skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Top Ruby blogs by engagement
Hey all, we've launched a big update to postrank.com, looking for feedback! The big new feature is ranking blogs by engagement (week over week). A couple of examples:

My Ruby reading list: http://postrank.com/user/igrigorik/topic/ruby

Rails: http://postrank.com/user/igrigorik/topic/rails

Anyone can create list, or just search for global topics. Feedback and ideas much appreciated. ;)
I was in Dubai a couple years ago and could not figure out how it could possibly be growing the way it was. They really do a good job of putting on a face to the world. I was working with a British expat who lives there, and he couldn't stop gushing about how great it was, to the point that I thought it might be an interesting "life opportunity."

I'm really glad I didn't take that opportunity. I remember seeing the buses with the blue-coverall-ed construction workers. This article put that trip in another light, that's for sure!
Having gone from working in higher ed to my own startup, I've always been a proponent of people waiting to go to college or doing other things. I just realize that for a lot of folks, it's just not very good advice and they can increase the likelihood of success, if they go to school for one reason or another.
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There's a kernel of truth here expressed as an extreme.

As I've gotten better at programming, I've changed how I use the debugger.

I used to set a break point and dive right in.

Now I stop and think a lot, then I might even modify the code a bit, make it fail better.

Make it fail in a more descriptive way.
Then I do a bit of debugging, then go back to thinking and perhaps modifying the code a bit more, repeat.
Reinventing the conference call
I recommend using bsdiff instead. :-)
->"Enlightened hiring managers just want to see output"

From my experience "enlightened hiring managers" are the exception rather than the rule.
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I agree. That is a bug, it's because your domain name is invalid. It should have told you that.
In the US, a job doesn't offer much stability;

The jobs obsessive parents push their kids into are usually quite stable. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc. Even software is relatively stable if you're good and you're working at a Microsoft or Google.
Does anyone remember the South Park episode about the Segway (called It at the time) that Mr. Garrison built that came out just after 9/11/2001? The one that used oral, manual, and anal controls?

This vehicle looks an awful lot like the one in that show :-)
Thanks. Will read the documentation. I'm interested in requiring a user's micropayment prior to viewing each piece of content.
The page is character encoded in ISO-8859-1, but the web server is reporting it as UTF-8. (Probably because the web page was written before Unicode became a common concern of webmasters, it dates back to 1999.)

In Firefox, select View->Character Encoding->Western (ISO-8859-1). In Safari, select View->Text Encoding->Western European.

(FYI, this shows up this way on Windows systems too. It's not MacRoman or Windows-1252 to blame this time.)

EDIT: Dang, took too long to write this message to be technically accurate; several others posted before I did. People who complain about spelling errors and minor inaccuracies in web posts should be shot...
Ruby developers ignore security risks, claim X-JSON header 'nothing serious'
Wow. How do you save anything when working for minimum wage in the USA? In Boston, which is a pretty expensive city?

I don't know the specifics of your situtation, but it seems to me that most "self-made" people had a lot of educational and social capital built up already. They might have taken a year or two voluntarily outside the system, but it was only because, previously their parents were themselves well educated and made enough money to send their kids to good schools and nurture their interests and talents. So while the child may be exceptional and hard-working, and legitimately earned success, it's usually not quite accurate to say there was no support.

Again, I'm not saying this is you, but I see it a lot. I know of maybe one person who overcame a true working class background where their parents actually discouraged them from even going into computers. Everyone else I know in this game is middle class, even upper middle class.

I'm also interested in how much milieu seems to affect outcomes. People who just grew up around independent professionals or entrepreneurs have no trouble visualizing themselves doing that, and they know all the social cues.
it didn't really answer the question 'When to Get Married' in a concrete manner. i wish we had a way to rate these articles from 1 star to 5 stars next to the title like for yahoo movies.
Self-enforcing. They're going to bat for you with early customers, later rounds of funding, etc. and if you don't display integrity you lose their connections and then some, I imagine.

edit: Oh, whoops! Not simply self-enforcing, as the other reply indicates. Still, I think it would be.
Is there any reason why one would prefer this over a bicycle? The articles stipulates that this is a big leg up from bicycle, although it doesn't provide any support for that claim. I personally don't see how this is any improvement over a bicycle, except possibly for those with disabilities.
It is interesting because it is easy to understand the problem quickly -- we've all seen maps. Additionally, for graph theory, the solution is pretty accessible.

