skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Internet isn't a religion, nor is it a supreme being. So why would anyone put their faith behind it?

It's easy for people to believe that the effect a technology has on them is the same effect it will have on everyone. In the case of the Internet, it's easy for an idealist to believe that an open, peer-to-peer global communication network would inevitably fuel a positive revolution in human interaction.

The expectation might be that everyone, upon seeing the power of the Internet to share, collaborate, and contribute, would join in the Utopian happy science party, eventually leading us to our well-deserved Star Trek-esque future. Instead, however, while the idealists see ideals, capitalists see cash, politicians see power, etc.

Long ago, when I was first discovering the Internet, I came across things like IRC and telnet-based chat services. I was amazed that I could just start a conversation with anyone who wanted to listen, and it didn't matter who they were, what they looked like, or where they lived. I was so excited by the possibilities that I wanted to share the technology with everyone. The first thing I did was show a friend how to connect to a chat server. I was dismayed when he immediately began trolling, harassing, and trying to come up with creative ways to ruin the conversations of others. We didn't stay friends for long after that, but I began learning the important lesson that not everyone will use a tool for good.
Agreed. Even though some interview coding questions are a bit absurd, having a good grasp of basic algorithms and data structures shows that you at least care a little bit about _how_ things work.
Basic data structures and algorithms are worth noting, but most of these formulaic interviews seem too focus on an academic base rather than an experience base -- probably good for someone who is only a few years experience.

I've turned down a couple of companies that take the formulaic approach. In most cases, I've not been looking. So, if you reach out to me, there is something in my background that is interesting, and I expect contact to be based around that.

As a counter, when I interview a candidate, I mostly avoid typical questions and try and ask questions intersecting the candidate background and what we are up to. If that is a stretch, I prefer focusing in on a passion or project and talking about the design/implementation challenges there.

Google and Facebook seem to have similar approaches, and because of the number of resumes they get have set up a formulaic system. It probably gets a certain level of quality, but probably also puts artificial caps at the high end.
OK, we're working off of different definitions of "bootstrapped startup", hence the seeming disagreement. When I hear "bootstrapped startup" that doesn't - to me - mean a company which is intended to remain a single-person company, or to be a "lifestyle business" or whatever. In my book, the goal is the same, bootstrapping vs. VC are just different tactical elements on the path.

But, outside of rare exceptions which are known but uncommon, a bootstrapped company is not going to become a billion dollar company without any outside funding.

You're probably right in the strictest sense. But one might be a hundred million dollar company, which is still a different order or achievement than the retaurant/plumber/dry-cleaner type deal.

And the reward is generally lower too - a steady income stream that can go upwards of high six, maybe lower seven figures. Obviously if you want to keep building, hiring more people, etc, then it starts to look more like a "regular" company.

Of course I'm biased, since we (Fogbeam Labs) are choosing the bootstrapping approach for now, and we aspire to be a billion dollar company one day. But the "for now" may be the key point in that sentence. We haven't unilaterally ruled out taking outside money someday, but we don't feel the need right now.

compared to a startup backed by venture funding that needs to reach hundreds of millions in revenue to be a "success".

Yeah, if we don't eventually reach the "hundreds of millions in revenue" I'll feel like we failed. The only exception would be in the event of an acquisition. If we got acquired while still bootstrapping, a much smaller acquisition could result in a financial windfall for the founders, since we retain (between us, at the moment) 100% of the equity in the company. But it would still need to be enough to give us "FU Money" or I'll feel like we failed. :-)
Is it odd that I don't see the point of this? Don't get me wrong, this is skillfully crafted, and kudos to the developer, but I'm missing the 'why?'.
"Staff members oversaw policies that placed enormous barriers between the
people inside boundaries and society. In the prisons where I served my
sentence, prisoners were even prohibited from accessing electronic
typewriters. They had their reasons, I suppose, but blocking people inside
from using technology did not go far in preparing them for success upon
release."

