skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stross' blog entry is interesting. It's good to have somebody like him lay out the math in regards to space exploration and colonization.

I agree -- the only smart thing to do is to advance research into things that lower the cost. If you asked somebody from 1850 what it would take to visit the moon, you'd get a response much like Stross': it's simply a matter of technology.

I believe that field propulsion will eventually be invented and will save the day for a lot of these issues, but I base that completely on faith in technological progress.
It works both ways. Sometimes I want to throw ideas around with a partner and other times I want to go deep inside an intuitive thought process. The key is to recognize what wants to happen at any given moment, and to have a culture that respects that flow. It really bugs me when people try to impose a predefined process on that. But it also bugs me when people come up with reasons to say co-programming isn't productive, when experience shows that it clearly often is. (Not that you were doing either of these things.)
"I think we're agreeing."

Yes we are.

"As I do for all blogs, I just assumed the courtesy implicit prelude: "This is my opinion shaped by my experiences and most likely only applies to the system I'm currently interacting with.""

As did I, but if, as a writer, I made an unqualified claim (even if true) that is completely out of whack with my readers experience, I think it is fair to get push back. This is perhaps due to my coming across this article on HN vs directly on the original site.

I think the article is a decent one (not great, but decent).

"I mostly agree with his sweeping generalization if applied to, say, the subset of startups that get coverage on Techcrunch."

As would I. But this is HN. :-)
I think you should post a job offer. Nice sentiments are appreciated, of course, but people actually might want to know about you first and what you want done. Otherwise your post has plenty of warm feelings and zero information, as it is.
No I did not, butI read papers, written by the author.
Indeed it is slow, but still be good for final compilation.
Alas it is r4rs, and also I heard that it sometimes generate incorrect code. Still Scheme is better choice in my opinion for performance sensitive code, than ruby/python.
Signs of a Programmer Created UI
What does it mean when the article says "perhaps we can credit it to his Midwestern roots for his drive"? I've never lived in America long enough to understand the differences between Americans from different parts. Anyone willing to give me a crash course?
All the good ones are probably working on their own ideas.
Do you think IMVU would be the great company it is today if it started with two product marketing folks and one business "model engineer" and all the programming was outsourced to "commodity" coders in elance.com or getafreelancer.com?
My experience with pair programming:

It is so great when the other person is very good/smart at programming. You sense that your work is way more than the sum of the individual parts. It is like an explosion of creativity because you don't stop when you have a block and the other has not, or he has a block and you have not.

It is not great when the other person is not good/smart. You make all the work, the other can only spot the obvious, and makes the sum way less than individual parts. Feels like an endless drain that won't finish ever.

In world war they experimented with airplanes pilots: creating groups with the best ones, letting other groups with the not so good. It was fantastic for the elite groups, but bad for the mediocre ones.

They mixed groups with good and mediocre people and it made the mediocre turn good, but the good didn't became elite.

So I think this has pros and cons, and is not for everyone.
Also, in the U.S., the poor wouldn't buy vegetables, they'd buy fast food.

Maybe there's a "do-gooder" entrepreneurial opportunity: show poor people how much fun vegetables can be.
LOL "TriinT"
I know what you mean. :)

I think I'll keep reading PHD comics, just because it's really funny. I don't relate it to grad-school as such. Just the whole exaggerated sense it is written in.
Badoo – Fotos von Ileana
I wasn't trying to claim you don't understand python, simply that the only way to be CPU bound on multiple cores with a single python process (as is claimed) is to be running non-pure python code that unlocks the GIL before doing CPU intensive work.
that seems to be a reaction to an exaggeration of what Tim said. He clearly said(emphasis mine)

"I was the tech lead responsible for scalability/reliability at IMVU for a long time, but eventually our bottleneck clearly shifted from reliability back to marketing/product development. "

I read it as, "Once we got reliability sorted out, the bottleneck moved to marketing/product development."

He never said IMVU could have been built without good programmers(of which class, he is an instance), but product dev/marketing became (or were) equally important (or more important) and so he moved to that team. At least that's how I read it
You probably missed the point - my concern is not the speed of compilation _of_ _the_ _compiler_ _itself_ - it is totally irrelevant, what is important is the performance of _created_ _compiler_, which is going to be ok, taking into account the quality of Stalins optimizer.
I was mocking the author's format--your immediate reaction would be better addressed to him.
"but that it was literally a printout of stories that had appeared the day before on the Times's web site."

