skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember coming across an innumerate post on this blog once before, bringing in some reality, and being told to leave. I note that there's no quantitative analysis in this post. His message seems to be that the sky is about to fall because some state governments aren't paying for food stamps, etc, which is reading a bit much into it.

Here was that post: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/07/trailing-edge...

He thinks that going back to the 50s and getting rid of microcontrollers in sewing machines would save substantial amounts of energy, and he didn't let the fact that those microcontrollers draw minuscule amounts of energy compared to the sewing machines and could result in a net savings if they allowed it run for a second less change his mind. So I would take anything he says with a grain of salt.
a focused well thought out less is better then an ill thought out more (ultimate example: the marquee and blink tags in Netscape)
A 2010 Algorithm for the Knapsack Problem
To see the relationship between a designer and developer, you must think of it in terms of relationship and how our cognitive processes work.

I'm not talking about knowing what tool you have to use to create a light/shadow effect, but experience in how certain rules applied to that instrument can create something that has a much more visual impact. I'm not talking only about Photoshop. This applies specially in the mind setting. I can create something with my mind, just the thought, the idea.

When you code, you have your instrument (computer, programming language, etc) you have to apply certain rules to match your design idea. But that's not all. With graphics, you can abstract datas (ie. idea), but programming you can pattern complex datas in a way that graphics can't do (ie. algorithms).

I'm in HCI/UIs and I design more than program, but that doesn't stop me love seeing (read: learning) code.

Paul Graham has a related essay on Hackers and Painters: http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
I like how they choose to trade off consistency for speed.

It's not like Facebook is a mission-critical application that requires all data to be 100% consistent. If an update to a user's photo album isn't immediately viewable by all other users, it isn't that big of a deal -- most users won't even notice, and the speed increases over MySql were dramatic.
Over the past year we've tracked more than 30,000 published car reviews, including reviews by Consumer Reports as well as 100 other major publications. There is absolutely a correlation between review scores given to vehicles by publications that accept advertising and junkets, and those that do not. Make of that what you will.
forgot about these

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html
There is tons of research, and I've read a small portion of it. As I suspected, you really don't even know what the research says, or if any of it disproves my point. You are just kind of hoping it does.

Hint: it doesn't. Most of it is inconclusive, and I've seen almost nothing proving hard work is not a significant factor. Regardless, my main point is that Bowle's statistic is consistent with laziness causing heritable poverty, which completely disproves his point.

As far as income mobility goes, I don't know of any research that can conclusively identify causative factors. We know whatever factors prevent mobility are heritable, location based and ethnicity based. We also they are not money/income based, since many low income immigrant groups have extremely high mobility. Vietnamese immigrants went from illiterate peasant to middle class Americans in one generation.

My first gf is a perfect illustration: in 10 years, she went from illiterate African refugee to Republican campaigner/fund raiser making more money than me (that might have changed in recent years). If she could do it, basically any American could do it.
It's unfortunate; It seems Apple watched Amazon "test market" a product. When Apple saw there was a viable market for such a product, Apple focused on it. Now everyone will be trying to catch up. Now Amazon wants to play for real? I really feel it will be to late for anyone to make a completive product. We have seen these strategies from Apple's competition in three markets now. Apple/Jobs very politically tamed the insatiable music labels, and now the book publishers, while at the same time locking out the competition's bids. I don't think Amazon played their best game here.
Looks good and looks like it has a similar feature set to the Slicehost iphone app, with a couple of additions (e.g. activity graphs).
Okay, that is a pretty cool system. Sad now that I don't know anyone involved, can't get an invite.
if you were to get sufficient angel investing, and location wasn't an issue, would you stick with ATL or move to SV or elsewhere?
If you must see the actual job description, here it is: http://www.salesforce.com/company/careers/locations/a0800000...

It's vague for a good reason. We don't want someone who has been coding in only one language for the last 5 years. We need someone entrepreneurial...more like a jack of many trades.

I know there are people like that out there and I'm willing to wait to find someone good.
No. It was reported in June, 2009.

It could have been discovered a long time ago.
Airbnb Hiring Front-end Engineer
About the A4
And you know what that means? If you are a salaried worker this money is coming out of your pocket!

Think about that! Everybody should plan for occasional unemployment and there are two ways to go about it:

1. You save a year worth of expenses all by yourself, and live on that when hard times come.

2. You don't save, but the government saves for you (directly via payroll tax or indirectly via unemployment tax).

On the surface the two approaches are equal as far as worker is concerned. And yet! In the first case once you save enough you could stop saving and enjoy the surplus, but in the latter case you can't stop saving no matter how much you "saved" already.

