skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the most interesting part of the article, IMO:

“[Watsi’s] goal is to become the largest crowdfunding medical treatment platform. This is way down the line, but we could move into providing social medical insurance. As soon as we have large enough dollars coming through the platform, we could even treat patients in the USA.”

The first time I visited the Watsi site, seeing all those photos and reading the stories of people in need of medical care, I thought of the many people I know in the US who have little or no health insurance. Well educated, hard working people who can't afford medication and common medical procedures, people who haven't been to a dentist in years, and so on.

I understand that in developing countries more can be done for more people with the same funds, but I'd be very happy if this project took off in such a way that it would let the world help the US population in need. It might be more realistic than waiting for the implementation of a healthcare system deserving of a first world nation.
Out of interest, what kind of Web Development do you do? In my experience, if you are a PHP developer that primarily uses WordPress, or solely a front-end developer there are far more employers out there that are ready to shaft you.

That being said, £15k is criminal. I'd not pay a student that little, let alone someone with three years of experience.

Would you be willing to relocate? London is obviously the biggest place in the UK for tech jobs, but I would highly recommend looking at Bristol. It has some fantastic agencies, a few large tech companies, and a good mix of languages (ASP.NET/C# is strong here, and I see some Ruby and Python work around). Most importantly, someone with three years of experience would easily rake in £25-30k. I've worked with a few devs that have come from your area looking for work, and they all seem to love it here.

Regarding the point of your post, I can understand how your stammer would make you feel less confident. I know that it's a bit rich for someone on the Internet to say "be confident", but in reality an interview is as much about you interviewing a company as it is about them interviewing you. You seem experienced enough that most friendly dev teams would happily take you on if there is a mid-level role available. While I would say that you should definitely seek help if it's this much of a problem I would also suggest that you try to focus more of your energy in an interview on assessing the potential job, rather than trying to sell yourself. It'll make the process a lot more logical, and will probably reduce the stress levels in the room, and hopefully with that the potential for stammering.
If you buy into life having rules about how it is supposed to look at certain points then this is applicable. If you don't accept it then life simply comes down to knowing what your goals are, working out a way to achieve them and going for it.
How much memory does Chrome actually use on a Mac?
I'm throwing this out there as a tech lead who interviewed and made hiring decisions on juniors in the Austin, TX market.

First, working apps are big: put them on Heroku, link them up. I don't care how "straightforward" or "noob" they may seem, I want to know you're capable of shipping working products. If you can only get me 90% of the way to a solution, having to solve the last 10% for you on a regular basis makes you far less valuable to my team. Blog about the challenges or one interesting aspect of each of these projects: even 3 paragraphs can show me you know how to communicate technical things.

Second, GitHub all the things. Show that you know the "full stack": front-end markup, data modeling, a bit of jQuery can't hurt. HAML/SCSS are all the rage, not too difficult to pick up, and show you're "hip."

Third, go to Rails meetups: in Austin, we have a hacknight every Tuesday, and a monthly Rails meetup. If I've worked on a problem with you over a beer, your resume will naturally gravitate to the top when I have an opening.

All of those things are doable over weekends and evenings, and running with just these three tasks for 6 weeks would put you, in my experience, a hundred miles ahead of everybody else looking for a junior position.

Good luck man.
It's possible that both were "correct" but that -O2 and -O3 gave different results due to x86 extended precision. For some interesting reading, see:

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=323 (a centi-bug of back and forth between "it's broken!" and "no it's not, and we're not going to change the compiler.")

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-08/msg01183.html (a really informative thread about the issue)
WebP gets color profiles, metadata, and animation support
2) Actually scares me. Without a fire under my feet I fear I might get too "comfy", not ship because of perfectionism, and not focus on the most important things (I'd work on coding instead of customer development and sales).
There is a shortage of people who make it through the interview process, not the number of resumes.
Did you take a poll?
GHC and GCC are 2 of the most widely used compilers for the respective languages. The research uses most popular compilers, which are used by many different projects, not the most micro-optimized once.
Is it still "Hello, world!" if that is never printed to the screen?
Wanted Analytics released a press release on January 8 2013, showing that "The number of product management or product development job ads posted during December rose 23% compared to December 2011, 30% versus 2010, and 99% from 2009"[1] which, is a good indicator of growth in the market.

There is definitely a shortage of good talent across the majority of languages as a good developer is in demand. However, you have to prove to potential employers that you're a good developer which is why they usually as to see Github profiles etc in the application (and if you haven't got one already you should definitely make a Github account). Likewise, since you're learning you could even blog about learning Ruby on Rails and even create some mini-working products on Heroku to show that you're capable of shipping & able to communicate in technical terms.

