skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
as an employer (sortof... everyone is an 'independent contractor' a mostly defensible position right now, as everyone works from home, and pretty much takes stuff off the list of things that needs to be done when they feel like doing them.) I think that if you can talk employees into this arrangement, and retain them, having 2 20hr/week guys is better than having 1 40hr/week guy.

the first, most obvious benefit is redundancy. If one employee gets sick or gets another job, I've still got the other guy, and can often talk him or her into working more temporarily to cover until I get someone else.

The other benefits are that I think nerds often under bill. A person working for me 20 hours a week ideally (well, ideally for me, the employer) gives me as much 'inspiration' as someone working 40 hours.

I also think employees are vastly more productive when they feel like working. In my situation, if I pick the right people, I get to pay them when they feel like working, when they are most productive, and then not pay them when they are unmotivated, and thus less productive.

Now, if I hired everyone as employees, then we'd have interesting issues with health insurance; each employee would have a per-month cost not dependent on hours I got out of them (I'm assuming that I'd have a better retention rate if I offered health insurance) But it's possible that cost would be low enough to justify the scheme; maybe I would just pay them a lower wage than I otherwise would?

(man, health insurance is fucked up... as far as I can tell, if I want to get people tax deductible insurance, I have to get everyone insurance; If someone wants to opt-out, as far as I can tell, I can't give them the cash I'd otherwise be spending on them.)
On my middling ADSL (10M/2M), Fox takes about 4 seconds, but it's readable after 1 or 2. Not bad for being on the other side of the Pacific.

FF3.6, all plugins disabled.
Notes on the resolution and other details of the human eye
Well, if using Python over J2EE is wrong, I don't want to be right.
I'm not sure, but I think Clojure would fully evaluate all terms until it gets the one you request. Clojure has lazy sequences, but it doesn't turn everything into thunks like Haskell.
as you get auto-subscribed, this is no early adopter. Gmail's around for years
I'm not an expert on Xapian or Lucene, but I think the scope of the book is quite a bit wider.
Unless they actually mean vi. Not all vi implementations are Vim, especially those on Unices.
As most of the comments on the post demonstrate, his demand that all software developers hate their own code more than anyone else's code is a little unreasonable. If he's been fortunate enough to always be the least competent on his team and therefore has saved himself the frustration and his co-workers only produced code which he admired, then he is definitely lucky.

That's not to say that most of us are great programmers -- most of us, as you might expect, are average programmers. It's just to say that there's a lot of code out there that's not even written by programmers at all. You get the designer who's been copy/pasting every snippet he could get his hands on until it just made the dumb thing work, you get construction workers and plumbers who were attracted to the glamor of a desk job after throwing out their backs, or whatever.

One of the last codebases I worked on was a website that ran a whole company but didn't have any ID fields anywhere and all joining or other inter-database matching had to be done by text comparison. This system was written by an ex-construction contractor who'd fallen hard on his luck, learned HTML one day, and became this company's de-facto programmer, so it makes sense that it would be like this; the concept of an ID field, after all, is not self-evident to one without training.

Much code out there is "written" by people who have no idea what they're doing. I don't mean that in the self-effacing, most-programmers-are-average-programmers way, but I mean it in the way that "your system was built by someone who was literally just as qualified as your receptionist or janitor" kind of way.

Given these circumstances, I don't think it should be an immediate writeoff if you can do better than the last codebase you were brought in to fix.
Well, I was trying to fight replying this because I can't really see any good coming of it, but I just have too much to say in response, and some of it may be of value.

You derive your opinion of him, via a DM on twitter, which was probably nothing more than mockery? I guess first impressions really do matter, and of course, the first 140 chars. Still I find that silly.

We apparently do differ, I sure as hell don't look at things as black and white, like you do, and I am probably not a model citizen. I look at everything as a game, a game is nothing more than a system and manipulating a system is something I find very intriguing. I mean, as a kid I used to take everything around me apart, from lawn mowers to computers. I was interested in how things worked, and making them better or different was what I did for enjoyment..in the process I broke a lot of things, did many things I shouldn't have, probably pissed my dad off a few times, but in the process I learned and I find that method extremely awesome. It's not like I hurt anyone in the process. Honestly, if I can do all that and profit, you're damn right I am going to do it. Hell, I AM going to do it.

The way I see it, SEO is exactly that..and, its not like everyone else can't do the same thing. There is nothing stopping you, me or anyone else from doing what Calcanis does, except of course the ability and therefore I don't see that as a bad thing to do. Call it bad morals, I call it pursuit of knowledge but who are you to judge?
Using Multiple Disks in Hadoop
San Francisco Public Information News-Greg Shade
I've had an iPod Touch and my girlfriend has had first an iPhone 3G, and now 3GS, for about a year; and on Tuesday I got my Nexus One. I think the Nexus One is the better device. There's a lot of polish missing, with too many taps required for some things, not enough finger-swipes etc., but everything else considered - especially background apps - I would not swap it with an unlocked iPhone. (And I have a fair choice of networks, being in the UK.)

