skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who's worked closely with Indian developers for the past 3 years, I can corroborate several of the statements above. My teammates and I were usually spellbound by the acronym-laden resumes of some Indian developers. "Wow, this guy must be really good! Look at his credentials, dude!", I used to say frequently. Reality, however, sinks in rather quickly. More often than not, the "super star" ended up turning in subpar code, working a bazillion hours a week and, still, missing deadlines and estimates by ample marks. It was all very confusing at first. I understand fully now.

I'm not saying there aren't excellent Indian developers. I've also met a few of those. Alas, those are not the majority.
The great Rose Bowl hoax of 1961
No, you are exaggerating. And the things you WOULDN'T have done are precisely the things that make the app stand out from the crowd and become a success, which is the thesis of the post.
First Round Capital: office hours in Boston
"But it has really taken off, in a way that I think sometimes makes the Python guys (who have been slowly and steadily gaining ground) a bit jealous."

Reality seems a bit different to me:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

http://bitworking.org/news/413/ruby-books-sales-a-retrospect...
OSPF Virtual Link
Still, some awesome enhancements nonetheless! Congratulations are in order for all contributors and the community :)
It is not beyond supply/demand. If I can see the value of education for my lifetime of earnings is greater than what it will cost me I will do it. If it's not or I can't tell, I will not. Crying about the short sightedness of others on this dimension or many others is nothing new.
The SO guys seem to really love to hate on FOSS. I'll admit that the user interfaces for some desktop FOSS stuff are crap, but let's not forget that the server architecture is top notch.

How many programmers would be out there asking the kind of questions that show up on SO if it weren't for the ubiquity of the LAMP stack? I shudder to imagine a world where hitting the start button on your neat weekend project involves buying licenses for Vista, IIS, Visual Studio, MSSSQL, etc., etc., etc. "Now that I've dropped $20k on dev tools, I'm ready to get to work!"
Yes sorry:( Up too late on a deployment. Dovecot is great.
Gaikai Demo: Stream Desktop Apps/Games to the Browser
Well only yesterday I asked a question on StackOverflow and noticed that there does not seem a way to monitor a question without answering it. So even now it needs more polish.

Probably after one weekend a clone would not be as polished, but it might be usable enough. If it picks up, there is still enough time to add polish by and by (maybe taking another direction than SO in some respects).

Also if it is open source there is a chance that other people chime in and help adding features they miss.
I agree this is the main feature I was hoping would make it that didn't, too...
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831....
At Boeing (where i work) a Masters Degree in an Engineering Field (cs for me) counts as about 2 years experience when promotions are considered. If you get your degree (Boeing will pay for everything) while you are employed here, they also give you a 100 shares of Boeing Stock.

So for some like me, getting an advanced degree is free, and only offers upside. So after reading the articles, I could sum it up as advanced technical degrees can help, advanced liberal arts degrees not so much. Oh and some schools have bills and need more students paying tuition to pay them. There are no surprises here.
I find his time-based argument compelling. While the SO code is likely not the simplest possible code, it is likely that it is within an order of magnitude. Moreover, coming up with the simplest possible code is hard work and would take longer than coming up with the original code, even if it would be a bit faster when typing it in. If it was not harder to write simpler code, people would write simple code to begin with.
American judge proposes a ban on linking to online content without permission
A grad degree is a chance to be paid to work on a project of your choice, without as strong a demand to make it mass-marketable. It's a chance to work on a project where novelty and interestingness are the lead factors in the viability, and not how easy it is to sell it to end-users.

How valuable is that? Well, that depends on you.
In my experience SMC ("state machine compiler", tres original no?) is better-suited than ragel for working with state machines that're easily specified as "state charts".

The difference is that ragel is oriented around consuming a stream-of-chars: the generated state machine expects to be consuming chars as input.

You can pick up on this in the writeup even though Zed's not pointing it out: he first has to define his messages as chars (eg: 'done' == 'D'), then he specifies his states + transitions in terms of those definitions.

SMC instead generates methods for each 'message' and it's the enveloping program's responsibility to call the correct method to update the state.

This is cleaner for simpler state machines.

None of this is intended as a knock on ragel, btw: it's a very solid piece of software, and for more-complicated state machines should be the go-to choice.
It's kind of ironic that in the overlaid page, there's two skyscraper ads side by side right above the "fixed panel" and they take up the same space as it does.

I've seen the "pushdown" and find it's a great cue for taking a break from the computer.
I think the original poster was saying that he didn't have a B.S. in a technical field. So getting the Masters gave him the credentials he needed to go after jobs he was intrested in. I do not believe he was saying that he had a B.S. in Computer Science and needed a M.S. in Computer Science to compete.

