skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the point is that the use of any title looks bad. It's better to impress with achievements than titles.
Makes sense. Though as I said in an earlier post, there are some folks that are young, can talk a great story, get a book contract and end up making a decent $ from their writing. I don't see much wrong with that approach though I know some have a problem with that.

Just like you, I did not tell my age to clients when I was 14-15. But that was more out of fear. Ones that found out before giving me the project(via sites like rentacoder/elance) would never pick me. So I quit sharing my age until later into the project once I'd knocked their socks off. Ironically, I was able to provide a better service to clients back then than I can today. Today I care wayyy more about money/ROI. Back then I only cared about the actual work. Money was almost zero motivation.
Democrats and Schools
you can under HVM mode in xen, too. Full virtualization, though, in it's current state, is inferior to paravirtualization. Significantly so. This may change as hardware advances, but right now, you are much better off going with something that can run paravirtualized.
Every friend of mine training to be a doctor resents the implication that becoming a doctor isn't an achievement. They're sacrificing more for their title than most entrepreneurs sacrifice for theirs.
application/octet-stream (because your webserver doesn't know any better)

application/octet-stream has had to be used for things like .zip files because Internet Explorer insisted on opening up application/octet stream even the browser was configured to save it. And to make matters worse, there were some configurations where Quake3 .pk3 files, which are actually zips, wouldn't save by Internet Explorer, so you actually needed to rename them to .pk3.zip, which would sufficiently confuse the browser and prompt to save it.

On the client-side, mouthbreathing open-source developers are always paying ultimate fealty to Content-Types that were naively sniffed on the server -- text/x-python? how could I possibly display that?

Using a text/* renderer.
California to withhold a bigger chunk of paychecks
Jon didn't run into most of these problems so much as answer others who did run into them on stackoverflow.com or the MS newsgroups.
HAHA... I thought that too until I finally understood what he meant.

Remember, he started off with just Marine coins, then... "In the past five years, Morin has expanded his coin business beyond the Marines to include other service branches, weddings, sports teams, and corporations such as Starbucks, Delta Air Lines and United Parcel Service. He hired a Web designer to jazz up the online site. He changed his company name from Marine Corps Coins to Coins for Anything and has expanded into trophies, pins and lanyards (the neck straps to which security badges or credentials are attached)."

So you say, "he expanded", but he views these expansions as additional businesses and treated them as such "... estimate that Morin's companies earn a net profit of around $1 million; he didn't deny that estimate. He is rolling most of that profit back into his enterprises. A competitor offered to buy the coin company for $4 million a couple of years back."

Furthermore, I wouldn't downplay the t-shirt business everyone. I would have said the same thing about the coin business until I read this. Only difference is I know a bit more about the t-shirt business and the money is there.
Our digital crisis
Here’s a good series of articles on how it works in Ruby: http://blog.grayproductions.net/categories/character_encodin...

Apparently Ruby 1.9 handles it well.

(I wouldn’t be surprised if this had previously been linked on HN.)
Great idea, well-implemented. Ignore the naysayers.
This explains in part why students at a school like Harvard are not uniform 4.0 2400 students.

The main reason Harvard's class does not consist solely of students with 2400 on the SAT is that such students are too scarce.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/41382...

Here's a FAQ about demographic trends from 2008, which perhaps needs a bit of adjustment in light of the current economy:

Population trends in the United States are not the only issue influencing the competitiveness of college admission here. The children already born show us what the expected number of high school students are in various years, but the number of high school students in the United States, which is expected to begin declining in a few years, isn't the whole story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/education/09admissions.htm...

First of all, if more students who begin high school go on to college, there will be more applicants to college even with a declining number of high school students. And that is the trend in the United States and worldwide.

Second, colleges in the United States accept applications from all over the world, so it is quite possible that demographic trends in the United States will not be the main influence on how many students apply to college. The cohorts of high-school-age students are still increasing in size in some countries (NOT most of Europe).

Third, even if the number of applicants to colleges overall stays the same, or even declines, the number of applicants to the most competitive colleges may still increase. The trend around the world is a "flight to quality" of students trying to get into the best college they can in increasing numbers, and increasing their consensus about which colleges to put at the top of their application lists. I do not expect college admission to be any easier for my youngest child than for my oldest child, even though she is part of a smaller birth cohort in the United States.

And now I would add to this that at the very most selective colleges that have just announced new financial aid plans, next year's (and the following year's) crush of applicants will be larger than ever. When colleges that are already acknowledged to be great colleges start reducing their net cost down to what the majority of families in the United States can afford, those colleges will receive more applications from all parts of the United States, and very likely from all over the world.

