skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lack of context for phones frustrates me because it means you can be "accidentally invasive." If you approach someone in real life, you can use your senses to gauge what they're doing, thinking, and feeling at the moment of contact, and make an social gesture that is appropriate. It helps with first impressions, which are always important. And with email the asychronity is high so your risk of reaching someone at a bad time is low, so again, you can make a good first impression.

But if you're going over phone, there is some expectation of real-time availability - nobody really likes voice mail. Phone calls have a dreadful suddenness to them. Thank goodness we're moving past the days when almost everything had to be done by cold-calling a number.

IM and texting can be even worse in some ways as the expectations of timeliness are fluid so communication may get frustrating when one person is moving way faster than the other, but I think they actually work really well when used for short-term "business update" types of communication: "I will meet you at 5pm." "Do you have a link for <x>?" "We changed our plans for the meeting." etc.
I think from a non-geek perspective, "I read a lot of books" might mean "I enjoy reading, perhaps we can talk about books we've read?"

Whereas "I read about 5 books a week" sounds more like "I count how many books I read so that I can one-up anyone who thinks they are as smart as I am."

A non-geek who reads 5 books a week might admit the exact figure if probed, but would be more likely to look slightly embarrassed, to imply "yes I know that makes me odd" and "don't dislike me; I'm not trying to seem superior but you asked."
I think they probably captured everyone that makes reading Newday's website a regular part of their day. I can't imagine ever doing that personally but I guess it's possible. I hope that they just refund those people their money and move on and try something else.
Actually, don't. I can't tab to them and hit space to select them. They take up more room. They break labels. They are ambiguous.
What the hell? It carries the presumption that you have something educational to say, but it certainly doesn't presume that the other person doesn't. Education can flow both ways. Indeed, it's more interesting that way.

Just look at any thread on this forum: people contribute information and correct each other and it's interesting, not patronizing.
But you're not going to be living there for the entirety of your 30-year mortgage in most cases. What happens when 5-6 years from now, you want to move, but you're underwater and can't pay off the mortgage by selling your house?
Should you get the Apple tablet?
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vais

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vais

Didn't sound like a distasteful attitude to me. Just believes in his own work.
Chris Bosh Is Just Chilling With Hundreds Of Domain Names
It carries the presumption that you and nobody else is the Educator of Audiences and the Guardian of Validity of Discourse.

Not necessarily. Preserving accuracy in a complex system with a lot of data flowing all over the place requires multiple checks throughout the system.
My customizations all use jQuery anyway :)
That's really confusing. A control that says what will happen when you click on it is a button. What you have there is a button that is trying to look like a switch.
Why I think the Amazon App Store will be a better deal for developers
I was just writing a page with that same explanation! Now, to you all the women, money and success…

It did seem to work for most apps I tried too. (Gmail, Voice, Tasks) There's also a meta tag to select the kind of status bar you want (gray, black or translucent) but it seems that it's dismissed if the page doesn't really have it.
Or like the Red Scare in the 1950s.

Or like the Satanic ritual abuse witch-hunt in the 1980s.

Or like any number of other moral panics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
I'm at a loss to rephrase the problem part in an appropriate way so I removed it. Ask the second question yourself if you can and wish to.
My money is on "Put up a cheap site before building anything" customer development.
Oh, the parentheses he'll omit!
Here's more about it for those interested: http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:6292

...still, it actually looks like it would be a real pain in the ass to type on since the keys aren't staggered. Maybe it's something one becomes accoustomed to?
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077805
So this is what a "hacked" PS3 looks like
People with an IQ of 100 ("Normal or average intelligence") are two standard deviations from people with an IQ of 70 ("Definite feeble-mindedness").

People with an IQ of 130 ("Very superior intelligence") are two standard deviations from people with an IQ of 100.

A normal person will have to change basic communication skills to be found engaging by a feeble-minded person.

Likewise, an intelligent person will need to accommodate a normal person.

The term condescension has come to have a pejorative connotation[1] but is actually fitting in this context.

[1] Compare Webster's 1828 Dictionary:
condescension, n. Voluntary descent from rank, dignity or just claims; relinquishment of strict right; submission to inferiors in granting requests or performing acts which strict justice does not require. Hence, courtesy.

- “It forbids pride and commands humility, modesty and condescension to others.”
- “Raphael, amidst his tenderness, shows such a dignity and condescension in all his behavior, as are suitable to a superior nature.”

With Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 11th Edition:
condescension, n.
1.	act or instance of condescending
2.	a patronizing manner or behavior
I find that a lot of what is seen as "professional" or "unprofessional" is dumb. I'd much rather do business with a human being who doesn't mind being a little silly sometimes than not.

I do think it's unprofessional to say things that could offend people, because its inconsiderate. But emoticons? Loosen up, I say.
> and move on and try something else.

