skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd argue that before one can become a 'specialist' that you should first become a 'generalist'. I would consider myself a generalist - I'm primarily a C# - ASP.NET MVC developer.

But that doesn't stop me from writing WCF services, web services, using message queuing (MSMQ but I prefer RabbitMQ with MassTransit nowadays) or writing T4 templates or custom code generators. I generally do website design (I have worked for a branding/design company previously where I designed websites based on graphic designers' slicing) that includes your typical front-end stuff like JavaScript/CSS with some pre-processing (SASS, Less, CoffeeSCript), AJAX and web sockets.

I would consider myself a 'full-stack' engineer because I am generally responsible from writing everything from the front end to the databases and integration. I consider things like design patterns, wiring up IOC containers, applying SOLID/GRASP principles (ex. abstracting components to minimalize the need for change), managing project timelines, planning and estimates a daily ritual. All my projects use either a N-Tier or a DDD approach.

I have also toyed with a multitude of programming languages and frameworks outside of my scope of 'specialisation'. I'd hence argue that becoming a good programmer would requiring you to become good across the board (and at things outside the scope of the project - ex. I apply similar approaches to what I've learned from writing Scala/Python/Haskell).

I wouldn't consider a programming 'specialist' the same as a domain expert.

You definitely need to acquire domain knowledge to be efficient at what you do, but you shouldn't need to be considered an industry expert. I've only seen bad things happen when programmers are left to make decisions that require domain knowledge because there are no real domain experts around.
I think the question implies the other way around?
My domain is registered until 2021, and it only cost me as much as it would cost for two years of PostHaven.
Here are some other writeups:

Here's Eugene Spafford's write up: (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1701&...)

Page 26

> However. at a recent meeting, Professor Rick Rashid of Carnegie-Mellon University was heard to claim that Robert T. Morris, the alleged author of the Wann, had revealed the jingerd bug to system administmtivc staff at eMU well over a year ago.

Here's Seely's "Tour of the Worm" (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/courses/nidsS05/attacks/seely-...)

> These notes describe how the design of TCP/IP and the 4.2BSD implementation allow users on untrusted and possibly very distant hosts to masquerade as users on trusted hosts. [Robert T. Morris, "A Weakness in the 4.2BSD Unix TCP/IP Software"]

Here's Mark W. Eichin's and Jon A. Rochlis' "With Microscope and Tweezers" (http://www.mit.edu/~eichin/virus/main.html)
If only one would read the actual article...

> It’s hard to know how precise manufacturing techniques were back then, but one of the best clues we have is the Antikythera mechanism. It uses hand cut gears that are surprisingly precise, but still probably not good enough for a mechanical computer. Small inaccuracies in the gear trains would add up, and this is evident in the Antikythera mechanism. It would be even more pronounced in a room sized contraption and would almost certainly prevent any useful calculations from being performed.
>but how did the idea of selling his idea and then building it ever sound good?

This is the very soul of the parasitic "Lean" dogma today.
Which devices dominated the mobile web in 2012?
I was waiting for the part where they asked the judge to join their new web based child adoption startup as an advisor
List Your Business in Online Yellow Pages for More Benefit
Absolutely. Tax rates on LCTG are much more favorable than tax rates on dividends.
I posted about this almost two years ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443710) ... I am eagerly looking forward to DNSimple (http://dnsimple.com) entering the market as their own registrar (instead of reselling enom). Their founder has said that is a high priority goal for them this year which will immediately make them the registrar and DNS provider for all of my domains.

Oh, and don't use name.com, they hijack DNS. :)
It took me seven years and two failed startups (one of them through YC) before I finally had a hit (the Ruby on Rails Tutorial). I think part of what made it work was intentionally taking a medium risk for a medium reward. My first two startups were all-or-nothing (which turned out to be nothing), whereas the Rails Tutorial, even had it "failed", would still have produced a five-figure annual income stream. (It succeeded, so it's six.)
You were using a Parrot AR, which is regarded by serious drone enthusiasts and aerial photographers as nothing more than a toy. Obviously, wind would be a factor - that's why we use heavy octocopters for aerial photography and videography.

If you would like to know more about the current state of this technology, please ask. I'm about to publish a book on the subject.
This description does not discuss reliability. IIRC, these cat's whisker diodes need frequent readjustment. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio#Crystal_detector agrees with that)

Using a single one to build a primitive radio receiver is easily doable, but combining a couple of thousands of them to get a 4004? I doubt one could ever get that to run for a second.

