skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given that I already stated a wide range of skills beyond PHP (and I use more languages than I even listed there) I hardly think my closed minded attitude is the problem.

There are a lot of complaints about PHP from people who've never even used it. They have bullet-point list of features lacking or strangeness and think they can make an informed comment. But I have built several large scale projects in PHP and at the time I started them most everyone's pet language here was too immature in the web space to consider. Look at Ruby, the tools of choice for deploying it and serving it up are constantly changing. I don't have time for that fire and motion. Maybe for the next project I will choose something else. But I think developers here would rather fawn over the pet language of the week than hear from someone using PHP effectively.
I don't think your problems with Go are at all a given. Playing repeatedly and fast is a choice you can make out of pure logic.

Go is a language and should be tought like a language. You don't explain phonetics to a child, but instead let it immitate sounds, scream and giggle. Try explaining phonetics to a six-month-old child.

There's no reason why you couldn't just play a game, play fast without thinking, and immediately start another one, maybe even before finishing the first one. What you're doing that way is not looking for ways to win, but for the responses you get for your actions. It's like babbling 'apdy' at your father and getting back a 'daddy'. Thinking about how to use your vocal chords isn't going to get you there, what you need is practice. It may not look like you're learning, but well, you do.

View it as learning the sounds of a completely new language, and imagine you're a baby trying to appreciate the noises someone else makes and then try to immitate them. There's really nothing about you that prevents you from doing this except a choice.
Off-Course Pilots Cite Computer Distraction
Is that really depression? I think that what a lot of us confuse for depression is really contentment. This guy is happy to live his life as it is, but for the worry that he ought to have a drive.
Roadmap for Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) Documentation
"The community of hackers seems to be in as much denial about impending energy shortages as classical economists. "

On what do you base this claim?
This happened to me (although I was not brilliant). My social awareness (or whatever you might want to call it) only developed when I started university, and it made me look at what I was studying with disgust. Having said that, I think the advice given by Salon sucks. There is no "finding yourself" this is bullshit, there is only "making yourself". You have to choose and you have to throw yourself after your choices, there is no way to think yourself into life.

I always liked this Baudrillard quote: "The modern ideal is to make your life what you want it to be. In reality, that is what you do when there's no other solution."
Respectfully, it's posts like this that are keeping me from investigating the new k-v stores for our (large) Rails app. I don't want "awesome", I don't want a "lifestyle", and I'm certainly not motivated by the idea of replacing something that is fast enough, but not as fast as it could be.

You've got every right not to care what I think of Redis (or Couch or whatever), but if you do and you're wondering how to address people like me --- ie, people who would rather add one more tiny feature to a product that sells than talk about NoSQL --- can you tell me how Redis fits in alongside a MySQL/AR setup? If I'm already committed to AR, where does Redis (or Couch or whatever) make my existing app better?
Android 2.0, Release 1
Highlights - http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.0-highlights.html
Google Brain Drain: Local Ads Exec Leaves For VC Firm
I'm younger than this guy was in the article. My next door neighbor just went off to college to become a fashion designer. A handful of my friends became poets. A few friends of mine are forming a video game company.

I don't see the point in bashing somebody because they like something. Very often, those people that try something and turn out to be terrible find what they love in the process. Why insult them?
Hopefully, the next yc batch will have one..
416 Limo - Toronto and Mississauga Limousine Services
We specialize in providing you with professional limo services for your wedding day, limos for corporate events, social galas, airport limousine services, high school prom limos, bachelor parties and much more.
Not true, its where cameras and shit come in. I honestly can't solve the logistics problems of playing DnD with friends in different states weekly :P
You don't know him. Don't be an ass.
I've been playing with this while it's been in private beta. It's good, and works just like EC2, but for DB
Entrepreneurial success is somehow related to character. There are many books/blogs defining, or trying to figure those things out.

I distributed a game called "Button Masher" on the TI-83 to class mates in the 8th grade. You hook up two calculators.... and mash the "Up" button as fast as you can to see your bar reach the top. I didn't make any money because I didn't charge, but the thought crossed my mind.

I think it comes down to a couple of things, whether they are all/some sufficient/necessary probably depends on experience or personal anecdotes. That said, here is what brought me to it:

1) The unbound desire to create something without a rubric.

2) The internal joy one receives when that created something makes someone's day.

3) The motivation to act when you see something and say "I could totally do that better."

So to me, 'making money' comes down to:
wanting to prove to myself + desire to help others = profit.

edit: formatting.
Well, i've seen this too, not only with Go but with Programming and a whole lot of other things. They're busy showing off how good they are, instead of helping you learn.

