skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I thought of doing was finding an MMORPG that is localized in the language you want to learn, as well as in English. Play it in English and then switch over to French and join a guild. A couple reasons why I though this could work:

-Because the context is limited, you should be able to intuit more meaning on your own in much the same way that people learn languages from birth.

-You can start with written words and move up to spoken language (Teamspeak, ventrillo, etc.)

-You are subverting the carefully designed rewards placed in all MMO's for your own needs. -the better you know the language, the better you can play, and the better you will be rewarded.

Possible downsides - a lot of the language will be slang, or be particular to the game itself.
I sold my house with redfin on Dec 31 2007. The transaction was absolutely wonderful. It was a money loser for Redfin - first offer fell through due to misrepresentation by the purchaser, second one was complicated due to an extremely picky purchaser, and it took a total of about 60 hours of work by the Redfin agent to get the deal closed. It was an unusual case but the point is i've done about 4 other transactions and this was the most professional and hardest working agent and it was the cheapest... So they don't drop you if your transaction turns out to be a statistical outlier... HIGHLY recommended.
> While it is cool, I wonder if that really was less work than simply storing things in a db.

Yes, it's less work. The introduction of a databases nearly always more than doubles the complexity of a program and the amount of code written. There's a reason developers like in memory prototypes and persistent hash tables, they require less code than any other solution and don't force you to tear apart your model and try and stuff it into tables and put it back together again on every page view.
Pocket God offers case study of how to build a hit iPhone game
Um, what? You really think the only use case for video search is finding particular clips with known titles? There's an entire industry around stock photos/videos that right now relies almost entirely on manual tagging, you don't think that field's ripe for search? Or the petabytes of video being streamed from security cameras, you don't think anyone out there wants to search that for faces or license plates or whatever? Video search is going to be absolutely killer, and Google's sitting on top of the largest, most varied training corpus in the world, thanks to YouTube.
And let's not even start talking about consistent reads.
While I agree with the idea that you should never share your password, you're blaming the victim. Having read a few accounts of their exploits now, this company is manipulating these people.
It starts off with amazingly good qualifiers, but quickly degrades into a list of obscure SF references :-(
Looks neat but this definitely has very little to do with logo. Logo was basically a kid friendly interface sitting on top of a very Lisp like language, this is much more like @dustmop says, Game Maker or Klik & Play.
Not knowing more about Evony's business model, I think this is likely an example of optimizing for the wrong metric - in this case clicks versus conversions. The creator of the last ad is probably thrilled that it's "performing" better than the earlier ads, although I'll bet the actual return on investment is the same or worse.

On the other hand, if the site is ad-supported in addition to the freemium model mentioned in the article, this is a way to drive up the number of unique visitors in their traffic stats.
I don't know, but consider: Their target customer who will actually pay them money is someone who is going to sign up to play a Civilization-like game in their browser, and likes it so much that they're willing to buy in-game perks.

Are those people the sort of people who click on softcore porn banner ads? Could be, but my intuition would have suggested that they aren't.
Sex sells. Every marketer knows this.
I'm pleased that our sign-up forms were shown to be the fastest at least... (I'm a product manager for the Trovix/Monster integration, and previously product manager for Trovix.com)
AS3 speed optimizations
Locate_me.js - Locate your users by using state of the art geolocation services.
Because, if youtube is ever profitable, they will be sued. over and over until the end of time.

much better to just miss breaking even. Shovel all the user data into doubleclick, and all the video data into crazy data mining algorithms.
>One of Microsoft's greatest accomplishments in the original "OS war" was to confuse users to the point where they didn't understand the difference between an OS and a computer.

How, exactly, did Microsoft bring that about? Did your mom know the difference before Microsoft came about, and then they made it too confusing and she forgot?
You could compile to brainfuck, treating it as a very simple virtual machine. It's just simplified to the point of being incredibly inefficient, like factoring Church-encoded numbers with Prolog's unification, rather than using its built-in mathematical primitives.