So, they would have to step up to better diodes. Of course, one can speculate that they could have done that, and they could. In the end, it is all down to the observation that flattery (aka imitation) is way easier than invention.
I've always wondered about this. What are the chances electronic devices have been built in the past and for some reason there are no remains, we just can't tell them apart because we have no idea what to look for, or the materials they were made of have completely disintegrated by now?
This is amazing. One good way Internet is changing lives! Before this, I didn't know about Watsi. But now that I know about difference they make to people's lives, I'll definitely contribute.
Doing a startup? 50% of your work will not be what you expect it to be.
A lot of the Roman impatience with early Christians was due to their energetic ... disagreements ... about your statement that "the trinity is nothing if not an expression of polytheism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_controversy
I couldn't agree more. As much as I like languages that facilitate DSLs, this is an unrealistic view of software development.

To add to what you wrote, you have to also consider that all developers in one team have to agree on a common DSL beforehand, which is an investment of time in itself, and the fact that if there is an unusually big change in requirements mid-development (which, let's be honest, is not a rare event), you might have to go back and change your "pyramid of DSLs" to accommodate it, maintain compatibility and update all your colleagues on the new languages.
Ugh, I know it's nitpicking but the correct phrasing is: "Why Not Everyone Should Learn To Code". It's not that difficult, is it?
One thing to keep in mind is that you're going to have far fewer problems with compatible hardware.

On my older laptop things were breaking on each upgrade. Most problems I had were with the Geforce graphics card included, but wireless stopped working at some point in combination with the router that I have at home (kept working with other routers just fine, so I guess it was a protocol issue). Anyway, it required constant tinkering.

So first of all, on that laptop I gave up on Nvidia's proprietary drivers and went with Nouveau, which for my needs works well. 90% of all problems I ever had were linked to these proprietary Nvidia drivers. Don't know how well Nouveau works with newer Geforce cards, but you should give it a try.

I also have a new Thinkpad with Intel HD 4000 graphics and the Wifi chip is also from Intel. I rejected other models with Geforce cards on purpose. With the latest Ubuntu everything worked flawlessly out of the box on this laptop, graphics, wifi, sound, everything.

People expect Linux distros to run well on any hardware they throw at it and many times it does, but if you're buying a new laptop / PC, do some research first and prefer models for which all drivers are available as open-source, or if you don't want that hassle, search for models certified for Linux. Thinkpads are good (if you get it with Intel HD at least), Dell also sells a couple of models that are Ubuntu-certified, like that new developer-targeted laptop, there's also System76 and I'm sure you can find others.
Show HN: Few of My bugzilla quips
Bugzilla stores list of quotes, called quips. One quote is chosen randomly and is shown on bugzilla pages. For Lord of the ring fans hackers the list should be interesting.

Following are few of my interesting quips:

A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our webapps and break all bonds of open source fellowship, but it is not this day. This day we fight! This day we patch! - Aragorn

Even the smallest bug can change the course of the portal - Galadriel

History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the bug passed out of all knowledge. - Galadriel

From the ashes, a fire shall be woken. A light from the shadow shall spring. Renewed shall be code that was broken. The debugger again shall be king. - Gandalf

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." - Gandalf

WHILE (bug remaining) DO {debug}

Developers are the only group where they are asked to do something which has never been done before, and tell someone else how long it will take before they even know what actually needs to be done.

Dont try to squash the bugs, squash the bugs - Morpheus, from The matrix

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. - Steve Jobs

"If more of us valued food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a much merrier world.” - Something to learn from Hobbits
totally dead https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/software
You are really misusing the phrase "co-founder" here. You do not have 5 co-founders.

Only one of the 5 is really clearly a founder (the one with 50+%). The other two are somewhere between "co-founders" and "founding employees". Especially since you acknowledge that there is an inequitable division of power/decision-making. In a situation with co-founders in the purest sense, all co-founders would have equal power. And then you have two investors, who are not co-founders.

The two "co-founders" with less than 50% are "co-founders" in the same sense that Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin were "co-founders" of Facebook. They were co-founders officially, but they were obviously 2nd to Zuckerberg and had far less power than he did (and none of them are at Facebook anymore) and were probably more like founding employees.

At most you could say you have 3 co-founders. But really the closer truth is that you have one founder.
I decided to look it up on Wikipedia. As best as I can make out they have basically nothing in common except the polytheist/monotheist division between characters.
Apple wins in part because of their secrecy. Would iPhone have been so successful if they told the whole world of it's coming 10 years ahead? Well, technically they did, in their patent filings, but the world wasn't listening. But, if they did so publicly, Samsung would've been there, copying the tech way earlier then they did.
And it adds WHAT to HN?
I like all the email related ideas. I hope someone is implementing them. Anyone want to partner for self destructing email?
Does anyone know what came of this awful cyber terrorist? Given what we wanted to do Aaron Swartz, and what we are going to do to Weev, this guy should be facing capital punishment by comparison.