Like what ?

This is their hail-Mary pass, if the subscription model does not work what are they supposed to do next?

If this is an example of what will happen when paywalls rise on 'old media' sites then they're dead in the water.
Seems like the StackOverflow bug is spreading.
Agreed. Either the common man should play by the same rules, or he needs to fight to enforce that those at the top don't get to cheat either. Otherwise he is basically a "chump."
A teacher, male or female, who is anxious about math should not be teaching math.

Teachers should be confident in the knowledge of what they teach. Otherwise they are doing it wrong.
> Ah, the Dunning-Kruger effect at its finest. :-)

While I find it regrettable that the implication of this remark is that I'm some sort of idiot who doesn't have the faintest idea what he's talking about (making him think he does), I understand how you could see this as a presentation of it. I'm not basing my claims off the fact that some of the guys I've met "know everything," I'm basing my claims off the fact that many of the most experienced developers I know don't know shit in comparison.

Granted, it's not a fair comparison of 20-something to 40-somethings at all; I've met far more mediocre 20-something programmers than I've met 40-something programmers, and I'm at a place where fantastic 20-something programmers tend to aggregate.

That said, it's not fair at all for the claim to be made that 20-year-olds are dumbass Rails coders [1] who need to just shut up and listen, because many of us are comfortable operating in a large variety of languages and large projects and are EAGER to listen to worthwhile advice (I probably average a half a post a day? Maybe less? I assure you that I visit HN far more often than that).

All that said, many of the biggest home runs in the short history of our field have come from 20 year old kids who did their own thing.

[1] Which is not, in any way, to imply that Rails coders are dumbasses. It was just the implication of ggp that the 20 year old rails coders are.
Insane. The home rows are a key too wide. A qwerty touch typist never needs to move a finger more than one key left or right from its resting position (try this -- it hurts!). This layout forces you to do so regularly to hit either control/shift modifiers or the cursor controls and/or backspace in the middle (gack: imagine having to move your wrist just to backspace over the "S" you just typed!).

Traditional layout may have its bugs, but that doesn't mean that anything novel is better.
Ask HN: Best Host for Wordpress Blog
I am currently hosting my Wordpress Blog with Media Temple. I am not very happy with them though.

Any suggestions?
Too bad this doesn't actually run JavaScript on the GPU.
Complete Genomics To Sequence 1 Million Genomes – Interview With CEO
> Girls often believe themselves to be bad at math, in accordance with gender stereotyping

This seems to be taking one (politically motivated) assumption and making it into an uncontested piece of background information.

There's a fair bit of good data that suggests that women are, on average, not as good as men at math.

Perhaps some girls have math anxiety in the same way that some (male) nerds have anxiety about meeting new people: they KNOW that the task is difficult for them, and they don't want to fail.

> The study found that when elementary school teachers, who are primarily female, displayed a high level of anxiety about math, that skittishness was transmitted to their female students.

Of course, if female teachers are less skilled at math, then that would also explain the findings.
Google Voice's "new 'make call' API is bad to the ass"
Just add 'scare quotes' around logic and it changes the intonation.
I don't understand something here. If the teacher is female why should it not rub off on the boys in the same way, after all she's primarily a teacher. Or does a female teacher that has math-anxiety automatically project the opposite to the other gender ?

If that's the case then you should put males with math-anxiety in front of female students and vice versa.
I've only worked for one (software) firm which was large enough to have someone on staff who were responsible for "architecting", and I mostly thought they were idiots.

I think that if you are competent enough to build any part of your project, but can still understand the big picture and have some appreciation for elegance and beauty in a design, you've got the basic idea.

I think architects are also better trained at accurately sizing up time requirements and logistics, for an entire project, and at being aware of time and money and arbitrary client constraints.

And I think architects are trained a lot more in presenting their ideas to hostile audiences, which gives a lot of insight into taking and giving criticism, and finding the flaws in your projects and designs before they ever reach a client.
Would be cooler if it used CSS transitions.
It's terrifying to consider that you wrote this article without knowing me and in fact without living inside my head. Anything in your list that I don't do I avoid only by conscious effort.

Of course many of these behaviors are not bad so much as different, but my "best" categories are:

* Most of the time I actively analyze conversations for signs that people are talking past each other, so I usually catch myself if I'm using jargon without adequate explanation. (Of course this is fed by the commitment to accuracy and desire to educate, though.)

* I don't think I often evangelize technology, but that's mostly because I discovered some time ago that if I recommend it I'm going to end up supporting it.

Thing I'd most like to improve on in myself is struggling with turn taking in conversation. Like many of these categories, I can behave more normally, but it's amazing to me how much effort and attention this one requires.

