skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issues addressed in the table of contents appeal to me; but I expect you're right, that there would only be cohesiveness within each section, not between them.

BTW: I've heard good things about Objective-C. Any idea why it was not successful outside Apple? Was it because of Apple's proprietary approach?
I think you're too self-effacing. The problem is certainly not you.

I dropped out of school in 10th grade, and consider it the best decision I ever made. If you are going to do it, it's a decision you want to execute very carefully to avoid major confrontations with the people who still have a lot of power over you and think they're acting in your own good.

You might also consider Sudbury-style schools, where you would be completely free to spend your day however you like (I went to one after dropping out of high school, and now work at one).
A Better Browser
A time has come for you to choose A Better Browser. For Security. For Compatibility. For Humanity.
I remember making bacteria glow in the dark in high school biology.

I would be scared to death of tweaking my own genome. The prospects seem fascinating and attractive (I could make my hand glow in the dark or something) but what if I screw up? It's not like you restore from a backup.
Not only that, but when the issue was brought into the spotlight, the "leaders" of the Rails community dismissed as "edgy". Some have even applauded it. This is a major reason for Mike leaving.
Just because the person didn't know enough about the domain to use the correct terminology is no reason to belittle them by thinking they "want to do something stupid," though (and yes, that's why they're angry); half of software engineering is figuring out what the heck people mean with their requirements, and the usual best first assumption, no matter who your client/student is, is that they want to do something cool :)

I like to give anyone who asks me to teach them "to make games" or anything similar this test first, though: I take a pen and put it down on a page of paper, and tell them to tell me to draw a happy face on it, without expecting me to know what a happy face, or even a circle, is. I take everything they say literally, and tell them "this is how the computer would react to that." Clears up any misconceptions pretty quickly. :)
And no Scheme (Guy Steel is perhaps the broadest language designer there is).

It's perhaps to do with who had time/was willing to have a conversation.
What? You say you’ve never had a day of genetic engineering lessons? You don’t remember anything from high school biology? Well luckily for you,joining the DIYbio community is as simple as going to DIYbio.org and reading the forums.

So now I can become a bio script kiddie?

I don't see the point of following some instructions and congratulating myself on the results. Should I feel cool by association with the practicing biologists who figure out the principles, design the gear, and write up the instructions? What's the point unless you understand what you're doing and create something novel, with unique value?

There are plenty of hobbies where you don't have to be accomplished or original to give pleasure to yourself and your friends. Cooking and baking, for example. I can't imagine spending my time on DIY biology unless I decide to go hard-core into the subject.
One of the most-disliked kids at my school was the football captain, a Republican football player who wouldn't stop talking about politics or sports. I was in a class with him and with a completely insane dweeby kid who tried to add a word of Japanese into every sentence he spoke, and that second kid was completely ignored. We all made fun of the captain, because despite being football captain, he was just an absolute boring jerk. Similar targets in classes included pretty much all the sorts of people you just named. Even in really pretentious groups, like groups of actors, the one who nitpicked clothing was the one nobody else liked.
Grady's a smart guy but UML has been an utter failure.

Here's a good summary as to why: http://littletutorials.com/2008/05/15/13-reasons-for-umls-de...
All I know about this is what I learned from Giles Bowkett:

http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-...

who sounds dead-on correct to me:

I put huge slides with four-letter words on the screen when I give presentations, but it never makes anybody feel uncomfortable. But that’s because there’s an art to these things, and I know every time I do it that I might go too far and have to eat my pride and apologize. You did it wrong. The fact that anybody blogged about it means you did it wrong. So you have to just accept that and be a man about it instead of arguing with her. If a woman tells you that putting giant sexually suggestive images in front of her made her uncomfortable, you don’t get to bicker about that.

It's not so much that the Rails community has a particularly unusual problem with women. It's that, when one tone-deaf guy lights a match at a Rails conference, apparently nobody knows how to put out the fire before it burns down the community. It's a shame.
hopeless... you are right... but "Hacking a little code in 1 week" makes such a lame headline! :-) I am going to try to make it as much of a polished application as possible and after the launch start the long journey of marketing it!