Not really true. NYT posts the bulk of their front page material online early in the morning. Usually 3-4AM Eastern. This usually includes editorials as well. I assume it goes live online when the articles are finalized for print. This isn't set in stone of course. So someone sleeping a normal schedule getting their paper at 7 or 8AM is seeing mostly fresh content.
Totally! These tools are best used in a flexible environment, when you're in need or the situation calls for it. I think it is pretty safe to say that "this way all the time" is wrong for all values of "this way".
Aah, the elusive rockstar coder.

I would suggest you rewording when looking for a coder as in your case: explain briefly what is expected of them, what they would be doing, the technologies/languages in use. If those are too specific or have not decided yet, then you're looking for a technical co-founder instead of a coder.
The Happiness Gap is back
Its like how everyone has an idea for an AWESOME computer game, if only they could find (coder|artist|...)
Do a search for naked Friday. It's already happening on the site now. But the big problem is it's pedobear central. Most of these kids are too young. Sounds like a big problem they better nip in the bud now.
for bugs, i find rubber-duck pairing tends to get most of the advantages of pair-programming. for the c-c-c, i was just meaning toying around with new code "ideas". I suppose parallelizing approaches is a good optimization for a certain class of solving strategies, but I was more meaning to imply that your coworkers may have insight into other things (one of my coworkers is all about python, another used to do natural language stuff and i happen to have a degree in psych, so we all bring a different perspective to the same problems, and that is useful.)
SICP is a really good book to learn what is abstraction in programing, but keep in mind that it intentionally uses very limited range of features of actual Scheme to achieve its goal---here by "actual Scheme" I mean Scheme that is used to write real programs. Some people seem to get an impression from SICP that Scheme is minimalistic and you have to write your own structure or object abstraction using cons cells and closures, and conclude it is not a practical language you can use in your jobs.

Any modern Scheme implementation, in which you can write code at work, consists of not only the standard core language (RnRS) but also a large body of SRFIs (a kind of common libraries) and implementation's extensions. Unfortunately the extension part is fragmented among implementations, but in general, any decent implementation is far from "minimalistic" and comes with rich tools. SICP tells that Scheme allows you to make your own abstraction, but that doesn't mean you have to make ones every time.
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Advice to a beginning graduate student: do a start up instead ;)
Thanks to all TC50 STAFF Making our time there awesome
Not bad. Also not a very professional name for a "professional Twitter client."
There's a lot of filler in there, but one advice that I found interesting was to write right back what you're reading (I take it to refer to technical material and not exposition - e.g. proofs and definitions). Anyone has any experience with trying that?

(I've tried this with math books before, but it always felt too tedious to keep up. But I suspect I may have tried to hard, going for a nicely formatted shortened exposition of the entire material; I didn't try to simply jot proofs and formulas down as I was reading them).
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I agree. However the point I was trying to make is that technology expertise continues to be a "scarce talent" which seems to be the opposite view of that supported by Tim's post.
We're hiding from you! Check behind the couch
Er... castes != cultures.
Yeah, there was another post talking about how important context is. The basic functionality of DailyBooth isn't that different, but the communities are almost nothing alike -- except, of course, for the memes that originated on 4chan.
I agree :)

Both replies and votes go to controversial posts more then to "common sense" posts. It's not surprising - replying and voting require some amount of initiative end enthusiasm, however small. It's worth mentioning that _always_ informative posts get votes, and usually replies, so at least in one respect the system doesn't fail us.

I do miss slashdot's vots. There is something very satisfying in voting Insightful, Interesting, Funny or Over/Underrated, instead of just up or down.

Anyways, I think pg made the right choice. Better to invest in keeping the community small and quality constant then in a complicated moderating system. At least for HN.
Geometry of the restricted Boltzmann machine
H-D Non-Linear Variable Selection through Hierarchical Kernel Learning
The short version:

People who grow up on farms or in farming communities are widely supposed to be honest, plain spoken, unassuming and religious.

People who grow up in the big cities of the east coast are expected to be cunning, devious, greedy, atheistic and untrustworthy.

People who grow up in the affluent suburbia of the west coast are generally thought of as creative, decadent, and prone to inappropriate cultural exploration, believing in strange gods, making love to trees, etc.

In reality these regional stereotypes are as misleading as any national caricature.
Netflix Prize Movie Similarity Visualization
Is it a startup if it's developed by a consulting firm?
Percentage growth comparisons between companies of different sizes are meaningless. When you're small you can 'outgrow' anything substantially larger than you with ease. It only starts to count when you're of equal size, reasonably big and outgrowing your competitors by a significant margin.

Any startup will grow 1000's of % in the first couple of years, that's the easy part, you get that growth for free. After all 10 * 500 users is 5000 users, 1000% growth. But it doesn't mean much.
May I ask you what tools you use in Ruby?
No matter what how much damage we do to this planet, we are still the only species who have a chance of making it off the planet before it smashes into the sun.

