skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you wish to move beyond the level of learning methods to solve a very specific class of problems (like Calculus I/II/III teaches, no offence/looking down one's nose is intended), you'll need to eventually learn to write proofs. A good book to get you over the initial hurdles is Daniel Velleman's How to Prove It.
In my experience, CPM from AdSense does not scale by itself. When you're only serving up a few thousand impressions per day, all it takes are a few good advertisers on your keywords for you to get a pretty nice daily payoff, but as soon as you burn through the high CPM ads from AdSense, you get down to their low CPM remnant inventory.

For example, at 30k impressions per day, you might make $75 from AdSense at a $2.50 CPM. If you keep relying on AdSense as your traffic numbers go up to 500k impressions per day, you'll still get the $75, but most of the traffic above that level comes in at a low CPM, say $0.20, and you end up with $169 for that day rather than $1300.

The takeaway is that you can't rely on AdSense to scale, and selling your own ads makes sense at a certain traffic level.
I second Discrete Mathematics and its Applications. This book was the book I used in the first class that required a substantial amount of proof writing. A majority of it was easily tackled within a six week course.
"DataHandler". Now there's a descriptive name. Couple it with a "ThingDoer" and you will have a truly generic framework!
Why is Science Important?
Stage 9 (and final) - Hacking again

After you realize managing people and other's assets is not fun anymore you'll get back to your roots: start hacking again and start using your connections to build your own business
Lots of nice examples there, also you may want to check out http://infosthetics.com/
Developers in pain...
It's easy to think there are ways to shortcut in the art and tech worlds, but this technique is how sports people work. You don't get straight into the Olympics or Formula 1, but you work your way up through local clubs and divisions, represent your city, represent your state and work your way up.

Anyway, awesome article. It's easy to forget all this stuff when you're working with computers and everything seems so accessible (when, in fact, it's really no different to "real life").
Perhaps getting a buddy who shares your aims can help?
In Soviet Russia, cliches are jokes.
The Power of Opaque Selling
It is not a gray area at all if the keywords you are bidding for are relevant to your site.
I think that your objection is, rather, an indictment of schools and the surrounding bureaucracy.

Anyway, do people study such puzzles? For such a consistent, widespread rise, you'd expect it to be pretty obvious that they do, but I'm not sure.
A Modest Proposal is exactly what I was not talking about.
There's a distinction between the meaning behind what you say, and how you say it. Trying to shock people through your "how" is cheap.
One Giant Leap to Nowhere
The reason why polls are so popular is because they're easy to understand. You have one vote, you select the option you think is the correct answer to the question and the result show the spread of people's opinions.

Adding a layer of complexity to this by "investing" makes it harder for the user to understand. It took me a good two minutes and a read of the blog post to understand how eaxctly to vote (or invest). If this was a widget on another website, I wouldn't know what it was or to do with it. There's no obvious way to select an option and it's not particularly clear that you have to click on the row then select the amount to invest.

There needs to be a better explanation of what exactly the widget does within the widget itself, otherwise users will get confused and not use it.
I've read "Zen Mind, Beginners' Mind" sixteen years ago and it really affected my way of thinking (or, better, it reinforced my temperament).

On the other hand, I believe that living by these teachings can lead to a certain kind of passivity. Which is not bad per se.

Steve Jobs (not mentioned in the article) is (supposedly) a zen buddhist, but I doubt you can do what he did and truly follow these philosophies at the same time.
Sure; I'll email you as well.
Those figures are way too low. See

https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/AsktheBuilder.ht...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07...

At 30K uniques per day you become a google premium adsense partner and google will allow you to customize the adsense code etc.
It is. Jobs proved.
The million dollar question: would we have been so interested in how the attack was made if we hadn't had at least a glimpse of the compromised information? In other words, could TC argue that publishing the confidential information was a valid way of raising awareness of the security issue? I'm not convinced, but it's a tough one.
Interesting concept.

I would refine it as a gambling widget (that's what it is) and offer a percentage to the host.

Grow it and sell the service to bookies, they'll love it.
> Not to sound like an AT&T fanboi, but the other providers are just as bad. The pricing is the same, you get locked in, and the bandwidth isn't even as good

Sure, AT&T is "just as bad." I am convinced that the phone carriers are operating as a cartel. They fix prices. Their primary business model is "how much can we screw the consumer and get away with it?" Just because they all do it isn't an excuse.
I'm starting to get the impression that every budding programmer writes a Markov chain-based name or text generator at least once in their lives. It's the trick that never gets old.

