, the CEO said "thank god for that compiler" as it relieved pressure on a target chip decision. Similarly, Wasabi has targeted a completely different end architecture with apparently little fuss. This is not a trivial result.
The Sorry State of the Newspaper Industry: Advertising Income Fell 16.6% in 2008
Thanks, Amy, for sticking to making your point, and not just going along with the PR game of "Yay, they fixed it, they're great again, group hug!"

Your degree of differentiation (e.g. individuals at Google versus Google, Inc.) does a great service to the community and puts legitimate pressure on Google in a sensible way while avoiding the Internet ad hominem culture.
That's better than them being traded in secret, right? The CC companies know they're stolen and can immediately cancel them.
I haven't seen any evidence that DHH is a genius programmer, especially when his work is compared to that of someone like Lars Bak. Do you have a particular work of DHH's in mind as demonstrative of truly exceptional intellect and programming ability?

I reviewed Rail's ORM implementation extensively when researching the field, and I found DHH's implementation to be remarkably naive, with most advances provided by third party developers, and absolutely no demonstrative knowledge (theoretical or otherwise) of the underlying relational algebra, security concerns, etc.

A very simple example of implementation naivety: As of 2004, ActiveRecord implementation failed to even use parametrized SQL statements and was open to a variety of SQL injection attacks:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails/623

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails/749

In my reviews of DHH's work, I've not found code that I would consider 'genius', but note that this is not an argument that his work is without value.
Allow me to clarify. I don't mean that it's confusing or ambiguous. What I mean is that the only place people have seen the backslash in their language and many other places is as an escape operator. This means that the backslash - when seen alone - was most likely to be an escape character.

When scanning code, you often use "landmarks" to find your way about. This is why indentation is so useful. But this is also used on a smaller level. When seeing a comma, you usually expect to find something else after it, just because that's what you're used to.

The same can hold for backslashes. Personally, I "feel" that backslashes are an escape character to such a degree that to see one without an escaped item after it, feels like a syntax error.

Now, I'm not arguing that this is a terrible choice of the PHP folks - at least we finally get namespaces - but I do understand how some people find the backspace an irritating choice.
In college I often sshed from my computer into a lab computer, so I didn't really need the physical lab. Of course, maintaining servers may cost almost as much as maintaining a lab. Maybe preconfigured VM images are the answer.
I find myself doubting the veracity of this article, because I just cannot imagine this kind if lunacy. I majored in physics at the Delft University of Technology and although it wasn't perfect, I might as well call it perfect compared to what you are describing. The helpfulness of the IT department in attaining goals made up for every shortcoming.
Sam Ruby: Life after Bug Tracking Systems
Be or not to be a pioneer?
Is this a web-app for people to pose questions because they're too wishy-washy to weigh their options themselves?

Everyone has trouble making decisions sometimes--it's human nature on contact with a world more complex than the one we evolved in, not a character flaw. I don't just mean major decisions either--sometimes the hardest ones to make are things like where to have dinner or what movie to rent or what color shirt to wear. People are constantly encountering situations in which the cost of making an optimal choice exceeds the consequences of making a sub-optimal choice.

More generally, this is the problem of bounded rationality. If you can't make perfectly rational decisions, you have to find efficient heuristics to approximate those decisions by reducing the amount if information that has to be collected and considered. We've reduced the cost of information gathering to nearly zero, but that only exacerbates the problem of processing it into something useful for making decisions.

Most attempts to mitigate this aim to rank, rate, and prioritize, in order to narrow the firehose and give you only the relevant information. This is great if you know what information you need to make the decision and how you weight various aspects of that information. It's useless when you don't know how to decide: what information to consider and how to rank it. It's like having a research assistant when you want an expert. So what is useful in that situation?

It turns out we already have technology for that: expert systems. They're good for reasoning through a problem because they actively ask for information as it becomes relevant rather than requring the user to know beforehand what is relevant. They're great for situations involving uncertainty because they don't require answers to every question in order to provide potentially useful results.

Where expert systems fail it is because they lack common sense, breadth of knowledge, and the ability to adapt and expand themselves. These are all things which the collective intellegence of networked humans have demonstrated great aptitude at. Driving the former with the latter seems likely to produce interesting results, even if Hunch itself fails.

