skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am sure there is a need there, but I am always wary of vendors looking to define fields of study. One extreme example was a school not far from here that included CICS courses in their computer science (or did they call it information science) curriculum. The problem with vendors (IBM, MS, Sun, Oracle) is that their idea of a workforce is not necessarily one that questions the underlying technology or career definition. Correct implementation of floating point does not owe its genesis, but to thinkers like Knuth and Dijkstra who loudly pointed out the obvious deficiencies.

And as is pointed out here in the thread, the vendor's motivation might be to lower the cost of analytic talent. And wholesale renters of programming talent are fine with this too--no enterprise is looking for programmers to tell them that "you are doing it wrong".

Does anyone remember the advertising for COBOL, that it was nice and english like and that now your accountants would be able to do your programming and you wouldn't need to deal with those pesky goofy programmers?

Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-Telon. I remember one enterprise that finally decided that its paperless effort wasn't going to work, so it laid off 300 Telon programmers.

What I like about the world today is that programmers are seriously involved in these decisions. Did Dennis Ritchie say something that 10 years after Unix, that somehow marketing genius at AT&T decided that it was a good thing?

Wasn't VBASIC invented to make it easier for programmers with less training to do programming? How has that worked out for us?
I hate to be the one to defend Java, but he's so wrong about this one that it's laughable. He and I and you and all kinds of people use Java apps every single day; they just happen to be server-based.
> People that are competent aren't on stackoverflow all day answering questions for people that didn't read the documentation.

Agreed. If I were hiring someone a super high SO score might put me off - especially if they pushed that as a good thing about them.
Thanks for the expansive answer. I think I understand the feeling of dread you were talking about now. I get it when trying to comprehend the universe even though I'm aware of the scientific theories about it I can't help but let my mind wander about how big it is or what it really means for it to be infinite and if it weren't infinite what would it be in and what would be beyond it, etc. etc. Those little meanderings haven't really changed since I was 8 or so and I'm now 35 and I can just touch what it would be like to be insane when going long and deep enough.

A healthy dose of psilocybin mushrooms is what Bill Hicks recommended. (and so do I!)

Also, while I have read GEB since it's sort of required reading, I'm not really a fan of it. This is probably heresy here on HN but like all other of Hofstadter's books I can't stand his huff-puffery about himself and really it distracts from the interesting content in his books. I'm sure he's a nice guy and brilliant mind and it's most certainly a character flaw of mine but his writing style just doesn't click with me. I've tried multiple times to put it past me but have been unsuccessful so far.
Naz Hamid has done some wonderful work. I particularly like the work he did here on a CMS project: http://weightshift.com/design/aiga-cms-design

I also think the work skinnyCorp does (http://www.skinnycorp.com/) on all their sites is fantastic.
I know its an iPhone app, but the "here's an iPhone with some icons standing up with reflective surfaces everywhere" immediately pegs the site as a iPhone fad cash-cow wannabe.

I'm not saying that's what it really is - but if you follow these trends/fads, people immediately pay less attention to your product.
The article briefly mentions artificial intelligence. Some time ago I was at a lecture by Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, where he spoke about AI and AI in regard to Google. They are definitely thinking about it. Google has an army of PhDs, lots of money, petabytes of data and lots of computer resources... I think they will implement something that resembles AI in the next 10 years as it's one of the ways they can improve their search and their ad platform. Currently, Google is doing big leaps into this field already (with Google Translate, Google Voice etc.)
The “stars” and other bits of data that make their way into Google’s search results come under their umbrella term, “Rich Snippets”. You can specify them as Microformats or RDFa and they currently look at information about reviews, people, products, and organisations.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets/google-rich-sn...
A nice overview of the range of intellectual property protections available to a startup.

As someone who deals with early-stage startups all the time, the number one mistake I see concerns "do-it-yourself" founders who fail to take proper steps to transfer their IP into their startup at inception. In other words, they will form their entity themselves, use some online kit to do as simple a setup as possible, and ignore the IP issues altogether, which means that whatever IP they had developed prior to formation, or that they continue to develop even after formation, will continue to belong to them individually or to other third parties such as contractors, and will not belong to the company.

This is usually a harmless error in that it can later be corrected once it is discovered, but only if all the founders (and other third parties such as contractors) are cooperative about it. If they are not, this situation can lead to serious problems, especially if the problems are first unearthed during due diligence in the course of a funding or acquisition.

The article mentions this problem in summing up the most frequent mistakes in this area and otherwise has intelligent insights and observations throughout.
"To facilitate that I want to make it easy to discover our modifications and pass them along to upstream and/or other consumers of a given upstream. One way to force this is to continue working with a upstream archive (tarball release, maybe a snapshot) and our modifications as patches."

