skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes and No.

I am currently in Portland and we started our company here (Mugasha) about a year ago. Cost wise, its much cheaper to live here which definitely reduces burn-rate. The community is pretty cool, lots of awesome people who are constantly throwing local tech events. Lot of designers and developers (creatives) in the area.

What is missing?
For one. Statup types. Most people I have come across in Portland don't seem to be the type that would build companies. People seem to be working on mostly side-projects. The community is very "social media" driven and there is not a lot of chatter going around on about how do you build businesses?

Second, would be. Mentorship. It has been fairly difficult for us to find people who have been there and done it. People who have built companies in the past. There are no VC's here. Very few angels here, at least angels who are focused in the web/tech space.

I think Portland is a great place to start a project. Potentially meet co-founders. Although, It's hard for me to say that I would continue to build my company here.
Whole volume encryption works, although it can be a bit cumbersome.
I don't know why and I can't explain it, but I felt really touched and inspired playing that.

Being able to take "that leap" against all the in-game nay-sayers, actually felt as real as the day I left my job of 5 years to do it myself.
This is downright dumb considering the recent surge in Ruby and Javascript.

And please, please, no C++ unless you understand what you're doing.

However, I think nobody cares about this particular university anyway?
Angel Funding Advice
But you're not actually using version control (and newproject isn't a valid git repository) until you make a commit.

While that's a bit of git wonkery, it exposes an underlying truth about VC in general: You need to have something to commit to be using it. Whether you init the repository before or after the first file hits the disk is irrelevant.
I think you're contradicting yourself when you argue that economics is not a science and yet also argue that central tenets of modern econ have been "proven wrong." By what means are you claiming they have been "proven" wrong if not scientifically?
Yes, but my argument is that such an instantiation could easily be determined automatically. The declaration

T::bar x;

makes no sense under any circumstances if T::bar is not a type. Ergo, putting typename in front is redundant.
Could potentially make OpenID useful. But I think there's more potential to using a unified ID across the web than just sharing metadata. For example interaction between two services to which you have authenticated.
I use the title of "Product Manager" because that is what role I play.
Sincerely,

Paul Blart

Mall Cop
I think that all comp sci students should begin by learning to become competent in C. Aside from having the widest support across platforms, and being syntactically similar to many other languages, it's the closest you can get to understanding how computers work at a low level without dropping into asm. Frankly, knowing these things will make you a better programmer.

That said there is definitely a benefit to exposing students to higher level languages, both for productivity in solving more complex problems and understanding what the syntax and expressions of these languages have to offer. And by higher language I don't mean C++ :)
The worst of the Culture of My Opinion; Twitter in real life.
So I see the title. I glance at the picture of the guy, and immediately my eye drops down to his bio

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is a media analyst; documentary filmmaker, and author. His latest book is Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.

How the world became a corporation? WTF?

They lost me as a reader right there.
Smalltalk may be dead but there are millions of smartphones using Objective C which is in many ways a direct descendant.
And depending on the estimate, somewhere between 90-97% of emails are spam.

That doesn't reduce the value of email for those that are received by people though.
I'm not sure how long you lived in each of these places. The infant mortality rate (deaths per 1,000) is a popular metric among those in the industry, and in the Czech Republic it's 3.8; in America, it's 6.3. In the Czech Republic everyone is covered. There's no way to lose a house, a car, or even a chunk of savings over some expensive operation. There's no "qualification"; no one is turned down or turned away. Rich or poor, you're simply covered.
Apple makes hardware too, as its major products. They're as much a hardware company as they are a software company. The cash cache gives them a lot of flexibility. Microsoft was able to use its cash for the Xbox, and Apple can use its cash for all its stuff (iPhone prototypes, tablets, whatnot).
Vice President for Special Projects
Marinetti's futurist cookery
Did anybody else think of Ford Prefect and his theory that unless human beings are constantly communicating, they shrivel up and die?
Recovery.gov, perhaps one of the best-known of the new sites, offering up details of how resources from the Recovery Act are being allocated.

Recovery.gov is know for costing $18 million for something that could be mimicked with a Wordpress theme and a flash slideshow.

Although I do find them interesting because they apparently have a pagerank of 10, higher than that of Congress, the Senate, the President, Yahoo, MSN, or iGoogle, and tied with Google itself.
Stack-overflow-community
taught 300 students in Kabul, Afghanistan at one go (English Class) - what we did was we had PowerPoint, we had a microphone (connected to a mixer and JBL speakers) - and everyone had a sheet so they can follow the lessons, even had think-pair-share (using the PowerPoint as prompts) - had 5 of these classes going at the same time in Kabul University and 1 at the Kabul Polytechnic simultaneously. So you could ask 300 students all at the same time if you set it up properly :)
Personally, I wouldn't touch 'em with a ten foot pole, as either an angel or an entrepreneur. I'm watching a friend's startup get flushed down the toilet by these right now.