However, once you know the trick, you don't need anyone to teach you, but just someone you can imitate. Just get them to be quiet and play lots of games with you, or ask them questions when you really need to know something. Be the driver of your own learning, then your teacher's teaching skill matters less.
"Google manages its kernel code with Perforce."

Did not see that one coming.
It's funny, 'cos you're pidgeonholing the guy while telling him that he shouldn't let people pidgeonhole him.
mike emailed me, thanks
Procreation isn't productive?
Dear Bandwagon (email rant sent to Gruber)
The only thing you missed was the feature request link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

(in other words, the feature you're requesting is not currently in the site)
Healthcare is not a popularity contest
Technically, you could also provide mixins through the decorator pattern and interfaces. IntelliJ (and I am sure Eclipse) can generate this for me. However, that's less elegant and more fragile than using a language (e.g. Scala) which has Mixins as a language feature: IntelliJ can write code for me, but it can't read for me, nor can it explain it to other developers.

Likewise, I can use multiple inheritance in C++ exclusively only to mimic interfaces (as purely virtual classes) or Mixins (and in fact a lot of corporate style guidelines, e.g. Google's explicitly say that), but it isn't quite the same as having these as language features.
MySQL had more hype.
JQuery: JavaScript Library of the Future
The Zombie Game Experiment - Huge Concept Art Update
The moderated groups that I read/contribute to are doing well. Spam isn't an issue there.
You've obviously not met many porn distributors yet.

Because nobody else has said it on this thread, let me jump in and recommend Dungeons and Dragons to anybody that hasn't played it. It's a brilliant game that's cocaine for the imagination. Find some fun, witty people who don't have ADD, and a D&D night is wicked fun.
BT Yahoo
Sales Tsunami
Sales Tsunami is an awesome package both for beginners to Internet Marketing and seasoned professionals that are on the lookout for new methods to make huge cash through CPA marketing.
PHP is a blunt force language. You can get stuff done in it. It's success is based on low barrier to entry and easy deployment.

The problem with PHP is not one thing that it lacks. It's the complete lack of design in the language. Everything is tacked on, and the sum result is quite ugly. Certainly it's a usable tool, and you can build large scale systems with it, but there is no language that's as much of a mess except for Perl, and Perl at least is incredibly powerful.
What you say about life expectancy at birth is true, but it's also true that people who made it to adulthood didn't live nearly as long. I'd guess the average life expectancy of a 23 year old in 17th century England was under 60.
There's a lot of talk these days about how the individual cottage programmer is on the way out. I don't think so, even though a team of cooperating programmers is in principle a better arrangement. My doubt springs from the fact that the best of existing programs are the product of one, at most two individuals...

Does this mean that there's hope for those of us that hate programming with other people, despite pg's insistence that we need to have a cofounder?
Freelists is a nice service for FOSS projects. You might want to check it out.

Link: http://freelists.org
No you are not the only one. I guess Reddit comments in most part are not to be taken seriously?
Top 10 Tips to make Windows Vista High Performance
Really? I didn't see that at all. It does, however, gobble up all available memory.
Ask HN: Why are there still human teachers? 
Shouldn't students learn via software that provides a personalized learning experience just right for their abilities?

If a student has a question that the software can't understand/answer, then it could be forwarded to a qualified human who is responsible for answering questions related to a certain subset of topics.
I got through 5 or 6 of the articles RiderOfGiraffes pointed to, and it appears that the case for not extraditing this guy is:

* He has Aspergers

* He's been threatened with a 60 year sentence if he doesn't cooperate

* He's "terrified" of going to a US prison

* He could end up in Gitmo

* New Jersey officials want to "fry" him in the electric chair

* So they should just try him in the UK under UK misuse laws.

And I mean, whatever. I'd be terrified too. But then I'd also be terrified if I robbed a liquor store and got caught, Aspergers or not. The reality is, this guy would probably do 1-2 years, like Abene and Mitnick (even Mitnick did minimal time after his trial concluded). The "terr'ist!" and "gitmo!" stuff is just jingoism. He'll clearly get a better deal in the UK, and his family has to pull for that by any reasonable means necessary.
You'd think The Economist would bother to actually check instead of saying "let's hope the people who make the rules at the TSA don't read this particular xkcd comic."

Here is the TSA's response:
http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/10/response-to-bag-check-cartoo...
Randall replied in the comments.
That's why - http://www.google.com/trends?q=MySQL,+PostgreSQL
Totally agree. Being academically successful is one thing while leading the life you want is another. Most average people figure out how they fit in our social order ok. I think the appropriate quip would be "Welcome to the real world, now get off my lawn!" Move on, nothing new here.
You should chat with the moderators of those groups - I'm positive that they're having a similar experience.

