skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The takeaway for me was "It's better to be really good with your tools than to have really good tools."

He sucked because he had to write Java, yet never took the time to learn all its idiosyncrasies. Meanwhile, the people around him didn't care so much about what tool they were using, they just put effort into learning that tool really well. If he'd been using Lisp, there probably wouldn't be a problem - but you can't use Lisp (outside of prototypes and research projects) at Google.
Facebook’s Newest Funding Source: You
I use this:

http://www.makewords.com/
Damn, I didn't take the SAT because I didn't need it for my education path. How old can I be? :-P
Do you have any clue what you're talking about? Some of the smartest, most talented people in our industry have helped turn Facebook what it is today -- THAT'S why it's a success. People like Adam D'Angelo (who almost single-handedly created the real-time engine that is driving a lot of Facebook's new stuff, along with the architecture that allowed them to scale) and Aaron Sittig (who created the Mac-like, user-friendly interface that has drawn in so many) are, on their own, geniuses; when combined as a unit, we can see that they have created a product that is appreciated by over 200 million people.

Mark has had his issues, sure; haven't we all? He was an awkward teenager, paranoid of others and obsessed with his own code. If you can't understand how someone like that would do what he did, you really haven't spent much time in the hacker scene.
Sharing is supposed to be altruistic. Frankly this may make me less likely to share because it taints my good willed sharing with a profit motive.
This article makes it clear:

"In order to qualify as an unpaid internship, the requirement is simple: no work can be performed that is of any benefit at all to the company. That is, you can not deliver mail, sort files, file papers, organize a person’s calendar, conduct market research, write reports, watch television shows and report on them, read scripts, schedule interviews, or any other job that assists the employer in any way in running their business."

http://laborlaw.typepad.com/labor_and_employment_law_/2007/1...
Facebook has a large enough audience where they don't have to simply appeal to people with your level of intellect to generate meaningful revenue from a product/service. There are tons and tons of people who love wasting time with silly things such as this. We don't know if there are enough of those people to make this useful, but dismissing it outright isn't particularly productive.
Reading over Popcuts' site, they don't proclaim anything about your ability to make a profit or start a new living by buying music off their site. In their about section, they specifically angle it as getting something back for having 'good' taste in music. And they seem to be delivering on their pitch, as the top earner you cited is getting a 41% discount on the music they purchased. Their music prices are also aligned with both iTunes and Amazon, so I would hope nobody feels ripped off or deceived for purchasing market rate music with the chance of getting something in return.
Ask HN: Choosing a mobile platform
Our company (of two people) is about to the phase where we are going to be developing a mobile application.
Our customers are mainly local government personnel, so we expect a mix of iPhones and Blackberrys. The problem is, neither of us (the only developers) know Java very well, or for that matter ObjC.
Our web app is written in Rails, so of course everything is XML-accessible. The main part of the application that mandates it be an actual native application is that we need to send a LatLng location every 5-10 minutes to our home base. I am aware that the Blackberry browser provides location via JS, but we need something that runs in the background. The second main thing we need a native app for is mapping. We need the ability to add points and possibly polygons to whatever mapping system the device uses (BB Maps on BB, Google Maps on iPhone).
What I'd like to know from HN is: What do you recommend based on what I've told you here? If you need more info, please ask as I'll definitely be checking back.

Addendum:
We have considered Android, but the number of devices that it is deployed on is abysmally small. We are also looking at the Mojo environment on the Palm Pre, but it hasn't been released yet.
You can take this too far. For me, the interesting part is in the hunger for knowledge itself, and not what we do with that knowledge. That's led me to pretty much reinvent myself as a programmer every year - I went from doing Java Swing apps, to PHP webapps, to Netbeans plugins, to Haskell compilers, to JSF webapps, to Python/JavaScript Web2.0 startups, to a big C++ codebase in about 8 years (the last 5 are all in the last 3 years). The problem is that there's a whole lot of stale knowledge rolling around in my brain. I pray I will never have to use the JSF/Facelets/A4J stack again, but I spent a year becoming pretty familiar with its intricacies. Meanwhile, my coworkers who joined Google straight out of college are way ahead of me, because they didn't take all these detours through dead technologies.

There's a balance to be struck. You need to be hungry enough to viciously attack new problems, yet not so hungry that they become an obsessive end in themselves.
It's like they took a credible micropayment system, but decided to make all the micropayments entirely worthless. If you could cash out accumulated "credits" for real money, or earn "credits" for something more substantial than status updates (who's going to micropay you for a status update?), or even spend micropayments on something that's actually useful, it might be the start of an idea.
Yeah, I don't think it's exactly wrong to say that greed and stupidity caused the crisis, but it seems like a category error. If a farmer kept planting crops in September, and they died during the winter, and he said that they died because it got cold, then he'd be perfectly correct. But that way of phrasing it almost suggests that he expects it not to get cold again next year.

