skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And github? They even give you the stats: http://github.com/languages

(Interestingly, the stats are pretty easy to change. Perl was 2%, then Yuval Kogman and I moved our repositories there, and got it up to 3%. We advertised heavily on IRC, and now it is at 6%. Tripling the amount of code on github in a few weeks is certainly a sign that Perl is not dead. It's also interesting to consider that Yuval and I are 1% of the open source community ;)
Here's a mind game for you. I own the exact same model car as you in the same color.

I accidently drive off with your one (putting the fact the keys were in the ignition down to my own absentmindedness), and as a result get stopped by the police for grand theft auto.

What happens then?
Actually, there's one simple meta tag ("X-UA-Compatible") you can add to the head of your pages that will make IE8 use the IE7-compatible rendering engine:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/readiness...

IE7 obviously isn't perfect (or even good), but it's also nowhere near as bad as IE6 in terms of supporting standards.
A Breakdown of Obama’s New Budget and Stimulus Program
It's hard to hold constant all variables except one between persons. Is it reasonable to expect that a programmer with drive and skill wouldn't know about some internet lore, wouldn't know of resources like freenode and stackoverflow.com, and wouldn't know something about the variety of technologies that are out there?

The direction of causation is tricky to unwind. I think you're right, however. If a two programmers were of equal competence, except one only knew about Java and the other sat on Hacker News all day, the Hacker News reader would probably only have a small head start. However, it would be hard to find two programmers that met those descriptions and were of equal competence.
I've negged people for having a number of failed startups in their work history, without any intervening stable roles. I've never negged anyone for a single failed startup. So, be aware that a resume full of go-nowhere company attempts may not serve your career well.

I took time off the lifestyle and worked at an established (but small) software company for about 4 years after my last failure, and feel like I was better off for that choice.
I went there to post a link to

http://skepdic.com/myersb.html

but Alex3917 has beaten me to it almost a year ago.
You are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions. For one thing: If you publicly deface a website you advertise the existence of an exploit which someone else might then use for evil purposes. But, more importantly: Who says that an edit to a user profile is always harmless? People have lost relationships, job leads, careers, and reputations over such "trivial" things. Remember the poor teacher whose Windows box got infected by a virus and spewed porn links all over the screen in front of the students? The woman who lost her job and narrowly missed being convicted as a sex offender by a crazy prosecutor?

These people are using the website with no warranty. It says so in the Terms of Service. Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, etc, guarantee nothing about the security of their website, and whether or not their technology even works correctly. Even if they did say in their warranty: "Your information is guaranteed to be secure," does that magically make it illegal to make a worm?

Two: "What defines the line between legal and not?" The answer, ultimately, is judges and juries. These people have a wide range of discretion and are often surprisingly reasonable. (Although certainly not always. And they cost a lot to convince, and they can be randomly unreasonable, which is why there are a lot of jury-trial horror stories and why lawyers prefer to avoid jury trials whenever possible.)

If I leave a loaded gun lying around and you pick it up and shoot me dead, the legality of your action is going to depend crucially on what you can make the prosecutor and the jury believe. If you convince them that you did it by accident -- that you were honestly just playing around with the gun on the assumption that nobody would be dumb enough to leave a loaded gun around -- you might be found innocent. If you had a documented motive for killing me, or were arguing with me at the time in front of witnesses, or if there were no witnesses... well, good luck.

Good points. Especially the loaded gun thing.

But in the Myspace example -- what harm was done to Myspace that warranted any punishment? Is it because they're such a successful website, that it matters more? I mean, let's say the kid made this worm for a site with like 1,000 users... is it any less of a crime? And why is it not Myspace's fault for not securing the website?

Another thing I'm confused about... how responsible do the website owners have to be? Let's say they allow javascript in profiles. The worm was nothing more than javascript.. I'd argue that somebody was just getting creative with their profile! If they made an endless loop of alerts, is that a "virus" because in most browsers (ridiculously) you have to force quit them?

And, finally, how in the world does any of this technology stuff get explained to the people making the decisions, eg, the judge and jury. It seems it's nearly impossible for it to be adequately explained to them to the point of them understanding enough to make a fair judgment.
Because you get more money if you hit the well-off as hard as you hit the wealthy. Bill Gates takes income when he wants it.

Also, I note that the referenced article doesn't mention the tax shelters that were available "then" that went away with Reagan.

There is one exception though - large estates. Almost none of Bill Gates wealth will be subject to the estate taxes. Same with Warren Buffet. Remember that the next time you hear that they think that the estate tax is a good idea.
Adding Up the Government’s Total Bailout Tab
Ask HN: In this situation, what's a fair equity share?
I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this, and know each case is individual, but what guidelines should one use?