You can say what you want about us and how beautiful nature is, but in the end there are thousand of species that can fly but only one that can play the guitar, thousands of species that can walk, but only one that invented the car, a million species that breath but only one that build a ship to sail under the waters...

The point of all this is that the human species really is something special.
We can debate the performance of a hypothetical compiler for eternity, or we can cite examples; slow compilers written in a non-C language along with publicly available input data.

i.e. benchmarks or it didn't happen.
That is actually a special case: There aren't a lot of people who are both artists and coders, so there would nearly always be someone who would be looking for the other part.

And no, I don't have an idea for an awesome game. But that is because I am working on one, so I will properly be inspired by next summer. Oh well.
Or full time for someone else - only a small number of the professional programmers I know do 'out of hours' coding for fun or profit. The ones that do tend to be restricted to a fairly narrow age range and are working on their own things or with a well-trusted friend.

Despite the fact that I am running my own business I frequently get asked to work on <an idea that is sometimes good but usually not interesting to me> by <a person I have met once with no idea of how hard their concept actually is to implement> who seem to be under the impression that because I can code I'd be happy with a 5% equity stake and will jump right on it.

I take it as a compliment that they think highly of my abilities and try to be helpful by trying to point them at people who are looking for work, suggesting some ways they can make their pitch more credible (for example, committing to the prospective programmer how many hours they will put into PR and sales work), and resetting their expectations up to about 50% of equity.

Right now the tables are turned on me as I would love a good PR and sales person to work with (not business admin - I'm good at that). But I need someone who can fund themselves for 12 months and so that puts me firmly on the wrong end of the supply/demand equation for once. The experience has given me a lot more empathy with the B school grads out there looking for coders.
Feel not safe when HootSuite asks my password.
Long time passing.
Girls picked them every one.

But seriously, these kinds of coders are very difficult to get your hands on, you might want to go read some of Joel Spolsky's writtings on how to interview programmers.

The basic problem, as you have found, is that the greatest programmers aren't looking for a job, not even now during a recession, and certainly not with you.

Standard advice involve networking, showing up at user groups, trade conferences, et cetera.

These can take a long time to work however, so in your case I would take a look at how to make your company more interesting for the type of people you want to attract.

Try to look at your company as and outsider might do:

1)What would a great programmer love about the work? Because , as you might as well face now, you are not going to get anybody really good really excited about the prospect of maintaining an in house Java ERP system. You would have a good chance to get one to work on a new system build in Clojure though.

2)How are your managers going to treat people? The old fashioned manager based on the military/factory hierarchy or the new get out of the way so the people can do awesome work while I watch their back politically?

3)This is something you might not have thought about, but do you really need this type of person? They are way better technically, but Joe the coder is going to be way easier to satisfy, employ, manage, keep around and replace. You don't need the rangers to take Berlin, you need a lot of expendable barely literate soldiers.

Anyway this is just a few things you might want to think about.
A Debate on the Future of Newpapers (Masnick v Carr)
"SAS makes all of the money. JMP is the fun product," Sall said.

This guy is my new hero!
a) Why is this news? Hootsuite has been around for forever.

b) 'OwlHuntr'? For Real? Can you be just a little less obvious?
Personally I would like to get an US visa, startup or not -- but this is plain ridiculous. As I understand it, the VCs are running out of good projects to invest in in the States, so they want the hill to come to Mohammad, i.e. the founders to get to the US.

US is a lovely country I'd very much like to visit, but why don't the VCs simply pack up themselves and go to other countries and fund startups there? I understand that they would find it difficult to follow their investments in foreign environments, but there is a number of solutions they could combine, from having trusted local experts at location, to combining western legal entities with the local technical expertise (Seedcamp's Zemanta, from Slovenia, is a good example).
Cool. Needs a Google Maps interface.
linkedin or meetup.com is a good place to start. Otherwise try a local software house, but they may not help much with requirements or take equity - and you'll pay high prices, but at least you can meet physically and get the ball rolling.
Those numbers look good. Makes sense.
46,463,575 registered users.
Two things immediately come to mind here.

1. how many of these huge social networking sites are there out there, and how many of them (like this one) have I never heard of?

2. yet again it's free, so what's their revenue model.

If this posting was just spam to HN, or put here to generate discussion, I just can't tell.
How to remove TrustWarrior
This article shows how to remove a fake/ rogue security application called TrustWarrior
developers looking for non-technical partners - now that area would be in demand. The power shifts to the developer, but that would be a good thing for the project. A site for this would be great - developers would never have to take a project again that they don't like again (well that's a goal). One of the logistics involved is geographical dispersion of founders: is that acceptable, and how can it be overcome?
This business guy vs hacker thing is a false dichotomy and I'm sick of hearing it. It's good to work with others, and it's good to specialize, but there's no reason one person can't be competent at both.
Really well designed app, nice brand identity, lots of useful functionality. All looking good.