I have no idea if Hunch will be "huge" or hugely mediocre -- that is heavily dependent on the yet-unseen functioning of the site itself and users that contribute to it (the who, the why, and the how), but I at least find the approach novel and interesting, which is more than can be said for many startups.

Must be nice to have a huge name to tag onto some silly idea that'll make insane money no matter what.

Not as nice as it is to take shots at people for being successful, right?
Additionally they can display different combinations of features for the bullet points and prices each time the page is looked at and see what generates the most interest.
I see nothing has changed since I was there ten years ago. At that time the CS admins were students, but the job seemed to attract the BOFHest of the BOFHs.

If you had an office you probably should have just put your machine on csres and run it yourself.
I highly recommend Omnigraffle Pro to anyone trying to diagram their app ui's, flows, etc. It's way better than Visio. The site cyunker is linking to is a goldmine of stencils.
An analysis of the Hulu/Boxee battle
Excellent. This is great news. Once they are on the net, the cardholders are effectively safe because of fraud protection. The real danger is when you don't know your number has been stolen. Based on the headline, it doesn't appear the journalist who wrote this piece understands that. Sigh....
aargh! not ANOTHER way to connect to mysql database again!
It's unfortunate that you had to go through all of that just to get Google to do the right thing. Certainly in this arena Google's image has been tarnished (further?).
"Control of the botnet from one particular country would be persuasive evidence of some involvement by persons in that country."

Hedging your bets?
Sure. I was only thinking about, you know, dissertations written at actual schools.
Take-home message:

Step 1) Build a brief, branded landing page describing the product, with a 'contact me when you ship' form.

Step 2) Gauge interest based on form responses. Only build if interest is strong.

Step 3) Edit product and reiterate.

Brilliant!
Now, they need to conduct this experiment again with a general population control group and a "successful people" variable group. I'm willing to bet that successful people think for themselves.
Sorry if it's rude to ask, but why were you vetoed?
'Sell before you build' is an old saw, but the 'coming soon/contact' landing page metric I had not heard before, and its great because its a very simply algorithm for developers to follow to arrive at a successful product.
Overly sensational title (the original; gibsonf1 did the right thing using the original title)

I'm sure the same credit card details can be found with other search engines, but the title implies Google had something to do with it.
Despite considerable disagree, I always enjoy your arguments anamax

Again, I need to clarify. The various institutions of course never became absolutely unregulated but particular, symbolically important regulations were removed.

It is true that regulations like the distinction between savings banks and investment banks might not prevented similar banks maneuvers were the banks determined to engage in them.

However, it is actually important to keep in mind that a good deal of state's symbolic action toward private institutions are crucial for its limiting or not-limiting their behavior.

Throughout the financial industry, "Greenspanism", the idea that the market knows best, became the watchword of the regulators and the regulated, meaning that the regulators often failed to take action around worrisome trends. The Federal Reserve, for example, could have punctured the housing bubble at any time by saying loudly and forcefully "this is a bubble, you have to stop now". The results might not have been pretty then but they even uglier now...

Also

> Subprime mortgages were a creation of regulation and were overvalued as US regulatory policy.

I would love see documentation of this...

> Regulation and tax policy encouraged US banks to hold more Fannie and Freddie stock than they would have otherwise, which guaranteed that they'd all take a hit at the same time.

Actually, I'd see Fannie and Freddie as "poorly regulated but guarantee" institutions. Certainly the worst kind.

I certainly don't view the state as automatically good and the private sector as automatically bad. But not I also wouldn't see all state actions as good regulation or even regulation in any sense. The Post Office is owned by government and maybe regulated by the EPA. The US military, is controlled by the state but can tell the EPA to * itself and often does.
Not necessarily. Just start conversations with a low impedance to join. That's why a common greeting is "Nice day, isn't it", instead of, "I was debugging some comonads in Haskell the other day".
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Sounds like a case of the bad ol' "I'm the boss here!"-style 'administrating', eg. some grizzled unix wizard knows only HIS way of doing things, that's automatically the way things SHOULD be done, these young whippersnappers'n their fancy GUI-driven installers, get off my lawn etc.

All they have to show for themselves is a flawlessly running system, which, to Those That Make The Decisions, is all that counts.
On a related note, check out Mindrosia: http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/mindrosia-app-ideas-gener...
"I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better" (originally said by Beatrice Kaufman) might apply here. I have programmed significant systems in assembler, Fortran, RPG, Cobol, C, C++, Smalltalk, Python, and Lisp.