Most cognitive dissonance for me is the whole issue of caring about the "how" more than other people do. I think I appropriately focus on what and why when making decisions, and on one level I know that most people do not in fact care about the how. But on another level I can't quite believe that (e.g.) anyone who watches American football wouldn't want to know how they make the yellow first down line show up.
I enjoy http://bit-player.org - it's a blog by Brian Hayes, who writes on computing science for American Scientist magazine (but is currently on sabbatical from the magazine, hopefully not from the blog).
We've had cameras for centuries and home movies for a couple of generations but until recently, the act of recording something was seen as deliberate and permanent.

Now, photos and videos are a part of our day to day lives, an extension of our own thoughts and social interactions. That change is colliding with the historical concept of producing media for consumption (it's also colliding with technical reality, but that's a whole other issue).

The conflict arises not simply from the availability of technology but from the level of intimacy we have with it.
They look very similar to "Google Adsense for domains" links.
Ah, this is what I was missing. Makes sense now.
It does exist - "I Can't Believe Its Not Porn"
I wanted to add that I believe the industry's biggest problem to be a lack of software development talent. No top MIT graduate is torn between working for Google and working on automating the paper workflow of a hospital. Although there are several standards available for specific types of information exchange they are rarely implemented properly. They are also poorly designed. The CCD standard is quite atrocious.
Exemplor — Example driven development
Source is cute: flip a coin indeed -

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>
// Load jQuery
google.load("jquery", "1.4");

google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {
var decision = Math.floor(Math.random()*2)
if (decision == 0) {
var response = "NO";
} else {
var response = "YES";
}

window.setTimeout(function() {
jQuery('#answer').html(response);
}, 2000);

});
</script>
Even leaving aside intelligence, on geek to non-geek conversation, there's often a knowledge gap in at least one area. I'd bet that Joe Geek's knowledge of web browsers is way more than two standard deviations higher than Joe Interlocutor.
While it's possible to find exceptions, there are some strong indicators of mild (or high-functioning) autism among the geek crowd, and several of the points in the article could be described as autistic traits.

Probably the best example is the stereotypical geek's inability to read facial expressions. Some geeks -- like me, and, it sounds like, you -- teach themselves how to do it, but this is still a trait which comes more naturally to most people. This, combined with the geek's active "inner world", causes awkward conversations and social behavior.

Above average numeracy and a tendency to mentally model problems and situations visually are a couple of other indicators, as well as tendencies towards emotional irregularities.

While you might be able to act as though the differences between you and others is not great, the fact is, their brain probably doesn't work very much like yours does.

I knew someone for a while that was working on his thesis in psychology; according to him, the field of psychology had a certain reluctance to measure various disorders in degrees. Although psychologists might say, "this person is autistic, and can function somewhat in society", and, "this other person is autistic and cannot function in society", they're reluctant to say, "this person is only a little autistic". (This was the subject of his thesis.)

Based on what I've read in the DSM and publications like SciAm:Mind, as well as what I've observed of people, I'd tend to agree with him, and I'd say that it's a pretty safe bet that the majority of stereotypical geeks are "a little autistic".
The article is about actual conversations, not HN threads. Real life interactions have to do with whether the other party perceives you're being a patronizing git, not whether you believe you have something educational to say.

Little Edit: if you think describing 'I don't agree with you' as an 'altruistic desire to educate' and single-handedly preserving the 'validity of discourse' and the 'truth and correctness of human understanding of the world' is anything short of absurdly presumptuous, you might want to re-read the linked article very carefully.
Sounds like it could be useful. Of course, it would be infinitely more useful if researchers were using a semantic markup language (perhaps Content MathML) so that equations with the same meaning could be discovered regardless of the actual symbols used.

Not that I'd want to code MathML by hand...
As a resident locally "served" by Newsday I can only ask: what were those 35 people thinking!

Comparing Newsday to the NY Times does a disservice to the Times. Since being taken over by Cablevision, Newsday can best be described as the New York Knicks of media. It has become a throwaway add-on for Cablevision in its competition with Verizon Fios.
Cool[1]... nice single purpose app BTW.

My normal advice to you nifty niche App'ers is to look at long standing apps to see what they did right for revenue. Namely http://www.network-science.de/ascii/

----------------

[1] GD still has its own problems, but it seems like subscribing to secunia for GD would catch most, like this recent one :: http://secunia.com/advisories/38055/
They may not be very good at telling you how they want to do something, but they are usually pretty good at telling you what they want to be able to do.
My guess is a highly specialized form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Tendency towards fields like programming and engineering -- where correctness is both demonstrable and required -- are just side effects of this.
Right. That succinctly describes something other than a 'conversation between humans'.
The implications are a bit disturbing. Paid access to those databases combined with case law means that if you are poor then you won't have full information about what can get you jailed.
This seems tautological in the mainstream thought? Degrees of these behaviors are often used to identify geeks in the first place.
Hmmm it's a thought.
and kinesis keyboards are probably way more comfortable
In technical terms, the problems in software are just as difficult as in buildings, but you don't have to deal with inspectors and building codes and aesthetics.

