skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The overall field is called allometry. Kleiber's Law is another reason behind our size and shapes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law

"for the vast majority of animals, an animal's metabolic rate scales to the ¾ power of the animal's mass."
"Can you really trust the product opinion of someone who hasn't put out their hard earned cash to acquire it?"

Hm, but in this case, I don't think the item he received as a bribe was the same as what was reviewed. (Otherwise it would be obvious which company it was, as he asked for a MacBook Air.)
There are two types of graphic designers- creators and copiers.

Creators create original work and ideas, and can synthesize a wide range of influence, tools, and trends to get exactly what they need.

You will never be a creator.

But there's no reason why anyone can't be a copier. There are enough resources to easily help with every aspect of graphic design. Find something you like and try to incorporate a similar effect into your design.

Start with taking a few moments to keep tabs on Smashing Magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/).
I agree, especially with the first two. I'd recommend searching for those terms on Smashing Magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/). I'd also highly recommend http://webtypography.net/. It's a more accessible, if incomplete, version of Bringhurst's book. (Bringhurst's book is great, but it's a bit much for total beginners.
Is this really arbitrary nonsense?

Do you want ad networks gleaning your physical location(s) throughout the day? Do you want random applications surreptitiously recording your phone conversations?

While both of these limitations might seem, well, limiting from the developers perspective, they both seem very much in the favor of the end-user to protect them from potential abuse.
HN numbers over 20,000 people, more than 2,500 are 'regulars', #startups is about 100 people.
I really wanted to like Spore. I got it the day it came out and played it for quite a while. Ultimately it was just too simplistic for my tastes.

Even if it remained simple, I might have enjoyed it more if I could more freely explore. It just seems like the game is worried about you getting bored and so injects alot of things that have to be taken care of relatively quickly. Even in the space stage it seems I could never get too far away with someone needing me to come all the way back because of an attack or eco-disaster. I just got tired of being interrupted all the time.

The Massively Single-player concept didn't seem to scale well as your empire got larger. The massiveness seemed to punish the player rather than reward him.
I recommend Blueprint CSS grid framework (http://www.blueprintcss.org/) . It's really easy to use and forces you to think about layout (which is the root of good web design). You get some basic typography styles for free too.

I've found that it has helped a lot in quickly putting something together that looks good and can be easily improved incrementally as your site evolves.

You might find it (or something similar) useful when it comes to building the fundamental site structure.

Edit: clickable link.
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted stuff here, I've been looking for these kinds of resources for a while now, but never really asked.

Oh, and I thought I would share this: http://users.cs.dal.ca/~inkpen/CSCI4161/4161_lecture4.pdf , it looks like a presentation on "Non-Designer's Design Book" that a lot of people have mentioned.
He's the most corrupt dictator in America, followed by the Kirchner clan. Who can forget the Maletinazo?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maletinazo
Don't you think it's a little premature to conclude that the quality of her brain (and not, say, geography) accounts for the difference?
Yes, that's how mistakes were covered up, exactly.
Fi you're looking for work in the Minneapolis are and have .NET and mobile phone skills, holler.
Microsoft is not just going to idly allow WINE to steal its userbase, even if WINE becomes 100% perfect and everything runs and works exactly as it would on Windows. MS has a lot of money and they will use all of it to keep Windows alive, whether that means pounding everyone involved in open-source with streams of litigation, buying off distributors (see EeePC), propaganda and FUD campaigns and whatever else.

MS already sees Linux as a threat, which is what the deal with Novell is about -- it was a proclamation to all Linux users that Microsoft isn't just going to let you stop giving them money. You either go through their approved vendor (through whom MS makes money) or you risk big SCO-esque (targeting users, not makers) lawsuits for patent infringement, etc.

To sum up, WINE is good and nice, but as soon as Microsoft perceives it as a real threat they are going to mobilize billions of dollars to put it down.

MS doesn't care about virtualization because you still have to buy Windows to use it.
We're hiring a Facebook Developer or just a PHP developer who wants to do Facebook apps.

http://egghaus.com/2010/01/12/hiring-facebook-application-de...

work@egghaus.com
Still not sure what kind of money we're looking for but talking to other startup friends (and assuming the money is in SV and have to relocate) it's about 175k-200k for 1 year of 2 full-time coders. I can personally live rather cheaply (heck $15k seed lasted over a year and I'm still running with it) but it depends on the going rate for rails coders and such. Not many coders I've come across care about equity these days and are all "fuck you, pay me" haha. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097188

So increase that amount depending on what we want to do - 3 full-time devs and a business/sales guy for 18 months, or 3 full-time devs, a biz guy and part-time designer? Then I have to think about if I want to take the Venture Hacks route of "raise as much as you can, when you can" or the Om/Fred Wilson route of "milestone funding".. enough to get to X, then raise again. What do I know about funding I'm just a coder. :)
Google is hiring.
"My first step toward creating Pixel Nation was simply to gather up all of my old columns, which meant copying and pasting them from the Web pages on Xconomy into a Word document. I would never have attempted this task before November 2009, when we added a single-page view option that lets you see an entire article on one page. Many of my columns are fairly long, so they get broken into two, three, or four pages on the site, and it would have taken forever to stitch them all together from these separate pages."