For people that have already been whitelisted in (and assuming that you don't get spoofed) the experience is great. For those running the group? Not so much.
I wonder if Google is neglecting Groups because they think Wave will replace it?
As the article points out, Google Groups for private lists is awesome. Free and includes a gig of storage.
An interesting argument, but one with which I don't agree. To give up on something because someone else says its undoable is certainly un-brilliant; but I can understand being demotivated by someone's argument that your goal is worthless.

Recall that the guy is in South America, where many millions of people still live in the most grinding poverty; I can understand why a teacher would argue that since videogames are toys for rich kids, it's self-indulgent to devote oneself to such a thing when only a day's journey from the university (or maybe less) there are people with no clean water, access to medicine, etc. Now, I actually think a South American videogame compny would be a fine thing in the bigger context: it would create jobs, diversify the economy, could lead to new educational tools and so on. Videogames certainly stimulated my interest in computers and technology and still do. But while he may be brilliant enough to become a fine game programmer/designer/businessman, I can't blame him for being socially and economically immature enough that he's not able to see how it all fits together.

so my answer would be 'you love video games? Then make some, the world needs better games, because games can be powerful learning tools'.
will it live up to the hype and replace a wide swath of other communications protocols

It's not like POP killed IRC, or HTTP killed SMTP. Different protocols do different things. What serious candidates would there be for Wave to kill?
Oh wow, thank you for pointing out the link. I used to use Arachnophilia and thought CareWare was a fantastic concept.
The real reason why people use URL shorteners is because they can instantly track how many people have clicked on their link.

For PR2.0 whores, it's addictive.

Twitter's 140 character limit was just the original excuse. Now everyone who is selling stuff loves the ability to track every click and see how their propagate over the "social graph". If they could, they'd force you to install a Firefox plug-in so they know what you are looking at and why you didn't click on their link...
and ...scrunched up [his] face to look a little angry, and said "I'm a dot-com millionaire" with utter seriousness

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/theafterparty
So, on one hand, you wouldn't know how to make money before you gained experiance selling stuff, and the more experiance the better.
On the other hand, you should gain experiannce by bootstrapping and putting your money at risk, instead of the investors?

Am I the only one this doesn't make sense to?
And the alt-text is intact!
This isn't the first time I've read the argument for a computer being superior to a woman because of its exactitude and unforgiving nature, yet total acceptance of the correct. It is, however, one of the more eloquent (and concise!) versions of the argument.
Ask HN: How do I meet qualified business and marketing people?
I have been interested in starting a company for a while now, but I am having trouble finding a qualified partner with business and/or marketing skills. I’ve gone to a few networking events, but I find that 90% of the people there are geeks like me, web designers or get-rich-quick/MLM types. How did you find your partner (or vice-versa)?
Application deadline for Winter 2010 pushed on October 28
But when it really comes down to it, isn't almost anything a good thing to do "until you figure it out?"

The lessons we learn are to be found everywhere. Hindsight makes me laugh at how so many of my "lessons" were around me at all times, in even the most mundane things!

I keep forgetting that for me, it's all about the journey, not the destination.
At one point,probably right at the beginning,Reddit was a bona-fide news-aggregation site. Now, its just an outpost of 4Chan, at least the main page definitely is. Nothing wrong with that except the contents and quality of comments and postings have gone into a completely different direction.
I think that the "bulwark against totalitarian rule" idea comes in two versions. The naive version imagines that the USA suffers an actual attempt at a military coup, and that the coup is defeated by gunfights started by armed citizens. The sophisticated version asks about ambitious young men: when they dream of gaining political power, what route to the top do they dream of?

If you are an ambitious young man in a country that has had military coups in the recent past, you might join the army, hoping to rise in ranks and be in the right place at the right time. That could also apply in a country with disarmed civilians. It is no part of the American dream. If you want political power in the USA you go to law school (or into banking?)

The 2nd Amendment protects against tyranny because it shapes the Zeitgeist. It makes the idea of staying in office after losing an election seem silly: you would only get shot. Since the very idea is silly the scenario is never played out.

This poses a puzzle to the would be Hari Seldons amongst us. Does the 2nd Amendment inherently undermine itself? Do we end up, after two hundred years of political freedom, thinking that the idea of protection against tyranny being provided by an armed citizenry is just plain silly, because we never see it in action? Where does that lead? Do we repeal the 2nd Amendment, leaving our grandchildren to discover, one hundred years later, that the Zeitgeist has changed and that old Amendment really mattered?
VMWare Fusion 3 is out (new features linked)
What's contradictory? Sell stuff, and try to do it on your own.
Actually, none of the private or commercial pilots I've known have ever referred to themselves that way.