The Economist magazine published a brief article about these trends in April 2008.

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...
As a writer myself, I always thought that was kind of an ass-backwards approach. Writing a story about being young is the cheapest and easiest story to write. So props to the people who manage it, but I don't necessarily see that as a success.

I find, funnily enough, that the people who succeed the most past being young are the people who find passion in what they do at an early age. So embrace what you love! That's what you'll find it easiest to grow at.
States providing vouchers for Microsoft training
http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/us/communityinvestment/elevateamerica.aspx

My state and six others are now providing training and certification from Microsoft. I would hate to be a competitor for Word and other Office products and find that my own state is helping Microsoft compete against me. I'm not sure where something like this stands regarding government support for one public company's product.
Worse in that people are falling into illusions of grandeur. I'd say it's more about being honest with yourself, and others, about your work and accomplishments. Embellishing is fine, but you do have to admit that it's gotten to a pretty ridiculous point these days, especially in the web world.

I'd also say that being more realistic and grounded will drive you more to achieve that level of success people often believe they've reached in their illusions. If you're a CEO of a revolutionary web 2.0 company operating in stealth mode, and you don't see any traction, you'll be more likely to give up because reality isn't falling inline with the ridiculous expectations you've set in place.

I will admit, I am guilty of this at times.
Drupal Moves Into the White House
Young kids use the term CEO because it gives them a sense of importance and officialness. There is nothing sinister or inflated about it, it's just kind of like playing house or pretending. You play the part you dream of one day being.

When I was younger I remember starting "companies" and trying to be really official about it even though I had zero experience and didn't know shit. Who cares? It was fun.
Funny thing is, in my experience, commercial software gets better with time.

I, for one, am not pining for the days of Windows 95, Office 95 and IE 3.0.

Open source, on the other hand, gets more incompatible with time. To keep up with it, you need to constantly rewrite / re-architect your apps, or stick with an ancient but maintained setup, if you can find one, and probably pay for it too.
I'm a psychology graduate, but I work in web development now.
It's different for academics because getting a PhD is just the beginning. A top academic would probably not consider it the most important achievement of his/her career.

A top academic is well known and everyone will automatically assume that he/she has a PhD and a respectable position at his/her university, so mentioning the title is redundant.
We're Rich, You're Not. End of Story.
How Reliable Is the M-16 Rifle?
My father did little when it came to marketing (he mostly sold office buildings), but one of his few lessons about it was that one should never advertise their product as "exclusive". If something really is exclusive, people will start using that description all by themselves - your product will be in demand but have a very limited and controlled supply. If it's not, advertising it as "exclusive" just sounds cheap.

I find this similar to the use of the title CEO in start-ups. If you advertise that as your title, there is no reason you're doing that other than vanity. If there's one of you, you're not the CEO - you're just the guy doing things. If there's three of you, then you're just one of the guys who makes decisions. If there's twenty of you, you have a proper corporate governance structure, and all you do is manage and plan, then maybe call yourself a CEO.

If you're really concerned about your title between the sizes of three and twenty employees, you're worried about the wrong thing. If you really need one for some reason, call yourself Founder (if you founded the company) or President (if you have the ultimate decision-making power and preside over decisions). If you don't do either of those things, put the words "Senior" or "Director of" in front of what you actually do and speak like you've got some authority.
Character Palette Bookmarklet
Some people would argue that in the long term, psychologically speaking, hard labor to scrape a mostly independent living in a "direct" fashion (e.g. subsistence farming) feels more intrinsically rewarding than comparatively easy work with no obvious impact in an authoritarian hierarchy (e.g., generic corporate desk job).

People in general are usually pretty terrible at making choices that would improve their happiness. So even though almost anyone would pick modern life in the USA if given the choice, it's entirely possible that people in the bad old days actually were more satisfied with their lives on average. Well, except for possibly when they were dying in childbirth, starving in famines, succumbing to infectious diseases, or enduring other temporarily unpleasant states of affairs, anyway.

Actually, the idea "being happier working very hard in hopes to make a living, producing something tangible without being subject to arbitrary authority" sounds a lot like the startup mindset as well.
I always make the call on inline callbacks versus observers based based on whether they're critical for the model's state. If your representation of whatever domain concept your model is doing relies on the behaviour in a callback - it belongs to the model. If not, in an observer.