I took just an introductory course in graph theory so I only got to see this famous problem and a few others. I would think that this crowd would find a list of other famous problems from your field quite interesting.
is there any firefox plugin that "unshortens" these urls on hover?
Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund - Paul Graham - July 2008

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

"#3: New news. As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they've been slow to adapt to the web. It's more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives. "
Good job on releasing it so quickly.
I really like your product (and model) because it scales so beautifully from the word go. As you said, from the moment you launch you'll be making money (in theory) - want more revenue? pour more resource in that side of operations.
So... how long until it gets hacked?
Simplicity delimited
I'll give a pony (and my girlfriends logo making skills) to anyone that makes a url shortener from scratch in Arc.
you need the bad coders ... to write these libraries.

Great egalitarian point: it's not just karma, but that everyone has a unique point of view, with something to offer. Rejecting some segments of the population as inferior seems destined to fail, similar to (excuse my Godwin) rejecting people like Oppenheimer.

And when you "just want to get things done", aren't we all "bad coders"?
I agree. Also, most browsers now have a search bar in house. in my experience, many people use the search features more often than the address features, even if they are going directly to the main page of a web site.

It's just easier to remember the name of a site than it's literal/direct address. Even if they are one and the same 90% of the time, it turns out to be faster using google.
This was discussed in this thread, but this tends to be more of a trait of immigrant parents rather than Asian parents. I grew up in places like New York and California which was full of first-generation immigrants (mostly Asian and Middle Eastern) who had come to the U.S. to kick ass and take names academically and they were the hardest on their kids. However, if you meet second-, third-, or fourth-generation Asian-Americans in places like Hawaii or the Japanese or Cantonese-speaking parts of the Bay Area, they tend to fit the profile you describe.
Always wondered - what value is this database? short of editing the /etc/hosts or browser plugin to redirect from $nowDeadURL/dh36 to $newURL/dh36.

Do people have urls so valuable locked in a tiny url service that'll be lost forever if the service dies? serious question.
Someone that made a lot of money once... may be savvy. Someone who has repeatedly made money on different ventures... very likely savvy.

There are a lot of people that hit the tech lotto because of being in the right place at the right time (e.g., google employee #20). There are many fewer that have hit after hit.

My experience (direct and indirect) says that someone that is business savvy will likely leave you feeling fucked over. To be successful in business you often have to push the boundaries of what is legal and acceptable to most people.
Teaching is stable, but doctors and lawyers only have stability through their credentials. Clinics fail; firms contract; hospitals eliminate positions. I don't know about the past, but these days law firms are quick to expand to take advantage of new demand and new markets. Surely sometimes they make mistakes. Microsoft and Google seem stable now, but who can predict the future? Plenty of "stable" companies have laid people off, closed research labs, and sold unprofitable pieces to new owners that had no intention of keeping them running.
Out of curiosity, have you checked out Pharo? It just seems nuts to me to agree to give away such a huge percentage of revenue just for your development stack.
whats stopping someone from using a different title?
And it only says that 80% completed college. It doesn't say how many of the 20% started their college education. Many internet billionaires met in college and dropped out because they had a great idea (of course, most of the other drop outs probably didn't succeed, but that's another story).
In those kinds of people it's not a la carte--you don't just get "resiliency, dedication, and tenacity" and not get "intense, willful, and independent." They go together.

Unless companies start genetically breeding perfect employees ...
A problem with using the original domain as a subdomain might be that for people not familiar with your service, these URLs look more like a phishing scam than a shortened URL, quite the opposite of the intended effect ("transparency"): Would you like to go to "http://paypal.twi.bz/c"?
I'm not sure that's true. Microsoft and Amazon, for instance, did pretty well in Seattle. And Pittsburg does have CMU, whose CS program comes in right after MIT, Stanford and Berkeley's. It was probably easier for Google in the Valley. How much easier is hard to say.
What is the Importance of Being Physically Fit
OK, so the guy at the beginning of the article knows that he will go to jail if he doesn't pay his debts. Then he alerts the government that he is in debt, and gets arrested. WTF? Why did he not leave the country before the government was notified that he was in debt? If he is a UK citizen, I doubt he would be extradited for that. Even if he was, I think it would be easier to fight the extradition in a UK court than it would have been to pay off the debt in Dubai.

Am I missing something?
Honestly it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I worked at Urban Outfitters for $5.15/hour. I started off sleeping on a friend's couch until I could save up enough to get an apartment. I shared a rough but clean apartment in Oak Square in Brighton with two other guys. It was on a bus line, and I could also bike to work if it wasn't snowy. We paid $300/month each. At my income level I didn't pay any real taxes, so I brought home ~$900/month. Spent $300 on rent, spent about $100 on food, maybe $50 on utilities/laundry, leaving $450 each month for savings. At this point that sounds like nothing, but then I didn't have any real expenses and it adds up month after month.