The advantages of higher-level languages are unmistakable. There are stories of pairwise comparisons of each of the sequential pairs in this list. In higher-level languages, I found I was producing solutions at a pace unthinkable in lower-level languages.
To take this to an extreme, you could simply ask people - off or online - "Do you ever have problem x?" implicitly asking about the problem your product will solve. The more responses you get, the more you'll know you're on to something.
OK, now for the contrarian opinion: you're barking up the wrong tree.

A good university does not coddle up students like kindergartners, feeding them pap. It's more like boot camp - in the mud, on foot, carrying a heavy pack. Apparently, it's pointless, sadistic, exercise: the 'product' of the work has no value. Except for the connections your synapses make ...

Frankly, it's hard to feel sorry for students who will not 'read the FAQ', or do anything to improve their conditions by themselves, if they feel it's important. It either is not important, or the culture of helplessness has reached too far.

Also: C.S. is not about this week's 'state-of-the-art' tools - as the late Dijkstra (who taught at U.T.Austin) put it, it's like astronomy and telescopes.

P.S.: in any organization with more than a few dozen people, support staff will ask for emails or web-tickets. That's for two reasons: accountability and knowledge sharing.
One software package called The Brain Fitness Program by Posit Science, and promoted on PBS (in a very infomercial-like manner), goes for $395 for a single-user license. It does seem to at least have some clinical studies behind it but that still seems like a lot to pay.
This brings to mind a really interesting story.

I had the chance to work with a guy who had just sold his business. It turns out that early on (about a year into it) someone came along and offered to buy the whole business for $1 million dollars.

At the time his situation was bleak:

* the site was being overshadowed by two much larger direct competitors
* he was 'hosting' the site from borrowed space in a kind relatives basement.
* growth was really solid, but revenues from the site where far outpaced by bandwidth/hardware costs.
* He had a second mortgage on his house and his credit cards where completely maxed. His wife, while understanding, was understandably distressed.

The thing was, he absolutely believed in his business. He was confident that he was going to be able to overtake those competitors. Instead of selling and pocketing a nice gain, he pushed on.

5 years later he had a top-100 alexa site that sold for $300 million dollars. He had managed to stave off even VC funding until quite late, and so the vast majority was held by him and a co-founder.

That's the opposite of risk aversion. It's funny, he considers not selling one of the stupidest things he's ever done. Anyone in their right mind would sell and move on to something else. He didn't, and it paid off with a 300x return.
Well, to be fair to the implementors, using \ makes the parser slightly easier to implement. Good languages (and libraries) are willing to make implementation harder if it makes the code easier for the user to write. But this is PHP.

You seem surprised.
If you put it that way, then I would have to agree. But I don't think I would go so far as to fork the language to correct the issue as was suggested above.
When I was looking at schools, the advice I got was "Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what it's in - employers like liberal arts as much as technical fields because it shows that you know how to think. While if you get a degree in something specific like engineering, your job will probably end up outsourced to India."

Luckily, I happened to like computers anyway, and learned quite a bit of programming on my own. Plus, by sophomore year I'd basically figured out this was bullshit and employers really do care about concrete skills. But had I not been interested in programming as a hobby, things could've turned out very differently for me. I considered majoring in sociology, after all. ;-)
Studying history gives you perspective. You don't need to major in it, but the heart of historical research consists of analyzing all the known evidence from a time/event and trying to logically argue a case for why things happened as they did, and/or finding the weaknesses in others' interpretations. It's not about memorizing dates.

The mainstream in computer science is incredibly ignorant of its own history, and burns a ton of energy reinventing the wheel every few years. (The old school Unix tools still work, for example, they're just fast as heck now because they were written to work on computes with about as much processing power as a bar of soap has these days.)
TheFunded.com to shut down
We're currently doing this for EtherPad. We added a "pricing" tab to our homepage, but we don't have any prices yet, just a sign up form. So far (2 weeks in), about 100 companies have signed up to hear more about our for-sale version.
"Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what it's in"

I wonder who has a better chance of getting a job at Google: a history major from Stanford or a CS major from , say, CSU Chico?
I read from him somewhere recently (but I can't find it!) that basically, since he wasn't from a company or anything, he wasn't accountable. There was no one to fire him if he told them all to drop out.
I thought Boxee "won" the technical cat-and-mouse game by emulating Firefox? According to this, it's been working since 3/25:

http://twitter.com/ishuluonboxee

That said, given the proclivity of the major studios to sue anyone and everyone, I'd expect the legal cat-and-mouse to begin any day now.
Hey all, good point, sorry we didn't make the relevant information easy enough to find. Hopefully I can help.