It is interesting that Debian faces the same issues and has come up with the idea of using Git as a source package format: http://wiki.debian.org/GitSrc
GWT 2.0 Comes with a New Performance Tool: Speed Tracer
For the sake or discussion...

Should we apply the same thinking to blogging? Are competent programmers too busy programming write blog posts?
Admit It, The New AOL.com Looks Beautiful
So you basically took a UK company, used to organize large events that span several days a few times a year (and only in UK and a few handpicked US cities), with a lot of preparation time, and let it organize a fast-paced series of events every other day in a number of different US cities they've never been to? Sorry, Joel -- I really respect Ryan and his team (although I can't grieve over Mel Kirk's leaving), but here's your fifth why right there, if you ask me.
"you will receive just as good of an education."

Pretty bold statement. In my personal experience, having good professors, and smart hard working students in a class with me makes all the difference in terms of how much I learn. While its true, just because a professor or student is at a university doesn't mean he/she is good (just like community college doesn't automatically equal bad) a university (particularly a good university), because of its admissions policies and hiring practices is going to weed out a lot of the bad. A community college will weed out hardly anyone. Not saying a community college isn't the right choice for a lot of people, just saying that there's a lot more of a difference than this top 10 list admits.
I don't agree with many of the assertions made in this post.

> and you will receive just as good of an education

It depends on what you're being educated on. For the cookie-cutter classes every first- and second-year undergrad has to take, yes, I agree. For courses dealing in something you're deeply interested in or which involve advanced theory, it's more of a mixed bag.

> No crowded dorms, no roommate issues, know more people

For me, learning to deal with situations where I'm just a face in a crowd, having to deal with roommates I didn't always get along with, and having to make new friends because I didn't know anybody were all valuable parts of my education.

> You don’t need to take the ACT or SAT

Depends on the school.

> Employers don’t care what college you got your degree from

Depends on the employer. In an ideal world, each candidate would be judged entirely on merit and accomplishments rather than on things like schooling. However, even then going to a university will provide more opportunities to get involved with cool projects or to experiment with emergent technologies.
I'm just curious why Cable Companies have not been investing more energy and time into the homer server market... it seems that is the future... though actually didn't I hear something about Comcast breaking into the Alarm industry?
I beg to differ with you. It's highly articulate criticism coming from a regular JS blog reader and with an incredibly high reputation on StackOverflow (Cletus seems to be the 4th top ranked user.)

Cletus's post raises very valid points and expresses the feelings of betrayal of many people who contributed to StackOverflow many hours of work for free. And he shows several contradictions in what Spolsky preaches and what he practices.

Ironically your comment doesn't add much to the discussion and criticizes Cletus' blog post for being a negative post. Also you seem to confuse the author of the post with the submitter in HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=fogus
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=cletus

Finally, you say Cletus is telling people "which blogs are worth reading", what makes me think you actually didn't read the whole piece.
Blood Frontier Beta 2 is available for download - Linux Critic
That's why you would use it where available, instead of targeting.

if (browser.supportsWebSocket) useWebSocket(); else useComet();
First of all, influenza is not "an unharmful disease". It's can be a serious threat to people with a lowered immune system like people recovering or suffering from other diseases. That's why people die from it and end up in the statistics.

If it could have been exterminated like some other diseases in the past we would have, scientists have trying and working long enough on it.
So you definitely wouldn't want to hire someone with say, the highest stackoverflow score (Jon Skeet)? While I definitely agree that a high score isn't a black and white for a "good programmer," a SO score/account is yet another metric that may be available to try to find the perfect fit for your company. I see no problem with a person making more information about themselves available, especially if that information is in the form of technical Q&A.
Limousines for sale
Thinking about Buying A Limo? Limousine for Sale has a large inventory of new and used limos for sale changes from day to day, so check back frequently and you'll be sure to find the limo you're looking for!
I've heard lots of people say they hook Mac Mini's up to their TV. How are they doing it? I've got a DVI -> HDMI cable but that only handles the Video are people using junky PC speakers for the audio or is there some kind of in expensive multiplexer you can buy to get the audio into the HDMI cable.
Only if you think that good programmers should program 24/7, otherwise maybe it's OK to take some time to string some high-falootin' words together.
I like some of Metalab's work, but it seems like most of their designs are just copies of existing ones. http://go.urbanairship.com/ is almost identical to Metalab's marketing site except a few colors have been changed
If you can do it in less than five minutes, do it now. If it takes more than five minutes, add it to your todo list (or copy and paste the subject line).
Five Popular Google Chrome Extensions Worth Installing
Hot patching inlined functions with x86_64 asm metaprogramming
Hacker Portable Application Suite
I'm wondering if professors at community colleges are in fact better at teaching, since they aren't under the pressure to "publish or perish". And at the freshman-sophomore level, isn't that more valuable?
Charles Babbage's Difference Engine
Deep statistical analytics is fun. It's also pretty far down the road as a need for most businesses.