(Whether the bf compiler was actually written or just generated by compiling to bf is neither here nor there.)
Indeed, the general populace still does not know how to behave safely on the Internet, and only time can change that. Wasn't Tagged asking for your email password to read your contacts. If that's the case, the fact that even small percentage of those 60 million people willingly gave it up shows how naive people are.
Personally, I can't see the appeal of Chrome OS over something like Ubuntu NR.
This is silly. There may not be anyone who needs all of these skills, and the author himself doesn't have them all.

I guess the title "A very long list of geeky skills you may or may not need" was not very catchy.
Funny. I thought that the idea behind being a geek wasn't to learn arbitrary and unnecessary skills. My friends and I'd always thought it was about taking advantage of our intelligence to learn things we thought we'd need to know or like to know in the future. All the stuff we learned - including the rare overlaps with this list - sprung from that need to know.

I've met a few geeks who feel like there's some sacred path to being a geek that means you've got to know all the dwarves' names from the Hobbit, and I've wanted to hit them all across the face. Smug dipshittery is just as bad when you're a geek as it is when you're an athlete.
I'd take a Lego set over this any day of the week. Modern toys take a lot of the creativity and imagination out of it.
Information Counterrevolution [pdf]
Is VC too Fat and Happy?
+1 for "Figure out something your team can do that will make money. Then think about the long term."

I'm in the same boat at the moment, we've raised some seed money and are somewhat in the same boat. In our case, we spent 2-3 weeks of June talking to ~2K of our users on the phone to get some real feedback on how they use the product, what sucks and what else they want to see. At the end of it, we had a pretty solid list of bugfixes and enhancements... but, better yet, we noticed that there were 2-3 specific features that people actually offered to pay for. So, as a final sanity check, I emailed a small sample of those users with a credit card authorization form and asked them to fax it in... I got most of them back (and then shredded them since I don't actually have a way to process them just yet). :)

If your userbase is actively giving you feedback, maybe it's worth spending a little bit of time having in depth conversations to see whether any paid features might emerge?
Maybe that "nerd" target customer does not exist, so they settle for the softcore clients (who might be more willing to pay for whatever, too).
I see that and think snap
Yeah, that's what I've noticed too. LinkedIn doesn't seem to have much penetration outside of tech hubs though - I noticed a big difference in adoption just going from Boston to Silicon Valley. The girl in question was from Williamstown, MA, which is basically just two streets and a college in northwest Massachusetts. I'm not too surprised FaceBook beats it out, given the large student and academic population.
I don't see the connection. One could maintain that source code is not art and that Michelangelo's works were not graffiti.
I couldn't bear it anymore past point 15.
From the page that says what the Lamson project is about (emphasis mine):

"I’m always looking for people doing interesting things with e-mail. Even if you’re a spammer, or someone trying to destroy the spammers, I want to hear from you" (Zed Shaw, maintainer of the Lamson project).
Chrome OS Screenshot Leaked
Most other OS vendors made it a thing to differentiate the OS from the computer, and still do. Apple wants you to know what Mac OS X is, and Linux obviously does as well. Microsoft worked very hard to blend the experience. In fact, they continue to do it today. Notice that their ads are "I'm a PC", NOT "I'm running Windows".'

Also, the point is not necessarily whether people are somehow born knowing the difference between the hardware and the OS, but rather that it is beneficial for some parties for people to be educated on this subject (such as Apple, and Linux), whereas it is not beneficial for others (Microsoft), and hence Microsoft can perpetuate this by simple inaction.

I think its a clear win for Google if people start being further confused about the difference between browsers and OSes, since their whole goal is to convince people that the browser is the OS.
Big Brother flies into Valley with 'crime-fighting' eyes
I disagree with this wholeheartedly. You should be able to user your address book to find which of your friends are on a social media site without blasting an email out to those who aren't.