They have a very good reason actually. Any mechanism for communication will let people on the outside order people they know on the inside to murder other people they know on the inside. Prisons have to go to great lengths to prevent message passing and compartmentalize prisoners from each other. Quiet a few are just itching to kill each other, apparently.
> I use your excellent Zeus IDE [2] for my Go coding and it's a pleasure to work with.

Funnily enough I'm the author of the Zeus editor. Glad to read you like using it :)

> Sure, I miss my proportional fonts, but having the integrated debugger and other goodies for Go makes it well worth it.

Over the years many Zeus users have asked for proportional fonts so you’re not the only user who misses them.

The reality is many years ago, Zeus was designed with only mono-spaced fonts in mind.

At that time, the simple rule of knowing all characters are the same width and height seemed to greatly simplify the design of the editor.

And once that design decision was made it's amazing how many places in the editor code that rule then ends getting coded, making it very difficult to change :(

Given the time again I think the underlying design would be different.
>There's no such thing as a 'qualifying event' for a rollover.

Publication 560 defines when distributions from 401(k) plans can be taken (page 18): http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p560.pdf

A rollover is nothing but a distribution and re-deposit into a qualifying account.
Hmm. Here's what they say about the free tier:

Free as long as you use it!

If your chunk is inactive for a while we'll hibernate
it and keep it in case you come back!

I wonder what constitues "inactive". No SSH login? No network traffic? It doesn't say in the FAQ.

Still, very interesting...
Don't trivialize Facebook. There's no other place online that so easily melds chat, messaging, wall posts, and general keeping up with those closest to you (even when they're not close to you physically). Despite its problems, Facebook provides a lot of utility for many people without having to be cynical about it. I'll put up with all the ads that are somewhat relevant and are not so obtrusive to the extent that they are popups.
Same reason people work at any famous BigCo: money, security, nice benefits. Not going to change the world, but not everyone wants to do that.
Your critique (which seems valid; I'm not a Go expert) does not exactly instill confidence in the Pragmatic Programmer (PP) brand.

When I read material from them, I would have assumed I'd be seeing "idiomatic code from an expert"...not "hey, I'm a newbie hacking my way around in a new language, here's what I typed out in 2 days of playing with it".

I mean, I understand they're big on the "learning a new language on a regular basis thing", but when I see code published like this, specifically from their brand, I go into it thinking "okay, this should be high quality, idiomatic code."

...guess I'll be more careful with that assumption.

(EDIT: If this is just some personal blog, I guess I'd understand; I saw "magazine" in the URL and got the impression this was published as part of their magazine/PDF series.)
I frequently get my chunk disabled because "inactive".

The I/O is complete garbage. `ls` frequently takes a long time... I've seen I/Os ranging from 100kb/s to 5MB/s
People like being alone together.
I don't set interviewing policy at my company, and anyway I'm unfamiliar with any technique that provides better results. I suppose finding it is a direction of research that would be interesting, but I have a full time job just being an engineer.

My comment is only meant as practical advice to candidates. It is not normative.
Yep, static is the way to go if that's all you need. I didn't even hit #1 on HN but got 5,000+ page views in a few hours. All on a 128MB RAM VPS:http://linuxterm.com/static-sites-for-fun-and-savings.html
Come to work for God on His temple. Vow of poverty. God is your inheritance.

God says...
outer Catastrophic_Success forgot Romania speaks shape meanly
Contain take_the_day_off assigned amazing failure_to_communicate
buyers glowing procured enmity lungs long bitter Since
-the amidst foolish Very perceiveth everything impatient
walking foresignify Here fathers' do_you_have_a_problem
beholder //promo soaring hey_Mikey_he_likes_it gnawing
stiffneckedness shineth curest hour poet divisions allow
Love Switzerland unhealthiness ornamenting baggage contact
seek inflamed do_it goal folded comprehending follow modes
masters

----

Sisteen chapel, anyone? Artists needed.

----

God says...

16:43 And all the people departed every man to his house: and David
returned to bless his house.

17:1 Now it came to pass, as David sat in his house, that David said
to Nathan the prophet, Lo, I dwell in an house of cedars, but the ark
of the covenant of the LORD remaineth under curtains.