Just one more benefit of working for yourself. Employment is such an archaic concept.
Too much work.
It seems to me that creating an open market for angel investment will cause all the problems the public market went through in the past few hundred years (bubbles of extraordinary proportions, fraud, etc.) That means the government would have to establish more and more regulation to prevent abuse, which would severely limit the ability of startups to operate. Having the market be restricted to a pool of accredited investors instead makes more sense to me.
Like the animated presentation, except for the speech bubbles. Link to 'about' page should be more prominent, I want that info before signing up. Also, more screenshots or a demo. I don't like registering first - let me play with it, then register when I have something I want to save (eg >250 words input).

The idea is very neat: I like your non-ownership approach. I think you need to show more to potential employers in terms of tools to help navigate all these very individualized resumes.

Sorry, I share Ryan's misgivings about the name. Try again.
"If I read the signs correctly, America has finally reached the point where its economy is so deep into overshoot that catabolic collapse is beginning in earnest."

The problem is the author did not read the signs correctly. There are definite problems to be sure, but the catastrophe he is predicting ("stock their pantries ... learn a practical skill or two") is paranoid, head-for-the-hills nonsense that seems to crop up a lot these days, not only because of the political and economic changes that have occured over the last decade, but also thanks to the Internet, which lets such views gain a much wider audience and amplification than they would have in the 20th century.

One comment about local tax revenue: There will be a correction in some states, starting with California and many municipalities. The end of state funding and a sharp reduction in property tax revenue will force layoffs, bureaucratic restructurings, and an end to the generous pension and benefit plans that many public servants now enjoy. It just can't be sustained. But he is going too far in his suggestion that it's part of some "end of days" scenario.
I can't agree that Mono is a "steaming pile of crap". Mono lets me run my .NET utilities on OpenSolaris; that all by itself makes it a win and most definitely non-crap for me.

My primary problem with it is its lack of a production grade precise compacting garbage collector.
I wish I had the budget to hire a product manager right now. I need one. :)
There is a finite amount of funding in the federal "checkbook"/budget for a given year. Spending that money means that it can't be used on projects that will pay much better dividends in the future, even if it just means paying off a debt, reducing future interest payments.

A useless bridge will be a drain on the budget in subsequent years for little economic payoff in terms of improved productivity. It's an extremely inefficient allocation of resources, to the point that it's very likely that it's worse than almost all alternatives that don't involve building something.
IPadBeta.com - Beta test Apple mobile applications
Follow this with a post asking how many people scored jobs from HN.
Qype, Europe’s largest local review site is hiring, if you're looking for a job in Europe/Germany:

http://en.blog.qype.com/qype-is-hiring/

we are a small team with big challenges ahead. Location based services is an exciting area, we're experimenting with "20 percent time" and looking for great Rails developers and a sys admin/operations engineer.
The marginal cost of building a new apartment tower needs to include the cost of increased public services or you end up with perverse incentives.
It's not about intelligence. It's about willingness to compromise. I personally don't like the compromise that the iPad offers over a TabletPC.

However I do like the compromise that the QUE reader provides. It does only one thing, but does it extremely well.

The iPad tries to do more, but isn't great at anything and can't be modified to do more.
Sounds cool, hope to be there.

Anyone know what these things are like? Is the crowd/discussion more business focused or more tech details focused? (Both?)
Ask HN: Are you looking to fund startups?
Darpa seeks to engineer synthetic biological immortality
Cnet: NASA hacker loses latest extradition fight
not asking that. is there that much performance diff btw c and c++ or what are the reasons for the choice? first c++ is sexier that's for sure.
The bubbles seem to exist regardless of what we do; the fact that they've been around for hundreds of years suggests it would take more than a few laws to suppress them.
I would venture that the "inherent" skills (i.e. skills that can't simply be learned) are those that separate the truly good anything, whether it is a designer, developer, or basketball player. Maybe the term there is "talent"?

Agreed- devoting yourself to anything will adjust your perspective. But I'm not sure that alone can explain super dork programmers or really off-the-wall designers? There's something more fundamental there.
I went ahead and created a form for this and posted to HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1104674
It's tangent, but I'm interested. Are you alluding to particular events in recent history or kinds of events?

Any pointers to reading on this?
If they become wealthy through taking of taxes, wealth redistribution, or outright theft, then the end will be predictably horrible.

There is trouble in rhetoric like this. You have asserted an equivalence class of taxes, wealth redistribution, and theft, which are three different things. Taxes are the dues you pay to the society in which you live. In a democratic society, you get one vote in how those dues are spent, and a voice to convince others that your way is right. Of course, money talks, and this process can be corrupted in innumerable ways.

Wealth redistribution happens on a large scale through a pattern of market forces, governmental intervention, and other economic and psychological factors. The last forty years have seen a massive wealth redistribution in the U.S., and it's not in favor of the lower 80%. For many reasons, the ethics of which are fervently debated, this wealth redistribution has been one-way.

