skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't waste your expensive and valuable college time on software engineering tools, source control, and other mundane crap that any monkey can learn quickly. Every programming tool that I learned about in college is now either unused (CVS, RCS, Motif), or dismissed by the l33t rock-stars as dinosaur technology (C++, Java, Perl). Today's l33t tools will be just as dead in ten years. Learn enough to do your assignments well, but view the time invested as a sunk cost.

If you want to learn how to be a coder, go to DeVry, or read some O'Reilly books and hack away. Your career will be mercifully short and uneventful.

If you want to be a computer scientist, spend your time learning math and theory, and learn it inside out. Then take business classes, chemistry classes, language classes, art classes -- anything to make you marketable in a non-technical way. The only way you're going to survive to old age in software (if that's even possible) is by acquiring talents that grow more valuable with age and experience -- skills that can't be cheaply exported to the next younger guy who is willing to work 80 hours a week for low wages and free soda.
haha, I know im kind of being a pussy and doing it to cover my ass. You also have like 4 bajillion other projects! It's more of a do I want to do this full time for passion reasons? I'm pretty certain if I went balls to the wall on the marketing+product feedback side, it could be a success.

Mark and I are comfortable enough with HN to have founder discussions out in the open.
Consider yourself lucky. You could have been taught ISO-9000 or something from the Software Engineering Institute. The way things go now, three classes and you would have missed a release cycle.
Why not do both?

I'm hustling to get my new app out and I plan to use a kind of "hybrid" system. Perhaps it has a name but the premise is just that you have to attach VALUE to whatever it is you are giving away. If you price something as "FREE" and then give it away, then the user does not feel like he's really getting anything. If you price something for $200.00, and then give it away, well they just got $200 for FREE - AWESOME!!

So my current plan of attack is have 3 pricing tiers that all costs money. Then as of now, I'm in "beta" so I have this huge "sale" "this month only" where all users get "PLUS accounts FREE FOR LIFE!". And clearly right there, Plus accounts normally cost $100/yr, so I'm reasoning that a customer would derive more value from signing up than if I had just called the Plus plan "free" with a fat ass zero for the price.

So in other words. Be a premium product so everyone understands you are worth something, and then have sales, and reasons to give those oh-so-valuable plans away.

HTH
He's a politician, of course he isn't interested in the truth. He's interested in getting the biggest dollar value into his pocket, that's all politics is and ever has been.
One of my relatives works in the petroleum exploration industry as a consultant. He told me that on a recent stint in Moscow he came across a real, physical software black market. He said that they basically told him they could get him anything he wanted, including the $100k+ software packages his firm uses for oil exploration with cracked hardware dongles for authentication. They just needed a couple days notice and were charging a few hundred $.
Funny. That's what I do with phone.
Best 3 Business Books for Internet Entrepreneurs
Highly relevant stackoverflow.com thread: "What is the most important thing you weren't taught in school?": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/258548
jove.com is a good example of using the web to better share science, so is openwetware.org.

the people running labs these days are usually 35+; they grew up before google. In a sense, they see the web as a way to do what they've always done faster, as opposed to doing new things. As younger people replace them this will change.
Here's one idea im just shooting out there for the hell of it. Seriously, it might be absolutely retarded and just designate it as so with comments: Microtransactions. Give people x amount of free videos and x amount of free photo albums. After that, they pay for each one posted (something really small).
Don't forget about all the non-technical stuff. No one programs in a vacuum...

The Systems Development Life Cycle: analysis, design, development, testing, security, deployment, project management

Underlying systems theory, regardless of language: architecture, databases, frameworks, MVC, properties, methods

Underlying logic, regardless of language: iteration, branching and conditions, functions and routines, variable typing and scope

Anyone can go to webmonkey and learn how to write a "Hello World" program. But these basic underlying concepts that you use for the rest of your life: that's what college should be for.
Said.fm is Listening - Human and Robot Interaction
Heh, I read about this tactic in the Yes! book. It's a great one. I think it'd be a great tactic to do for a short term marketing run, but labeling a Basic product as $30 a year BUT YOURS FREE!!!1one for the long term might not be so reputable, right?

Thanks for your input!
I read The Ascent of Money, by Niall Ferguson over the summer and I am reminded of a passage discussing Argentina:

"So successful did Argentina's default prove (economic growth has since surged while bond spreads are back in the 300-500 basis point range) that many economists were left to ponder why any sovereign debtor ever honours its commitments to foreign bondholders"

http://books.google.com/books?id=JA_IYJ0P4ZkC&lpg=PA4...
"Take initiative. You're not going to learn to be a programmer in college. Do open source, internships, summer jobs... Make sure you work with people better than you."

And then focus on getting the most out of the stuff that college is good at teaching: fundamentals and theory. Do you really want to learn how to be a practician from a career academic?
Experience is the best teacher. Just build programs! The more you build, the better you'll be. Note how I said build, not write. Think about it.