Sigh.
Riklomas, thank you for your time and comment, I think you're right. We believe that an answer to a poll is the binary truncation of one's belief, and what we're trying to grasp is the full answer. Still, it's harder to extract it indeed, and the main reason is that we are used in submitting our views in polls, not markets.
However, given that simplicity and directness is our main target with producing the widget, do you think that a different terminology (like betting or playing instead of investing, or what?) will make things more straightforward for the busy user?
MacRuby AOT, DMGs with ChocTop
I'm speaking of impressions, not uniques.
Don't forget that caffeine is absorbed most efficiently sublingually :)
Everyone here is probably fairly well aware of how easy it is to compromise accounts on these online services. I hope most HN users recognize that the appropriate course of action after hacking a service like this is to notify the account holder to help them improve their security before revealing the details.

If you really aren't doing this for profit, and you really don't want to hurt the victim of the attack, (as Hacker Croll claims) then don't disclose the information you stole to major press outlets. This attack is really in poor taste, and I think we all of us here at HN should recognize the difference between pointing out the dangers of the internet and being one of the dangers ourselves.
I came to the same conclusion in my first job out of college, working in IS/IT at a large automotive firm.

Now, I'm not so sure. I think there is a large craft component in the implementation of software, but there is also an engineering component in the selection of algorithms and datastructures, as well as testing and benchmarking. I think what I'm saying is that the construction of software is a craft, but the design of software (should) still have a large engineering component.
It's not exactly the same idea as yours, but I think UserVoice do something quite similar, you get a set number of votes and you can pick how many to set the feedback you want:

http://feedback.uservoice.com/pages/1-general?lang=en&re...
"We’ve waited to post exactly what happened until Twitter had time to close all of these security holes."

Unless you're saying that techcrunch should have waited until gmail/hotmail update their security policies?

I've ignored (or tried to at least) most of the twitter documents hype - but I thought this was an interesting and well written article.
CL's customizable generic dispatch is just more than :before :-) the whole thing is just tasty.
So that's what the silicon in 'silicon chip' refers to, neat. All I have to do now is work out what the carbon in 'carbon fiber' means...
Still a vote-like, 0/1 mechanism (with a pre-defined number of votes for each user) - it's hard to find the market mechanism in "everyday usage" anywhere around, that's our more innovative part :)
True Passionate Curiousity
http://cobaltsaffron.com/newsletter/CobaltSaffron-01-us.pdf
break the normal flow of control

But after the signal is fired, and handlers do their handling, normal flow is restored and the code just after the signal resumes (assuming no exceptions were thrown). COMEFROM doesn't make that guarantee, making it much harder to follow.

It isn't that code can jump to an arbitrary point in the program (a function call can do that) but that the code after that point won't get called, barring a corresponding GOTO back to the label.
Very interesting, but I still think Techcrunch is way beyond the ethical line in this whole farce.
Intro to Caching,Caching algorithms and caching frameworks part 2
Postmodernism generator
Things to do before you Die:
I just requested a media kit from a blog that covers data centers: 45$ CPM.

CPMs at big internet marketing sites are worth much more than that.
They were really cranking up the word count:

Now going back to Hacker Croll and his list of Twitter employees and other information. Twitter just happens to be one of a number of a new breed of companies where almost the entire business exists online. Each of these employees, as part of their work, share data with other employees - be it through a feature of a particular application or simply through email. As these users become interwoven, it adds a whole new attack vector whereby the weak point in the chain is no longer just the weakest application - it is the weakest application used by the weakest user. For an attacker such as Hacker Croll looking to exploit the combination of bad user habit, poorly implemented features and users mixing their personal and business data - his chances of success just got exponentially greater. Companies that are heavily web based rely largely on users being able to manage themselves - the odds are not only stacked against Twitter, they are stacked against most companies adopting this model.

Could be summarized as "Twitter used Google docs." Everything else in this paragraph repeats things from earlier. (And things from earlier repeat things from earlier.)
"iTunes has a security hole that shows credit card information in clear text..."

Where are their auditors, their bankers, and their trading partners?

SOX won't let us fart on Tuesdays but a public company can store credit card information in clear text? Unbelievable.
The software is Arts and Craft.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

(Note that he titled it "Art" and not "Science" or "mechanism".)

We're also beginning to see the formation organizations similar to Guilds in software.

& Soon we will have our own guild of Cathedral building Templars using esoteric knowledge :)

No sign of model-T on the horizon. (Remember that in software assembly line, what rolls down is not a 'copy' but another 'program'.)
Ah yes, the American optimism. Obama's hopism.

(1) Large opportunities are available for businesses to invest and make money.

- where? VCs obviously don't think so. VC down 50%
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/17/venture-capital-down-50...

(2) People start spending money again because consumer confidence improves.