The tax issue is real, but only delayed by avoiding a valuation. I think more creative forms of equity compensation are a better solution.
I almost agree with you, but assert that "frequently" isn't good enough; the Chicago school's attempt to rely on empirical evidence is necessarily incomplete, just due to the sheer volume of data.

That said, I tend to subscribe to the Austrian school, which I believe we can agree does not qualify as a science.
All my business cards I've chosen when working for other companies say only "Programmer." I like that.

But when you're a founder or such, you have to cop to it. You don't want it to look like you're evading responsibility or jerking people's chain.

So it's "CTO and Co-Founder" on my business cards and (when appropriate) on email.
It seems like a solution looking for a problem to me. I have an issue.

Anyone out there looking for something like this?
How is the performance? I have no experience with whole volume encryption, do you have any useful links?
It depends... when speaking with people I want to make deals with, I use my title. If I'm dealing with users/customers, I just ID myself as co-founder.
> If the goal is to clone an existing application and just move it to the web, what actual problem is being solved?

As soon as you sit down at a different computer, neither the application nor the work you did with it are available to you. That's a problem solved by hosting it on the web, though there are other ways to do it.
Someone write a science fiction story and explain dark energy as mixing caused by living ramscoops.
Our software works on IE6-7 & Firefox, but yes, it can be a nightmare to support newer browsers.
Ask HN: Any ideas for a MS thesis in networking?
Hi,
I am starting on my MS thesis this year. I am looking around for some good areas in networking to do my thesis in. I worked in VANETs ( Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks ) for my BS degree. I didn't find the field that fun though. Can someone suggest some good topics in networking to work in, you know just throw in some ideas, then I will research about them more to see what I like and if it is good for a one-year MS thesis work. Please !
Chief Nerd
Not to mention the influence of Smalltalk and Obj-C on Java.

(See, e.g., http://www.virtualschool.edu/objectivec/influenceOnJava.html )
New Technology Incubator On The Search For ‘Rising Stars’ - WSJ
The College of Computing has been alienating their more academic members in favor of "industry" orientation. I suspect that this comes from trying to increase funding, but more simply it is indicative that those making the decisions no longer have a clear vision of what they are teaching students. It isn't enough to say that they are showing preference to C based languages, as one of the primary "weeder" courses which was taught in C was discontinued years ago.

I don't know if this uncertainty and doubt of academic computer science is limited to Georgia Tech. Just recently, MIT dropped their scheme course for one in python, with the goal of being more "practical". Is it better for undergraduate computer science to be practical or academic? I will suggest that if students don't learn abstract computing when they are undergrads, they are never going to.
Poll: What's your Health Insurance status?
All this talk about health insurance, so I'm wondering what your status is.
No Insurance whatsoever
Bought my own insurance.
Medicaid/Medicare
Health Insurance through college.
Health Insurance through parents.
Health Insurance through employer.
Please add a "Health Insurance through my country" option for those of us who don't live in the US.
You should use whatever you think your actual title is at this point in time. "President" or "Founder" would probably work well. For a small shop "CEO" and "VP" titles can be a little over the top. 90% of the time, this isn't an issue, but in some cases people will honestly have more of an impression of "Oh, isn't that cute!" instead of "Oh, he is is the CEO". I guess what I'm saying is that in general you will do well with no over or understating your reality in the company.

Do what you say, say what you do.
Man TweetShell: A Browser-Based Bash Terminal For Twitter
browser-based terminal for twitter
I agree entirely with this. I am not intending to start a flame war here, but this is how I see it:

My rationale is that C/C++-based software powers nearly of all computer CPU cycles these days either directly or indirectly.

From mobile phones to massive distributed systems like Google, it's there. It's probably even there in your fridge or smoke alarm these days albeit somewhat feature constrained.

For the Ruby, PHP and Python users, most of your language is written in C!

The .Net framework is mostly C/C++ underneath (Google for shared source CLI). Even the C# compiler is written in C++.

Java is mostly written in C as well.

The iPod software is written in C (not it's not objective-C - check out the About/Legal section for the libraries it uses).

Objective-C even started as a load of C preprocessor macros.

Ultimately, C/C++ is the foundation of the most software in frequent use, the Internet and our society. That's why they should teach it over Lisp/Scheme/Smalltalk/etc etc.

Oh and possibly just as importantly, it works.
Dave Winer Admits He Didn’t Create RSS
I don't have any experience with Zend, but I've heard its just a very heavy weight install.