Oh yeah, and contributing to open source is the bomb. You learn so much about real-world applications of your knowledge.
How to Stop Home Foreclosure
I'm not a Ramamia user, so please excuse it if my comments seem ignorant; they are. I'm just thinking about what my family would want/need. If it's slick enough, we might become users one day. As far as I'm concerned, you'll have to beat the MobileMe/iPhoto combination, which is still very much one-way, but extremely easy to use.

Some family members want to download and share pictures. I have explained that that's not what this site is for.

This is a must. Save the original files when they're uploaded, even if you then show downscaled versions to users on the web interface: have a prominent "download printable version" link/button. Also: have a button for downloading a whole album as a zip file or whatever. You're charging people, so suck up the extra traffic and storage.

Killer: have an "order a [framed/unframed] print of this" button for those who don't have a photo printer and glossy paper. Interface with a third-party printing service for this, get commission for it.

Speaking of iPhoto: importing albums straight from iPhoto would be fantastic. This is technically possible from a Java Applet or maybe via Flash, but prepare to sink quite a bit of effort into it if you decide to try this. Let me know (email in profile) if you need any pointers.
Which is the Easiest Poker Game to Beat
You play to put cash in your pocket. The issue is that it is tough to win at poker because players appear to get better each day. And there are so many games to make a choice from : Hold'em poker, Omaha, Pony , seven Card Stud and others.
Yeah, as a once-upon-a-time dreamhost customer, I was pretty annoyed to have paid $119 for a years hosting only to see that they discount it 98% every now and then. Definitely not a good feeling.

I think what I'm thinking is more a long the lines of "actually" giving away a non-free plan. So whatever your entry level paid plan is, just lower it a little more, and then be prepared to charge money for it, but anytime you want to do a marketing push, give it away for free. So its not going to be like some secretly free plan. The whole point is to give something of value away for free. I think all customers would appreciate that.

Lastly, I like how 37 signals has a lowly-advertised ass-basic free plan. It's still free, but they make it a point to really imply that "it aint all that great". I like this because it implicitly reminds every customer that deals with 37 signals that their product costs money for a reason. It's kind of like thinking about it backwards...why would I think this company is worth anything if they give everything away for free? Actually...thats EXACTLY what I think about dreamhost now. I have to say back in the days I thought dh was a good company because it was better than the godaddy account I came from. But I've come to realize they absolutely whore out their plans (98% wtf) and its literally at a direct cost to their full-paying customers.. (shared hosting) I am officially not a fan of dh and I am that burned enough to leave a negative comment about them in a public forum as I'm doing now ... Give your customers something of value!!
Ah yes, the Poochy the Rockin' Dawg theory of application development:

"Hmmm, add in a little more MVCness."

"OK, good, can you make it about 30% more AJAXy?"

"It needs more social networking, can you do that?"

"Now, how about adding in a pinch of virality?"

"What about crowd sourcing? Can you add more crowd sourcing?"

"Is there some way we can leverage synergies in the cloud?"

"Excellent, ship it!"
The whole purpose of learning about technology is to make technology do something for people. So somehow we got the idea to focus exclusively on the technology and hope the people part takes care of itself.

Smart people can learn all sorts of interesting technical stuff. In fact, if you're smart, you're going to learn all sorts of stuff like SDLC, functional programming, OOAD, ER Modeling, etc.

What they don't teach you is the part about interacting with regular people -- people who have no idea how to make technical things happen.

Interviewing. Negotiation. Conflict resolution.

I know it sounds fluffy, but I see smart guys all day long. What separates the truly successful from the rest of the pack is how well they interact and solve problems for people, not tech smarts. Technical smarts [and a willingness to develop them more] are a given by the time you get into the field.
1) They banned using ANY equipment or resources payed for with ANY federal dollars in stem cell research (and very strictly enforced it). Since many labs have to share equipment between projects, this effectively banned most stem cell research.

2) They had direct ties to the Discovery Institute, the main force behind the Intelligent Design Creationism pseudoscience movement.

3) And whether or not there's a vast pro-AGW conspiracy, that doesn't excuse interfering with publication of climate science from NASA.

And that's just off the top of my head, fortunately I haven't thought about this in a while. For more info: http://www.amazon.com/Republican-War-Science-Chris-Mooney/dp...
Honestly, I wouldn't put too much faith in this working. It's possible that I'm just really bad at this, but the last couple times I've been looking for work, I've never gotten a company to budge off their initial offer (even when I truthfully told them that I had 4 other offers on the table). In one case a company I turned down did come back with a higher offer a year later.
I'd also like to add that the interview question type of pressure is of the type "I have to start moving my mouth within 4 seconds or I'll look bad."