The ability to go onto the marketplace and download e.g. a battery monitor app that could display a number on the notification bar rather than the 5-state default was refreshing. I had to jailbreak by iPod Touch to get similar functionality. I similarly had to jailbreak it to disable auto-rotation; that's a default option in the N1. And the sense of freedom in being able to e.g. download Opera and replace the browser is refreshing. This is a device that doesn't necessarily need Google to improve it - competition can play its part too.
BasketBall Game By Theentermedia
I expect she is just tired of debating lazy gender-essentialists and the non-mathematically-rigorous kind of EvoPsych Just So Story author.

For counterweighting to your links, consider reading this http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2YUdkUtoyqIC
Valve offering free Valentines and Official Gear sale
Unfortunately astrological signs didn't give me any 'opposites' I can compare myself with. Having read through the descriptions of various character types associated with various astrological signs, I cannot say I identify with one any more than another.

MB-types give me a set of sliding scales. I show up as strongly I and strongly N, which allows me to compare myself with ES types - I recognise very little of myself in ES types, and a lot more of myself in IN types, which means I'm biased towards the assumption that there is at least some basis to it.

I can also make predictions about what types my friends are, and (before telling them my guess) ask them what type they are. Currently these predictions seem to be matching up pretty well, although a little fuzzy on the P/J axis.
> With respect, and with gratitude for your compliments, I ask: Is there really that much of a difference?

I think so. "Fucking crazy" implies a madness/insanity/etc that can't be overcome. It's fine if you're trying to make a point and need quick words ("Wow, humans can be really fucking crazy sometimes" in response to a story), but pointing out how humans are crazy also shines a light on potential solutions.

Saying, "People are prone to making associations with certain words instead of concepts" is helpful - you can think, "Okay, then how can I use descriptive words that aren't loaded with unnecessary baggage?" Or if you're trying to persuade, you can look for terms that are favorable. Or you can point out the error in word association. Or you can try to "humanize" the concept - that's my guess at what happened in this particular story. "Homosexuals" implies someone else - a third party, an enemy, "not one of us". "Gay men and lesbians" implies people, humans.

Just writing off humanity with, "People are fucking crazy" makes it easier for people to shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, that's how it is." Instead, I think it's something to be overcome. The more we point out exactly what our errors tend to be, the more we can work specifically on them.
What is with the commenters here hating on feminism?
"Pat Robertson would wet himself if he actually understood who he
was talking to."

:D
You can configure buzz's connection to other sites by going to gmail, buzz, "n connected sites" above the text box, click the Edit link next to (non editable!) item that says Public. A box pops open with a link to that site's privacy page.
"A cynical commenter at TPM suggested the control experiment
of asking people if they favor "heterosexuals" serving
openly in the military."

I think that would actually be a very enlightening experiment.
Forum "Conversation with God"
http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=4

other discussions :
http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10
Semi-related: How do I write Ruby and poop out Javascript?
Glove hack for iPhone
Well even in that case attackers won't touch your data (since you aren't targeted), so you'll be still safe. If they are targeting you then it's the same thing.
Beyond text, there be dragons.
"flywheel generator mounted in its passenger seat that can spin at up to 40,000 rpm"

Now that is what I call exciting: sitting next to a few kg of metal spinning at 40K rpm.
lazy gender-essentialists and the non-mathematically-rigorous kind of EvoPsych Just So Story author

My parser choked on this. She's tired of debating who/what?
I don't think anyone was hating on feminism . The quote was " crazy feminist" I believe. Feminism , like all "isms" has its fanatics and extremists.
The Smarter You Are, The Less You Click
All the rapidly increasing areas are hacker friendly, software publishing, technical management and consulting and software design.
'useful' is subjective. That mast would not have to be 'very large' to power one's GPS system, and having that certainly could be useful. At even lower power, a tiny impeller that measures boat speed could be very useful.