Theft is a crime involving the unlawful taking of physical goods.

By asserting this equivalence class, you have already partaken in massive rhetorical fraud which is harming our ability to engage in reasonable debate.
> half the American workforce has no steady work, decaying suburbs have mutated into squalid shantytowns, and domestic insurgencies flare across the south and the mountain West,

Lucky for me I'd been off-planet on vacation at the time of the war.
There wasn't much to do. All the bowling alleys had been wrecked, so
I spent most of my time looking for beer. One day I was out looking
for a nice place to build a city for my children when I spotted a
mutant in the forbidden zone. I landed my vehicle to pursue and
destroy this genetic freak before he could warn other mutants in the
underground caves.
"According to many developers, it is the most original new face in computer languages since Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++ in the early 1980's."

Uh, isn't F# mostly a derivative of OCaml (and Haskell)?
Adobe, I’d be using a little more stick
You know - we should find a way to identify the HN'ers at this conference. How about we find a pen/pencil and mark "HN" on our badges?

(I assume there will be some kind of badge, but that won't work if there's not).. which if that's the case maybe we can do a challenge-response:

Challenge: "how did you hear about this"

Response: "Hacker News"
Yes, you're right, they're not "ancient" in any meaningful way. However, studying long isolated languages is still interesting, since whatever similaraties can still be discerned between (say) Indo-European and Andamanese languages were presumably present in the common ancestor of these languages, which probably existed more than 60k years ago. Thus by studying an isolated language, we might learn something about an ancient language.
I think it's dumb to have to hold your screen with one or both hands for an extended period of time.
I'm not there yet at all, pretty much in the same boat as you, so take this with a grain of salt. I have heard that in addition to all of the great technical tips about color/fonts, etc, the goal of an amazing design is to make it look difficult for the user to reproduce. If your design is something that someone would say "I could put that together in Microsoft Word," then it's just too simple. I think I read it in Simplebits or somewhere like that. Very soft gradients and rounded corners can each be incredibly subtle, but combined can give the effect that it's a professional design instead of something someone put together quickly. That's why you shouldn't ever use Times New Roman, because it's the default font for most browsers, and it shows the least amount of effort.
Cool, I ordered it, thanks!

I already have "Don't Make Me Think", and it's given me some good advice, but the more I get, the better.
Thanks to everyone for their advice. Upvotes to everyone for taking the time to respond.

I like kls's approach, as it doesn't require me to explain a personal methodology for referring candidates to my HR department (as notaddicted's suggestion would have me do).
Nuanti brings HTML5 and Ogg Theora video to Silverlight
As long as the software model is, "if it crashes my desktop computer (or my handheld device, etc.), there is no legal liability for the consequences of my bug," the lawyers do not have an entry point.

Put it in as software embedded in a device where the crash may lead to physical crashes, injuries, and deaths, and the liability stakes increase immeasurably as lawyers and lawsuits enter the picture.

This is a tough area, as almost all complex coding will have bugs in it. In such cases, the manufacturer of the device will have the primary liability to the injured party but almost certainly would have indemnification/contribution rights against the software developer as well. Whether such rights would ever be exercised against a company employee is doubtful but they would undoubtedly be used against a contractor to whom the work had been subbed out.

Important words of caution for software developers dealing with such systems.
65k-85k for Flash/Flex Devs
Hi Flash Game Developers. My name is Joel Auge. I'm the CEO of a 20 man team building games on social networks. We're award-winning (facebook funded), profitable, experienced, young and happy. We're looking for a Senior Dev who can lead a team, and an intermediate Dev to join that team.

We don't hold your hand. You have full autonomy - you just get paid for delivering great ideas.

65k - 85k
Fridays are yours to work on your own projects.
No set schedule for coming and going.
Great benefits.
Rockband, Arkanoid, Red Bull, Bubble Bobble, Beer.

contact me at joel@hitgrab.com for more info

http://www.hitgrab.com
If you are posting job opportunities for a large company (Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc.), can you please provide personal contact info. Many people likely already applied at such firms but were nicked because of their more unique backgrounds.
When this comes to market, the Von Neumann bottleneck compensation techniques will become obsolete in a way. However I would love to see how this will speed up computing in throughput, because this clearly is a major achievement.
Publishers line up against Amazon’s $9.99 e-books
Thank you, you have made my day.
I'm not sure this would fix the problem.

According to the pg quote in the article "There probably aren't more than a couple hundred serious angels in the whole Valley." There are tons of people in the Valley who make >$200k/year. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of them. If only a couple hundred of those people take the risk of angel investing, what would lead us to believe that a lot of the lower-salaried people would choose to participate?