All-night overtime or short deadline pressures are completely different beasts.
What pg said: http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
Slow computer? Fix Registry Errors, speed up XP
Still wondering about this.

There really should be some analysis somewhere (just for Fermi's Paradox, if nothing else) to answer this question:

How fast could humanity have reached viable colonies in space -- if we had used Orions or "normal" nuclear rockets? (NERVA, or better).

NASA would hardly fund research into their total failure to reach a fraction of what could have been. Is that the reason why this isn't well published?

Since we're still here, I think physics experiments to explain Fermi's paradox has to be wrong (unless they destroy a whole solar system).

I think I'll email the guy which has centauri-dreams.org and ask.

Edit: A meme like virtual worlds which everyone got dependent on, disregarding species and culture, sounds just impossible. It seems more likely that older civilizations kill off the new ones, to be like Greta Garbo (alone).

Edit 2: My point is that the "Great Filter" (see http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1848) should be behind humanity, unless it is that other civilizations kill new ones, since a large fraction of all civilizations that are where we are in development, would have viable space colonies.
If the person errantly assumes that the best metric to evaluate the programs is by an unadjusted comparison of their most recognizable achievement (which is simple, obvious, and wrong) then I can see how they would make a point similar to the one above. I do not believe that malice is required for shallow exploration of the problem set in this way. The sarcasm is petty, but it may follow from the earlier error.

So the issue in this case is wether the sarcasm follows from the errant logical conclusion or wether a malicious intent inspired the faulty logic and bad attitude. As the righteous are often petty, I cannot discern if the error is deliberately dishonest or negligently shallow and intentionally righteous.

Either way, I agree that it is a terrible argument and a worse comment.
Yes, using the newer elements. Haven't had a need for the others yet.
reductionism, ur doin it wrong. when we make simpler abstract models of complex systems it's because we have an axiomatic understanding of the complex system. you have to make sure all the complex variables cancel each other out* properly before you can ignore them and confidently state "this model accurately represents the underlying reality".

*this is a simplification obviously. lots of models involve not canceling out but other statistical techniques (like linearizing the relationship between two variables), which is part of what the climate debate is all about: are these simplifications valid? the reason "climategate" is a big deal is because it is evidence that no, no they are not.
Thanks. This does look amazing. I'll try it out and post my results back here. Interested to hear what kind of things you you or others use it for. It really gets you thinking about new possibilities.
Because I speak my mind, and the truth that many don't wish to hear, I won't do that even though I'd like to.
You seem to be making the assumption that scientists are interpreting their own data correctly in the first place. Reproducibility isn't just a check on outright fraud, it's also a way to check for mistakes in the original findings. The data isn't for lay-people and journalists, it's for other researchers.

As somebody who has had to compile (economic) datasets for public release, I understand that there is cleaning of raw data that needs to happen. However, this needs to happen in a transparent manner, and any transformations should be clearly called out or explained.
One could argue that people use religion as a tool to control the people whom they want to associate with.

In that respect, it may not be a mind virus so much as a socially acceptable way to keep people away from you whose behavior you don't like.
There is something that puzzles me in all this : why didn't he spoke of it earlier ? Especially since it's advertised that he did it "so he could tell others the truth".

Perhaps he spoke about it and it didn't catch media's attention.

Anyway, if it's true then it sure is very brave, and crazy. I mean infiltrating an extermination camp ? You gotta be insane (or suicidary) to try something like this.
My company is up to ~40 programmers in my regional office, and our method appears to scale well enough for now.

We let everyone who asks take a very relaxed programming test. Simple (if you know basic algorithms, at least) problem, 4 hours deadline, work from home or in one of our free offices, programming language up to the interviewee. The delivered program is then rated by a few of our programmers who give some comments and a thumbs up or down. If thumbs are generally up, the candidate goes to the interview. The ones who get to the interview almost always end up hired.

So, basically, we have 3 tasks:

* Answer emails, send out tests, receive deliveries, and schedule interviews or say "sorry" to each candidate: This is the most stressful, so we rotate that every once in a while.

* Going over code and commenting: Enough people consider this a somewhat fun break from normal work that we don't have any problems scaling this.

* Interviewing: This has to require the R&D leader and at least one senior programmer. Since the people who get this far are almost always hired, it takes up no more of their time than it has to.
I find this so true.
TechZING 24 In the Face of Uncertainty (Podcast)
The price for dedicated servers in Germany is just crazy ... a friend of mine is using this one too and I also have an account. If price is a concern (for testing and personal purposes), find a friend or two to share a baseline dedicated server is usually much better than using a cheap VPS.
"... This doesn't really explain why these chains succeed in America, though. ..."

How about "acceptance of a lower standard of coffee?", different culture (Melbourne historically more influenced by Europe than America) and the relative youth of "business franchises" in Australia?