I had to read this twice to make sure I really was reading it. His "method" of acquiring all his articles is browsing to each webpage and copy/pasting the text into Word. The rest of the article shows a similar level of technical expertise in the tools of his craft.

I am flabbergasted that a writer would do that. Writers deal with text all day. Creating, editing, and managing the text files seem like pretty basic components of writing. Anyone know if this is normal for writers? Are they normally this incompetent with text manipulation and management?
And his brain still would have not been developed.

And the newspaper in question would have just covered up the mistakes.
I second the Rutledge recommendation below.
In the Boston area, where I live, the central city and inner suburbs have bans on how high a building can go and generally make it extremely difficult to get building permits. I've heard it takes up to 10 years and millions in lawyer fees to get a permit to build a new apartment tower. The mid to outer suburbs have strict laws against duplexes, have minimum lot size, and greatly restrict new development.

So either way, it is nearly impossible to build. With unrestricted supply, the cost of housing would be no greater than the marginal cost of building a new apartment tower. But because of the supply restriction, any house within 30 miles of Boston costs far, far more.
Google AI Challenge 2010: Lisp Starter Pack
Here, follow this thread.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1098905
I'm looking for someone In the SF Bay area with metal casting experience to do some paid consultation. I know, this isn't programming related, but it is science related. Email geuis.teses@gmail.com.
No no no, you misunderstand.

They disallow you to even tell the person about it.

As to the recording, you're not allowed to record telephone conversations that use the 3G or phone network in any way.

This means even in telephone recording application designed to record calls the customer wants recorded. This is now forbidden by Apple. (As one of my customers found out 6 months of reviews later when the app has done this all along).

This isn't a "protect the customer from abuse" sort of issue, this is a "Apple doesn't want apps to do it at all" sort of thing
House prices also raise because we have more unaffected money:

- food represents a smaller and smaller proportion of our expenses;

- manufactured goods also became more affordable, as they're produced either by robots or by 3rd world workers;

- double-income families have become the norm.

Since the housing market is essentially an auction system, with limited offer elasticity, it's natural that it swallows a large chunk of what could have been our disposable money growth.

Now, there are other factors, especially in the USA, which will evolve:

- the gold rush on estate as a speculative investment undoublty caused a bubble (although it only explains part of the price explosion). This seems now largely over.

- by accepting to lend to everyone, banks have artificially increased the number of potential buyers, hence further increasing the prices reached by auctions. Now that those dummy buyers have played and lost with the banks' money, banks will have to acknowledge it as ARM-induced foreclosures unfold, and they'll probably be more careful before letting someone enter the house-buying game.

So prices are very likely to go down, but not to go down as low as they were in the '70s, even in terms of income proportion.
Shorter version of the article: Meritocracy, when it even works, makes the winners smug and the losers depressed. Economic gains do not equal what we lose in community. We should discourage some necessary conditions for meritocracy (e.g. mobility) to promote traditional symptoms of community/culture (e.g. immobility).

I don't agree with the article, but I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance. I think economic gains more than make up for whatever we've lost, and society is adapting to preserve the things that really matter in new ways. But even accepting that personal accountability negatively affects happiness, it seems easier to try reshape attitudes about personal value, rather than restructure society to make everyone feel included.
This article has lot of facts and figures and i really apologise for just dropping this like this (late night/early morning) but with the median figures adjusted for inflation from consumer price index, I don't think its quite fair to say that you can just drop numbers and compare them to present day. I didn't see this mentioned but then again my eyes are really tired and maybe missing the point but:

$148,800.00 house in 1975 is the equivilant of $595,484.88 in 2008 in buying power

Median income of $42,936 in 1975 has buying power of $171,826.20 in 2008.

Roles Reversed

$245,300.00 house in 2008 in buying power is $61,295.66 house in 1975

$50,303 median income in 2008 is the equivilant of $12,569.73 in 1975

Buying power calculated using the inflation caluclator of http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

"The CPI inflation calculator uses the average Consumer Price Index for a given calendar year. This data represents changes in prices of all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households. This index value has been calculated every year since 1913. For the current year, the latest monthly index value is used."

Now maths really isn't my strong point. Actually really bad and I know that there are many of you far far clever than me so I reserve judgement and hope someone can double check for me but i just wanted to mention this because I didn't see it discussed.