Edit: Haha, downvoted already. I'm kidding of course. I am a fan of rtm, and the eponymous worm.
I really like the way FreeBSD does it: stable base system but all (ok, most) 3rd party software is still fresh.
Apple's monolithic beauty vs Google's chaos
Not exactly. When the Western Empire fell, the Eastern Empire retained Constantinople as its capital, from which it engaged in a protracted series of increasingly expensive wars with the Sassanid Empire (modern-day Iran). These conflicts peaked in the early 7th century, at which point the Sassanids suffered an astonishing implosion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassanid_Empire

That was the vacuum that Islam (then nascent) filled. Only after seizing the remnants of Persia (and, critically, control of the silk routes running through it) could the first Caliphate move into territory once controlled by Constantinople. By the time the second Caliphate had extended Islam's control into Spain, more than four centuries had passed since the abandonment of Rome as a capital city (330 CE), after which the city persevered for another century before being sacked entirely. However the Western Empire was long gone by the time Islam appeared in the territory it once controlled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_expansion_of_Caliph...
He has made his money. Enough to do another startup.
Use your favorite search engine and you will be enlightened.
The problem isn't Pebble
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5078424

Swartz, RTM, sure, but Weev? You can't seriously put weev in that list.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Hacker News.
Deep neural networks are now being developed for use in Google's speech recognition tools and Microsoft's. Microsoft claims a 30% increase in accuracy by using deep neural networks (developed in cooperation with Hinton's group at U Toronto)...
As someone who has consumed copious * 10 amounts of caffeine, I would disagree. The tolerance to the diuretic effect isn't that much. What some people refer to as "tolerance" is more the effect of dehydration. Of course, drinking large quantities of water to balance the large quantities of caffeinated beverages isn't a brilliant idea either..
I think Hackathons are still a good way to meet like minded people and find co-founders.
On a project I am working on, I write all my public interfaces in literate programming style so it can doubles as comprehensive API documentation to put up on GitHub pages or websites or printed for sending to 3rd parties without me having to carefully correlate code and a separate document (they'are already there together.)

On other, more private parts of the code, I just write it normally, with minimal comments.

Another benefits is that, when you change the code, the relevant documentation is right there next to it. I find this minimizes the chance of having an outdated documentation and make it very simple and convenient to update the docs when I update any public interfaces.
"and here is the spec for our in-house framework".

"and here is the 1M LOC codebase, which was carefully crafted to avoid using any of the complicated frameworks; all you gotta know is the C standard library".
The problem you are referring to is solved already - it's called frequent flier miles and free upgrades, or paying for the additional space.

Elite status with United means you are almost definitely going to be 'economy plus' at the least, which means extra leg room etc. For me it means I am almost definitely going to be upgraded to business class for free because I usually outrank most others on a flight.
I have never experienced a hackathon, most similar thing that comes to my mind, that I was part of are hackfests on some open-source conferences and those were pretty great.

Usualy a hackfest meant bunch of coders interested in a project sitting in a room for ~5 hours and doing bug fixing, new features, or just discussing. Everything is good in moderation, I guess.
Not sure about that, but it always amazes me how the advanced the Greek and Roman societies were at the time, by the documents that reached our times.

If the fall of the empire were not to happen, who knows how advanced the mankind could be in our times.
That's the price of trying to provide a vital service free with some clueless, non-paid "customers". I mean, frontpage of HN with zillion upvotes and comments, after you fail to support customers.
I got the some request, uploaded the requested documents and had no issues?
Trying to put a "60h/week" commitment into a contract is unwise on many levels:

It's trying to measure by clock-watching something inherently qualitative rather than quantitative.

Most people can't be productive and efficient with that kind of sustained time-on-task, for more than brief crunch periods.

And, if they're a co-founder, you need to trust them, and be setting mutual understandings, at a much deeper level than some contract.

Your jurisdiction's law may (and probably does) differ from the US, but if there's some process by which he (or conversely you) can be let go if things aren't working out, and thus any payments or vesting stops, then that's your elastic all-purposes way to deal with someone's failure to meet expectations. Writing down some unrealistic commitment metrics can't replace the kind of deep mutual trust and shared mission you'll need.
Right, however the Pauline creed places Jesus as divine alongside God. This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone. And predates the period you describe. Of course, Christianity has become more and more polytheistic over time and now resembles, particularly in the third world where saint worship and veneration of bones is common practice, a belief system that is only marginally more monotheistic than Hinduism.