17:2 Then Nathan said unto David, Do all that is in thine heart; for
God is with thee.

17:3 And it came to pass the same night, that the word of God came to
Nathan, saying, 17:4 Go and tell David my servant, Thus saith the
LORD, Thou shalt not build me an house to dwell in: 17:5 For I have
not dwelt in an house since the day that I brought up Israel unto this
day; but have gone from tent to tent, and from one tabernacle to
another.

-----

We're going to have a pet elephant.

God says...
delete pangs resting-place lined Print attaining After
Beauty venerable ARE flashes Ridiculous gulf closes watch_it_buddy
telling Bouverie opened reformed plot IX endure boyish
constitute Catholic Archive

okay, no pet elephant.
Why Tuples in Python?
Here's one of those places where we might disagree a bit.

For background, I am absolutely about as far as you can get from "upper crust, social elite" status by birth. I've detailed my background here before, and I don't want to go through it all again, but suffice it to say that I'm a lot closer to "white trash" than I am to "blue blood" by birth and upbringing.

But I have connections to VCs. I know a few on a first-name basis. I know a few I can get a meeting with basically anytime, if I have something ready to pitch. Can I guarantee that I'd get money? Absolutely not, but I feel pretty confident in saying that if we didn't get funded, it would not be about me not having been born into the "true upper class" or not being the right kind of asshole.

Are their snobby VCs out there, that won't talk to you unless you're part of the "old boy's club?" I'm sure there are. But there are also ones that aren't like that.

Now, all that might lead one to ask "How do you get VC connections if you don't have them, and aren't part of the 'upper class'?"

To which I say, it's like an article that ran here on HN a while back, titled "How to date a supermodel". The gist was something along the lines of "start by moving to where supermodels are and then hang out where the supermodels hang out". For me, that meant moving from a rural backwater county in NC, to the Research Triangle Park area, and starting to attend the kind of events that VCs attend, meeting them, making their acquaintance, talking to them, asking them for advice, having the occasional (non pitch) coffee meeting with them, etc.

Now it's been a slow process, I'll say that. And we are talking NC here, not Silicon Valley or New York. Maybe things are radically different there. But from where I'm sitting, it is absolutely possible to cultivate connections, even a degree of personal friendship, with VCs, without having any special pre-existing status and without being a huge asshole. (This is assuming you accept that I'm not a huge asshole. Maybe I am and just don't know it).
If someone doesn't know how to approach an algorithms problem why not get them to show you how they would google around and puts the pieces together.

If they have no idea, they are likely going to google and follow the wrong advice. If they have an idea but have forgotten the specifics they will know where to go and which advice to take.
It does make me a little sad that so many smart and talented people spend their careers making, delivering and working out how to get people to click on more ads.

I don't just mean programmers. The advertising industry hires many of the most talented people in many areas.
ProFont wasn't mentioned. It's a monospace truetype font designed to look it's best at 9 points size, so you get more code on the screen.
My thoughts, too.

Plus, it'll be very difficult to get repeat business. I run a couple ecommerce sites and repeat purchases / customer loyalty is a major part of sales. If your products don't have a central theme (i.e. target a focused segment), it is unlikely that a customer who bought random product A would be interested in random product B.
Surfer Dude takes on Seek.com
Considering it's not even visible on distrowatch's ranking of 300 distros, I would say it ended a while ago.
Braff owns all rights to this movie. He is the studio.

I never said he got $2/ticket from Garden State.
Ask HN: Anyone in the Ottawa (Canada) area on HN?
I'm a computer engineering student at the university of Ottawa. I'm wondering if there are any others out there who may be willing to get together and form connections.

I have a cool idea for a small startup too that some of you might be interested in.