(edit: i see it mentioned - sorry)
"The solution offered is offensive, amounting to randomly allocating power and privilege amongst a given population rather than allowing the best and brightest make their case through personal excellence."

The important question that the author raises is this: why is that offensive? Right now we allocate power according to the chance of genetics and environment, and tell people that we're actually allocating it through personal effort. Which raises two questions:

1) Is it okay to lie to ourselves about what determines the meritocratic hierarchy?

2) Is it more tragic that a bright, smart, knowledgeable person not be able to fully exercise those properties, or for a slow, unintelligent, uninformed person to not be able to have a dignified place in society?

The answers to these questions could be either yes or no, but we need to be honest about our answers to them, and why we answer them the way we do.
yes but its a huge improvement over years past
I'm also looking to possibly add a contract head to my roster. I run a small technical services company who develops connected TV/OTT/interactive TV applications. We're based in SF and likely would need someone on site in the SOMA/South Park area. I'm in the same building as Engine Yard and Sauce Labs (Sauce Labs actually rents a few desk in the same suite as me - though they're mostly in their own space now). We've done work for CBS/Brightcove/ The UFC and a few others.

I'm looking for a contract junior dev mostly with Javascript skills, but with the ability and desire to dive into new platforms and programming languages.

Can't guarantee much right now but I have a ton of work in the pipe that could make this a regular to full time position.

Drop me a line info@adifferentengine.com if this sounds like something you might be interested in.
And a measure that Warren Buffet says to ignore.
I'm glad you've finally stated outright that this community means nothing to you other than being a great place to advertise. I think it was already fairly obvious... but thanks for clearing up any doubt. You realize that paid upvote rings are a large part of what killed digg, and are killing reddit? And they will kill HN, if they become common enough. It may seem innocent and fun while you personally do it, but before long the front page is nothing but posts about balls, and who wants to read that?

Feel free to rag on all the "drama" it creates, but that's because people here actually care about the quality of this site. Is that stupid? Naive? To you, clearly. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to desire that your favorite stomping ground not become just another place where the almighty dollar trumps all.
Well yes - one metric might be characterised as "how well you are able to work in the civil service".

Something I have to say I was pitifully bad at
I wouldn't imagine there's much of a market for small-arms design. It's an old-school, natural-monopoly sort of subject, one of those for which the slow, careful, bureaucratic model that Paul Graham (correctly!) condemns for software was originally devised.

So I'd expect three things to drive down the value of small-arms designers: the point that variable costs are much higher than fixed ones in small-arms manufacturing; the presence of bureaucratic inertia in the militaries and police agencies who represent the main customers; and the fact that the problem domain is very well-understood and has been for quite some time. The AK-47 is showing its age, but is still viable; the H&K G3, the FN FAL, and the M-14 are all around 60 years old (the M-16 is a newcomer at 50 years, and the "space-age" bullpups, the Steyr AUG and SA80, are around 30); and the Colt M1911 was designed before the First World War and, from what I understand, is still one of the best pistols on the market.

There are a few "cutting-edge" weapons that are just coming into use -- the Tavor and the H&K G36, most obviously -- but I think these reflect a change in the perceived threat environment more than an advance in technology.

So, in other words: I'm not sure that there's very much to _do_ in the field of small-arms design. There are some small, innovative companies in the field -- Calico Light Weapons Systems is an obvious one -- but the problem with being a small, innovative manufacturer of firearms is that you don't have much of a market. Even when Bill Clinton _isn't_ in office, private citizens will never spend the kind of money on small arms that governments do.

I want to emphasize that I'm coming at this from the perspective of an interested amateur, and my interest is more in infantry tactics than in the weapons they use to implement them -- so there may be factors here that I don't know about. I'd second the recommendations by hga and gexla: contact people who know more about this, but, I'd say, prepare to be a little disappointed. (Aerospace engineering strikes me as being a field which is still evolving, and thus ought to be more promising for someone with an interest in designing weapons systems.)
SpaceX, Los Angeles. With the Obama administration's recent budget recommendations for NASA (cutting the Constellation program), we're continuing our expansion. Mad C++ & Linux skillz? Want to write code that lives on the International Space Station or controls our vehicle while it visits? Think humanity should colonize Mars? Drop us a line, we're hiring. Visit spacex.com/careers for more info.
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I want to add to that. So consider the United States (assuming you live in the US). Do you consider it just a vessel for your opinions? Do you agree with and support everything the United States does? I'm going to assume you said no to that (if yes, then I'm arguing with a crazy person). And do you think any one person in the United States agrees with everything the United States government does? It would be extremely unlikely if it does happen, and even if it does happen, the US government has the possibility of veering away from that person. This is because the US government is a distinct entity formed when the mob of people come together. Unlike your computer, it does not act exactly as you do.