Kohana is super light and easily extended, though you lose a lot of the fluffy libraries.
Infant mortality rates are not a fair metric for comparison because the point of viability is significantly earlier in the US that in most other countries in the world. When adjusted, US infant mortality rates are some of the best in the world. The US is also one of the best in terms of experimental treatments, emergency room care, cutting edge surgery techniques and specialty care for diseases such as cancer. The downside is that care is generally more costly in the US, but there is a reason why the wealthy individuals in many other countries come to the US when they need heart surgery etc. The challenge of reform will by to preserve the really innovative and successful aspects of the US health care system, while expanding coverage affordably.
That's not pointless babble - that's social grease. I do wish writers wouldn't take everything that doesn't have a clearly defined goal and label it pointless...
Well, that's OAuth - which allows you to tell each service that the other can use it.
Do not lie to me.
The root problem is not the teachers’ union, or the principals, or the school boards or the framers of hiring/firing policy. The root problem is us Californians, as a body: we’ve set up a legislative and budget process that is unwilling to pay for anything, and now we have no way to raise money to keep state services going. That means primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, state parks, etc. etc. are all feeling the crunch.
If the person is willing to download the movie from the internet (illegally), why would they even pay for Netflix in the first place. And once they do start downloading they'll start questioning why they have to pay. It seems like this 30 day thing wouldn't really change things, or that it would screw Netflix too.
Express Yourself (and your company)
Sometimes I feel like any newer language is said to be influenced by an older one...
C (not C++) can be a secret weapon too, if it absolutely has to be as fast and efficient as possible.
Hear, hear. I already have a general-purpose programming language that allows me to do most things relatively trivially. I want to know why I should add Haskell to my toolbox, not replace my perfectly good hammer with it. For instance, I learneda while back that stable, asynchronous, distributed networking applications are made trivial by the likes of Erlang. That's a good reason to learn that type of language.

Haskell seems like a nice language, but I'm not yet convinced it is worthy of a slot.
Ask HN: Which MMORPG do you play?
Ask HN: Which MMORPG do you play?
I had a similar experience, if I'm interpreting this correctly, in that my university was pretty focused on the theory. I had a lot of CS courses where we were programming in "pen and paper." When we did write code it was often Java, but you knew that any course you took the professor could swap in pretty much anything else. Depending on the AI professor, you'd work in Java or Scheme. Compilers class could be a C-like language targeting MIPS with the compiler written using C++ or it could be a Java-like language targeting the JVM with the compiler in Java (though I should say these "little languages" were probably very similar because they were a very small subset of their respective languages).

I think if you learn the fundamentals (and that often means having a good grasp on C) it shouldn't be too terrifying to pick up at decent grasp on lots of languages.
US News says georgia tech is the #4 engineering school in the US...
That's great idea - I've seen Brad talk about this kind of thing back when he was heavily involved in LJ - and I think it has a lot of potential for bridging the gap between email addresses and URLs, thus meaning that anyone at all can cope with OpenID and the like.

And by making it extensible (I love the idea of the "well-known" folder on the protocol page) it can be used for a whole host of future uses. Very nicely done.

EDIT:
http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/wiki/WebFingerProtocol is the protocol page.
How is the choice of C/C++ a decision in favor of simplicity?
And that would be a pretty silly thing to say, wouldn't it?
Too bad any synopsis you read pretty much blows the surprise.
NYT: The Gap Between Google and Rivals May Be Smaller Than You Think
Sounds like an interesting idea, although I'm generally against centralization for stuff like this. The copy on the main jshub page doesn't explain the concept nearly as well as the blog post; just reading the main page would leave me with very little idea of what you're proposing.
"Web programming is difficult in a different way than say, compiler construction or kernel programming... Web programming is mad due to integration issues and malicious users"

To me, web programming isn't as well-defined as most programming topics, and requires competency in too many domain-specific areas for one person to master all of it.

Assuming you know what you want your language/web site to look like, compare..

Writing a parser generator, parsing the tree, optimizing the instructions, generating the instructions, regression testing, benchmarking

with..

Designing a database schema, maintaining HTML/CSS, making a pretty design, writing Javascript, safely deploying, configuring web servers, generating test environments for all browser/OS combinations, doing usability testing, and making sure you're not giving away any of your users' data.

A lot of the compiler-writing phases are yes/no (language design aside), and a lot of the web phases can't be answered easily. E.G. "Is our login system secure?" "Well, probably... Dave's pretty good with this stuff and he thinks it is."
Wikipedia:

RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9.[4] In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91,[2] which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer's scriptingNews syndication format.[7] Libby also renamed RSS "Rich Site Summary" and outlined further development of the format in a "futures document".[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Flagged.
Reports of the Rails Envy podcasts death have been greatly exaggerated.
Yep, that is the IHS I meant. I wouldn't be so quick to complement the VA, they too have a lot of problems.
I didn't realize there were so many options: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)

501(c)(3) would work for the Dojo under Education, [Technical] Literacy, and Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals.