It's knuckleheads like this that will get govt. regulation dropped on the rest of us.
Apple doesn't appear to review iPhone applications for security.
> At the same time, programmerManagers love Java because everybody else is doing it, which means there's one less thing that can be held against them when their project finally collapses under the crushing weight of their foolish incompetence (original emphasis)

Dear god! It all makes sense now...

Also:

> Two, we will undergo a vigorous ISO standardization
eff ort.
More like "100 Essential Skills for Geek Posers"

Silly list than skims the superficial surface of what others think we are like.

If OP bothered to submerge himself into our world for more than a few microseconds, maybe he'd come up with a real list that understands true geekdom. And that list would not be "100". No self-respecting geek reads any list with a composite number of entries.
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were working on their Apple I, Apple II in garage, the hottest computer company then were in Boston like DEC.

Of course both Jobs and Wozniak were lucky to get an angel investor, Mike Markkula, due to Intel's wealth from its IPO.

So the important parts are those:

1. You are good enough.

2. you can meet someone who is rich enough, understands the process of starting a tech company,is willing to risk his/her fortune to help you out while taking a good windfall later, if you are really good.

It is easier in SV. But there are all those people in start up hotbeds. I guess the problem is where and how to meet them. But as we all know. Rich people hates people come forward to ask for money without showing something interesting first.
Indeed, almost no one understands the 'unemployment' statistic. As I understand it, only people who are actively seeking employment and have no job are included.
The realtor themselves don't make that much as it's a pyramid scheme. A realtor splits the commission 50/50 with the broker, and then pays fees (advertising, listing, business expenses, etc) out of their 50%. Take out taxes as well, and real estate, in most markets, ends up being a minimum wage job.
The New Yorker would have said more things than could have been fit into a paragraph. Say five pages of use and four of tripe. Here it was a good 95% garbage and another 3% quoting other people saying garbage.
"Properly connect a TV, Tivo, XBox, Wii, and Apple TV so they all work together with the one remote."

Is that even possible? I'm pretty sure some of those are IR remotes and some are bluetooth.
It's true across the tech community; someone can post a completely wrong analysis of pretty much anything and as long as it fits peoples' expectations, they'll keep citing it even if it's wrong, and it's incredibly aggravating.

Some common examples include Windows having a lower TCO than Linux, Theora being better than H.264, and of course practically anything in the realm of politics.
>I like how no one cites employment figures for engineers and programmers in these articles. That's going to be the future employment prospects for men in the long term.

In the long term, can't a significant amount of engineering & programming be automated and/or offshored? Obviously not all, but I'm not sure engineering can be counted as a future-proof career path.
One thing you can search is closed captioning, like SnapStream does:

http://www.snapstream.com/tvtrends/
Thanks paul. I think the most immediate answer is: improve the product and keep pumping out features. In the short-term our costs are really under control. I apologize if my initial thread sounded like I was shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. With the recession and downturn in the economic climate, startup logic (understandably) has shifted from the web 2.0/YCombinator preaching of: build, find users, get acquired or profit. The difficulty is that competitors in our space operate on this “free” model and are backed by substantial angel or VC money. In fact, the only widely visible startups that seem to still be operating under this logic were founded and funded pre-recession. What is going on here?

I’m somewhat confused by all the conflicting recommendations I get on early-stage startups. Again, cash is king and we have some ideas for monetization (which, of course requires more $).

In today's economic climate, can startups afford, literally, to avoid realizing a business model after you've scaled? I realize that YC has increased the number of seed investments, but has the angel community also increased the pace at which they invest in these fledgling ideas at the >$100k investment stage? I'm in Boston, so my perception is a little bit warped. Can someone offer their thoughts?
Just one: The ultimate source of all knowledge on language learning.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/
Hacking applications in Cocoa
To gain the scalability/performance of a k/v store while having the capability to do complex queries (e.g. joins, range queries)
Rules That Govern Groups
Certainly fakes.
Of course it's a fake...it's Friday humor. =)
http://www.livemocha.com/
lol. Guess I should have read your post beyond the first paragraph. -1 to me :P
I sent you an email =)
Things I care about here:

(1) The "virus-free OS" meme, which is pernicious and displaces reasonable thinking about system security, which is something that everyone --- Apple, Linux, Microsoft, and Google included --- are working hard on.