"... I'm fairly likely to go to Starbucks simply because I know what I'll get there (a slightly overpriced, slightly over-bitter, but adequate, latte), while experience has shown that picking an unknown local coffeeshop leads to, on average, a worse cup of coffee, with high variation. ..."

That's a good explanation - take the safe, reliable option even if it's not quite the real thing.

I'd offer another, theory. Starbucks also happens to choose their locations near known coffee locations to offer customers an alternative customers with the hope of putting them out of business. This is what happened in Melbourne and it backfired. The competition was too great ~ http://www.melbournecoffeereview.com/2008/07/celebrate-good-...

The problem of "finding a good coffee" might be solvable in the US by Starbucks. But in a city where Italian migrants created the "Cafe` lifestyle" through respect of produce, technology and setting, Starbucks efforts are a poor imitation.
Frankly, I'm having trouble taking either of you seriously. The comment was a silly one, but clearly the ego of Paul Graham cannot handle jest that compares YC unfavorably with the invention of the wheel.
This has been know to intelligence agencies for many decades, there is nothing new here that makes it worth the time to read.

Well that's the thing, and what makes it worth the time to read it: while intelligence agencies have known about this for decades, regular people don't know it. Worse, the Congress doesn't seem to know it.

Don't forget that this article was written in March 2003, when the whole country - or at least the government - was still on a "how did we miss 9/11?" kick.
Number of efforts across the board, including chemistry and biology. The extreme side of the "open science" world is Open Notebook Science

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Notebook_Science

In general you are required to put enough into the methods section of a paper to be able to reproduce the results, but as the computational side gets more and more complex and supplementary data sets get bigger and more complicated, the need to make the raw data and (if possible) code available for people to reproduce the results and/or test the assumptions becomes almost a necessity.

A number of folks are thinking along the publishing side as well. Theres PLoS One (http://plosone.org) and Cell has been doing some very interesting prototyping on the "paper of the future". People have already mentioned JoVE and OpenWetWare. It will happen, but it's going to take a few years. Too many years of established practice.
The Perfect Desktop - Fedora 12 i686 (GNOME)
f() is only available in the Erlang shell/REPL. The reason it has such a short name is that it's intended for use in the shell and not in real code. Its purpose is for forgetting a variable name that you may have defined earlier during interactive testing in the shell. It's not available in compiled code and is not intended for re-assigning variables within a function.
there are conceivable cases were it seems natural to not keep the "base data" around.

Your example does not demonstrate this point. By taking the temperature readings in degrees C, you, in fact, are taking the "base data". Of course, you also should record the equipment that you are using to take that data. The height of mercury in your thermometer can be determined by the the brand of thermometer (including the Manufacturer and Model #), and the temperature reading given. Most scientific peer-reviewed research articles are very specific about the equipment being used.
Thanks for this. Lamson looks very powerful but it's probably overkill for what I'm looking for.
"Intelligence Quotient"

The value is defined by a bell curve.
This might be the best advice I've heard in a while:

"Grab something hard, confusing, foreign, etc... Master it. Then move on... Don't wait for other people to teach you things. Learn stuff on your own now. Maintain the expectation that you only know 10% of what you need to know."

I feel like I should print this out and post it on my wall. Thanks, disspy.
While I fully agree that the immutability-by-default mindset helps with concurrency, having single-assignment variables within the local scope of functions (what zephj is complaining about) is strictly due to Erlang being originally implemented in Prolog. Strictly speaking, letting you destructively modify local variables in Erlang wouldn't have any impact on concurrency.

In Prolog, it's because there's only unification, not assignment. Semantically, it's as if "X always had that value, it just wasn't known until now" - you can pass around unbound values and retroactively bind them for all places of use, but you can't ever change them. (Difference lists are probably the best example of this in action.)
We’re building a start-up based on the lean principles. The reason is simple: none of us are ready to quit our jobs until we’re sure we have a winner. Call us cowards perhaps, but we have families to feed.

The problem will bulking up at the beginning is that no one will invest in your product if it doesn’t exist and you’ll never get started on anything. The lean approach encourages you to get off your butt and just do it.

For our situation the lean startup approach is working very well. We got a working product out the door very quickly and we’re learning a lot from our first customers. Plus we’re having a ball! [http://twegather.com]
Building a Clojure Web application with Incanter, Compojure, and Leiningen
Hey! That's really cool.
Droid does, iPhone doesn't: The porn app store
I'm not a Global Warming advocate.

But I've never found the "Global Cooling" argument very compelling. I don't think you can take any misconception from 34 years ago and use it to invalidate a current scientific theory because the technology we use to measure and extrapolate has increased so greatly.

Keep in mind this article was written only 4 years after the first commercial microprocessor was release (the 4-bit Intel 4004). So you can't even compare our ability to measure and interrupt data now to what they had then.