I agree that the law seems a bit silly, and probably unnecessary, but I'm not sure that removing it would have much of an effect.

Which leaves me thinking about other ways we could encourage more angel investing activity....
paranoid, head-for-the-hills nonsense that seems to crop up a lot these days

It is worth noting that this blogger, while a major commentator in the 'collapse scene', has always been on the other end of the spectrum, arguing for calm and reason against the paranoid, head-for-the-hills types.

Not that he is telling people to head for the hills in this post - rather he seems to be arguing that we should pay attention to some what is really going on, and prepare ourselves for possible repercussions accordingly.
Matt Asay's big break is a big one for open source
They're also non-Euclidean geometric shapes. So calling it fractal is ambiguous at best and requires you extract one element that makes a fractal. While there are times writing in such a way can be helpful, this is not one of those times. Instead, "Quality is consistent across levels" or even "Organizational quality is self-similar".
I'm very interested in project management in the bay area
Will Apple only allow apps to run ads served by them in the future?
Why does he say to "clear your debts" in preparation for the collapse, I would think you should fire up more debt, its all going down anyway ... ?
I'm interested to hear where you've read that the installations of the Flash player are in decline. It seems to me that when all the browsers can fully use all the HTML5, CSS3 fun you will still be able to use the Flash plugin as well and the install numbers won't decrease anytime soon. Won't these technologies just co-exist?
How do friends and family rounds get around this angel investment rule?
When I worked as an Emergency Medical Technician I observed that nursing homes who regularly trim their residents' toenails are always of significantly higher quality.
You can sort of do this in Groovy.

def val = {try { 1 } catch(ex) { 2 }}.call()
assert(1 == val)
Your application left me with a number of questions:

(01) Are you aiming for people to upload CV's or for Companies to use the application to find candidates.

(02) As a candidate I would like to see how these CV's should look. (You should provide some pages with samples - before registration).

(03) Are you going to charge me?

Any application should have a prominent CALL FOR ACTION button. What must I do to upload my CV? Can I do this without registering please? After all I am bound to give you my email on the CV and you can ask me for a password at that point and do I really need to go through a captcha?

Please don't take the above as negative, disrupt the market by all means if you can, but I feel the interface needs a bit of work, it also needs to be a more serious which I believe the flash block on the front page does project a very light image. Would a financial manager applicant feel comfortable to give that link to a Bank CEO?

In my view is that you need at least two more iterations. The first one should include a more careful look at the market segment you are targeting and the second one to amend the UI to 'funnel' your visitors to immediate action.

Bonus would be to be able to alley privacy concerns and to offer a degree verification program.

What does P.C. stand for?
It's the battery life, stupid (iPhone apps and ads)
Indeed,

One factor that "keeps the ball in motion" is that no one knows whether the final end will break in favor of the debtors or in favor of the creditor.

Hyper-inflation breaks in the favor of the debtors - Everyone without a variable rate loan can payoff their mortgage in no time.

Deflation breaks for creditors, if incomes and wages go down, homes go away.
Google Offers Cash For Bugs
Fair enough. It doesn't have to be helpers. It could become the standard way of writing active ajax elements. Typing out <a href="/stuff" data-remote="true">more</a> is pretty efficient even by hand.
if that was the case i would stay in atlanta for sure. i live right next to a huge park (Piedmont) with my black lab. i often go running through the park with her, spend time out there on sunny days and so on. it can't get better than this for a dog owner! that and there are lots of women in Atlanta :) - a top 10 city for singles the last few years. I believe it was #1 in 2008 by Citysearch or some other site. Can't say the same about San Francisco.
A more detailed examination of these results here: http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/02/graphene-fets-promise...
Dude, when it comes to Giles, it's not a "possibility that he could be trolling". It's a certainty. :-)
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>This part irks me most. Apple just created a larger iPhone. That's it. Sure they added features like iWork, but things like iWork just didn't make sense on the smaller form-factor of the iPhone. That's it. Sure they had a different approach to the problem (making a larger iPhone rather than making a smaller touchscreen desktop/laptop), but it's not like they created a new experience with the iPad. The iPad is just the iPhone experience with a larger screen and some extra apps.

I think you're getting it, but then skipping right over it. The change in form factor is the point. You can do things with the UI using the additional screen size on the iPad that wouldn't make any sense in the iPhone. They want to iPad to be the right form to browse the web, watch videos, consume content, etc.

A netbook is the same as a laptop, just scaled down. But that change in form factor is enough to make them frustrating to use, leading to initiatives like Ubuntu netbook remix, in an attempt to make sense of the change.

Whether scaling the iPhone up makes more sense from the human perspective than scaling the laptop down remains to be seen, but I'm hopeful and interested.
The day I had my brain switched off