I think it's very hard for people to see bubbles as forces of nature, because in retrospect you can always see how dumb they were. So it always seems as though, if we just rationalize the system a bit, then we'll no longer have bubbles. However, no system has yet been invented which is capable of preserving rationality within a modern economic system. Hundreds of years of evidence suggest that whatever reforms are attempted as a result of this crisis will eventually run into the same mishaps and errors as ever before, unless someone comes up with a truly systematic account of bubbles.

You're right that I shouldn't assume that this crisis is an expression of cyclical booms and busts. I'm very puzzled by this crisis, and the information that's available is maddeningly vague and handwaving.
France to Block The Pirate Bay
Upvoted from zero. I am not the biggest Arrington's fan to put it mildly, but this talk is actually quite insightful.
It's very important to have a Press Kit that allows reporters to quickly see why they'd want to talk to you. You can see an example of ours: http://www.dawdle.com/press/ I give topics we're good at, and proof of social status. Note that our Press Releases are at the very bottom of the page.

In addition, most people I talk to think about getting press for their company's launch or greatest new feature - that's wrong. The best press comes from being a good resource to reporters, regardless of the story. You want to be mentioned as an example of a general trend. Those are the stories that have "legs" - i.e. another reporter will contact you for their related story on something similar.
FBI seizes entire data center, won't say why
Well, any insurance company that doesn't have a combined ratio (CR) less than 100 is not making money.

Example: a CR of 92 means that for every dollar of premium, the company has to spend 92 cents, leaving 8 cents of profit. A CR of 102 means that the company has to spend $1.02 for every dollar taken in.

How much spent depends, in general, on operating expenses and claims paid. Limiting how much you spend can only get you so far; hence the rest of an insurers profit comes from investments.

(And where does the money for investing come from? Collected premiums!)
I know an IT firm in Shanghai that gives an IQ test to all new employees. You have to score over 140 to stay on past your probation period.

Although IQ and SAT might be good indicators, fortunately, I can actually interview programmers and get to the heart of what I need.
JRuby - Quick and Dirty
VLC 0.9.9: The best media player just got better
The best advice I can offer is target your reporters and be persistent.

My experience was very different because I rode a wave of interest around something and put myself in front of that wave.

What I found to be effective was actually reaching out to various reporters/bloggers who have written on that subject or similar subjects in the past.

I wrote fairly specific emails to both an LA times and Wired journalist and after being published on both sites, from there it snowballed with many journalists (TV/radio/newspapers) soon contacting me afterwards.

Also, one thing I did do (which was a little naughty at the time) was create news that I thought was unbelievable at the time, but pushed it to as many gossip columnists and bloggers as I could find (mostly disreputable folk) and through various network effects (and many many hours of typing emails) the same news ended up on the front page of Yahoo.co.uk for about 16 hours.

Screenshot below - the rickrolled again story in #1 spot on Yahoo's UK homepage... was a result of my imagination.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/yahoo-page.jpg

This same story was also on Cnet's homepage too, but I never got a screenshot of that sorry.

Really the best thing I would do is set up a whole lot of Google Alerts around a subject that your startup is targeting and whenever a story pops up online, contact that writer with your perspective.

I did this approach during October last year, this is the traffic that was generated for the entirety of the blog's short lifespan (that month essentially).

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

These journalist's incomes depend on putting content out there, help them out, they don't bite.
"That's like saying that ruby is probably as fast as c because the interpreter is written in c."

I was under the impression that Rhino was doing some compiling to byte-code (unlike what MRI does, but what perhaps like JRuby does).

Live and learn.
BlueRuby -- From SAP
Pros and cons of FPS?
Having a conversation with a prospect where the product is hypothetically free is different from giving your product away. One example: some prospects won't use a product in their business unless it's supported (and they assume if it's free that they won't get reliable support). Giving it away won't allow you to assess how they value it. Also, as a rule of thumb it's easier to drop prices over time than raise them.

See "The Penny Gap" for another perspective on the difficulty of starting free and charging later: http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html
I saw these guys present to the MIT e-club.

Choice of the word profitable: it's profit sharing (for some percentage). There is a definite incentivization. When one uses a credit card with "cash back" or to get airline miles there's not a huge difference.