I think its a good example of one of the points made in the linked articles. That if you have an undergrad degree that's not really what your interested in a Masters lets you correct that.
maybe because they don't know about it. Not many people have heard about the ageing research and I think the project would gain a lot of funding if they started raising awareness by targeted advertising and marketing.
> "Being "selfish" means living your life according to what is most meaningful to you. [lists life choices], for others it means working at Burger King."

i find it hard to believe that given the same free will and opportunity some people voluntarily work at Burger King. i think there are socioeconomic and blank-slate issues at stake that ought to be considered before naively advocating "selfish free will."
Make blog post. Post entry to HN. :)
It has more spit and polish than you think - just not flashy. (Think 'Shibumi'.)
No, I'm a bad Hacker :(

I'll jump in there again and file a bug report.
"Month of the twitter bugs" started with bit.ly vulnerabilities
Because all my time is a fixed quantity?
I'd like to live forever; I just don't think it's going to work out. ;)

And I don't see any reason to prefer internal problem solving to external problem solving. If anything, I would lean toward external problem solving, as I believe very strongly that interacting with my peers has made me far better at it.
While I agree that readability matters _a lot_, the "Zen of Python" honestly bugs me. But maybe it's just the counter-culture ethos that dwells inside me. +)

Note: I used Python daily at work and for open source projects. I also use Ruby for open source projects. I like them both.
Since they now have a trademark application in the works, they _must_ try to enforce it. When a company consistently neglects to enforce it's trademark and it becomes part of the language, it becomes a genericized trademark. it ends up in the same boat as "kleenex" and "xerox" and may not be enforceable in the future - a.k.a "genericide".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark
Have you seen the "P2" theme for wordpress? There's your multi-user blog with most of the functionality you mentioned.
Funny you should say that, my background is also as an EE and I also can't imagine not knowing about state machine design. Yet just this week I had a junior guy tell me he's never seen the concept in software, outside of a testing harness for a hardware fsm.
I hate to say that not even American legislative and judiciary branches could be stupid enough to outlaw the anchor tag, because they prove me wrong half the time I make that sort of assumption. But this is really another "series of tubes" moment; I don't think it'll go anywhere.
Chevrolet Camaro Transformers 2 Revenge Of The Fallen
Mmm... semenjak Shia LaBeouf pertama kali menemukan mobil Chevrolet Camaro 1977 di sebuah toko mobil bekas yang ternyata adalah sebuah robot bernama BubbleBee yang kemudian berubah menjadi Chevrolet Camaro 2009, cerita semakin seru :)
I posted on my blog a few months ago after the news of Google Chrome that I expected Facebook to follow suit and release a browser as it is becoming a key tool in the platform wars.

The Google team sponsored and helped develop for Firefox, and I'm sure some Google employees still do develop for it, however the creation of Chrome is a clear sign that the honeymoon is over and it's time for Google to internalize it.

Google's strategy has been support other people's projects until they prove themselves, then either acquire or create their own.

It sounds ludicrous to suggest, but consider what would happen if IE, in IE 9 decided to block Google. Oh sure there would be an outcry from the technologically savvy, but what about our non-computer literate friends. What would they do? How many of them would actually install FF or Chrome rather than just try Bing and find that 'hey, it is almost as good as Google.' It's crazy, like my suggestion in my first comment, but it's a fact that one day they're going to stop playing nice and platform companies are going to begin trying to build the walls to their advantage.
I thought the "series of tubes" was an excellent analogy for the internet.
Ruby On Rails is a framework not a collection of third party libraries (like pypi), that said if you really want to compare RoR to something then that's http://www.djangoproject.com/
What I was the most interested in was the financial aspect of it. Unfortunately it was an unwritten section. Does anyone know any resources or article talking about the financial aspect of flash games. Is it possible to make any money at all developing them?
Getting Answers: an alternative to "Asking Questions the Smart Way."
Nice game. Since you're interested in criticism, and I think it's the little touches that make people think a game is 5/5 instead of 4/5:

- I second the tiny screen complaint. The small enemy fighters might as well be pixels. A full screen option, if technically possible, would dramatically improve playability.

- I don't "feel" the movement system. I'd prefer really big thruster effect when I accellerate and turn. You have this but it's tiny. I want to feel Newton's Third Law. This game is way way behind Star Control II as far as the fun factor of simply moving the ship around.

- Combat doesn't feel strategic at all, but just like a spazzy click-fest. I have no idea how you'd solve that, but look at how much more fun the combat is, again, in Star Control 2.

- The store system, where an option to buy the weapon doesn't show up until you buy the previous one in the ladder, feels gamey and artificial, and turns me off a bit.

- Going into the Flex interface in the starbase instantly, with the music and sound suddenly stopping, is jarring and feels very amateurish. Something like a docking animation, with the buy/sell interface consistent with the look and feel of the rest of the game, would go a long way towards making this game seem professional.