My experience is that when people say analytics in the corporate world, what they really mean are simple reports. The only reason it is remotely high paying is that you get locked into a vendor (Microstrategy, Cognos, etc) and have to use consultants with those specific skills.

It's a hard field to break into because people are very hung up on specific tools, eg "oh, you haven't used Informatics PowerCenter 29.4.3 for 6.4 years along with Cognos Magic Report Web Engine 79.63.3 for 9 years? sorry . . . "

As an example of how simple what is mostly needed is: I spent some time working at one of the biggest financial companies in the US. Specifically on a project that was pulling data together from server monitoring (eg resource load), web app use ( hits on each web app deployed by the company), and cost info from the accounting teams.

There were two big goals - use some simple predictive models to understand resource (server) capacity needs in the future and to tie cost per user per app back to revenues generated per user. Amazingly - to me at least - this wasn't being done at any but the grossest levels.

Nothing deep there from an analytics perspective at all. I'm not ignoring that a few companies are doing crazy stuff with huge data warehouses, but most (even very big) companies aren't anywhere close to needing petabyte data analysis.

What is more challenging for most companies is building the capability to do the simple reports. This often involves delicate negotiations with groups reluctant to let you even have the data to build the report - it is a turf thing, eg "No, all financial cost reports come from us" or "oh, that's highly sensitive accounting info and can't be shared." You ignore this political negotiation challenge of analytics at great peril to your project. It is an order of magnitude bigger issue than actual analytics on the data.
Demand Five | watch Neighbours, Series 2009 - episode 5794, Thursday 10 December
Agreed, he made some good points. Further, he gets bonus points for linking to Joel's own blog entry "Finding Great Developers" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

Joel says there are three ways to recruit

1. Go to the mountain

2. Internships

3. Build your own community (hard)

(but also lists a fourth in the body of the posting)

4. Employee referrals

Obviously, Stack Overflow is based on building a community and now they are trying to leverage that community to generate money from matching companies with developers.

In his post, Joel states that "[t]he average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career." Paraphrasing the next two paragraphs, he asserts that the truly great (as opposed to average great) developers "...show up on the open job market once...".

Maybe I'm jaded, but I cannot think of a single truly great developer that got hired through the standard recruitment methods. Recruiters and, especially, HR departments filter out all the truly great developers when sieving resumes because the truly great developers tend to be modest and honest, not traits that get them through a buzzword filter. The truly great developers I've worked got in by bypassing the HR system via an inside person.

I would assert that truly great developers pick the companies they wish to work for. As a result, the only way to catch them is to have a great company so that they find you and you still need to get lucky. As Joel writes, "The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market."
Not really about the app (It looks neat however) but on the site, the "Take a tour" section should display the screen shots in a gallery, lightbox or some such. It's rather hard to view them all.
I did read the whole piece.

I don't care who Cletus is, I was responding to what he(?) wrote. If his post was good but he had a low SO reputation, would I discount his opinion? And I have no idea there is a cletus here as well as there. I wasn't paying any attention to who he is for the same reason I was dismayed by how many words he(?) used to discuss who Joel is.

Finally, I never said his post was not truthful. There is dreck in the world. I know that and so do you.

p.s. But yeah, I hesitated before commenting on account of the irony. And then I removed the first paragraph, which originally read:

Fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck.

Not my most articulate writing by a long shot...
The first time I discovered the Mandelbrot set was an incredibly emotive and beautiful experience. I immediately moved to Wikipedia to further research it, where I found out about the Julia fractal sets that can be formed from the same equation by seeding it with a specific complex number.

Then I found this image mapping Julia sets on the complex plane by their seed values.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:725_Julia_sets.png

I actually broke down and cried.
It's not quite what I said though. The thing with SO careers is the "tied into SO" feature. That is making your SO score a big metric; but isn't a very good metric at all because I am sure there are as many SO programmers with 2K score as good as, say, Jon Skeet just not as active.

Additionally if someone promoted themselves as "I have X score on SO" it would worry me.