- How? They have no savings, and their credit's being pulled.
You should have put in a bid then. Could have made some "easy" coin for a month's work. Only three of 59 approved vendors decided to bid which speaks for itself.

> It only takes a few pages of reading the RFP to start seeing the rampant waste. They'll be purchasing Sybase, Oracle, and MS SQL Server for the project. Why all three? That's likely 100s of thousands of dollars right there.

The actual text says that the government would prefer to leverage servers and licenses they already have and those include Sybase, Oracle, MySQL and MS SQL Server. Other databases are allowed to be proposed, but must be included in the cost (including support for the duration of the contract). The existing site uses MySQL so they are not opposed to open source.
Ask HN:  Defining Moments in History?
I just finished watching a clip on CBS's Sunday Morning about Walter Cronkite. One of the pieces was his coverage on the moon landings. Immediately after that, I tried to think of truly remarkable moments of history that have occurred during my life (25 years) that are anywhere near man landing on the moon. Besides the Internet, which can't be traced to a single day, the only thing that comes to mind is 9/11, and that's certainly not a good defining moment. Does anyone have an candidates for defining moments within the last 25 years?
Becuase we're proved that a economy based on financial engineering and construction and selling each other houses has worked so well?
What? no. You see more realtors after housing prices dropped? You see more car salespeople after car prices dropped?
In case somebody missed it (Richard Dawkins on postmodernism):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645178

Edit: here's the direct link to the article:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html
Ah yeah I suppose I should have posted it!

That is exactly the number I have. I was told it's for the region that includes Texas, but like you say, they can forward you on where you need to go, and the people at that number tend to actually be helpful.
Nov. 9, 1989: Berlin Wall fell

April, 1989: Tiananmen Square

Dec. 31, 2007: European Union drops all borders
(EU countries have essentially become like U.S. states)

Jan. 20, 2009: Barack Obama sworn in as US President
Reading this and a lot of other similar pieces makes you wish you were in a position to do something. Really though America's the only nation that could really pull off any real space progress at the moment and even that would be questionable with the current state of the enconamy.

Really though with a trillion dollar bailout, imagine the jobs that could be created and the uniting of the people with something like another space race but to mars.
Oh, I didn't see that somebody has already posted this as a link in the comments. No cross-posting was intended.
I'm familiar with TAOCP. :-)

I think it depends on what part of the software development process you're looking at. Designing new algorithms and datastructures... probably art (in the way that developing mathematical proofs is artful). Choosing from a set of well-understood algorithms and datastructures... probably engineering. Coding up said choice into something that users and other programmers will use (in the case of libraries)... I'd put it in the craft category.
I have thought about all of those, but they don't rise to the same level as the moon landing.

EDIT: The Berlin Wall would eventually come down at some point even if the Soviet Union was not on the verge of collapse. Tiananmen Square was a tragic event, but these types of events happen periodically. The European Union is the closest that comes to what I was looking for. Obama's election was just another day for me.

What I am looking for are things that people thought were truely impossible, something so remarkable that it took your breath away, either for the good or the bad.
A case for online office apps
I like the original article by DeMarco which Atwood discusses. DeMarco makes a good point that normal engineering methodology doesn't work with software. Anyone who has tried to code up something based upon an 80-page spec document written by a junior analyst who knew neither the business nor how to code might agree. Writing code is more like writing an engineering plan than it is trying to follow one. DeMarco writes about the dangers of using the wrong metrics but he doesn't offer much of a counter-proposal - something like "fail early and fail often?"
Historically the way out of these sorts of downward trends has been war of some sort. It would be interesting to see if a "science" war such as a renewed space race without the militaristic/jingoistic overtones of the moon race would serve the same purpose. I think I read too much utopic sci-fi, though.
The Berlin Wall falling was much more important than the moon landing. The latter inspired us, but the former changed everything for a huge portion of the world.
"Software Engineering is Dead" is obviously an overly sensational title, but let's look for the deeper truths.

First a little background. I have built a career developing business applications as a contractor, often in very large organizations. I am almost always very successful and I'm often regarded as a hero doing what most people here would call "just doing my job".

Why is it so easy to be a hero in the enterprise with software that would just seem ordinary in a forum like hn? Is it because enterprise programmers aren't as good as us? Is it because their managers are all phbs? Or because they don't know how to run projects?

I'd say no to all of the above. Enterprises are filled with lots of excellent people doing great work.

I think that the real problem is that the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) that so many depend on so much never really did work. Why?

Every phase depends upon Phase I, Analysis to be rigorously done. This rarely happens for 2 reasons: users often don't know what they want and most systems analysts don't know how to extract it even if they did.