I'm the third person, and my percentage is pretty low (low single digits). I came in pre-money, and I accepted the percentage given because (1) I was fine with the salary offered (deferred until funding) and expected money to come imminently (it took a bit longer, but we're getting customer revenue) and (2) realized I didn't have the full picture (how many points were in the option pool, saved for legal counsel, etc.) and couldn't evaluate what a fair share was.

It looks like funding is coming via customer revenue about... now. We'll be incorporating soon, which seems like a convenient time to revisit the equity question. I don't feel entitled to a 1/3 split, since the other two guys have been working on the project a lot longer than I have, but I did come in 7 months pre-money, so I feel entitled to all the trappings of founder status, and an equity share that would reflect that.

What's a good guideline for whether or not I'm getting a fair share? Is it wise or unwise to negotiate a higher share, and at what point (pre- or post-revenue)?

Also, how do board seats work? If I enjoy hacking more than business, do I want one, and how do I go about determining if I deserve one? (E.g., if there are 3 board seats, I don't feel entitled to one; if there are 5+, I'll be pissed if I don't get one.)
> If you figure out the answer to this, politicians, PR people, and journalists will be knocking down your door.

Huh? Which of those groups have any interest in promoting truth?

Oh - I get it. We're talking about "the truth", aka misinformation, propaganda, etc,
Odd data point: PHP is well-represented everywhere except Lamda the Ultimate (no surprise there) and ... Amazon. Why are there so few books on PHP when it's so well represented in Craigslist job postings?

My best guess is that books are a really lagging indicator, because books stay in Amazon's database for so long: there's no way for PHP, Python, and Ruby, or even Perl, to come close to catching up with C and Java, given the large number of C and Java books published before those languages were even invented.
I wouldn't put too much stock in those numbers. To start with, they are not measuring actual programing language usage. If you want to know which languages people are using, the only way to really do it is to do a simple random survey and ask them.

What these statistics do is go to specific communities and attempt to measure which languages those communities use. Using those numbers to measure language popularity in the population at large makes the assumption that those communities are representative of the population at large. That's a faulty assumption to make.

Do you, for example, think that Slashdot has a large segment of the "Excel VBA Macro Developer" market posting to it? Probably not.

There are other sites, like Stack Overflow, that show a 2:1 preference for C# over Java. Does that mean there are 2x as many C# programmers as Java programmers? No. It just means that more posts on Stack Overflow are about C# than about Java.

Information about the number of unique books written about a language at a particular store does not imply anything about popularity. If you considered "unit sales", that might give you a measure of "popular book subjects", but not about language usage. For example, it could be possible that Java programmers buy more books on Java than C# programmers do on C#. Many of the C++ programmers I know have several books on C++. I don't think that means C++ has more users than, say, Windows batch scripts.

The web site does say "these results are not scientific", but I don't think that's a strong enough statement. The "scientificness" has to do with how the data is collected, and how the results are reported. Even if they measured the same things using scientific means, the numbers still wouldn't imply what they claim them to imply. A better disclaimer might be "these results are not useful for making any decisions what so ever."
As a cult, Catholicism has done way more harm in its history than Scientology. I think it's very sad to see another generation grow up believing in that sort of sick madness.
Not really. It may be possible in theory to cure all diseases, but whether we can do so in time for YOU is doubtful (the older you are, the more doubtful it is). If we can, you'll die of an accident sooner or later. If you upload your mind into a computer with backups, you can avoid accidents but it's questionable whether it's really "you" who would survive. And even if everything goes perfectly and you consider the upload to equal "you," you'll still die in the heat death of the universe.
"Symptoms of the disorder first appeared while he was enrolled at Cambridge; he lost his balance and fell down a flight of stairs, hitting his head. Worried that he would lose his genius, he took the Mensa test to verify that his intellectual abilities were intact."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking#Illness
Out of interests sake: how does one validate an IQ test?
"The federal government simply isn’t raising enough money to pay for its obligations, Medicare being the biggest."

... and this was BEFORE TARP, TALF, AIG, GM & Chrysler....
I like this topic because it's a stretch for geeks. Most of the challenges a computer geek thinks about every day can be solved by application of existing, understood principles. Mistakes are almost always logical errors in application.

Socializing is where geeks get into the other kinds of hard thought. Having to work hard to get data. Having a bunch of apparently valid ideas that yield contradictory results. Arriving at valid, logically sufficient ideas, but discovering that they aren't suitable for application in practice. Living, over extended time intervals, with observations and techniques that you empirically know to be valid, but which you can't find satisfying explanations for.

Plus it's universal. We could have similar discussions about painting, music, or gardening, but only a small minority of HN readers could contribute to each of those topics.