If you are aiming for large amounts of power, I would expect it to be more efficient to replace part of the sailing by a wind turbine, and to get rid of that water turbine.
If he's been fortunate enough to always be the least competent on his team

He's Jeff Atwood -- the hand of fortune has no role in his relative incompetency.
Meridia for sale
Guns don’t kill people, puppies do
Well, not supposed to work like that if you think it in terms of "regular" mathematics and the problem is still (some|many) programmers don't know about this problem...
Tempgraph: a command line utility for plotting historical climatology data
Most colleagues at work listen to music from their iPod, not their workstation.
lazy gender-essentialists = the kind of people who make dogmatic pronouncements of the form "women are x" without scientific cites (or with old, outdated science that conveniently backs their point)

the non-mathematically-rigorous kind of EvoPsych Just So Story author = the kind of damn fool who makes a story like "berries are red, women needed to gather them in prehistory, and that's why women prefer pink" based on a weak study on the color preferences of a small handful of women. Evolutionary Psychology is not an excuse to invent vaguely plausible evolutionary explanations and call them scientific. (The Just So Stories are Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian fantasy tales of how creatures attained their present form.)
That is good point guys, I will need to change that. Thanks!
If everyone titled their posts like this, the HN front page would be garbage.
Another possibility: they are testing software, so want to keep the CPU free. But phones in a noisy environment are continually trying and failing to connect, wasting resources. Not sure why one would affect the other so much though, so this is a sketchy guess.
Thank you for this! I am not sure if I should change the copy now as it would probably does not make sense for people who would come later to read the article and there would be no mistakes.
You guys make it so complicated ;)

Prelude> repeat "developers"

And since this is Y combinator news...:

Prelude> fix("developers":)
That's cheating. Haskell isn't a language, it's The Word of Simon.

The question of which Simon is left as an exercise to the reader.
We, sysadmins, are not programmers. Our job is to configure and manage systems. We know nothing about machine languages. Most of us use scripting languages, like python and perl, to automate tasks. So please, don't ask me what the difference is between a Service and a Repository class, because I have absolutely no idea. It's Chinese to me. So, programmers, stay ways from me, stay away from my environments, and stay away from my procedural python scripts.

Or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
Static analysis doesn't find everything, owing to the Halting problem. Discovering apps that use APIs, on the other hand, is often much easier, as they have to import the APIs somehow.
Wow, I thought it was just me. In life I'm pretty laid back--it generally takes a lot before I get riled up by another person. But trying to get something done and running into dumb bugs in bad software makes me rage. I don't rage at my own code though, like he suggests--at worst it's just embarrassing. No, I only rage at other people's bugs. And only when I'm not in a position to debug or fix it (proprietary binaries, web apps, etc).

I think that's why I find my Debian system so comforting. Despite things often going wrong I feel secure using it because no matter what goes wrong I can get the source and fix it (well, within reason--I still can't figure out why my %$#@! sata disk drives randomly hang up for multiple seconds at a time).
The people writing the JavaScript that demonstrates the wtf.

I can see that some of the design decisions in IEEE-754, like NaN not beeing equal to NaN might seem unintuitive, but it has nothing to do with JavaScript - the standard is implemented by numerous languages and hardware.

That large numbers are rounded to a limited precision should not even be wtf if you think about it for a moment. Otherwise a single use of PI would fill up all the computer memory.
Windows Mobile is another target: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Build
What business leaders can learn from Bhutan (or, Gross National Happiness)
The problem as I see it, and it is still a problem even with java6 and prepackaged tomcat installations. Is that Java attempts to replace the OS rather than work with it.

It should not be a pain in the ass requiring a helper shell script to print the pid of the running process to a file.

And I'm sorry, but your code-browser may have a fancy gui for editing your xml configuration files. But I don't want to rely on having a GUI available to me. And reading raw xml even pretty-printed, is annoying.

Also, memory and disk space are not infinite; networks are unreliable and slow; and executing binary code dispatched from other machines is a security risk even inside the vpn.

If the java community cared about any of this they would have fixed it long ago, but as it is most java apps have a baroque suite of helper tools for deployment and management, and while they spew lots of internal information there seems to be some resistance to having them talk to syslog, and the process is not trivial.
Current silicon retina, which exploit similar event-based "pixels" (as opposed to frame-based scans), are way below the eye's resolution, but can still do so much:

http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch

Makes me wonder what the tiny composite eyes of insects can do in a complex environment like a forest.
No more downtime - Amazon S3 based external JavaScript hosting
That's interesting - I made that kind of diagram first, but found it harder to understand than the graph. The "diagrammr" version puts me too much in mind of timing sequence diagrams and I find that distracting.
Amazing beach
Do you want to the enjoy the beach life.so,here we can find the best beach vacations,homes,resorts,etc...
We are the most advanced civilization on the universe...
I agree but from having been doing some recruitment lately I can truthfully answer that the worst code I've seen recently is not my own... It's scary to recruit programers...
To hell with browser security, let me cram the Mentos in the g.d. bottle
Three Steps to Demystifying Online Dating
any chance anyone has the article cached? it's behind a password wall now!
Not true, XHR allows to use DELETE and PUT without any problems.