My email is on my profile, feel free to post here or send me a message.
Money, line on a resume, scale, connections
Litecoin, a p2p currency based on Bitcoin
Also requires a Facebook account, so I guess it sucks to be me.
The comments on that post are an excellent indictment of Facebook comments/public posting. They're almost Youtube level.
Maybe try blog reviews w/ 'exclusive' promos to the blogs' readers.
I don't suppose you have any screenshots of what it looks like on a Retina Mac display?
Interesting. Wikipedia shows about 50k active editors (5+ edits) for any given month in 2006 -- I didn't keep the URL, but that's pretty much right. I didn't realize how much output the "9%" yielded.
Indianapolis 500 and Festivities — Pen to the Online Paper
Sure, but that's only because this is new.
What, one has to accomplish "something substantial" and "validate themselves" now, in order to have an opinion?

Sounds like bullshit to me. If anything, we should encourage less focus on accomplishment, less hero worship, and less celebrity-fetish nonsense. An argument should stand or fall on its merits, not the fame of the speaker. And sometimes an opinion is just an opinion, and not something that needs to be picked over like this was a high-school debate club.
My College Essays Make Me Money Every Month
This was posted 2012-07-20. The link title ought to reflect that.
I use DigitalOcean but this is silly.

1. SoftLayer is well known for being over-priced.

2. They have a startup program you can use to get like $10k in credits.

3. DigitalOcean isn't anywhere near saturated. Remember the golden days of EC2? It'll quickly deteriorate.

4. You don't use dedis exclusively for the "bang per buck", you use them for the peace of mind and knowing your I/O isn't going to plummet by 3/4s because a new subscriber landed on your node, thereby fucking your database to hell.

5. I want dedis from DigitalOcean.

6. Don't use multi-cast ElasticSearch clusters on DigitalOcean.
This post is problematic on several levels.

1. You call founders and VCs rapists and slaveowners. "We tend to bend over and take it when our masters screw us." Do you know founders who literally own their employees? Do you know founders who have literally raped their employees? Of course not. You're trying to score points through lazy writing. Citation needed.

2. You state that developers lack courage. Citation needed.

3. You spend most of the comment writing in the first person singular and then switch to the first person plural in the last paragraph as a rhetorical trick to elicit a sense of solidarity in the reader. This is manipulative.

4. You state that you had a bad experience about a year ago and say that you thought it was a 1-in-10,000 case, but then after you "poked around" you found out it was "the norm", i.e. 1-in-1. This is a ludicrous statement. How can you know what the norm is after poking around? Did you talk to 100 people? The other 9,999? There are actual people out there conducting surveys on things like this. Are you one of them? Citation needed.

You are not contributing. You are not doing a job. You are fearmongering, aggressively and perniciously.

Certainly there are bad actors and bad players in "tech". But simply stating that "horrible experiences are the norm" over and over and over again does not make it true. It's lazy writing.
Twitter Speaks, Markets Listen, and Fears Rise
On the one hand, it seems strange that a hosting provider would be giving out free VPS accounts. This seems like it would be the last act of a dying hosting provider.

On the other hand, this is probably not much different than what Heroku gives away. In fact, Heroku probably gives away a lot more resources (considering that AFAIK you can create as many free tier apps as you like.)

Perhaps this will be the opening shot in a new trend which started with the PAAS providers. Provide free low tier space and make money off the bigger fish.

Personally, I would rather not share my space with freeloaders unless that space is tightly restricted. If the providers are being squeezed on their margins from competition, then I would rather those low margins be spread equally through all plans with no free tier (which I suppose is what Amazon does, they are regularly dropping their prices but nothing is free except for the trial.)

Free hosting isn't enough to move me away from DigitalOcean, especially given the SSD storage.
Achieving US citizenship by investing in US companies
Closer to real-time speech recognition using the GPU
I'm not a cellphone expert - is it possible to buy an unsubsidized & unlocked phone, and then reload Android direct from Google? So you don't get the bloatware & "service monitoring" apps. What about device drivers?
And nobody should. With Nexus4 available for 300$.
Court Ruling Takes a Stand on Essential High-Tech Patents
Seeking a summer pintern
The server benchmarked on SoftLayer is not dedicated, it is on their CloudLayer platform (virtual machines).
India is drowning in its own excreta
Google Will Sunset The Meebo Bar On June 6
I should also point out that Facebook is hiring not just engineers but also designers, product managers, infrastructure people,...