(P.S. Difficult engineering problems are discussed here often, but I think people mostly tackle them vicariously. In the real world, solving a hard engineering problem is rarely the most efficient way to deal with it. It's kind of a last resort.)
While this is probably illegal, Twitter clearly does need people to help them fix their system. The last two years worth of my tweets got deleted yesterday for no reason. That's an outright embarrassment to them, and it makes me angry as well.
I'm sorry but I don't understand the rationale behind that statement and I wouldn't voice my oppinion if it wasn't you've been upmodded so much. So I'm curious, if you do not partake how can you possibly succeed?

While I do understand why you'd be reluctant to partake in them, it's not like they hold no value whatsoever or there being an inherent loss in partaking.

Although I do prefer civilized discussions.
You are a minor player. Not being harsh, but it's just a job for you. Don't worry about the corporate details, if you believe in the vision. If the company is successful, you will be too. But make sure that as the company grows, you grow (career wise) too. You might get rich some day from it.
if lookups are essentially free, this has the potential to heavily cut down on the amount of data you need to store

Assuming that the size of unique_library_size # is smaller than library_size. That's unlikely to be true for this example, but I get what you're driving at. However, column stores basically do this already: for example, you might store the library_size column ordered by size, and then compress it using either RLE or differential encoding (data item i is stored as a delta against data item i-1).
A Documentary on Parkour [video]
This comment section is really going to end up with a lot of bickering and very little progress made...

I will note that Dawkins has certainly succeeded in producing his own "virus of the mind" cult of religion-fearing individuals primarily fed by his vitriolic and scathing intellectual attacks against religion.

For every few Bible-believing Christians you find an atheist pseudo-intellectual clutching his hardbound copy of "The God Delusion". So much for free thinking there.
This could actually be better in some cases, because he can dress his deferred salary (which can be whatever he wants it to be with no contest, since it will never be paid) as an actual salary.
Historic Blockbuster Store
This is a self-absorbed inflammatory post from someone who is clearly going through a difficult experience. I don't think he's a troll (though the account was created 2 hours ago), but I also doubt there's anything you can say to him in this thread to change his feelings.
The same exact argument as the OP holds for CSS... When is playing a DVD considered illegal? What if I just put it into an unlicensed player? What if the decryption algorithm is so simple a 14 year old can crack it? What if the algorithm has been cracked for 14 years?

DCMA says that breaking ANY encryption even if the encryption says take my data, treat it as binary and invert all the digits, and the first line contains those instructions, it is illegal to break the encryption because of DCMA.

So yea if its a 1 digit password its illegal to guess it.
W3C web site redesign in beta – send in your feedback
Preoccupation with IQ is not for losers. But we also live in a world where computers augment our cognitive abilities. And so any measure of intelligence should probably be a combined measure of brain + computer.
Not directly, but the same family:
http://www.bananabook.org/discovolonte/2008/03/what-does-kei...

Banana Cavendish = 6th Duke of Devonshire

Gravity Cavendish = Grandson of 2nd Duke of Devonshire

I am strangely intrigued by a whole book devoted to the banana.
By being the sole center of learning and scholarship in the European Dark Ages, by giving birth to the modern university, and by inventing musical notation?

Yes, I am aware of the bad things too. Reality has nuance.

Edit: Now that I think about it, you are certainly right that the Catholic church has done more gross harm than Scientology, if only because it is much bigger and has been around for more than twenty times as long. However, I am not sure how the net harm stacks up, due to its central role in the founding of Western civilization, and other mitigating facts.
When I interviewed, I said my startup was basically a great experience, I absolutely hoped to give it a go again in the future, but right now all ideas I had led through Google. That seemed to work for them, and it was basically the truth. No need to lie or misrepresent.

You definitely don't want to give the impression that you're just applying to pick up some quick cash before trying your next startup. But there's a lot of middle ground between that and "I never want to be an entrepreneur again, and will happily be your corporate bitch forever."
I wonder if there is an (inexpensive) service where people would be given free reign on a dev site? If not, I imagine one could be made kind of like rent-a-coder: every time a user found an exploit, the site owner would give them karma for credibility and a commission fee.
I disagree, because I've put 7 months of opportunity cost on the line, which is about $60k, so I definitely feel entitled to the trappings of founderdom. I'd almost certainly leave if I found out that a post-money marketing guy got more equity than I did.
She's probably doing what she wants to do. What's the problem?
This is probably the best advice here. Companies hate hiring -- it's a pain in the ass to find qualified people, not to mention a ton of paperwork, and the time required to get 'the new guy' up to speed. So, if Company X thinks you're just going to jump ship and do another startup after six months, there isn't any way in hell they're hire you.