JeremyChase... if you have some free time build something! :-) Part of the goal with what I am doing is to demonstrate what can be done in a week and discuss that at BarcampBirmingham this Saturday.
This is great... and it's gong to get regulated out of existence any day now. That's sad, but I just can't imagine the powers that be being cool about this.
It makes more sense to put an exact duplicate of your server platform (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris) in a VM on the Mac and develop on the machine headless. Same applies to developing on Linux.
Wait, we saw this yesterday:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582132
1st International Competition on Plagiarism Detection
Anything safe and useful will be available commercially. You might have to take an international flight, but that's a small price to pay to have it done by somebody who knows what he's doing and has done it before.
I would love tweaking with some stuff, but I guess it would be an extension of my current hobby of growing tropical plants. Making mango's purple, or kiwis caffeinated...

I would put some serious time into a hobby like that if the resources were available.
Well I've thought of Python that way for a while too, before I saw anybody else say it, but I meant it in a good way. It's like BASIC but actually useful.
"Being able to effectively interact with other people is an extremely important skill in life..."

Absolutely. High school is a great time to learn to get along with, and like, all sorts of people. You have your whole life to study and learn. But knowing how to get along with people is more important than any other skill you can learn.

Beware developing an "I'm smarter than everyone around me" attitude like most geeks have. It limits us, both in success and in happiness.
Studying Insects One by One
I voted up your comment but the problem with dishing out that kind of advice to a teenager is that there is still a lot of living to do before you realize what it is that will make you happiest.
Ditto. I used to be a member of a guitar forum where religion was banned from discussion. All well and good, but I left in the end because whilst it wasn't discussed, I couldn't stand to read endless lyrics about the wonder of god, and every other piece of advice being to "join in with your local church band". You can, apparently, smother a whole lot of guitar discussion with just a smattering of religion, and all without any actual discussion. In the end, I wasn't comfortable there due to something that was nothing at all to do with guitars.

I can ignore religion when I want to, and I can destroy an illogical belief system with the best of 'em, but, I'm much more likely to just find somewhere with less barriers to the subject at hand. It was unprofessional of them to disallow discussion of religion with wishy-washy rules, and it's unprofessional to plaster coding in porn, soft or otherwise.
Bingo.

I think it's widely unappreciated (even in China) that China's entire educational system is only thirty years old. During Mao's rule, all the schools were shut down while teachers and intellectuals were denounced, sent to labor camps, imprisoned, and killed. When they started up again in 1978, they were effectively starting from nothing.

It's frakkin' hard to bootstrap an educational system, especially for over a billion people. It takes educated people to produce educated people, and there just aren't enough educated teachers to go around. The situation is slowly getting better, but it's certainly not improving fast enough to stamp out millions of high quality graduates.

The problem is compounded by Chinese pedagogy, which has a "Moses down from the mountain" flavor to it. If your teacher gives you bad or incomplete information, then you're stuck with that. Both critical thinking and autodidactic learning are almost entirely unknown.

The Chinese government should be given credit for recognizing the importance of education, but I think this time their reach has really exceeded their grasp. China is going to have to scale back its expectations, and that process will be shockingly painful.
I've been working on a "side-project-hopefully-a-business-too" now for 8 months and I was seriously getting bogged down in it. I decided this past Friday to put everything else aside and take a week to do something new. I decided to make a bare minimum version of the same product with a completely different brand.

I'm still in the thick of it, but the biggest payout is how refreshing the experience has been. I could end up without a viable product at the end of it, but at least I've renewed my vigor and passion for the idea. That alone has made it invaluable.
But that's the best bit!

I love using Command-C to cut and paste throughout the OS including the terminal, rather than having to switch to Control-Shift-C for certain things as you do under Gnome, where forgetting means canceling something.
> You know that you're the reason I wrote this article, right? This is exactly the attitude that made me freeze my main account away. People who take things that other people say and extend them to drastic proportions just so they can be dicks about it.

Look man, you said you had a solution to the problem. What I said is hardly a leap. You have a funny definition of "drastic proportions".

> But no, you won't address the ideas I put forth. You'll nitpick. You'll be an absolute snot just so that you can gain the upper hand in an argument. And so you might reach a point where I and people like me get tired of your bullshit and walk away, and then you'll declare yourself the victor because you were the last person to make a post in my comment thread, but all you're doing is making the person on the other side want to punch yourself in the face...

You're descending into ad hominem territory here. Please don't.

I didn't address your solution because I don't think there is one, and I don't see value in arguing about it. Perhaps I misunderstand the problem you're trying to solve.

> They're interconnected.

I never said they weren't - I limited my discussion to the assigning of blame, which I took to be your primary subject as well. But now, it seems to me that you are not separating the issues of "cause" and "blame" the same way I am.