I just joined a couple of weeks ago as a product manager and in the short time here, I've loved it.
Those graphs do not tell the stories that he claims they do. Or at least, not without a lot more explanation than he gave.
Read up about making good landing pages.

Make a landing page selling your idea.

Have a 'Sign up' button and a 'Free trial' button.

Make it go to a page where you mention that you're not yet ready for release and ask them for their email address and permission to let them know when it's ready.

Run a Google AdWords campaign using various keywords that point to your landing page.

If you have different variations of ideas, have different sets of keywords go to the landing page with different parameters and then use different text to describe your idea to those specific markets.

Use the list of emails you collect to determine how good the market is.

Don't spam those people unless you really do have your product ready.
It's more complicated. Nitroglycerine has strong bounds.
Obviously more knowledge is good knowledge. And perhaps the bar for being a good programmer involves being able to

1) Implement a red black tree on a white board

I would argue, though, if that's the bar, there are probably other bars that are a bit lower that at least some of the algorithm triumphalists would fail, such as to

2) Throw up a basic and secure Wordpress site on an Amazon EC2 instance

or

3) You're running into an issue where you're getting an error message about running out of file descriptors. Tell me what's the issue here and what you'd do about it

or

4) write a basic, safe script that makes backups of each file in a given directory and its subdirectories

or

5) tell me what the fuck is the clearfix?

Now, if intermediate algorithms is something that people should be able to do, surely you'd agree 2-5 are even lower bars to meet (since they're things that virtually all of those "bad programmers" are able to do). By the same token, though, it's absolutely the case that many hires at the BigCos actually wouldn't be able to respond to 2-5.

I wouldn't say that those people shouldn't have been hired; after all, people learn! But if algorithms are actually part of the everyday job, someone could also learn them, no?

To the extent that you're testing for raw intelligence--which is the most important aspect of any of these types of jobs--algorithms are a good ruler. But to equate the measurer with the measure is somewhat foolish, because it's a means to an end, not the end itself. If you can use other probes of raw intelligence, those function just as well as being able to vomit up algorithms and data structures that, as people point out, any person who spends a month or so studying can get a solid grasp on and then never need again.
Is there anything like HN for tech entrepreneurs only, maybe a subreddit somewhere? I see here regularly posts regarding jobs/interviews/etc. which are all great ressources but since they got so many upvotes -- this one is on #1 right now -- I wonder sometimes how many on HN are full-time (tech) entrepreneurs and how many are employed/freelance coders.
It's not as good as Python yet but rapidly getting better.

There's an excellent SQL abstraction library (Korma), Ring makes for a nice WSGI equivalent, Compojure and Clabango combined give you a Flask'ish experience, and there are a goodly number of Forms and validation libraries.

Some like to use CLJS on the frontend. There are libraries out there for making that nice.

I usually use vanilla jQuery or Angular on the frontend, no CLJS.

You need get more specific with your queries, I'm not going to write a novel at the merest hint.
I think the legit researchers should be the first ones to take an effort to disassociate themselves from the types like this one. And not only by passively reminding "other types exist too" but by actively excluding criminals from their midst and being intolerant to such behavior. Offtopic for this discussion, I presume, but if we already ventured there...
The problem is he vigorously asserts that his positions are fact, based on his experiences in the finance and tech industries. Newcomers to the tech world read these posts and assume it must be true when in fact these statements are just one person's opinion based on a handful of experiences.

Everyone's entitled to their opinion. If you're going to argue from experience however, you have to have compelling experiences to argue from.
Honesty Experiment
I don't own a Retina display and I'm not sure about the correct scale but here is an example rendering of Akkurat Mono in a bigger font size: http://cl.ly/image/16423o3J0H3N/o
Then this is even sillier, SoftLayer non-dedi is pointless, they're notorious for being overpriced as a brand.