But yes - Flash can only use POST and GET (or maybe only POST? It's been quite a long time since I used Action script)
Ever had your vacation interrupted because an American decided to start a project ? I'll take atheist productivity any day.
Here's a link directly to OkCupid's blog, which is good/interesting for a variety of reasons): http://blog.okcupid.com.

And here's a link to the related NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13cupi...

That article includes customer acquisition metrics related to the blog's most recent post: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths....

That blog post has received 750,000 visitors in the three weeks since it's been published. Those visitors resulted in 10,000 new members. That's about 34,000 visitors and 450 conversions per day and the overall conversion rate was 1.33%.

If OkCupid had to buy that much traffic and conversions through a CPC program they'd pay tens of thousands of dollars (or more). At $0.10 per click they would pay $75,000 for 750,000 visitors, at a more realistic $0.20+, they'd pay $150,000+. At a 1% conversion rate that would be $10-$20 per new member, or $100,000 to $200,000 total for 10,000 new members. Sensitivity test the variables up or down, but this shows the blog value-creation potential. Nice work, guys!
We know nothing about machine languages.

Not too long ago, sysadmins sent kernel and driver patches upstream. And the true Unix beards have a .gdbinit file per-kernel that's longer than your CV.
Exactly , I'm just furious about the buzz thing, so I wanted to send a feedback email to them, but... seems like there is no one there.

Seems like a bunch of geeks with autism that fail to understand that what they do in people's mail affect them enormously, is not a game, and you should ask them. People understanding 101.

Seems like this mathematical and logical geniuses are relationships retarded.
Simplicity is good, but so is flexibility and compatibility. As I mentioned, parts of REST aren't good enough; anything that doesn't have access to http status codes won't be fully compatible. A decent RPC protocol like JSON-RPC is both flexible and simple.
An added bonus to not marrying your protocol to http is that your API will work seamlessly over other protocols should the need arise. I have an API that was originally intended for web clients, but later the need arose for some internal tools to be able to call the same methods remotely and asyncronously. Instead of going over http, the jobs are submitted to gearman in JSON-RPC format and everything works without having to modify the server or unnecessarily and inefficiently route the calls externally through apache.
This is the thinking that led the French to the 35-hour work week. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have occurred to them (probably because they were more-or-less interchangeable bureaucrats themselves) that an out-of-work bricklayer can't work the hours freed up by restricting the work-week of a plumber...
Random thought spurred by this article: camera and camcorder ads in pregnancy-related pages probably convert pretty well. IME, it's when your firstborn is coming that you realize your phone's camera isn't good enough.
mg is a smaller, only slightly configurable editor that behaves like Emacs's defaults.
I bought a business lXnXvX laptop, and guess what? There is a pile of junk waiting for me named as enhanced experience, well thanks it really made my day by continuously bringing up pc diagnosis software at ridiculous times and asking me needless questions. I became a pc doctor now, installing and updating my computer and making sure it stays healthy. That's my primary job anyway, to keep my pc operational and as healthy as possible. If there is time left from that duty, maybe I can use it for other things. The reason I am angry is this is a premium product and I am obliged to pay $2000+ for this.
Ehh that is proving my point.

That's refinement AFTER launch of the product. That is something entirely different than what that 5USD test is all about.
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Online Business Events Services
ABuzziness helps you find business and events running in this town and what buzzers says about it where buzzers can do things here and can meets with other buzzers.
What is a "password association?"
Barbie’s Next Career? Computer Engineer
What are the advantages to a graph based language? Better parallelisation? Opportunity to apply genetic algorithms?
But S3 does go down, even if they have SLAs. A Google search is your friend:

http://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+s3+downtime

I don't think anyone can guarantee downtime, but you sure can minimize it.
There's a lot of polish missing, with too many taps required for some things, not enough finger-swipes etc., but everything else considered - especially background apps

At this point you are in the far distant percentile of power/advanced/ideologically-inclined users, though. Obviously some people will care a great deal about the precise display of their battery status. But you have to recognize they are far fewer than the number of people who care about being able to do basic things with 3 fewer taps.
I think he means HTML forms. PUT and DELETE are broken in at least some (even modern) browser implementations.
Announcing the Customer Development Group
Yes, fully agree with you. But Amazon will have thousands of engineers 24x7 for fixing up if things go really bad. Amazon S3 is a way to ensure someone will be working to get the site up again if servers go down 2 am in the morning and somehow SMS alerts don't reach my phone.
That's a little strong. Of course there is good software out there. There's even great software out there, just not much.

In a field where the barrier to entry is so low it is natural that the average quality will be lower. Compare this to say, aircraft design, where the bar to entry is skyhigh (pun intended) and as such average quality is higher.