Furthermore, for further evidence of employers trying to attract Ruby on Rails talent then, you should have a look what LivingSocial are doing to attract Ruby on Rails devs with http://www.hungryacademy.com

[1] http://www.wantedanalytics.com/press/2013/01/08/innovation-i...
Thank you so SO much for taking the time to drop some knowledge here.

This is fantastic. If I'm ever in Austin, I'd be glad to buy you a drink!
Death to the Modern Day Ad: a startup concept
From the OED

conservative, adjective.
1. adverse to change or innovation and holding traditional values: [...]

The primary meaning of conservatism is more to do with being risk averse and disliking change than the political movement it (sadly) shares its name with. In this regard, the author's usage of the word makes sense. He wished to conserve what was there previously without regard of what it may have made way for.
>While R is the de facto standard for performing statistical analysis, it has quite a high learning curve

What? R has a ridiculously low learning curve. I remember literally the first time I used R I loaded up a dataset and had a histogram and qqplot within 5 minutes and 3 or 4 lines of code. Just figuring out what libraries I would need to do that in python (and installing them) would probably take me at least 30 minutes.

I think it's still highly debatable if Python is the way to go for general data science, especially if you're spending a lot of time analyzing data. R is more mature, but the tides are steadily moving in python's direction.
Dr Oz Garcinia Cambogia: Does It Work? | Belly Fat Diet
TechCrunch made a good point: Home introduces chat multitasking. That's as innovative as webOS' Synergy.

And we saw that both iOS and Android incorporated Synergy.

So I don't think it'll be too long before both iOS and Android introduce multitasking chat.

If anything, we should thank FB for forcing their hands and moving everyone forward.

Home's advantage might not last for long, in other words.
Isn't a conservative outlook literally a status-quo preference, you wish to conserve what was instead of risking what might be?
A lot of people read Gower's blog as it has some really useful expositions of undergraduate maths, which he makes available for anybody who might find them useful. In that sense I think he is justified in not providing a reward; you don't have to do the test if you don't want to anyway. He will no doubt post later with the actual writers' identities.
Hence why many use rbenv instead.

https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/#neckbeard-configuratio...

https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/wiki/Why-rbenv%3F
> A minimal government is one not worth buying. A big and intrusive government is one totally worth buying.

I get what you're saying. If a government barely has any powers, they yes, it's not worth corrupting, but I really don't think we're headed in that direction any time soon. Surely even a medium sized-government would still be worth corrupting?

Moreover, why can't we have both? A government with smaller influence, but still freer of money-influence than today's.

It seems to me that the current political reality is that Lesig's proposals would be much easier to achieve than bringing our government's influence to a level more agreeable to a libertarian.

I would speculate that democracies like our own broadly tend coverage to the middle of extreme views. If that's the case, then we won't achieve a libertarain-sized government, unless you convince a good majority of voters. Hence, it seems clear that we should focus more on the quality of government, right now.
I'm wondering why a file upload dialog opens up when I click in the empty area beside the 'redo' button in the demo (FF 19). Is it just me?
I wholeheartedly second this. Even though I quit a high paying job which I could work any hours I wanted to and had full autonomy, I've known owning my own business was something in the makeup of my person for a long time now. I think people like me are the exception, though, and that a lot of the "coolness" of owning your own startup puts social pressure on people to do something they might not even be suited for.

I don't think the prototypical engineer is truly suited for startup life, and neither is the prototypical business guy. Both of those jobs need to typically work within an established framework, while a lot of startup businesses are about busting out of a framework or completely inventing your own.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with not being a millionaire/billionaire. Yes, you can't have your own island, design and commission your own uber-boat, or provide flu shots to an entire city, but a lot of people seem to be able to find happiness without those things.

Personally, my end-goal regardless of success is to teach a high school web/game programming course, or whatever is popular to learn at the time. The only reason I'm not doing that right now, is that I'm curious to know whether or not the drive inside me to build things is a part of my ego or my destiny.
This is great insight, thanks.
A desktop program that does something like Zapier would be useful and not terribly hard to make. I simply would not trust an online service to hold some credentials.