While I certainly benefited from having good parents, I didn't have the direct financial support the OP referred to. My point being that you can financially bootstrap yourself without rich parents and without looking at college as "free" rent and food.

I agree with you about the support of parents, focus on education, access to computers, visibility to successful people, etc... means a lot. However very little if any of that can fixed by tinkering with higher educational institutions. It's cultural, and it's economic.

While I'd love to see everyone given the same opportunities, support, etc... it's confusing because we can't have everyone working in nice offices making $100k+/year. People still need to work at McDonalds, drive street sweepers, pick up trash, and all the other key roles in our society. Is it "fair" that upper middle class kids have a better chance of being upper middle class themselves? No. Is there a good way to fix that? Not that I know of.
If you use it for a for-profit program you have to give the company a % of sales. I would rather suffer through Objective-C.
Yeah - the point isn't so much the ease of farming, rather it's necessity in order to increase the 'people / acre ' and the inherent interdependence of people as a result. we've been moving towards socialism since birth.
"Some of the most common professions among the parents of American billionaires (for whom we could find the information) were engineer, accountant and small-business owner."

It seems to me that most of them had a safety net - their parents.
100% of billionaires are outliers. Try not to extract patterns hoping for repeatable success.
I wonder how many news related startups applied.
You're rigth, I guess if you apply what PG have said about hackers to business people you have it.
This article links to another one which lists and describes actual issues with the core language. I don't think that it's quite as bad as you make it out to be.
I don't know the specific Lisp or libraries involved, but reddit (YC funded) famously switched from Lisp to Python, (mainly) due to libraries.

http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html
If TV science was more like real science
Have you tried it compiling for S60?

I checked out their samples. They have a file in the .sisx format which I guess is S60-v3

Could you share any more info about this tool and your experience with it?

P.S: it would have been better if they had a pay-per license model than charging a % of the app's profit. Ridiculous offer for commercial apps.

EDIT: just looked at their licensing.
http://rhomobile.com/products/licensing

wtf? they have 3 licensing models. one for opensource apps, another for free closed-source apps and another for closed-course apps charging money for usage.
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Do you have a blog or something? It sounds like you have some good stories and lessons to share.
I know from personal experience that a journalism degree will get you nowhere fast in the writing world. Some of the top editors screen out candidates by if their degree is anything but a passing mention on their resume, if it's the top thing in your experiences you're rejected.

I got a job at 17 writing reviews, when I left the job (due to the politics of the job) I had more than enough experience to apply for a job for one of the big magazines. What editors are looking for in writers is a great personal voice, which is something journalism classes teach out of you. I have never seen 'journalism degree' listed on any job in journalism, it's simply not wanted.
Open source books worth downloading
Some people (like esr) say the main benefit of lisp is not to use it, but to use the insights it gives into how to think about code. It may be that you already have that.
I'm going to assume the actual statement "Good students are good at everything" is a quote that is, at best, rather out of context. It's patent garbage; I often take classes (and advise others to take classes) in things I know I'm no good at, either to advance from "Useless" to "OK", or just because it's something I enjoy. My art skills are truly awful and I'll never get top marks, but it wouldn't stop my taking an elective, because I'd like to be better and enjoy the area.

People who constantly get top marks in everything are, to me, suspicious. Mostly anyone who's smart can pick a syllabus they'll ace - but will they gain anything from it? Now, if they're getting constantly low marks, or random mark disparities in seemingly related areas, that might be a legitimate concern, but to blanket it as "Good students are good at everything" is just bizarre.
Thanks for answering my sibling comment. So the air does not get trapped.
Maybe worth mentioning again:

* Try using the personal pronoun "I" as much as possible.

This is used in the 7 rules itself
"I... and I... and I..."

* Try to have the difficult conversation 1 on 1 and face-to-face

Avoid situations where there is more at stake for the person you are having the difficult conversation with.
The concept itself is really a great selling point: you develop one mobile app in ruby and it works across on blackberry, iphone, symbian, android etc. Plus they have a sync server to keep data current on the device.

From my experience building a small app on it, it works great if your building an extension to an enterprise/business app. For something like Salesforce where its mostly just a glorified excel table + CRUD, it fits perfectly.

Wikipedia recently switched to it from Objective-C.