Nowadays, the only two major religions that one can say are even remotely monotheistic are Judaism and Islam. The Islamic notion of "tawheed" (unity of God) being a good example of a belief system that is genuinely monotheistic.
You can put him in that list only if you look at his crime objectively, and divorce that from the person you don't like. Which is an important thing to do when handing out justice.

Downloading and deleting a list of emails is not worse than spreading an internet-crippling worm. Nobody can make that argument with a straight face.
Spafford's write up is such a hoot. He complains about suboptimal file descriptor closing. Clearly, whoever wrote that worm (that targeted VMS and Unix in one worm, used numerous exploits, probabilistic replication, and required 40 pages of analysis) was some kind of mentally-challenged individual. Terrible, terrible ad hominems.
I'm personally using https://gemnasium.com, and very happy with it
Sorry don't want to be skeptic but just curious to know how are you so sure that it's Andrew Mason for sure. It could be somebody else stating he started Groupon.
HN accounts are not verified in anyways.
"Hackathons run by companies have always seemed to me to be a way for them to unleash creative thinking without having to devote significant company time to it or make strategic tradeoffs."

Yes. The internal hackathons I've been involved with have taught me a lot about a) problems developers face that they're motivated to fix, and b) areas developers are personally interested in and motivated to put forth some effort. (I suppose those are sort of the same thing, although what I meant by the first was fixing problems, and the second was introducing new features or products.)
I think interface designer should be the person who understand the use case of it's users.
Just a side note: I'm not sure if I really trust michaelochurch's comments anymore. Any time I begin reading a comment bashing Google's hiring practices, with the bashing done in a very specific way, I play a little game with myself by telling myself "this was written by michaelochurch." 9/10 times I'm right. There was one thread where several other commenters said (claimed) they had worked at Google during michaelochurch's time there, and that basically a lot of the trouble that occurred was partly his fault.

So I don't know who to believe anymore.
RSA Conference 2013: "It's Time to Prepare for a 'Post-Crypto' World"
They could do what modern computers do and apply error correction codes. I mean if we're already teleporting knowledge into the past we might as well go all the way.
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Ask PG/RTM: How are you dealing with hn point inflation?
I'm sorry for the meta-question about the workings of the site, but I've
been curious about the issue of point inflation on HN for a long time.

These days, it's not too uncommon to see a story with over a thousand
points, and stories with over 500 points seem to be an everyday
occurrence.

I'm not the best or most prolific commenter, but when I do post, I've
also noticed inflation in the points awarded to my comments. I might be
nice most of the time, but seriously, I'm no where near as good as my
score seems to indicate.

For example, I know %5 of my score is due to one of my friends dying and
I let people on hn know because some may have known and worked with him.
That feels both weird and wrong, but there was no way to make a
"no-points" post without the doubts caused by using a throw-away acct.
Anyhow, that's another matter.

I'm not obsessed with points, in fact, I really don't care and often
spend weeks not even bothering to log into hn. The only reason why the
points are interesting is they are used in your sorting algorithms.

It's very apparent your sorting algorithm is more complex than the
roughly stated "points over the square of time since posted," so I've
been wondering how the heck you are managing the point inflation
problem?

If you don't want to answer because it might enable people to game the
system, I'd totally understand, but I am extremely curious how the hell
you're able to manage the inflation so well. If there's any way you can
explain it without killing the golden goose, please kick the knowledge
downstairs to the unwashed. Thanks!
I was a college graduate with a degree in Computer Science and a dim awareness of the Internet. I remember being astonished to see an article about my esoteric field of work on the front page of the Washington Post, and wondered if maybe it wouldn't stay esoteric much longer.
http://nextdraft.com/

i look forward to next draft hitting my inbox each afternoon
I had never heard of literate programming until Monday with the release of CoffeeScript 1.5.0

So I tried it out and found it to be a really rewarding experience: https://github.com/JonAbrams/tomljs
New Java vulnerability is being exploited in the wild.
What is wrong with Oracle?
On a related note, I think the design and organization of your API's documentation is equally as important as the design of the API itself. Stripe's mostly single-page two-column layout (found here: https://stripe.com/docs/api) is brilliant, and makes it extremely easy to find what you're looking for.
example.com isn't just better: it's actually specified in RFC 2606 as one of the domains "reserved for use in private testing, as examples in documentation, and the like."
Management buy out. Big ones are generally financed by private equity firms. That's almost the only way besides acquisitions public companies go private. Whether a company is technically public is more or less academic once you get to 500 shareholders, the legal/reporting requirements are the same.
HTML5 browser exploit could let pranksters fill up your hard drive
How HTML 5 vulnerability can make any website fill up your hard drive.