skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with a poll like this, is that the only people who see the poll, are technically-minded, and there are more sides to the issue than technology.

From a technical stand-point, I completely agree - IE6 is a pain in the butt. But all the counter-arguments are more in-tune with other aspects of people lives. Most people don't give a crap what browser they use. Most people don't even know WHAT browser they use. Virtually no one who hasn't already upgraded will appreciate being forced to upgrade. If people are forced to choose certain technologies because their current choice is "holding technology back", then in my opinion the technology has failed the people.
First, I never suggested giving every dummy off the street a pass if they blow the technical portion of the interview. You're right: mistakes are acceptable. Given that, you have to base your decision on whether the person is a match for your needs on more than just a coding exercise during an interview.

Second, and more importantly, a coding exercise during an interview is long, long way from working in a startup, or working of pretty much any kind -- unless you've somehow managed to find a way to get paid for solving toy problems. I've done both, and both are hard, but in different ways. To use running analogies, working in a startup (in my experience) is a relay: you have a team, each of you is carrying your own respective bit of the endeavor, but the success or failure proposition is net across the team. In an interview, you're running a sprint, and all eyes are on you, and you alone. One feels completely different from the other, because it is.

Also, half the times (for a sample size of two) I've been asked to do a code exercise during an interview, the interviewer realized halfway through the exercise that he'd misrepresented the specifications of the widget I was supposed to make. The plural of "anecdote" may not be "data", but I've seen and heard, and can conceive of enough problems with the practice of interview coding exercises that I just can't trust them for anything more than exploring how a candidate approaches programming: the way they think.
I'm not suggesting anywhere he not go or drop out. I'm simply adding the perspective of someone 15 years down the line.
Yes.

Founder of http://www.transactor.com
Curious, I regret not getting laid in college.

Maybe it's best to accept hook-up culture for what it is, and accept that most college girls (and boys, too) are spoiled, immature, half-formed people. But where else can you find hundreds of hot young women that are looking for no-strings-attached sex?

Then again, this is Olin, which may complicate things because just about every woman you meet is almost certainly someone you're going to see again, potentially leading to much awkwardness.
I'm the founder of http://flooha.com
A really successful product is not guaranteed to remain so, but cash remains cash. I speculate that if yahoo was going to get into social bookmarking then if he hadn't sold, they'd have picked up somebody else and the competitive landscape changes drastically. To me, the big cashout means an opportunity to work on bigger projects. The personal financials are of course the most important factor. If I had a few million or a fat trust fund, I agree selling only makes sense if I figure I am getting a very good price.
I feel like Microsoft has gone through many stages as a company throughout time. Any software company could be matched to be just like microsoft at some point in microsoft's timeline. Same with google...
I really like the name. It's an instance of what I hope is a trend toward a sort of surreal micro-poetic naming scheme.
It's a bit random, but: if you're not already in good shape (and many of us hacker types aren't coming out of high school), find where the gym is and learn what to do there, and go three times a week.

College is one of the first chances where you A) generally have free access to a decent gym, B) have enough control over your own time to set a workout schedule, and C) you're generally old enough that working out will actually do something for you.

Getting in good shape will have a positive impact on your energy level, but more importantly it does wonders for your self-confidence and self-image.
Self-enforcing protocols are safer than other types because participants don't gain an advantage from cheating.

Barter is a self-enforcing protocol: nobody needs to facilitate the transaction or resolve disputes. It just works.

Except when bartering, participants do gain an advantage from cheating.
It's still a startup if you aren't funded. If you haven't launched, that I'll leave up to a judgement call.
Yes. Founder of http://www.recipepuppy.com
Watt-hours per mile is common, and easy enough for a reasonable consumer to calculate the expense of given the cost of a kWh in their neighborhood.

EPA MPG estimates for electric vehicles are unfortunately purposely distorted for the purposes of giving electric vehicles higher MPG [ http://www.sae.org/mags/AEI/6559 ]. For instance, a gallon of gasoline contains about 33 kWh of energy, but an normal car wastes about 2/3 of this, netting only 11 kWh per gallon.

Logically, an electric car should arrive at an MPG by calculating the number of miles that it would travel on this same amount of energy. Instead, the EPA has told all-electric companies that they can do this computation using 82 kWh (almost 7.5 times more than the logical value), giving all-electric cars a huge benefit (Nissan's upcoming electric has claimed 367 MPG).

Plug-in electric cars use a different value, which is somewhere between the two, giving Chevy some magic number in between. Just to confuse matters, the EPA sticker on the electric Mini quotes kWh/100 mi, giving it "33" city and "36" highway, numbers that resemble current gasoline car mileages.

(more info: http://www.hybridcars.com/fuel-economy-numbers/confusion-ove...)