A novel idea - think it just needs some simplification. Maybe it'd also be good to focus on a niche, or user generated content.
The engineering equivalent of Bain or McKinsey is Google. While they don't outright ask for SATs now, they come close. One of the other comments on this post suggests that they used to.
Damn you and your fanboy comments ;)
Some perspective on a destroyed career
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546080
Try https://domize.com/ — Power Search, which lets you specify vowels/consonants/alpha/numbers, endings, prepositions, verbs, synonyms, or load a list of domains from a URL to a text file. Plus it's lightning fast. Not exactly regex, but it's quite powerful. My favourite domain searcher.
I was aware of other workplaces, from other accounts by persons not in the test prep business, where SAT scores are a hiring criterion, so I thought this recent blog post was a good enough source to bring that issue into discussion.
You mention that you're considering iPhones and Blackberrys.
However, the iPhone doesn't support background processing. So you won't be able to implement an iPhone app that sends lat/long updates to the home base every 5-10 min (unless the user keeps the app open)
>Lisp has no monopoly on elegance or "metaprogramming"

Lisp (or rather, the Lisp family - the word has not referred to a specific programming language for decades) does have a monopoly on programming by way of raw syntax tree entry. The latter appears to be required for a proper macro system (though David Moon and others have attempted to change this.)

The fact is, I feel caged when I am programming in a language where I cannot monkey with the syntax at will, and I am not alone in this feeling. When I am barred from creating new syntactic constructs, I feel like a "human compiler" (in fact, exactly that which the job title "programmer" actually meant in practice before the invention of actual compilers.)

I wish to branch out to languages which feel less limiting and more general than the Lisps, not otherwise. And I have yet to encounter any. All of the good ideas of Haskell (laziness, etc.) are easily bolted on top of even a stock Common Lisp. Likewise for the other languages named. Forth, however, remains interesting due to its AK47-like simplicity and embeddability.
I use bustaname, its brilliant.
That was my theory too, all throughout my teens and early 20s. Then I actually did it, and now I'm not so sure.

Forming a startup exposes you to a lot of completely arbitrary randomness - probably more than your average HR department. You think that being denied because of your SATs sucks - how about failing because a competitor you never knew about launched literally 2 days before you and stole the limelight? Or getting turned down from YC for unknown reasons? Or having your startup fall apart because your cofounder gets into business school? Or succeeding because you just happened to end up on SlashDot, or because your chief competitor couldn't deliver a button for the Netscape search bar?

You'll always be a guinea pig, because human beings act in capricious and arbitrary ways. You just have the choice of existing at a customer's whim, an investor's whim, or an employer's whim.
I'm 27 and I still remember mine. I even remember which question I got wrong.
>stinking barbarians... were mostly responsible for the renaissance, the enlightenment, and modern western society

They were first responsible for the Dark Age. And that's analogous to where we are now:

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=21
Thats a good bit of information to know.
Google asks for it:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/joininggoogle/resume.html
I am somewhat of the same way with having a hunger for knowledge itself. I've found that what happens when I go from technology to technology isn't so much a reinvention as an augmentation. Maybe your experience has been different, but I've noticed an increasing depth in my analysis of systems, and I can't help but think that a part of this is due to the knowledge I've picked up in the meantime, even if it seemed tangential at the moment I learned it. To borrow some other authors words, it's partly why Peter Norvig, the Pragmatic guys, and ESR all push for people to learn different languages; your memory of the syntax might be ephemeral, but your internalizing of the concepts might change your thinking in ways you don't consciously notice.

This poses an interesting, and very difficult, question to answer: how do you know whether something learned now will be useful in the future, especially if few other seem particularly interested? Over time you might develop an intuition for which things seem like they would be useful, but I can't imagine such an intuition would be perfect.
I may have missed it, but why do you think this has to do with the Xmen movie?
"Disclosure: I work for Infoblox, a vendor who offers a DNS appliance. Even worse, I’m in the marketing department. "

At least he's honest.

The article basically questions the wisdom of placing an essential service like DNS in the hands of a possible DDOS target/single point of failure mega-provider. Fair enough, I agree actually, I run all my own DNS for exactly that reason.

Don't like the chances of selling a DNS "Appliance", though - anyone trusted to be technically competent enough to design the network in the first place should probably know how to set up a server themselves. Configuring BIND (or whatever) is not the hard part really, the hard part is knowing what to configure it with!
Doesn't IQ correlate well with job performance? Don't you think the SAT predicts IQ fairly well?
The time to build (a wireless-mesh replacement for the Internet, sets of encrypted radios, or for that matter, any subversive technology) is now, rather than when martial law is declared - and we are shipped off to the camps before our soldering irons can warm up.