To be clear, of course the victims are part of the cause of any particular confrontation. It couldn't happen if they weren't there, so there's at least that. What I object to is assigning _blame_ to them. Causes for these things are shared - blame is given to one side or the other for their own actions.

Your commentaries on battered wives and rape focus on what happens _after_ the incident. I am asking about the incident itself. The blame for the raping and the beating lies solely with the aggressors.

> Is McDonald's to blame for making people fat? Partly.

No. McDonald's is to blame for making fatty food. There's a difference.
Tools & Practices for Remote Collaboration
Swine Flu - Can Dogs Catch It? | Dog Stories | WayCoolDogs.com
it's worth pointing out that all of the protocols i've found on this site after a brief search are essentially late middle school/early high school science fair projects. i'm not a computer person but i assume that this is not what you would call 'hacking.'
I tend to like it. So you'd better do an A/B-test before committing either way.
They are allowing vendors of commercial plagiarism detection software participate -- I'll be interested to see if any of them do.
The cash prize isn't enough to make them go for it (500 euros) but the good publicity might. I know if I were a school, I'd be more inclined to buy from a company that won this competition.
I wouldn't mess with your own body. Use your saliva to play with your genes OUTSIDE of your body, but don't go inject stuff into yourself.

A real life doctor Frankenstein character died after drinking indigo in attempt to achieve immortality.
Highschool is a mechanism to socialize you and a filter for colleges.

That's what they kept telling me. I don't believe it. I for one acquired little social skills in high school and orders of magnitude more since I started working.

I think people just can't bring themselves to admit that high school is a net loss. It is not easy to admit you've wasted many years of your life. At the same time, most intellectually honest people can't really say it with straight face any more that high school has anything to do with education. So they cling to secondary made up reasons like the one about social skills.
I'd say it is a necessary read for anyone who is interested in advancing their career either within an organization or independently. The advice offered in the book isn't difficult to implement, it is essentially common sense and manners. I've read the book about a half dozen times and with each read I gain a little more insight into how to conduct myself professionally.
A Community of Rockstars: comparing Rails and Apache communities.
I can't directly relate -- I was homeschooled from grade 1 up, started college classes (at community college) at 15, transferred at 17 and finished my bachelor's at 19.

But as far as I recall, once I started doing College classes, I didn't really do any more 'high school' classwork. I took the GED to be eligible for financial aid, but I believe I still took the year-end test for 12th grade, so I 'officially' finished as well..

I doubt I was as knowledgeable as you, though, if you're already reading hacker news. I didn't know it was 'really' possible to have a startup, though I did web sites for people.

Point being, you don't necessarily have to choose between two more years of boredom and not having a HS diploma. You can pretty much take the GED and start college, and I really doubt that would work against you.

Community college might feel like more of the same for you, but at least you can structure your classes to have more time to work.
You can take it one step further and add the area codes to your database.

So I can choose to call munich from US, and it'll autofill the area code and the country code.
I agree, it's much preferable than to tabbing to it (since most sites don't use tabindexes).
With science fair level tools today you can splice some foreign genes into e.coli
Just put up a some simple text: "If you'd like to help translate this site into your language, please feel free to drop me a line at [email]. Thank you!"
teej... I've had a very similar experience... I spent 6 months working on a new product, but allowed it to get too complex and the project lagged. I am going to revisit it this year, start with a very simple feature set, and MAKE SURE TO RELEASE A PRODUCT!! :-) All the best man... I'll look forward to seeing your work!
As far as I can tell (as an amateur mac developer), the major advantage Objective-C has on the mac over other platforms is the extensive support that Cocoa [1], Apple's giant grouping of APIs/Frameworks/etc, lends. It's so helpful, in fact, that many Mac developers refer to programming in Objective-C as "Cocoa Programming" (also, it's the title of the best programming book I've ever read [2]).

[1]http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/

[2]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321503619
> I find that the people I know who have succeeded are the people who don't doubt for an instant that people want them to succeed

This is not the same as "Everyone who attempts to climb the social ladder succeeds", what you are saying here is more like "Everyone who succeeds at climbing the social ladder attempts it". The latter is true, the former is what I objected to. You are ignoring the people who attempted and failed.
While I can't access the page, the two concepts of Linux and Flex are culturally incompatible - one is a DIY barebones culture, while the other is already built.