[EDIT: Also, it has been said that the gasoline engine in the Volt will provide around 50 MPG. Whenever you travel farther than 40 miles (assuming a full battery), this car is no more gasoline efficient than the Prius.]
Founder of http://www.launchset.com
Unix pipes (deterministic concurrrency) are far easier to reson about than a mutitheaded shared state program (nondeterministic concurrency). But then you can of course argue that this is due to the fact that the shell with proper unix filters form a monad with cat as the unit and the pipe operation | as bind.
Quantity has a quality all its own. In particular, it means someone else suffers fixing the bug so you don't have to.
Don't do this. The name of the school on your PhD does matter.
Workstation sharing/virtualization for startup
I'm figuring out how to best stretch our funds.

I'm all for giving devs a comfortable workplace -- and that comes at a cost. Big desks and comfortable chairs are a given.

We initially wanted to set up programmers with a laptop each, and add a 22" monitor and external keyboard as extra funds became available.

I remember seeing NComputing and similar virtualization hardware that allows you to share a high-powered PC with multiple users. Is this a feasible alternative for us? Assuming that each PHP dev would be coding, SVN, testing, etc and of course researching their tasks... I'm not familiar with the CPU usage of hardcore programmers. How many would be able to share an Intel Core 2 Duo or Quad, 4GB RAM, 320 GB HD?
This can just be a temporary setup until we can afford to provide each with a laptop so they can telecommute -- would you recommend this? Would devs be just as productive as having their own machine?
Cost-wise, the initial investment appears to be at least 60% less -- but I wouldn't be too keen if productivity would suffer.
Sometimes it's easier to follow the herd. Since you're paying a lot of money for classes, might as well attend.

Keeping up with course material on your own, while skipping class, will result in 3-4 times the effort and lower grades -> you will likely work your ass off, get a mediocre grade, but have learned a lot (this avenue is more befitting for side projects). The main reason: each prof. stresses specific things in the final exam that were covered in his lecture. With a heavy course load, you cannot afford to pursue this strategy, if you want halfway decent grades.
US Consumer Credit Shows Steepest Contraction in Over 5 Decades
"Naive Set Theory" by Paul R. Halmos.
I think I view the emphasis as a substitute for reason. I (perhaps unnecessarily) reason that a reasoned opinion would substitute that reason for the emphasis, e.g., "soccer is boring because of [example of slow play], although [concession to artistry], [example of cricket's intriguing batplay in relation to soccer] makes cricket a more interesting game". In the article, hyperbole (and presumed common experience with the presumed bad Gimp UI) was a substitute for reason.

In your final line, your hyperbole supplements your reasoning without supplanting it.

(If I were to call a 'confirm password' dialog an onerous, Herculean task before talking about an otherwise unrelated part of the user experience you might expect I am poorly calibrated with the real world.)
Apps for getting things done on the Android Platform.
Secrets of the TechStars method for winning the pitch and getting the girl
Yes, I am the founder of http://StoryMash.com
Re-posting as I don't think HN liked me submitting with a bit.ly URL
Cheers
Jed
Enjoy some good conversation and some cold beers @ The West Alabama Ice House. This is the first of hopefully many fun and interesting meet ups. We are hoping to get a nice mix of hacker types. Devs, artists, EEs and musicians are all welcome.

No cover and beer ranges from $2 - $4. The Ice House has tons of seating and is an outdoors location.

Working on a possible small but nice sponsorship/giveaway. Details to come.
Imogen Heap Connects With Her Fans
I don't like how the two laptops they're using as examples in the photo at the bottom have different desktop backgrounds and screen contents. They could have at least cleared the desktop and used the same wallpaper.
Yes, http://www.fatfreecrm.com, also co-founded White Pajama, NextAge Technologies, and Fat Free Software.
I don't know about the do all the problems in a book part. There are a LOT of problems in math and science books!
Currently - http://sleep.fm and some other things too, soon to be released.
What if the homeowner truthfully and in good faith reports an accurate value for their home, and the government decides to purchase it anyways?

That assumes that the government can't already do this. They most certainly can. Even better, they can do stupid things like build High-tension powerlines the next lot over, rezone your lot into industrial, etc, etc.

This doesn't really give the government any more power, but it removes a lot of red tape, plus it ensures you get fair market for your home.

Assuming you over-report the value, you'd be making a profit on the sale - enough that moving wouldn't be much of a issue for you.

It's actually quite brilliant as it has the effect of raising taxes! If my home is market valued at $500K, I'd probably suggest I pay taxes on $550K, just so that I'd have that extra $50K in pocket if I'm inconvieneced.
I'd be curious to know what you find difficult about them, and why you think they do not teach well.

I find Euclid extraordinarily clear in his exposition of geometry. And I have not yet found a better teacher on conics than Appolonius, although Descartes comes very close with his analytic geometry.