Also, being as helpful as ever, google tells me 501(c)(3) = 450,588,064,374 m/s
Are You There Aliens? It's Me, Earth
Everyone says that C is as close as you can get to how computers work, but I can't agree with this anymore. C stack management and function calling requires work that is not part of a CPU. malloc and free do not map to anything at the hardware level, these are OS calls. The closest C gets you to the "computer" is pointer arithmetic and manual memory management. If you want to teach someone how basic hardware works, start with an arduino and assembly. If you want to learn how to program modern applications, use a modern language (Java, C#, JavaScript, python, ruby).

I think that people talk about C as an important language because it is difficult to write programs in. To these people it is a badge of honor to write clean, correct C code. Here's the rub: C absolutely sucks at networking, and concurrency, security and readability.

Every year that goes by, C becomes less useful. How is this a good language to teach students? (Edit: BTW, This is the Computer Science curriculum, which is separate from Computer Engineering. Georgia Tech's CS curriculum had no mandatory hands on hardware classes.)
I suppose this would be the perfect place for the following joke:
Most of my bad habits have had gray hair and foreign names. I don't have any at the moment, so I guess that makes me perfect (for now).

On a more serious note: My sense of humor is a bad habit that gets me into hot water. (Thus I imagine this post will be badly downmodded into serious negatives. ;-) ) I have half-baked plans to do a blog or webcomic or something as an outlet in hopes of spending less time in hot water.
CS departments are just less and less able to maintain illusions about what they really are -- trade schools for cranking out interchangeable corporate programmers. And there's nothing wrong with that. Honesty and unity of purpose are good things. Lisp and school never got along anyway. Lisp is for hacking. Its interests have moved elsewhere.
well, the opening screen does show you the controls, and the "play" button are strong implications that you're supposed to interact and play the game. but i admit i couldn't tell when it "started" exactly
I also like the VP of Sales pitch if you want an out in any negotiation, "well I have to talk to higher management, but what if I could do xyz for you..."
Don't. :-p You could learn entire languages (programming or otherwise) with the time you spend on those.
Saying Smalltalk and C... Oh boy.. That's the danger of the beer goggles.
General engineering and computer science are separate rankings. For 2009, they are #6 in "Computer Engineering", behind MIT, Stanford, CMU, UC Berkeley, and UIUC. This is actually a substantial improvement from the 12th place that I remember. Maybe "industry orientation" improves your US News ranking :-/
Programming is my MMORPG.

I often take on quests into GitHub, Savannah, or SourceForge.

I belong to several guilds like #rubyonrails and #mysql.

And best of all, my MMORPG pays me.
I lived a long enough to know and I don't know about metrics but about real living.

Not sure about "everyone covered" part because in other Eastern Europe countries if you don't pay in cash nobody is looking at you. I don't believe the Czech are more advanced.

The official "coverage" is a myth. If you are over 60 better don't go in hospital because the "policy" is to increase the mortality rate. Why - because the government do not have to pay the pension. Don't believe it? My wife is talking with her mother every Saturday by the phone and I know how it is.

Do you believe a simple over the counter medicine for arthritis is considered a miracle there? This is what many people here in US do not know - here in US we have the best medications that are really effective when compared with medications from other countries.

The technology - this is beyond comparison - for example the scanners - in Eastern Europe there is 1 scanner to probably 1 mil people.

These are the facts I have from personal experience.
SO_LINGER is not the same as Apache's "lingering close"
Make something up, make yourself the "Senior Sale Maker"
Sigh, again? I don't follow vulnerabilities that well but isn't this the third NULL pointer vulnerability this year?

I run a Debian server but strangely there are no kernel updates.
"one of the best, if not the best, news/article filter out there. ... if you remove the coding and start-up articles ... a super-interesting collection of smart writing and interesting thinking."

Rather ironic.
English makes a lot of sense to me, but Chinese just doesn't. Can't you see how nicely English hangs together, and how it expresses things so clearly? The pictographic alphabet and grammar and syntax of the Chinese language... it's just not as elegant or powerful.
I put my degree BSc (Hons) even though a friend says it's irrelevant.

I earned those letters dammit!
What a pretentious writing style
What the heck is this site? A personal vendetta on Dave Winer?
Slate: Why You've Stopped Watching CNBC
GM: Still Making the Same Marketing Mistakes
I've just been using Founder... especially since it's jut me here.