So, the top-poster should ask himself what he wants: Does he want a few years of nine-to-five, or to be starting a company again in a few months?

If the answer is the former, then he needs to do exactly as vaksel said. Play up the aspects of startup life that will appeal to Company X: hard work, thinking on your feet, people skills, having to come up to speed quickly. Play down anything that makes it sound like you want to leave in less than a few years. Talk about how the uncertainty of income was nerve-wracking, how hard it was to always be on your own, how much you found you missed having co-workers, etc.

If you do want to leave in six months, don't lie to a recruiter -- look for contract jobs. You'll make more money in a shorter period of time, build up a bigger network, and avoid burning bridges.
I would hope they do backups. With such a small team restoring the data wouldn't be quick especially since it is Easter weekend.
Sometimes the conversation is loud because the music is. This is a cultural thing and in California I find music much more quiet than in Europe. Depending where you are you won't be able to avoid a loud conversation.
You're implying that a noisy conversation is the only option and that I might be missing out? That there is no loss to sitting in a room full of people shouting at cross purposes and not being able to make myself heard without major effort? Of course there's an inherent loss: frustration, vocal strain, not having the situation go the way I want, you name it.

But what I more meant was that I construct situations where these cross-purposes conversations aren't present. If I've got six people to discuss a project with, I don't sit in a room and get them all to shout over me. There are other ways to have that discussion.

I probably should have mentioned in my original reply that I'm from the UK, which helps.
Here's something to balance this story out: one of the reasons I got my current job is because I founded a(n ultimately failed) startup.
"It's simple. Just change the gravitational constant of the universe."
Heh. Observant :)

Simplyhappynews is actually an experiment for my full scale startup, Broadersheet. I'll write a blog post discussing news misinformation and how we can overcome it.
While your statement is true long term, short term there's still lots of pain from adjustment.
I may be a bit dim here, but if you are doing the URL redirection your self, because you don't what someone else hijacking your content, and long URL's are not usable, then why not just create short URLs to begin with.

You wouldn't need any thing special, and people wouldn't need to shorten your url.
I love this stuff.

A few months ago I wrote a multifocal composer in python - like HDR combines images with different exposures, this combined images with different focuses. Turned out to be easier than expected (and there are much better toolkits out there.)

The plenoptic cameras are going to change this field once someone figures out how to make them.
Twitter bookmarklet shows the background of any profile
Would it be possible to cut grooves in roads in such a way that the sound of traffic is cancelled?
What exactly do the other founders stand to gain by giving you even more equity now?

If you thought the original deal was unfair, you shouldn't have signed.
Maybe if you're applying to State Farm. Why on earth would you want to work for them? Find another young start up, brush yourself off, and try again. You only fail when you quit.
Hadn't he put a message up yesterday saying he wasn't responsible?
Sorry it didn't work out for you. I'm one of the people who's been cheerleading the "Even if you fail, it looks good on a resume" approach.

Whenever you listen to any advice, you need to view it through the filter of Buchheit's Law: "Limited life experience + overgeneralization = advice". Lots of people post about their experiences here, but nobody's experience will completely fit with your own circumstances. So you've got to examine why it worked for them and determine if those same conditions apply to you. In my case, I was applying for a job at Google in Silicon Valley, not a big company in the UK. I had previous successful programming projects, though unfortunately nothing lucrative. And I had sharp basic CS skills and did well in the interview. I'm not sure how many of these apply to your own situation.

If they don't, you have two options:

1.) Make your situation look more like the people whose advice you've been reading.

2.) Seek out advice from people closer to your own situation.

It's really valuable that you've posted your own experience for others to learn from, but there's always a danger in generalizing too much.
+1 ... Ok fine I work there, but I use it too!
The paper says "For each workload, we also calculated
the break-even capacity/dollar at which the best [SSD cache]
solution would equal the cost of a disk-based solution." Their results tell you exactly how cheap SSDs need to get before they're worth using. Given that SSDs have improved 5x-10x on several metrics since this paper, they are already suitable for some workloads.

Also, the paper finds that for many of their workloads performance effectively does not matter so SSDs will only be cheaper if they are cheaper per GB than disks, which will probably never happen. They're not saying that SSDs are too expensive; they're saying that SSDs will always be too expensive. It's not clear to me that this conclusion is correct, but it is interesting.
Why wouldn't he be serious? As more and more people spew forth garbage onto the Internet, we just end up wasting more and more of each others' time. For god sakes, look at Twitter! Maybe there's some useful information in there sometimes, but for the most part it is pure noise -- and look how it's taking off! It's as if people would rather waste time both creating and consuming fluff than to spend the time to create and consume content that is actually worth something.