I've automated these sorts of tasks many times with Python scripts but never made a general solution with a nice GUI.
Definitely true, and you're spot on that I did write this from the perspective of someone who enjoys startups to working for others. In my case, I spent a lot of time (several months) thinking seriously about whether to leave because my job was great and the people I worked with were excellent as well. In the end, I decided to jump and was surprised by how the difficulty even after all that forethought.
Copying with pentadactyl using Y shows exactly what has been copied on the status line at the bottom of the screen.
> they do force people through their ads channels in the iOS store.

iAd is not required for apps on the App Store: you can use any ad network you want, like AdMob from Google itself.
HootSuite hammered online for illegal unpaid internships
Hmmm...I just hasn’t been thinking about such things
My experience is different. I spent a lot of time in the beginning teaching the three or four important theoretical parts of Perl (lists, context, monomorphic operators, and coercion) and then explained how to use the documentation. That leaves only a couple of places where the difference between approaches is substantial enough that it needs explaining. Dereferencing syntax is one such wart. Choosing an object system used to be another place where opinions varied enough that it mattered, but now teaching Moose by default is obviously enough correct that it's a boring choice.
Having a mortgage means you can't tolerate a long profit-less ramp up. Find a business you can start that draws revenue immediately. You'll have to do some business analysis before you code, but this actually is probably better than the "build and pray" method that many younger founders do.
What is D3.js?
Just an idea: how about adding gamification to the mix, linking Watsi accounts to social network profiles? You can take some pages from Zynga's evil playbook and use it for good.

https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification
What source should they use for their research? The phone. Everybody in the investor community knows who's investing and who's not. You just pick up the phone and call someone you're on good terms with, or you make sure to ask 'who else should I be talking to?' at the end of a meeting. If you want info on a specific firm, you say 'Is X a good fit? Are they investing right now?' I've rarely gotten anything but a completely forthright answer.

If you're looking to use some independent data source that doesn't involve talking to people (which is the wrong way to go about it because fundraising is inherently a social networking exercise), I'm not sure all the data is universally public. The best source for brand new financings (although not follow-on rounds) is probably the Twitter bot VCDelta (twitter.com/vcdelta), since VCs tend to be good at updating their portfolio pages. Perhaps you could also get institutional fundraising information from the Form Ds (formds.com).

I suspect the Crunchbase data will only get worse as the importance of TechCrunch continues to shrink.
I don't mean to sound like a Melvin, but, "That is literally flat out wrong/bullshit" is a remarkably poor thesis. Why is it bullshit?

I just got into the whole exercising thing a few months ago. The entire culture/industry around weight lifting is so hard to figure out. Everyone has different opinions -- usually really strong ones too -- but few actually defend their assertions on factual grounds. So, it's purely out of self interest when I ask "Why is it bullshit"

I just want to know about these things! Hell, I still don't even know if I should be holding my breath or breathing out while squatting... The pool of information about weight lifting is that muddled.
You either enjoy pointless nitpicking or have entirely missed my point.
Thank you all for your thoughtful responses! I really hope I did a good job conveying that I seriously did want feedback on this question, and my counter-arguments to Perl were simply to alert you to my biases going into the discussion.

Anyway, from these responses, I would say there is no compelling reason to learn Perl as a beginner or advanced-beginner, but perhaps for someone beyond that point there are some decent ones.
Popsicolor 1.0—By the Numbers
Although I generally agree with your point, I've found that the difference between working on a project full time and working part time is a night and day shift. There's a lot more pressure to make those sales if you define your full time job is making your business a success. I've done both, and found the full time option to be more likely to produce success for me.

The other thing was that I got lucky on my first startup and have a bit of income coming in from that, which means the cost of failure is pretty small. As an econ major in college, I'm well aware of the opportunity cost of not working, though, which did weigh heavily on my decision.
I feel like I'm one of the odd ones out where I enjoy my job at a large company that offers me pretty much everything I could want at the moment

I go home, relax, read, hangout with the family and work on really interesting open source & side projects .. I can't imagine how I could be much happier ..

IMO if your goal is to start a business start planning things out and take the risks you need to only you have to not just when you can .. which is very situational .. i wouldn't just go and quit your job if it's not immediately necessary on a whim due to advice from a random blog.
See if there's some way you can organize with your bank or a friend to limit your access to your savings, being only available in the event that everything falls apart and you have to go back to regular life.

This way, you won't feel like you have too large a safety net.
I agree with most of this, Ember.js is great. However, I'm not so sure on ember-data. It seems like it has great potential and will eventually turn out to be excellent but currently I've found it to be very frustrating when you actually try and use it.

To me ember-data is currently either you use it exactly as we specify and it might work but if you attempt to do anything that even slightly deviates from this then you're pretty much out of luck.

Firstly, it has a trivial to challenging barrier of entry depending on your skills/environment; it requires a working ruby environment and the ability to build ember-data from the git repo.

Then once you start using ember-data you'll most likely find yourself running in to all sorts of problems that involve you delving into the source code to find out what on earth is going off (no docs). Also I fell in to the trap of assuming that ember-data should do something and trying to figure out what was wrong with my implementation when it turns out it can't actually do that. For example, ember-data does not automatically update hasMany collections when you fetch a model with a corresponding belongsTo. Because of this you have to specify every single id of the related models for your hasMany relationship in the parent model's JSON and good luck trying to hack your way around this by appending models to the hasMany collection yourself.