(2) The guru phenomenon, where people embed themselves into the industry consciousness and become fonts for random meaningless sound bites.

Probably good to call me out for obsessing about it, though I'll note that I feel comfortable babbling about it on Hacker News because I "know" you people, and would be less comfortable talking to a reporter about it.
It's too bad "skill" 84 wasn't listed at the proper number.
dupe and it was killed the last time

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677406
He's made the point before that any advance in email technology will be primarily used for spam.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/03/lamson/print.html

"I totally think Lamson will be used more for spam than for anything really useful. My hope with Lamson is that it acts like a modern sewage system for the internet. Everyone's gotta poop. You can't escape it, so why not try to do it in a clean fashion that improves the general health of everyone involved?"
Pfft, like I'd use vi.
I'm not sure about automation (it seems unlikely to automate creative work) but offshoring, in the long run, won't eliminate jobs because there isn't a limited, set number of creative work that can be done.
How many large-scale software projects have you worked on? ;-)

In the small scale, it always looks like a program is just a bunch of lines of code, and any monkey can type in lines of code. But in the large scale, there're lots of judgments calls and architectural decisions that require that you weigh competing factors, with incomplete information, and try to come up with a "least bad" solution with possibly unforseen results in the future. You can't automate this, and if you try to outsource it without open lines of communication, you'll probably end up with a solution that satisfies nobody.

The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do after the rote parts have been automated.
I've tried many times, and I really want to go back (because when I sit at a vanilla emacs, sometimes it's hard to use it without my own customizations)
There's a lot more information on Scott Gu's blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/07/10/silverligh...

summary: HD media, graphics acceleration from GPUs, codecs: H.264, AAC and MPEG4, IIS Media services [free] helps to steram media (like the demo link from the article above), more UI controls, deep linking with maintenance of back/foward buttons in the browser, better text rendering and font support (i wonder what new font types), more networking API stuff for WCF...

and then on the tools side, they made improvements to blend: intellisense, prototyping designers, 'behaviors', and imports from photoshop & illustrator
"Google obscure facts in under 3 searches. __Bonus point__ if you can use I Feel Lucky."

That says it all. Basically a 'geek' version of "How much of an 80's child are you?" facebook style quizzes presented as something more. These things really bug me as they promte the fetishing of "geek culture".
Google Maps v3 (in beta) already utilizes the sensor variable - so I dont see how this is advantageous for a mobile website.
As for desktop apps - Google also has an API function to determine your location based on your IP. But I dont think it utilizes Firefox's geo-location ability.

<em>What is the benefit of this API compared to whats already available?</em>
How many non-X Linux distributions fit his description?

"For use as a desktop PC operating system, all the various “Linux distributions” are basically the same thing: variations of Gnome or KDE sitting atop the ancient X Window System."

It seems like Chrome OS will be the only non-X distribution which is a serious option for widespread desktop use. There are non-X distributions, but not desktop non-X distributions. If you want to dispute by adding Xfce or whatnot to Gnome and KDE, go ahead, but I don't think it's relevant to his main point: the mainstream desktop Linux distributions are all pretty much the same experience.
There's a few tricks you can do with Oracle function based indexes to optimize out like clause in this case. Can't speak for other RDBMS but I imagine they have similar facilities.
>> "Not wishing to defend 118 800, but after the first prank call from that service he could go "ex-directory" and get no further calls."