Are there some defective constructions in the Conic Sections or in the Elements that lead you to say that "you'll know next to nothing about even basic notions of mathematics"?

It's not clear to me why you think that the ancient texts are lacking in pedagogical power, except for perhaps a personal aesthetic preference.
This assumes that a person is looking for a soulmate in university. I certainly wasn't. There's lots of benefit to dating many different women - just make sure you don't lose sight of yourself. You can't pick out the good ones if you haven't been with a few bad ones. I learned more about myself dating a few crazy girls (and it was never boring) than I did dating the straight-A overachiever.
Facebook is being investigated as a potential data source as well especially given the acquisition of FriendFeed and roll out of their new search engine.

I am of the researchers involved in the project (full disclosure) and yes we are concerned about the numbers of tweets generated by "bots" or other software although we estimated to be much lower ~25% (still significant mind you). We receive approx. 1.8 million tweets a day but it is important to note unlike similar projects we make no attempt to quantify the sentiment of individual tweets and instead only say something about significantly large portions of them (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly) time frames.

Our method has proven useful on song lyrics, presidential speeches and blogs. See our publication in the Journal of Happiness Studies (http://www.springerlink.com/content/757723154j4w726k/?p=b9b0...) for more info, open access license.
How to Solve It seems to be aimed at math teachers, but it is useful for almost anyone wanting to learn more math since it gives ideas about how to think about maths.
In what situation would someone prefer glossy? I don't get that. Glossy is obviously much worse. Can someone explain this to me?
Poll: Are You A Founder
I thought this should be a poll to give a general idea of the numbers, since those who are not founders will select out of posting on the original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755291

Select both that apply, and generally keep the comments on the original thread.
Work at a startup
Do not work at a startup
Trend to Watch: Trust in Large Corporations Is Running Out
You say that "our understanding of mathematics and methods of learning have changed substantially since then".

While I of course agree that we now have a lot more mathematics, including non-Euclidean geometry, I don't see what thay has to do with the value of Euclid and the other ancient mathematicians. I'm not recommending Euclid and Appolonius as a complete mathematical education, but a good place to start.

What are the methods of learning that we now have that invalidates Euclid and the others from being valuable teachers of mathematics?
Cool. Even the handsome narcissists like me get tired of looking at themselves all day long.
> The choices on both axes were scaled to between 0 and 1.

That I don't remember, but I do remember that they had sex on one of the furniture items in question :)
i'm the founder of http://urfastr.net and another one not yet annonced
They have a monopoly on non-horrible smartphones.

Including the iPhone in the 4.3 billion worldwide phones is like including PCs in electric typewriter sales; sure they can do some of the same things, but they're clearly different products.
It's interesting how responsive Apple is to customer feedback. A lot of times, customers complain about Apple's new product leaving out some feature, and then the next revision magically incorporates that feature (a good example would be Firewire on the 13-inch macbooks).

They aren't at all vocal about this, so people see Apple as being super closed, but I think that they do care a lot about what customers think. They design products that people want for a reason. Sure it involves thinking outside the box and offering products that people never imagined asking for. But it also requires listening to customers' opinions and integrating that into future product revisions.
Nseries | Modern-Gadgets.Com
Minibosses - my favorite video game music band so far.

http://www.minibosses.com/

One full album available for free on their website, check it out!
The point that I was trying to make is that a well designed concurrent program is often easier to reason about than an event driven program. Even if it didn't have benefits scaling to multiple processors and hiding latency, concurrent programming would have advantages in clearly structuring programs.

A great talk about the advantages of concurrent programming in producing clear and understandable program structure can be seen in Rob Pike's newsqueak tech talk (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344)
Cofounder of http://isyncd.com going after sharepoint and box.net. Previously founding country manager for friendster philippines.
You didn't do anything wrong. A newsworthy public comment made by a public person (certainly 'newsworthy' and 'public' in the context of a site called 'Hacker News').

What Joshua (enabled by PG) did was simply silly. Don't add to the silliness by brown-nosing.
If they did that, they'd have to look at self-styled 'expers' who write books on topics like weight loss etc, with no formal qualification.

And there are a lot of those.
Gonna check this at home. I was really willing to change the songs on my MP3 player anyway.
An interesting thought, and we may eventually move that way, but I suspect we are a long way off from that.
I think the point was that it is hard for participants to cheat, the owner isn't going to go lower than a certain amount; thus, the owner is always going to break even or profit. If the owner puts the price too high then the buyer is no longer going to be a buyer, but a a person who is walking away from the deal. Kind of self-enforced because the person who is selling is not going to make money by putting too high a price on goods.
"I think they do a really good job in the problem domains they are designed for."

The problem domain of concurrency?

"What is missing is something that provides good-quality abstractions, high-quality static analysis and very strong safety guarantees in the general case."