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Location: in SF on Market near Powell Bart (Microsoft HQ)
Tickets: $40 at http://sf2startupweekend.eventbrite.com/

I'm happy to answer any questions: willis.tyler@gmail.com

-Tyler Willis
PR/Marketing ticket group is already sold out?
I'm sorry, I thought that the CS computer lab was for doing CS work.

Yes, there's some stuff you probably should have had available -- automount and a better print manager come to mind. But, really, what are you doing in CS classes that can't be done well using fvwm?
"Punning is self-centered, masturbatory humor"

How so? How more so than any other form of humor? Most folks I know like puns. Some groan, but that's part of the fun, like sweet+sour sauce.

A few folks get annoyed. My guess is they don't get language jokes, and they feel stupid.

Puns have a show-off quality to them, but they're wasted if the audience can't partake, so it's not simply self-centered.

Unlike guitar skills the crowd needs almost the same chops as the punster to make it work.
I think if you have good sales (or sales oriented) people on the team, you probably already are selling before you build, regardless on what stage the company is in.

As developers, we'd often complain about sales people selling features we haven't yet created. Only after learning about Steve Blank's Customer Development approach I realized that's how it's supposed to be. Sales people are the ones in contact with the client, and incoming revenue is the signal the real world is giving you on the value of your product.
that's a big problem I had with undergrad, and is directly related to the reason I dropped out.

Critical thinking has become a second-class citizen in our educational system.
> You keep on insisting that "more data" is a bad idea.

Not at all. I keep insisting that irrelevant data is a bad idea. I also ask what the IMF's actual record tells us about its relevance. I also point out that the US folk involved are largely IMF folk....

I note that you haven't taken me up on my offer of the phone numbers of the US. If you actually believe that "more data" is a good idea, you'd leap on that offer as helpful for each and every problem, but you haven't.

Why don't you want my data? Does your refusal suggest that you actually believe that irrelevant data is harmful? Is it the source, that data from a mean person is harmful? What?

> I can't resist quoting Google here, that "more data" is the way to go, as Norvig argues (slightly out of context; field is machine-learning):

You might try actually reading it. Norvig is a stickler for good and relevant data.

> I'm more or less arguing for that the IMF, or any other org. in those waters, has a lot of rich data in their possession.

And I never wrote otherwise. There's rich data everywhere. The problem is getting the right data and doing something useful with it.

> Regarding "abuse through power aggregation in developing nations" I don't have an example right now, on how that directly applies to the U.S. situation.

Fair enough.
> The main advantage of a prestigious school seems to be that you get to rub elbows with rich people's kids.

Another advantage is that you can casually mention it repeatedly on HN (casual university name dropping).
dpifke, If you try the link on Boxee to Hulu, you receive the following message: "this service is no longer available on boxee. Please check twitter.com/boxee and blog.boxee.tv for more information and udpates." Incidentally, the link for ABC is no longer working as well, but this could be just a temporary glitch.
I have noticed that in the people I have been pitching my startup idea to. Thirty seconds or so and they would "lock up" and stare blankly. It took several iterations and beta-testing on friends and family until I formulated my pitch into a 3 minute high-level interactive approach. E.g:

"We all use the web and love it. Oh man, this is my favorite website, I'm gonna do X and catch up with Y, but look! [problem description here]. [explain the aggravation caused by the problem. [real numbers about the loss in productivity or lost sales potential]. [projected growth in my industry, a quick highlight of what's out there and how we're different and better]." Then I go into the project description and everyone is delighted at that point.

To engage the people ask them questions. Instead of "we all do X" say "don't we all do X?". Instead of saying something is a problem for you, say "is it just me or does X bug the hell out of anybody else? [then look the audience members individually in the eye]"

Participatory learning is something good teachers and salespeople have known for a very long time, as far back as Socrates at least.
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