Yeah that doesn't scale too well. What about when there's hundreds of such services? It should either be strictly opt-in, or failing that have a centralized shared opt-out system.
Cisco cutting up to 2,000 jobs
No apologies necessary, you're asking a good question that I also have been thinking about for some time now. Feel free to email me if you'd like to talk about this in-depth or just need to bounce a few ideas off of someone. :)

I don't have a whole lot of insight into what's going on in the minds of the investment community but, IMHO, I think we all tend to think that there's more investing going on out there than is actually true.
Well, certainly in Oracle, it can use an index on a like if it is structured:

where col like 'str%'

However, doing

where col like '%str'

Means it cannot use any index. So in the example given, it would be able to use an index because there is a leading 'path' before the %, assuming MySQL can do the same thing.

In Oracle you can do hierarchy query's using the 'connect by' syntax, which means you can structure your table with id, parent_id and get all the rows out efficiently in a single piece of SQL, which is nice!
The point is not that it is a successor to Logo, but that it attempts to reach the same goals as Logo. In playing with it on the Xbox, the programming seems more like Scratch than Logo.

On a side note, does anyone have a link to the PC version? The Kodu site states that it runs on Xbox or PC, but I can only find the Xbox version.
There's something surreal about getting "n employees to be cut from X" when you work at X. Thank god I'm just an intern.

Anyone hiring interns next summer?
Are Parasites to Thank for Sex? [podcast with text summary]
A fine proggit post. Flagged.
i think yes i need to use spell checker.. but its just a start,so it will take some time..
> Be able to calculate tip and split the check, all in your head.

Wait. What?

So being able to do simple math is reserved for geeks now?

Also:

> Understand that it is LEGO, not Lego, Legos, or Lego’s.

You are not truly geeky unless you are a pedantic asshole. Make sure you rage in comments any time someone accidentally writes "it's" where they mean "its"... because, you know, it can't just be a typo.
Ignore the spammy looking website and the quiff but Michel Thomas's audio language courses - http://www.michelthomas.com - are brilliant. He has a very unusual but extraordinarily effective teaching style and within an amazingly short period you find yourself saying things in a foreign language that you would have thought would take years to learn. Seriously brilliant.
> Feel free to correct me if there exists a RDBMS which can use an index on a "like."

huh? mysql does that for 'like' queries which don't start with a wildcard (that's exactly what you need for breadcrumbed trees).

also (i didn't read TFA, though) you don't have to use 'like'. you can use BETWEEN or just "path >= 'a' and path < 'b'", which, i suppose, uses index in even the most stupid RDBMS in the world).

prooflink log from my live real production database with a breadcrumbed tree: http://pastie.org/541611
Fourfold increase in music produced since the 2000s
As a meme for perpetuating culture, turning off vending machine lights is superb symbolism.

I know a guy who did some consulting for Walmart and visited their HQ. He told me they had a conference room where, instead of paying for a projector, they stuck an old CRT monitor on top of a milk crate. Although he didn't get anywhere near the executive sanctum (perhaps if you get high enough, they don't practice what they preach), he observed many such cultural indicators in the middle tier.
That's why "being sufficiently microcontroller-competent to build an IR-to-BT bridge" is on the list...

(no, it isn't, but I'd have made a point if it were)
I did some probing and this appears to be purely a UK problem, although I sympathize. I know there were proposals to make mobile numbers public in the US, but I think they were shot down. I occasionally get spam text messages, but they were all from the telco.
...and yet, populated with hordes of non-techies, Google still hasn't been able to move YouTube from substantial loss to minimal profit (even when the world was in the middle of a "Web 2.0" tech boom!).

Now that we're in a bust, what does that tell you about their future prospects?
But so that's an admission that they're in the wrong business. They should trash the game and start a softcore porn site.
I was just down at the Barnes & Noble browsing the computer section, picking up bits of French spoken by a middle-aged couple--too quietly for me to be able to comprehend. The locals were speaking a lot louder.