You might want to try FlashDevelop with the Visual Design plugin or code Flash with the Flex SDK... in VI.
A different way to think of it is that you're reading someone else's source code in order to learn from it. Just because that's where you start, doesn't mean you can progress beyond that point.
I'm interested in a study which looked for correlations between having a tangible role model in science/engineering during childhood and later joining the field.
You don't seem to have a lot of content actually on the site. My suggestion would be to build a phrase table for country names, and set a cookie after the user has entered their home country for use later on.
Facebook.com: Future Ghost Town?
start doing drugs... really - it's a good time for it.
I am very close to agreeing with your first paragraph. Yeah, in those situations, you're to blame for being an asshole or rejecting people. But if they respond by beating you over it, the blame for _that_ falls on them.

In any case, I think what I wrote in the other thread about how I'm separating the concepts of "cause" and "blame" should clear this up.
But I think that the three examples you mention have very little competition ( or competition that has major problems) for OS X users.
Wow, and some people think the "social skills for nerds" links are off-topic for HN. Clearly many people in computing are ruled by their adolescent impulse to make people uncomfortable, at great cost to the community. Worse, they congratulate themselves for it. For the general good, here's the Cliff's notes for making people uncomfortable:

1. Gratuitous transgression is easy.

2. Necessary transgression is art -- intrinsically critical and enlightening. It's hard to pull off.

3. Compulsive transgression with no regard to the difference between #1 and #2 is juvenile.
I recommend taking a look at a book called The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. (http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-School-Edu...)

The assumption of school is that you don't want to learn and so you need to be forced to. For all I know this may in fact be true for most kids, and so school is necessary for them. However if you are self-motivated to learn then school is massively inefficient.

There is no need for you to waste the next two years. You can, if you wish, undertake a self-learning program (home school yourself). While it is true that there are things that will get by staying in school, it does not mean that you cannot also get these things outside of school, especially with a little planning. You will still get into a good college, have friends, develop your social skills, keep your future options open, and so on. The book I mentioned explains how.
Why do teenagers think they have it all figured out? I certainly did, and I was certainly wrong.

Don't think of the monotony. Think of the things that differ from day to day. You find something that interests you that isn't related to monotony and you focus on that. For me, it was girls; not to get laid, but to practice my game before I went to college. If you focus on the monotony you're going to kill yourself.

Life is full people doing things they don't want to do. Everyone does lots of things they don't want to do. Even the best job has many bits of work that no one wants to do. That guy in school who is always happy and who makes everyone laugh all the time - that guy does tons of shit he doesn't want to do. That guy at work who always seems happy and comes up with good ideas on how to make things better, that guy does a ton of shit he doesn't want to do also.

To a degree, it's how you deal with those things you don't want to do that define your happiness. Do you complain? Do you work REALLY hard to try to get out of doing it? Or do you maybe accept those things as learning experiences, and find ways to get the things you don't want to do done more efficiently and more quickly?

Be a man. Finish school. Find a career that gives you happiness, do the shitty parts, and find things to be happy about, work related or not. Or, be a whiny kid who constantly complains about how everything sucks.
But then why bother having the poll in the first place? If you're just going prune the results so that they look like what you expect, you aren't really polling. You already know the answer, and you're going to throw out data until you get it.
I've recently started taking the exact same constraint approach. I find it helps to give me a much more concise mental model of the problem I'm trying to solve. I guess this is because of the declarative nature of the constraints, and the fact that aren't trying to keep all the implementation details in your head. Instead you just ensure that whiles you are programming, you respect the constraints at all times. I find it particularly useful when the problem requires maintaining lots of different data structures that interact with each other.
Like it, bookmarked it. You could try and make it simpler (be careful....) but it does exactly what it's supposed to really well. I like the combobox usage as opposed to a dropdown.
NYC College Student/Hacker Seeking Summer Internship @ Startup
I am a passionate Computer Science student at the University of Michigan (living in New York for the summer). Familiar with Python, Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP, SQL, XHTML, and CSS. I have many more qualifications and would be happy to send over a resume. If it means anything, I read Hacker News religiously.

If this at all interests you, please shoot me an email at ycjobseeker@gmail.com. I'm not interested in unpaid positions. With that said, I'm not asking for much. Just need money to pay for food and beer while in school.

Thanks
Investigative Strike Teams
Programming is hardly the most important activity in life.
Kind of an interesting point to ponder over, is it fair to use 'startup' and 'webapp' synonymously-especially if there are signs of monetizing the system?