Then I played the demo video - @OwlHuntr...I didn't last more than 12 seconds before I died of boredom. If I need a video lecture, you have to make it something I want to watch, and it shouldn't take more than 30 seconds to give me the info I need.

Mercedes can convince me to buy a car with a 30 second TV ad, (not literally, but you get the idea). My time is too valuable to watch the long-form directors cut of your promo.
I play in communities where computer arbitration is the norm. Still they require a GM (and I think rightly so) to guide the game, search for replacements and answer questions. (And it is still technically PBEM, because the server uses email as the primary interface.)

However the typical workload for a GM is far lower than without computer arbitration, of course. And you can read all the negotiations, if you want to.
Very beautiful, touching and poetic.
There was a study a long while back, I think I read it in the mid 90s, that the best doctors and hospitals had lower recovery rates, because they took the worst, most difficult, cases. I saw it as part of a discussion of the difficulty of rating health care service providers.
Why do we need to solve the round-trip problem to Mars? Many set out in the past from the Old World to the New World with no intention of returning. There are plenty willing in the near future to go one-way to Mars. "Humans in space" isn't about science ... robots do that. It's about pushing the limits of the human experience and spirit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/opinion/01krauss.html ... send material and equipment to Mars first, then the first human colonists. To never return. It's 10% the cost of a round trip we can't afford.
Why the Apple IIe is the Best PC Ever Made
Stalin and Mlton are whole-program optimizing compilers. They take a bit longer than other compilers, but the results are impressive.
No, at it's best it makes it an analysis of last weeks news.
So `apple = PC` now? after all those years of telling people that they were different? Hmm.
"They do not seem to understand RSS feeds."

I'd wager that the majority of the users on their site don't care about or know what RSS is, like most people.
The State of the Web Design Profession
It's still an open question whether short term trading is a contribution to finding the right price for something and thus helping to make the system as a whole more efficient. I don't know whether that's actually the case. It may be in some cases and not in others.
> It's a ruse created by investors to give themselves more power and opportunities to fund companies,

I doubt that investors are looking for more power or opportunities to fund companies, there is rather a glut of ideas and companies that could be funded than a scarcity, so that can't really be the deciding factor here.

What I think drives this whole idea is that to regain the lead in innovation you have to make it possible for innovators to get in on the game. And America is the country to be in for that.

I only have to look at my own history to see how much difference location can make when you are just out of the 'seed' stage.

Whether it would work or not is a different thing, but I definitely don't see it as a ruse. Merely a nice idea but probably ultimately too hard to execute properly so that it is only an all across the board 'win', instead of a 'win' for some and a 'loss' for others.
Dude...Amazon has been the leading e-tailer for around a decade or so. Wal-Mart is not even in the top 10. Where did you get the idea Wal-Mart did anywhere near Amazon volume online? http://www.internetretailer.com/Top500/list.asp
You mention the real solution is an agreement people are willing to read. How about showing a colloquial, "human-readable" version of the Terms and Conditions with a link to the full legalese?
Learn about the business aspect, you can break this down as problems you need to solve and have your brain work on that.

I never liked the business aspect myself, yet I managed to build a business with a couple of employees, and earlier this week someone actually suggested I became a PR advisor — I hate PR, but I love psychology, and PR is really just applied psychology, and there is lots of data mining and math involved in that field.
Tips for Eating Out
"A personal computer (PC) is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator." (Wikipedia)
Looks like I'd have to share personal data with Hootsuite.com, ie. creating a hootsuite account which will log me on twitter. Sharing my twitter credentials with hootsuite gives them the potential of getting a bunch of profiling information they can sell (one day) or did I miss something?
Extreme Programming, early days (1960s)
Exactly. But there are legal issues with that, if you say "Here is our legal agreement, here is another agreement I want you to read" in court people will argue they should only be held to the agreement they were asked to read.

I agree with you, but we cant solve the problem with having a 'legal' and a 'human readable' version, we need the legal version to be human readable (ok ok lawyers are humans also :) )

It's claimed that legal language is needed because it's more precise, that's not true.

Take a relatively simple legal case in which no facts are in disputer, ask 5 highly paid barristers for an opinion on the case and compare.
Why does Lord of the Flies lead to me being recommended Lord of the Flies?
It required me to enter a name and email so I didn't bother voting.