The often suggested use for observers is for caching (which is a good example). In our big app, if the cache expiry doesn't happen the site will look a bit funny but the underlying transactional data is fine. Mixing those together wouldn't communicate the difference in how important they are.
Ask HN: do you have a low-stress job?  What kind of job is it?
I need a reliable source of income, but I also want to preserve my energy in order to spend evenings completing works-in-progress. HN, please lend me the wisdom you have earned: what jobs have worked for you?
Cool, but why do you need to go to http://tonidoplug.com/ip to discover your plug? Do I want Tonido to know that? Having to buy from their App Store to get more cool things would bug me too, since I already paid $99.
Okay they fixed the problem. I'd delete my comment if I could but I can't. No need to take away any more of my karma!

Thanks.
I think more than a few 40-year-old small business owners style themselves CEO as well, and for the same reasons.
I believe it is a contest, because we have a limited amount of time on earth. If you could do either A or B and you believe B is better, then why would you do A?

Of course The Divided Self is his exploration of the topic, but it's sold in the nonfiction section.
Ontario schools to teach financial literacy
I'll say! Real CEOs should be 14 years old, like Ben Casnocha back when.

(And yes, his company, Comcate, is a real company with employees and everything.)

Though I do agree with the general principle - it's why I decided that the title of Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute was more honorable, even though I could easily get something with "Director" in it.

But there really is a flipside; not everyone gets the countersignalling. I met with a Congressperson once who told me that if I wanted to meet with Congresspeople, I should have gotten a bigger title - the phrasing was something along the lines of "Executive Directors get into the office, Research Fellows wait outside" (said in a friendly and helpful way).

Similarly, at a gathering of VCs, someone said to me afterward: "When you introduced yourself as a Research Fellow, I thought you were just a scientist."

I guess in the larger world, people really do go around judging by titles, even if from in here it seems like obviously easily fakeable fluff.
I love that on hackerne.ws the poster/creator of the content you're discussing is far more likely to respond to what you're saying.

I've been a programmer (professionally) for 3-4 years now, been coding far longer than that and was wondering what your feelings were regarding CompSci degrees and the necessity (or not) of them.

Also, have you considered separating the "less is less" product and then creating the more "enterprisey" product as a separate entity and allowing your customers to upgrade within your product range instead of having in and out customer numbers?

I mention this as I think of companies that exercise pretty vigorous product differentiation (Microsoft's OEM versus Corporate licensing, Apple-anything) and your comment regarding not wanting to make your flagship product intimidating to new customers.

Just wondering what your thoughts were on those two questions, thanks.
NSArray vs. C Array
KLEE: Symbolic VM based on LLVM that finds bugs and generates test cases
I honestly don't think it has anything to do with age.
Ask HN: Best way to go about pitching a VC that's coming to your school?
So I'm currently in my last year as a CS Major at a well known university. A prominent and well known VC/entrepreneur, who received his Computer Science MS from my university and whose fund is relatively young but has been featured on TechCrunch multiple times, is coming this Friday to speak to top CS students about "your career aspirations and opportunities for you through his firm."

One of my partners and I were invited (our other partner has already graduated). I've already written a comprehensive business plan for our idea, which is what I used that to recruit my 2 partners. I'm going to update it for this meeting specifically. We are also starting development on a beta version.

We were originally going to apply to YCombinator and a few other similar programs for summer, but seeing that this famous VC is coming to speak specifically to students like us, what is the best way to go about this?

At a minimum, we are looking for advice and mentoring. If we were to dream, he would give us seed funding just like that. We are hoping to land somewhere in between.

1) I am lacking the financials for my business plan. I have no historicals really to base my financial projections off of. I don't have access to the financial information of relevant private companies, whose data could help me get a sense of what's typical. Even so, should I somehow just put together whatever I can? I constantly read about how investors want to see financial data, but really, they're just guesses! Not sure what to do for this.

2) In addition to a business plan, should I create some sort of 10 piece slide deck, like the one suggested in Art of the Start?

3) Any other tips? Something I'm not mentioning that would allow you to provide better advice? Let me know.

We really just don't want to squander such an amazing opportunity. Thank you in advance.
Can you give me some numbers to substantiate "costs will be low in Pune"?
I agree with events at Bangalore but I guess Pune is lately picking up on that too.
From the article:

"However, I cringe when I hear the title “CEO” used lightly. To me, it conveys a lack of humility and a desperate call for attention."

Lacking humility and making desperate calls for attention? High school is all about lacking humility and making desperate calls for attention. Calling yourself the CEO of your personal non-incorporated company would be par for the course, not a shocking breach of decorum.

I can't think its much different than my having pretended to be a wizard doing magic on the occasional weekend night.

I think that the sad part about this is that teenager's imaginations have slipped to the level where the geeks among them now play at being things that actually exist.*

Kids these days...