Remember the focus is not on the company, it's on what the company creates when it is a formation of a bunch of people. It creates a distinct entity which usually ends up being a compromise of its constituents wishes. People act differently in a group, they can lose their humanity, and usually there's less responsibility for misdeeds. This thing the mob creates should in no way be treated on the same level as any individual constituent of it. This is because, as I have tried to show you, it is not simply a vessel of any single human being.
On a planet with lower gravity, the same rules would apply, but the ratio would differ. A much larger human could exist there with the same proportions as an Earth human.

Perhaps this is how Galactus exists. He lives in space, where there is effectively zero gravity. Thus, he can be gigantic without any problems.
I think this survey/spreadsheet misses the almost all of the things that motivate angels (check out http://venturehacks.com/startuplist ). Your survey is entirely idea-focused. What it should ask (IMO) is:

"Who are you and what have you pulled off in the past?" (with links)
"Who vouches for you (investors, preferably)?"
"What's the market/idea?" (very short- most investors realize that the idea changing is VERY likely)
"Describe your traction?"
"Could this be a $100m company?"

If you aren't shooting for a big market opportunity ($100m+) you just crossed 95% of angels off your list. If you have no traction/growth, you just crossed 95% of angels off your list-- UNLESS you've clearly kicked ass in the past (note: kicked ass does NOT mean "did really good at your job")
Justin TV http://www.justin.tv/jobs Please apply (:
lol I had no idea, nice!
Color me naive, but I didn't realize that was SOP. Good to know though... good to know.
I want to add that he wrote a post about my company and product (Rocketbox, http://www.getrocketbox.com), but ABSOLUTELY NO COMPENSATION CHANGED HANDS. I would think that most of the companies he wrote about are in a similar situation, where they did nothing wrong but their article has also been deleted.

It's too bad this happened, I really hope he learns from this experience.
CouchDB (used, among other things, for both the client and server of Canonical's "Ubuntu One" desktop sync service). Dynomite, SimpleDB (though reportedly some parts of SimpleDB were initially rewritten in Erlang and later ported to C++). Darcs. Mochi Media's web stack. Jane Street Capital's trading systems. Unison (popular two-way rsync written in OCaml). Flightcaster.com. Coq. FFTW. Hacker News.

I want to give a special mention to FFWT, the gold standard for Fast Fourier Transform libraries. If you use any audio or video software, you probably use this library without knowing it. An OCaml program generates the C code that compiles to the FFTW library.
oneforty inc. (Brighton/Boston/Cambridge, MA) is looking for a front-end user experience person: http://bit.ly/oneforty-ui
I wonder if PG should implement a feature for a regularly scheduled article for this question.

The alternative is for one of the expanding membership of this site to randomly decide there hasn't been a discussion of this topic "in some time" and post this and get some quick points (not saying that this is happening here, now, but I can see the potential for abuse)
Sorry I may be too dense. But, what is the point of failure, if not to learn a lesson and succeed eventually. He seems to be saying the only time he did not fail (he got a raise) was when he did not enjoy the experience, it was too incremental. So, we should keep failing, and failing. Yes, I am missing the message. This may be acceptable for an academician. But is it acceptable for a businessman. After all he mentions that you feel the disappointment of 250 people and families that depended on you. Are you supposed to make it a habit and enjoy it.

Again, probably, since this is only a segment from the interview, I am not getting the full message.
Adobe CTO talks Flash performance on Macs, more
One day Will Wright and Peter Molyneux got together and decided to settle, once and for all, who could ship the most awesome tech demo in a box declaring it was a game. Molyneux got the drop on Wright by nearly a decade with Black and White, which featured stunning graphics, adaptive AI, some of the best emergent behavior I have ever seen, and a campaign mode which could not be beaten because apparently QA had missed level 4 (it was cleverly hidden by being shipped with only 5 levels, not the planned 82, thus lulling QA into a false sense of security) and did not see that the scripting was impossible to complete.

But Wright toiled and toiled for a decade, and then came out with Spore. And yay the gamers did look upon it and say, verily, it was an even more impressive tech demo than Black and White, with beautiful graphics and a host of content creation tools (though no AI to speak of), and that Wright had successfully created a null game while making it appear to the player as if there were six of them.

Thus Wright won the contest.
Actually, according to this article (linked by the main thread here), they do grow in size, relative to their contents.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world...
I think it's naive to assume there's anything that happens on HN that isn't socially engineered in some way.

Sounds glib, but render down the actions and incentives of participation on the site. In a business-focused environment where there's opportunity to influence a large group, whether for direct commercial gain or reputation-building, competition will necessarily arise.

We're all socially engineering each other all the time.

Take away posting attribution and karma and it mightn't be that way, but those are big incentives for continued participation, once a person is invested. Could the site exist without them?