(Which is a big part of the reason I choose to work as a coder ;)

I am saying that a top notch architecture school is much more demanding than an equivalent engineering school, from my experience. I say that having lived with ME and CS roommates, at U of Michigan, while I was in school.
Social networks are a source of information, not of frinends
"...One thing I can do is ask for help. A few weeks ago I needed an old computer, so I asked if anyone I'm connected to is going to throw away his or hers. Within a couple of weeks I've got me a brand-new old-but-respectable working computer. People ask for opinions about products. They ask for help finding a specific song. Social media is a great tool to dip into the knowledge of the many and find stuff where Google is completely broken..."
"35 people."

I wonder how big the Newsday executive suite is?
I seriously doubt that in most social situations, HN-like discourse would be considered "interesting".

Geeks find the constant back-and-forth of corrections in dialogue to be interesting and educational. Non-geeks do not; they lose interest by about the second iteration, and will become annoyed shortly after.
I discovered today that I have a similar problem, even though I don't even have an iPhone app: someone copied graphics from my web site for his iPhone app.

So far I have contacted apple and the designer of the graphics to clarify the rights (designers provided the graphics but I don't know where they are from). Not thrilled, but I can't imagine just letting that person get away with it.

Although what the other comment said certainly applies: the quality of the ripped off app seems rather low. He uses some of my icons, but the rest of it looks ugly.

Anyway, would be curious to hear how your story unfolds.
Google voice only handles your voicemail if you explicitly set it up through the google voice settings interface. It involves dialing a special number from your phone that google gives you. And if I recall correctly Mike Arrington did explain this in at least one of the posts covering the whole fiasco.
or deeper understanding of human psychology and game mechanics are spreading.
I qualified it as "all of the 20-year-old whizzes I know" very carefully. Clearly, I do not know them all. Equally clearly, the stereotype I describe can not be blindly applied. "Whizzes" is not extraneous either. Many 20-year-olds are perfectly competent and may be slower or less experienced but don't suffer from this pattern.

However, as impressed as you may be by people with three years of experience, it's still not ten years of experience. (Or twenty.)

May I also point out that you casually assume the other side of the stereotype: 'All of your experience becomes a hindrance when you start to follow your old steps to the "right solution" every time.' That's total bullshit. If you are getting "real" experience, the "good" experience (which I scarequote mostly because I don't want to go deep into trying to define them but it really ought to be obvious if you think about it), then experience itself tells you when your old experience needs to be augmented.

And what disruption are you talking about? I bet in your head you're thinking app disruption; "old fogies" can't come up with the idea for Facebook or something. In programming terms, the disruption is way slower than it appears. When I was 20, I got into Python. Python is still working on penetrating the mainstream. Now I'm getting into Haskell, and if it ever goes mainstream (probably not, but if...) it'll be another 5 years minimum. Programming "disruption" really doesn't move that fast.

(For all the sound and fury of Clojure and Scala and Python and Perl and Ruby and so on and so on, huge amounts of the cognitive traffic are just "An ORM for X!" "A jpeg library for X!" "A JSON library for X!" Patterned, shall we say. True disruption happens way less often.)

Besides... I'd point out that none of what you cite actually disproves my point. Everything you cite involves situations where they were probably either vetted by other people higher up, or still trading on quality to produce results quickly that are still a net technical value loss, as open source does not intrinsically prevent that. Open source even has some well-known common failure cases on that front, like "preference explosion", using adding preferences to prevent having to make design decisions or telling someone to shove off.

You complain as if I'm personally attacking you. I'm not. I'm attacking the stereotype, which definitely exists. And I personally have gotten to the point that someone introduces somebody as a "whiz", I mentally cringe. (The same cringe I do when somebody says "Wow, X fixes like ten bugs a day every day!" BIG RED FLASHING LIGHTS should be going off, not the good kind.) As much as you may not like it... this metric hasn't failed me yet.
Why Metalua isn't Lisp
"Is this what we asked for?

I think not."

I can't speak for anyone else, but I remember those large crayon boxes from when I was a child. They weren't quite as large as the ones from the article (50ish, perhaps?). But that said, I definitely was asking for the large complex box.

And if people are buying, is it any surprise that the companies deliver?
I agree that most of that title is linkbait, but when you whittle it down to just "Surging Countries", I think it gets to be too vague and non-descriptive. Truth is that the article is speculative in nature, so shouldn't the title indicate that. How about "Countries to pay attention to this decade"? That at least provides an indication that it is speculative and provides a timeline for that outlook, and it spares the reader the "you must" and the <number>.