- Nexus warps on the minimap look way too much like planets, they should really stand out.

- The pop-up mission objectives, again to me, make this feel like an amateur game from the 90s. I'm not sure how that could be made better but other games (say the level objectives from Starcraft or Warcraft) don't feel this way. Having some voice would of course be best but I understand the size constraints. Still some Flash games do this very well, notably Sonny and Sonny 2, and Robokill.

- Sorry, but the player ship is kind of ugly.

PS: I'm very much in your target market. I've bought Robokill, World of Goo, Braid, Aquaria, and many independent RPGs.
And they neglect the fact that not everybody has wide display or high resolutions. From my google analytics, i still see people using 800x600. Wow.
I'd actually rather see someone's free form artsy drawing than a UML picture

I totally agree. The whole idea behind UML is to force diagrams into a set of constraints drawn from a particular model of computing and design (early 90s OO, I suppose) on the assumption that this is the "right" way to imagine software. This excludes the ineffable creativity which drawings are so good for. It's amazing what happens in a good design discussion when people spontaneously pick up a pen at a whiteboard without thinking about it. UML forces people to think about something other than the problem at hand, distorting ideas and breaking flow.

And in the name of what? "We need a standard," they used to say, "so that people know whether they should draw square boxes or round ones, so we can get beyond the notation wars." What tripe.
Honestly the smc programmers manual http://smc.sourceforge.net/SmcManual.htm is probably good enough. Its quite light; even with a blog post one would still have to extrapolate from the author's application to how one would apply the tool to one's own problem domain.

But +1 for SMC; used it quite a few times already, in many cases in new product versions replacing legacy code where the original insisted to implement a partially-identified state machine "by hand" (and invariably ended up tripping over all sorts of unforeseen and edge cases).

I've also found that merely the exercise of thinking in terms of FSM definition, often helps to simplify the problem (for example by identifying that there may actually be multiple independent/"orthogonal" FSMs present, instead of one monolithic one).
Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the good old days when DDJ was good, but I think it's fabulous that they got Michael Swaine as editor.
Gmail labels get higher placement, drag-and-drop
1. The idea isn't really worth that much.

2. Would your friends be douches unless they signed an agreement not to be?
Part of the issue is that there is no such thing as "simple" replication unless one means "unreliable" replication. Simple replication is just shooting off the same SQL insert/update query on two servers. In the best scenario, that means that if you use a time function, you're likely to get two different results. In the worst case, it fails on one server and data gets out of sync.

Really, it's not that PostgreSQL needs more replication or built-in replication. It needs better replication than any of the current solutions. pgpool, while great as a connection pooler, is a terrible replication solution. Slony-I is based off triggers and its communication costs grow in quadratically (O(n^2) - yuck!). Plus, Slony-I requires an immense amount of setup for every table and every key. Mammoth replicator, which seems to be the closest to the right track, has a website that doesn't show much life and only a beta release for download. Plus, it still looks like there's a good amount of setup.

What we all really want is for PostgreSQL to implement a log-shipping based replication system where we can say "replicate this database" or "replicate these tables" to another server and have it just work. But there's nothing simple about that.
OK, contest time. Let's find the future word for microblogged statements.

Is there a way to run such a contest in such a way that every suggested word is automatically free for all to use forever (unless it was trademarked before)? I almost fear no :-(

On the other hand when I tried to trademark a word in Germany, it was rejected because it was deemed too common (I didn't think so, but whatever). So maybe if one could make a case that, say, the word "mext" was already a common name for microblogging statements, nobody could trademark it for that anymore? Just when is it common enough - winning a competition would probably be insufficient?
That comment doesn't sound right to me.

I worked fast food in my teens. I liked it. I could have made a career out of it. It was always fast-paced, you met lots of people, there was a challenge in skills, it had kind of a frat atmosphere. Lots of good stuff.

But my enjoying it shouldn't count? Like I said,l I must be missing something. It is sounding to me like you are taking the position that some jobs are just beneath any of us, and we should only take them under duress.

I'm sure upon reflection you realize how much trouble you can get into with this line of reasoning, right? Sure there are lots of people -- most probably -- who do not enjoy their jobs. But I'm not even sure that relates to what type of work it is as much as the emotional mindset of the person involved. There are a lot of miserable millionaires out there.

And you wouldn't want to be in a position of telling people which jobs were worthy and which were not, would you?
It's not the first time and probably won't be the last.

But there's just no way it could ever go through.
Really unbelievable.
"Ruby lived fast and died young."

How can you say that a language with active development and an active community has "died"? Seems like an odd conclusion to make, IMHO.