So almost everything done after Phase I is built upon a foundation of sand. It's either wrong or sinking fast. And what do most people do? Everything except fixing the problem: more resources, more project management, freezing specs (which aren't right in the first place), more rigorous deadlines, etc.

But rarely does anyone attack the core problem with the SDLC: defining the expected result.

So what should we really do? Develop something, anything, quickly, cheaply, and get it out to the right users. They will instantly give you feedback. What's right, what's wrong, what's stupid, all the cool stuff that no one thought of.

No one can just sit down and write a Functional Specification for a large business application. And even if they could, you don't want them spending time on it. Better to get the right people together and find out what they need. Usually, no one of them knows what the result should be, but all together, any decent developer should be able to extract enough data to write version 1.0 of something.

It's a lot easier to judge something that exists than define something that doesn't.

The larger the organization, the more difficult it is to change their ways.

Software engineering isn't dead. It's just that the process of depending upon blueprints before you get started never worked in the first place.
2003: Human Genome Sequence
6 June 1944 (D-Day)

(potentially Dunkirk would count more)
I've seen a lot of teams, and a lot of projects either fail or succeed.

It boils down to three things: People are the most important, over-generalizations about the development process is anathema, and always adapt.

The over-generalization part is especially rampant. Bloggers or authors want to make some sweeping statement about what software engineering is. Team members that worked on one successful project want to repeat that exact experience on another project. Project Managers who measured one thing on a good project become convinced that measuring that thing was part of what made the project successful.

Yes, there is engineering at work in software development. We load test, we plan scalability, we use set theory to model data and relationships. Debugging is about hypothesis formation and testing. There's all kinds of hard empirical science going on.

At the same time, the end result, the goal, is a nebulous thing that appears different ways in everybody's head. Large parts of this process give us the freedom to creatively construct things.

People who forget the engineering part fail projects due to bad design. People who forget the creative part fail projects due to poor user acceptance.

But highly-trained and motivated adaptive teams do just fine no matter what the environment.

The ultimate truth is: there is no ultimate truth.
Well stated.

Or to put it another way: software engineering is not dead, it just happens in a much faster manner than it is commonly practiced.
This generator reminds me of the Paper generator by some MIT students..

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

..much more funny and even pdf direct output :D
I'd say the EU was the least like it...

The Moon Landing / Space Race was all about the pomp and drama - it was a race. I'd say the Berlin Wall had that level of impact.

The EU? No one really noticed that - and their still arguing over it.

I suppose it depends on how we define a "defining moment".
Kazaa to return as subscription service.
You could say the honour perhaps should perhaps lie with either:
Sputnik I, Sputnik II, Vostok I (or Wright Brothers/Kitty Hawk I guess)
- but I would contend that in a few thousand years time (and the fall of a few more empires) - the Berlin Wall will lose it's significance
From the article: """There’s no manufacturing in space, and unless I’m wrong, there’s been little research done in space which has had great practical applications (please let me know if I’m wrong about this)."""

Well there is this list http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/apollo.htm of technology developed for the space program. But if you want space-based research of economic consequence; what of all of the weather satellites, the remote-sensing work done for resource management and discovery and the microgravity metallurgy and materials science work.

This article reinforces the technological and economic illiteracy of BusinessWeek.
I will give you that, but think about what it took to get man to the moon. You can say without a doubt that nothing like that had ever been done before. That's why I say the EU was almost there, but it doesn't meet the "never been done before" level.

EDIT: Before man on the moon, I think the event that previously rose to that same level was the first atomic bomb. Before that, Kitty Hawk. That's the level of significance that I am talking about, the moments that make you go "holy crap!" Now that I think about it, the EU is not even close. Sputnik doesn't even rise to the level of significance I am looking for, though it certainly comes close.
Designing Emergent AI
Feeding Frenzy – Sharks with a Big Byte | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
I have a very early Lua client library for libixp up at http://silentbicycle.com/projects/lua-ixp-0.1.tar.gz now.

The walk function (which returns an iterator, successively returning tables with each file's stats in a directory) is not complete, it's terminating after the first file sometimes. I'll smooth that out once the server side of the library is together and testing can be self-contained.

I'd like to work on the server library sometime next week, but I'm pretty busy. Is there a better place to contact you with updates?
You were saying adsense doesn't scale. That at 500K impression you are likely to get only $169. That is simply not true.

See this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=712746
200K impressions, 1300$ income
"Develop something, anything, quickly, cheaply, and get it out to the right users. They will instantly give you feedback.... It's just that the process of depending upon blueprints before you get started never worked in the first place."

Funny, you make it sound like software engineering is dead.
Building beauty out of logarithms and cosines