(that's also before we discuss whether the ability to answer questions well on SO marks you as a good programmer or not :))
Why do rich, fat men get all the girls? It's science
Henry Blodget: How To Know You've Hired A Killer Team
> you will receive just as good of an education

Not if one wants to get involved in academia or research. Frankly, I have gotten far more from working/talking with various professors and grad students then from actual class (in CS). Networking, I think, is another reason one might attend a better university. Otherwise, I would argue that most skills can be self-taught (or self-refined), and I agree that the author has some valid points.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm vaguely familiar with Ronald Bailey from one of my undergrad surveys - I will have to follow through with that promise to myself to read more of his work.
canceled my time warner cable a few months ago. just use them to get my internet now at about 40$ a month. they were desperate to keep me from canceling offering me like 99$ a month for tv and internet and all kinds of dtv stuff IF i agreed to a two year commitment. uh, ya right. forget that.
I would look at "Discipline and Punish" and "The History of Sexuality".
The fireworks continue at eBay/Craigslist trial with cross-exam of eBay exec
agree....google goggles looks like magic to me.
You Can Negotiate Anything
Ask HN: What do you use for issue tracking?
Google Code's issue tracker is great, but can't be used for closed-source projects. What simple (not bugzilla) issue tracker do you use and why?
I don't use a Mac, but for my PC I have a video card with two DVI ports. The DVI ports on this card will also send the audio through it. If you have a DVI to HDMI adapter, you'll get the audio on your TV/receiver.

Given that, I'm only using the video portion of the HDMI cable and using the S/PDIF (a single RCA cable, digital signal though) output on my mother board to send a digital audio signal over to my receiver.

I use XBMC (Windows, Mac, Linux) for watching movies. It's beautiful software, free and open source: http://xbmc.org/
50 ideas for website features
Facebook (& Sys Biologists) Take Note: Network Analysis Reveals True Connections
Leo Laporte will publish his personal monthly TWiT income
I would probably hire Jon Skeet. Of course, I would probably still hire him even if he wasn't on StackOverflow.
Alwayswriteagain: The Fascist In Citizen Welles
When I twisted my knee and strained a ligament, I was told to do exercises to strengthen the muscles around the knee. Apparently strong muscles can make up for weak ligaments. Maybe strong "concentration muscles" can make up for whatever is weak in a person with ADD. Or, maybe ADD can be defined as a person with weak concentration muscles.
The last month I have been doing this with XBMC. The base stuff works amazing and using xmbclive was quick and easy. The trouble I have been having is setting up Live TV. Our provider uses IPTV so getting content is as simple as faking a mac address and joining udp groups. But getting that setup nicely with anything "set top box"-like has been hard.

In my opinion though, this type of episodes on demand, no schedule required, watch when you want thing is the future of TV. It is funny that most people now have PVRs (and swear by them) but really those things are just caching content already saved and available in cable company head-ends. I am surprised there hasn't been more movement by cable companies to allow end users to watch their content libraries whenever and however they want. Especially with the way TV Shows are getting more serial and epic - miss one episode and you don't want to watch any until you are caught up.

Is it a matter of bandwidth or maybe just no interest in doing something new?
Interesting article that brings up some valid points but did this author attend a community college? Whenever I see a generic "Top 10" post on a blog I get really suspicious.

This is going to sound condescending, but remember those kids who had no inclination to try in school and go to a good 4 year college? That's going to be at least 75% of the students there. My brother took some summer classes there and he said they were a joke.

I've heard that teaching at one sucks, and the one or two students that are truly motivated really make the job worthwhile.

I would expect to find this especially true for a math-oriented subject like programming or engineering.
Profiling and Optimizing Common Lisp
highly-scalable - now:maybe, year ago:no

multicast - are there still stupid limits on max number of subscriptions?

real-time - sort of. have you measured the latency? depends what you mean by realtime.

distributed message passing system - distributed:yes, message passing:it depends what you mean. is polling considered as messaging?

archiving - what?

deletions - doesn't remove the items from search. I consider it as not-working.

dynamic subscription changes - yes.

access restrictions - sort of.

open API - yes

...
i would probably say the large memory footprint of redis , especially at 64bit vs 32bit.
Ask HN: Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Hi Everyone !

I need to create a privacy policy and a terms of service for my web app. I googled the issue and discovered that there are some free online tools that will generate those for you. I was wondering if someone has any experience with those. At the same time I would appreciate if someone can recommend a good template for those two documents. General thoughts and inpput on the subject is welcomed as well.

Thank you.
I think you should focus on improving the design of your site. Make it more simple so your content is focused - remove the weird matching colors, cloud picture taking too much space on the top and other things that take the focus of your site's main attraction: great content.

I think you could get inspired by A List Apart ( http://www.alistapart.com/ ), they provide similar articles like you, but their design and typography is much better.
I've seen a ton of those. I hate them, not because they're insulting, but because they fill the page with garbage when I print e-mails.

How could they be legally binding?
Before there was Boot Camp, there were DOS Compatibility Cards
I got the impression that in a lot of big organizations they just get automatically added by the email client.
The funniest by far is when you get a forwarded email with one of those signatures in the footer.