If your doing something particularity complicated it might not be the best option - yet. Although, they do have GPS, PIM and camera support that can be accessed via ruby.

The good thing is that its open source so you can hack the source if you know java/ruby.
Aha - that fixed it! Thanks, all of you.
I'm not sure if I can say faster, but I certainly think I'm better.
This reminds of the a study done about hiring practices at Xerox. The conclusion was that none of the founders and first few employees of Xerox, the startup, would even get an interview at Xerox, the big established company.
No, I don't think he has.

A brilliant algorithm isn't tantamount to business success. Plenty of great ideas languish, while lesser ones manage to gain traction.

As important as any idea or innovation is the ability to connect it with the people who can help spread that message.

I'd love it if this weren't true, but I'm afraid it is.
Just because not whole lot of people are using it, does not mean in any way that it's not "cool". There are plenty of "cool" services out there that nobody uses. You've got to start somewhere.
I could not agree with you more.

Look, if you can cut it as a programmer you can cut it is a programmer. Start programming, get involved in some OSS projects, get your name out there!

If you really genuinely want to be a "Computer Software Engineer", spend 4 years networking with other engineers and honing in your programming skills, not taking sociology and micro economics.
Well said. I would guess (and it's only a guess) that people with the drive to become billionaires would find a way regardless of formal education, and that there is no recipe you can follow to reach an outlier level of wealth.
The percentage might be a trade off to small startups considering the complexity of mobile development.

You should evaluate the cost of developing an app on 5 different OS's, using multiple languages and maintaining them for future releases. Versus developing and maintaining one app that builds on each platform.
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I'd agree with this (in spite of arguing against debuggers above). I was referring to my own development. In the case where you're handed someone else's spaghetti code and given the directive "fix this!", the fastest way to get up to speed on how things work is with a step-through debugger.

That said, if you have the time I still think the best solution is to develop unit and functional tests (assuming none exist), and learning the code base that way.
I sometimes wonder if startups and silicon valley culture have been romanticized and hyped to such an extent that the immediate thing that comes to the mind of young hackers is to drop out of college to pursue/start a startup! Dreams are great, and so is working towards them but I don't think one should get carried away by this madness and start buying into and believing this fallacy. A startup is not simply about working on a cool project or some fancy idea that you believe is fancy, it's in essence a business. A solid, successful business takes many hands and years to build. Not each of us is a Gates. A few years finishing college is not going to set you back and will certainly not get in the way of the brilliant entrepreneur.

I'm all for working on your passionate ideas, creating something of value, building a valuable startup -- but come on, let's not erode the basics and ignore the foundation of the building in hopes of getting to the top floor fast.

It is foolish to take a few examples of outliers and think of it as a pattern in general.
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Thank you! I have two blogs, professional and personal (http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/ and http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/blog/), however I haven't really talked too much about my "lessons learned" or experiences yet. Maybe I should.
What you say is true but neither of the two posts above yours stated or implied any causation.
Of course there are ways to fix that. Better education for everyone, and access to upper-middle-class prerogatives like tutoring, clubs, athletics, and unsupervised time with advanced, programmable computers. That's basically the thesis of Gladwell's latest book, that we get mega-successes by providing rich opportunities for young people.

Also, universal and well-funded health insurance is a great way to promote entrepreurial risk-taking. I know so many Americans who are scared to make the leap because they have a member of their family who needs some sort of medical care.

Street sweeping may be an unattractive job for many, which is why it should have a relatively high wage and a good benefits plan.

Actually the fact that you are even suggesting that society needs misery and unhappiness to function... well, this sounds very provocative, but it tells me a lot about your background. It's the sort of thing that is a universal but unstated assumption if you are middle class to elite. The theory is that some, if not most, people are going to have sucky jobs, schools, lives, and opportunities, and this is a good thing, because it motivates people to strive for the "better" jobs. Never mind that this often condemns people to repeat the misfortunes of their parents, no matter how talented they are.

In the USA, people look back on the 50s as some kind of golden era of hard work and conservative values, but that was when there was the least income disparity, the most investment in infrastructure and education (even for adults), and some of the highest tax rates.

Anyway I speak as a guy who went to a fancy private school, but as the token "ethnic" guy whose parents don't go for skiing weekends in foreign countries. So, I've been fortunate enough to see both sides.
But it is absurd to say that it can only be done in the valley. Did Microsoft go to the valley when HP and Apple had a huge presence? No. People came to them.
Interesting. Why did you have to work minimum wage, though? Couldn't you have taken a higher paying job, say as a code monkey?