*= Although I am a lisp programmer awash in a C of embedded systems guys (read: warriors), so pretending to a wizard and saying a bunch of mumbo-jumbo incantations that only I understood (and then blasting my enemies with fireball!) may have been some sort of pseudo-apprenticeship.
That's one of the biggest complaints I had from "Guy A" who looked at it. There was no decent way to 1) Interface with the content with his current site 2) port reputation two ways from his existing community.
Jimaddlee dot blogspot dot com
I set up this blog to share my life & pictures with my awesome friends around the world, & also to myself in case I've this deterioration of intellectual faculties such as memory & judgement one day.
I think anywhere can be the middle of nowhere, if you put your mind to it.
This is a little deceiving. Berkshire Hathaway might run on only twenty, but its holdings, both wholly and partially, total to much larger numbers of staff.

It's still a pretty efficient and lightweight operation, but it's not an exact 20-people-to-$150-billion comparison.
maybe the opposite of the big bang -- destroying everything. When exists==nothing....
I believe it is a contest, because we have a limited amount of time on earth.

Well, you have enough time to comment here. Is this really a better exploration of the human condition (or whatever it is you want to achieve through reading) than non-fiction books?

If you could do either A or B and you believe B is better, then why would you do A?

In reality, fiction and non-fiction are not mutually exclusive unless you're obtuse enough to make them so. They're not even clearly distinct in their value or purpose.
I believe it's because of the sales process: a salesperson wants to know if they're talking to a person that can make a purchasing decision, and also wants to give the customer they're dealing with the impression that they're more influential than the actually are. So there's a natural tendency for both sides to overstate their roles.

But then once the guys in sales get more impressive sounding title, everybody wants one and thus, title inflation.
This is so very true. That's why dynamic delivery of Javascript has enabled so much cool innovation.

Rather than focus on stuffing new tags into HTML, we should focus on pushing the abstraction level lower. I'd really like to see something along the lines of a secure/safe <script language="LLVM"/> and an analogously low-level rendering stack.

There are a lot of good things about HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc, but the homogeneous designs with heterogeneous implementations are holding back innovation.
Everything is amazing and no one is happy
Yes, but the sport might become more exciting if the players are able to perform better, and the participants might enjoy it more. It might also make the sport accessible to more people if it makes skating easier.
ForceClose - A StackOverflow Clone for Android
Force Close is a question and answer site for questions about the open-source Android operating system that runs on cell phones
Tangential:

Are weapons manufacturers as "evil" as the people behind http://www.swoopo.com/ ? (ie taking advantage of base human instincts and game theory for profit -- substantial profit).
"I guess you get what you pay for."

Let me guess: you just bought Windows 7 and you're trying to persuade yourself that the ridiculous amount of money you put down for that piece of software was well spent. Not too far off the mark?

In any event, this is not a case of "getting what you pay for"; this is almost certainly a bug in Flash, not in the free software stack. In other words, I don't suppose you believe that Flash player works better on Windows because you paid for your copy of Flash player, do you? (On the other hand, I guess someone who would buy Microsoft Windows on the precept that "you get what you pay for" might just be foolish enough to shell out cash for Flash player, too.)
you don't need to go there. You can get the IP address from your router.All the applications in the app store is already pre-installed in plug. So you don't need to pay anything more than $99
Given the history (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1088-how-not-to-apply-for-a-j..., and the ensuing discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219085), it's lamentable yet somehow sadly appropriate that this article misspells "37signals" both in the title and throughout the rest of the article. (N.B. I'm with Jason on this one.)
One partner in an iPhone company I was involved in who was over forty, after manipulating his way into it (he had only "connections" but no technical skills) went behind everyones back and named himself CEO on the website, despite the fact we were not incorporated, had no business contract (another mistake), had nothing but a DBA, no finished products, customers, or a revenue stream.

Very sad. I'm glad I got out a couple weeks before hand.
I really don't understand how some of these scams can be even considered legal. And it's everywhere. I see the Jamster and other ringtone commercials all the time, and always wonder about how many hundreds of thousands of kids they fool into subscribing to a monthly $5 plan when all they wanted to do was get Lil' Wayne's new music ring tone. I know it's all in the fine print, but there have got to be laws outlining what constitutes fine print transparent and deceptive. How can any child possibly pay attention to the small text at the bottom of their tv when they're being bombarded with explosions of colors and sounds elsewhere on the screen?
Why Threads are a Bad Idea (for most purposes)
< 1%. I'm an auto-didact.
i see.. so "swum" is the passive form of "swim" then?
I'd argue that, in general, all software gets better over time. I'd also argue that there are as many exceptions to that rule in commercial software as there are in open-source.
The founder's answered, but I can't really imagine someone setting up a site like this who didn't have kids. It screams of 'spotted a niche/problem'.