They have excellent abstractions and great safety guarantees. Not sure what you mean by static analysis. A concurrent program is non-deterministic, what is going to go under static analysis? I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding something here.

"software with huge failure tolerances by virtue of being able to reconfigure and coalesce resources at will."

Wasn't this the whole point of Erlang? You know like telecom switching?
1. don't watch tv or play video games, find more productive and ultimately rewarding ways to spend your leisure time, like playing a sport (team sport in particular is good, geeky choice is ultimate frisbee, but any team sport is good) learning an instrument, martial arts, theatre production, volunteer work, student government, etc.

2. you won't learn real programming in school. take real CS classes like algorithms, data structures, and object oriented design, they are essential, but recognize that they won't teach you how to be a real programmer. real programming cannot be taught, it can only be learnt. the toy projects that you will be doing in class are too simple for you to get a sense of the type of problems you will routinely face in a real project. they are valuable in teaching specific things you need to know, but if you want to get a real sense of what code looks like, join an open source project or find a good internship.

3. i reccomend taking theory of computation and compilers as early as you can, they will help your understanding of your other classes a lot.

4. take more math, especially statistics and game theory clases

5. take at least a few philosophy classes

6. take the time to learn how to make friends and meet girls, college is the best time to learn these skills, if you put it off later than that, you will get further and further behind other people in social skills and end up bitter and disappointed like pwnix_rising.
The mission has a Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/LCROSS-Lunar-Impactor-Mission/...

Hasn't anyone told NASA that Facebook is so last season? The probe should be Twittering.
Twitter's Life Cycle & What It Means To Marketers
Yes, co-founder and head of development for http://bigfolio.com + http://nextproof.com

Currently in our 5th year. "Ramen profitable" on day 1, and now "expensive sushi profitable".

I don't know if we're still considered a "startup" but we still try and act like one ... new, cool stuff always in the works.
That is one fugly slow website.
How about people learn critical thinking and filter out the quacks for themselves? I don't care to pay for nanny-state regulation, or have content censored because some source doesn't have a "formal qualification." They will always be playing "catch-up" to the latest scams anyway, as this article demonstrates.
And then you publically complain about being downvoted?
They look nice inside when there's no crap on them?
It tends to make the screen look brighter and more vibrant. Most consumers seem to think that means it's a "better" screen.
I'm the cofounder of NewsCred. http://www.newscred.com is our consumer site, but we are more focused on a B2B solution (not public yet).
Obviously we agree. The "linked list" is the metaphor here. You always should hire the best person that will respond to the needs of his/her role.
I strongly disagree. College is a great time to take the next, probably awkward step with the opposite sex. If you don't, you're stuck learning those skills while you're in "the real world", a setting which is generally less amenable to meeting lots of people who are around your age, thus inhibiting your rate of learning.

The goal is not to meet a soulmate at 18, but to become comfortable interacting with potential soulmates.
and I just bought a macbook pro 1 week ago :-( ... hopefully I can return it...
Me too! Well, not Gravatar. But GitHub.
Looks like consumers had too much credit.
Yup, http://facetoflife.com
Well, I've lived there in total for about 5 years and nobody in all that time ever remarked on this, but I did notice that older Canadians tend to favour (...) British-English spelling, the younger generation is much more US-English slanted.

Agreed on the governmental stuff, that's where the big differences are, but then again, those have to be bi-lingual anyway.
Taliban Now Winning
Remember that many people do not have either cash and freedom OR a big popular project. While nowhere near the level of Delicious, I had a project acquired, and ended up with neither cash and freedom or a project to work on in the end. But, I'm not ready to say I wish I wouldn't have sold it. It's part of learning and I'll have a different perspective next time around. So, while I know where you're coming from, I'm not going to feel too bad for you ;-). Seems like you'll now nkow what to consider next time.

BTW, I still use Delicious every day, thanks for creating it.
Wow, horrible application. First, Chrome gave me warning that ActionScript is too slow. And when you click on 'tabs', a new page is loaded even though it's a flash application! And why do they need a separate page for this? Why is it not accessible when I right click a Flash movie?
Amen to this. I've never understood the appeal of glossy displays. To me they're almost unusuable except under the most ideal lighting conditions.
Yup. http://skribit.com "cure writer's/blogger's block"
Y'all should watch this video : http://www.vimeo.com/3734864 . It's an excellent documentary on the chiptune scene. Do a search on vimeo for part 2 and watch it before someone pulls it off.
Thanks, it would be awesome to integrate this with Fluther. But there's still a lot of work to make this work especially on the authorization front. Let me know if you have any thoughts on that. And would you be willing to send Fluther notifications to a public open source web service such as Growl.fm or would you, as a website owner, prefer to run your own XMPP server to pass notifications directly to the user?