Granted, my sample size is limited, but I think that every one of them would be as annoyed at being referred to as an <aircraft x> Pilot as I am at being referred to as a <language x> Programmer.
The whole point of bootstrapping is that you risk almost nothing before you have some positive feedback that suggests you can risk more. You bet a nickel that you can sell something for a dime. Then you bet a dime that you can sell something for a quarter. Repeat until you're Bill Gates and you're betting a football team that you can make a lot of money leasing the Eiffel Tower.

If you lose at any point, you can take comfort in the fact that you haven't lost more than you know how to make.
Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality Could be Closer than You Think
The NYTimes has an article on the same subject today, although sadly they did not cite xkcd: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/27fires.html?hpw
I think you're missing the original point I was trying to make. Java and .Net aren't really the tools, they're the medium in which you work. Just like that civil engineer understands the trade offs invovled with different kins of concrete ad using it in different ways, the Java programmer understands the trade offs involved with the API and VM, in addition to generic CS tradeoffs. Look at the following two fake resume excerpts:

Bob T. Builder :
Civil Engineer with Emphasis in Concrete Stress
---Skills---
Autocad :
Industry Used Physics Modeling Software

Suzie M. Hacker :
Java Programmer
---Skills---
Eclipse :
Ant

They seem roughly equivalent to me...
I think the reason I didn't get it is because you guys did a damn clever thing with the bumps. I couldn't find the answer, I thought you had to set up the connection first and then go on from there. I guess lots of people are okay with magic.

Awesome project. Good luck!
Tools vs. People
Who will actually conform to this I wonder? I can't see Apple doing it anytime soon?
Wait, you're telling me that "the best new protocol" and "the future of the internet" is being held back by the telcos, the most hated, slow moving, bureaucratic companies on earth?

Sounds like we need push email.
Podcast Interview about Clojure
I've found that the best thing teachers do for me is to nudge me out of my comfort zone. I self-learned pretty much most of the things I know and I am very self-motivated. I thought I don't need human teachers at all. Teachers in my school seemed to just slow me down. Then I took a drawing course in a local community college recently and realized that there is no way I would have learned all that in that short span of time without my teacher. Since learning drawing is something I'm not as comfortable with as I am with, say, learning Physics or CS, I gained a lot by having a human teacher.
Nothing in there stood out to me. Does this upgrade cost money? Why would I want to upgrade?
Rather than central moderation, which is appropriate in some cases but would lead to silly turf fights on others, GG ought to implement a simple voting system, not unlike YouTube comments (where particularly stupid things disappear after 6 downvotes).

Google really ought to consider the idea of putting NNTP back; it's obvious they don't really want to develop Groups as a tool (we can still hope for Wave to save the day, but...) and so GG looks more and more like the zombified corpse of Usenet. Perhaps if there was a push for Groups to have it's own Google Code API we might see some innovation.
I'm looking for a partner myself...definitely not an MLM type, for they can go to HELL. LOL. Seriously, in regard to your note, I'm opposite. My degrees are in information systems; as a result, strong in business/marketing, but skills in software development are light. Although, I have programmed lightly backed in college. But again, my strengths are in business/strategic planning/marketing.

see my post if you'd like: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905652
Successful pyevolve multiprocessing speedup for Genetic Programming
I did none of that and I was wondering if that's something that's part of one's character, or if that's something that can come later.

Character is built. Therefore I do not get why there is an "or" in that sentence. It is a mistake to think you are born with character, or skill, or talent, or gifts, or anything: even if you are. In the same way I will always believe I am in control of my life, even if I may really not be.

Your post suggests that you are looking for reasons why ... lets call them what they are: excuses. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you'll need to sell stuff. Whether you've done it for the past 1000 years or have never looked into another persons eyes for more than 2 seconds, you just have to do it. No more excuses. Stop reasoning, start doing.
I think the only problem here is that we don't think to go looking for a solution. It will have to land in our lap to get used. And, I don't know that I'd pay for a solution unless it worked like magic. Lastly, I'd want it to be a desktop solution that I only pay for once. I have enough recurring payments in my life, I don't need one to manage my photos too.
he'll know EXACTLY what he wants to do

I think it is more likely that after three years he'll know exactly what he doesn't want to do.
Use Google’s Power To Create Powerfull Search Engines (Part II)