How many people even own dead-tree versions of essential engineering references? Most people have abandoned even dictionaries in favor of the web. We have grown utterly dependent on a rather surprisingly fragile medium with plenty of government tentacles wriggling in assorted orifices.
What was it? (I just registered for the SAT after reading this article. Did you pay the $12.00 to see the questions you got wrong and info like that? Looked like a ripoff to me. What's it gonna be, a 2-page printout?)
Although not regex related, but I find InstantDomainSearch very useful - http://instantdomainsearch.com
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2k/the_least_convenient_possible_wor...
The problem I see with talking about that attitude-from-birth is that it encourages complacency. Can you get to that instinctive level? I don't know, but I think that a person could certainly try and achieve a good level of competence. Saying that it's an accident of birth discourages hard work and encourages the idea of 'innate hacker skill.'
I think that there are some people on this forum that are missing the point. Just because you are a hacker, does not mean that you have the ingredients to make a successful company. As some have already noted, this is a program for those people who were rejected from TechStars initially to get into the program and glean most of the benefits by donating some of their time. Fifteen hours per week is only two hours per day, and that time could be spent simply providing another set of hacker eyes to a new feature (not building the whole thing from scratch), or another techie to bounce your idea for server architecture off of. What I don't understand is why they do not provide this same system for business types to "hack" into TechStars.
That's odd - my installed copy (0.9.8 OSX-Intel) doesn't notice any upgrades available. Percolating slowly through the mirrors, perhaps?
It was from the Reddit headline. It's not specified in the article, but it is the only explanation that makes sense here. I would be incredibly surprised if there was something else going on.
Please, can a moderator change the headline?
I wonder if the ECPA, Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, is still in force. If so the FBI may well be in violation of it.

Also reminds me of the Steve Jackson Games case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._Un...
Just curious, why don't you use Google Analytics?
> That's one of the reasons I hate Java, because learning Java didn't teach me anything except how truly brain-damaged a language can be.

> I learned more in my one year at Google than in the previous thirty.

This actually makes sense. It's not about being curious, it's about what you're curious about. I remember once asking one of my friends a very basic question about ring theory (whether a certain ring axiom is overly strong.) He completely refused to consider the problem, because it didn't seem relevant. That's not a lack of curiosity, just a lack of curiosity about irrelevant questions, and math is all about knowing which questions to ask. It's not like you learn nothing by solving the problem, just not anything you would have ever wanted to know.
It basically came down to not knowing what "ennui" meant. I think it was something like "apathy : indifference :: " and then I put "boredom : ennui" or something like that, because it seemed plausible and none of the other options really fit. But it was one of the other options. :-( Funny, too, since I'd just read that "apathy, indifference, and ennui" are three of the most common SAT words, and I should've made sure to know what each of them meant. But I was pretty religious about not studying for tests, so I didn't.

I did pay the $12 for detailed score reports, but I knew immediately coming out of the test that I'd flubbed it. I took it the same day as my sister, and I knew I didn't know what "ennui" meant, so I asked her and she'd gotten it right. Was still hoping it'd come in under the freebie limit thanks to recentering, but no: my year, you could get up to 2 wrong and still get a perfect score, but this was #3. (The other 2 were careless mistakes; I don't even remember them.)
Markets are just games with certain rules. It's human nature to exploit knowledge for gain. And we're very good at it, which is why you see home sapiens running things and not dogs or chimps. The emergent properties of nearly all markets are pretty obvious from the outset if you know the rules and just extrapolate.

Markets adapt to the ways people exploit the rules. For example, for a long time the rule was that houses made great collateral, because mortgages were government-subsidized and housing prices never dropped year over year. That was completely true until it was totally false.

Brooks is analyzing psychological motives, but he half misses the point (for the above reason; he wanted to come to a conclusion that supported a "conservative" viewpoint). I get really annoyed when people make the argument "but if only people hadn't mis-behaved we wouldn't be in this mess." Umm, any exploitable situation will be exploited by someone. Quit expecting morality to protect humanity. Don't you grok the Tragedy of the Commons?

It may be 'no true Scotsman', but I always thought the basic difference between right and left was that the right embraced exactly the view you have, e.g. "Don't rehabilitate prisoners; hang them," or "Don't give people a handout when they lose their jobs; you'll just subsidize laziness."
This made me think of a sequel to Speed where they can't shutdown the internet because if the internet isn't transfering at least 10terabits/sec through some unknown core routers, it will explode.
Here's a little writeup on some ex-googlers including Ron Garret:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-184506.html