As I said though, it does appear to have promise and to be fair it does not claim to be ready for production. However, I think it is a bit early to be attaching words like "love" to ember-data just yet. Ember.js on the other hand currently seems excellent and when ember-data becomes production ready I think they'll make for a very powerful combo.
From Wiki: "C.K.'s paternal grandfather, a Hungarian, immigrated to Mexico, where he met C.K.'s paternal grandmother, who was a Catholic Mexican of Spanish and Mexican Indian ancestry".

I am not sure what to make of your "big genetic advantage" comment however having educated parents can definitely be considered an advantage in some circumstances.
NVidia being a "distant fourth" as TFA mentions is directly linked to their lame behavior since basically forever with Linux.

As Linus recently said in a talk at Aalto uni, NVidia badly wants a part of the "900 000 new Android phones bought everyday" market and them being at only 6% is pathetic.

But you get what you deserve: this is karma getting right back at them.

As Linus said in it's Aalto talk: "Fuck you NVidia", referring to the fact that their share of Android phones was lame and mediocre and that this was directly related to their attitude.

I'll make sure to never ever buy any laptop / desktop / Android phone / tablet containing an NVidia chip.

Karma is a bitch and it took a long time for NVidia to get it deep. But this time they got it very, very deeply.
Stochastic Superoptimization
That's a good approach as well. I think it's highly dependent on your personal living situation. I sorta lucked out with my first startup in that it's producing a little passive income and I couldn't stand the thought of squandering it (ie, putting it in the bank to earn 1% pre-inflation).

I'm all in favor of doing work you like. If you are happy working for a larger employer, you're probably a lot better off than some crazy guy like me wanting to run a startup. :)
Why have copyright at all?

More to the point, if you're going to have it, how are you going to enforce it on the Internet? The number of ways in which a high-quality digital copy of a potentially copyrighted work is nearly infinite. Some of them are legitimate: reading a properly licensed file into memory in order to consume it. Some are clearly not legitimate, and others fall into a gray area.

The practical ease with which copyright may be violated is in itself an argument against its rigid enforcement. Without a pervasive technical infrastructure the question of, "Can I copy these bits?" is essentially unanswerable. The duration of copyright is not nearly as large of a problem as enforcement -- the current system doesn't seem to work too well. To a first approximation, there is no such thing as copyright of a digital work. So why should that change, and how do you plan to do that?
NASA Won't Be Going Back To The Moon In Our Lifetimes
Well done, sir.

Thanks for bringing this up.
I'm not sure I'd end by signing "the people who designed the hardware, software and network infrastructure you're reading this on," but I do know the feeling.

It's especially poignant in relationships. I feel compelled to provide a justification for why I want to be alone, because people assume that "because I need time alone" needs further translation. Sometimes it does, but for me it is how my mind settles. For a long time, I tried to change that part of myself -- I was told it is a maladaptation. Now, I think it's just how I am, and I don't feel a justification is required.

I like quiet.
In that case it _could_ be reasonable to let the bank foreclose on it. I know people that have done this to their relief. Obviously a more serious decision than selling a house, but still less serious than selling children.
I don't see it as necessarily replacing representative democracy, but complimenting it, giving people more of a say in how things are done on top of traditional voting. If I could explicitly choose how even 5% of my taxes were spent, that would give me a very tangible feeling of influence that I just don't get from voting, at least at the higher levels of government (as an american). It would also push me to do my homework about issues a lot more, but that might not translate to the public at large.

Agreed about the potential for the system to be hacked by powerful entities though, perhaps even worse than it is now...tough to get around that one.
I am no expert in this field but I distinctly remember back when I had a Tegra 2 (LG Optimus 2X) phone that the major obstacle of porting ICS to it was that there was no documentation and no open source code. With this barrier gone I hope Nvidia will be able to pick up some steam again looking as to how they pissed most of the cellphone manufacturers according to this article http://semiaccurate.com/2013/02/18/nvidias-telegraphs-tegras... (again, don't know how true this is as I am no expert)

This could also be an interesting development for the Ouya game console, maybe game devs will be able to get more performance out of the Tegra 3 chip with it's sourcecode out in the open.
Definitely. When I got married I told my wife "I might start another company, be prepared" but there's really no preparation for the amount of time/money/energy/hope that goes into a new venture. If there's any advantage I had it was that I knew what it required to get my first venture off the ground. But like anything else related to building/maintaining relationships, it's all about ongoing communication.