And it is really easy to enjoy Ruby without Rails. A friend and I have been doing it for a couple years now.
This is totally contrary to what was said last year:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682790

I'm very disappointed by their cack-handedness.
I've seen the video, and I am a programmer.

I understand the power of EB comes from the code that allows it to aggregate, sift and categorize data.

My point is that what makes that data useful is the interface with which people interact with the data.

Look at the interface differences between day one and day 365 - http://blog.everyblock.com/2009/jan/23/oneyear/. UI/UX design is not easy, and it's a challenge for most developers.
If a close friend of mine, in all seriousness presents me this form in the casual manner the author suggests, I wouldn't be able to help but think that he's the one being the "douche" by ridiculing the trust in our friendship with this poorly fabricated "agreement".
If they care about user experience, they'd detect the window size, and adjust the ads / layout accordingly. Hopefully they'd do that, but I'm skeptical.
I don't get it, although others seem to agree with you. What does one have to do with the other?
It is impressive, but beware of cargo culting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/1/7/never-ever-cargo-cult
Microsoft's Bing Search Wins Share From Google
This is a very idealistic approach. There are industries which have not produced a dime of revenue for many years and keep existing and employing a lot of people for political reasons.

Even in sectors actually governed by the free market, what you say only has to be true on average. As a software engineer I know I have worked at places that produced no value whatsoever to anyone. Once I wrote a Perl script that immediately saved the guy I worked for something in the neighborhood of my monthly salary per day. That was the only time in my life that I could actually say that I understood how my work translated to money. Usually you just write code which is a small part of someone's great plan which in a few years time may go somewhere or not depending on things that are outside of your control.
10 Tips for New iPhone Web Developers
Indeed. Even at 17 contemplating university, it was obvious that some disciplines were massively more employable than others. But there was - is - a myth that employers don't care what degree you have, so long as you have one, and that no matter what the subject is it's just a vehicle for "learning to learn". And that is arrant nonsense!
Here is an idea for you, I won't go into criticizing your idea. If I knew what will work out, or for that matter ANY of the people here, we would be doing it. We can spend hours and hours talking about the idea, telling you the problems why it wouldn't work, but still be way off course of the reality. Recently I spoke with my ex boss who has been in IT for so long, now retired and he said, quoted "If someone asked me back then if Facebook would have worked out, I'd say no chance."

I think, we entrepreneurs shape the world around us to tune into new ideas. Persistence and continuous mutation/evolution showed to work for life, why not business too?
Whenever someone asks a question here on HN, you get 90% of critiques and ways of discouraging. I say screw them. The spirit of real hackers and entrepreneurs is to just do it, be perseverant and have no fear of failing, but if it is to happen, fail fast and learn from it for the next iteration. No other can influence the success or failure than the entrepreneur himself, so I think you should hear the tone of only those that give you suggestions which way to go. I am sure you know what the problems are.

My suggestion. Build a prototype, use something that you can build it very quickly e.g. Rails and then hear out what the people are saying about it. Then modify it day by day from what you hear, and I guarantee you that you will eventually end up with something great. Your idea might be brilliant or stupid, but it is not on us to judge. Also, when you get discouraged, remember it is not on you either to judge.

I personally believe that is indeed needed and a great thing and has been going through my mind by reading a bunch of stuff. If I can somehow help, I'm in. I recommend you read this, that you would help solve:

http://www.strategy-business.com/press/enewsarticle/enews053...

Cheers!

Dejan/Aleveo.com
Yes, that's correct. Not only was my undergrad degree in music, I had virtually no computer/technology experience of any kind (this was back in the 80's and I was still using typewriters to type up papers.) So it would have been pretty difficult for me to enter the profession directly.

As an aside, my master's program probably wasn't the best overall preparation for a career as a software developer, actually. It was highly theoretical/mathy, and I think undergrad CS students probably got more and more relevant programming experience. It was mostly about having the credentials, I think.
A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs
Looking for single hackers to review my site
Title says it all... just opened today.

http://mikesandmegs.com
I assume (hope) that any sites doing this are already at a fixed width of at least 1024 (or whatever it is to allow for browser chrome).
Techcrunch misleading about dangers of using "tweet" in names
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. In reality fair use has been wilfully abused by internet aggregators. At the moment we're in the absurd situation where the aggregators like google, youtube, etc. make money for serving other people's content for free.

And what's worse is that because they've got used to all content being stolen they value it so lowly that Amazon are prepared to offer the content providers just 30%!

Look it from a different perspective and bloggers aren't a news-source, they're ill-informed, amateur, unaccountable commentators. We need the papers. Sites like YouTube don't make quality content, they steal it and serve it for free. Google doesn't create any websites, it steals your money by advertising competitors products right next to yours.

I love the internet as it is, but I honestly believe it's not going to last.