skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely right. People like this are just not going to be team players. Garmin is getting eaten alive by GPS pressure through the Iphone, they are not laying people off or asking people to relocate for fun. In short, this is a PR disaster for Garmin brought on by disgruntled former employees who just don't care.

Do you want employees that don't care about causing you a PR disaster?
Thanks, it's always nice to find someone that wants to help you polish your use of a second language, it's appreciated.

Subtle changes like that are hard to get right, I don't usually use that word in English and in dutch it is 'gehandicapte', and I translated that literally.

I sympathize with 'ars' though, whatever you call it the truth is someone has a body with bits and pieces not working the way the rest of us have.

What always bothered me about this, is when a dog loses a leg, the dog instantly transforms into a three legged dog, still competes with his litter mates as though nothing has changed, no special allowances given, none expected. It's literally just another dog. We humans seem to continuously compare the people around us with the 'norm' and we like to label those that are visibly different in a negative way, and those that are visibly different like to draw attention to that fact in demanding we level out the differences.
Agreed 100%

Why produce a great site and then not let your users access its valuable content?

Things scroll by the front page so fast it's not really fair not to provide a search feature.

I don't care if they let external search engines (Google et al) index it, but they should at least provide /some/ kind of internal search feature themselves.

IMO providing a search feature is probably at least as effective, if not more so, than the "noprocrast" flag.

After all, if I know I can search past items at any point in the future, I don't feel a pressure to load up the front page several times a day.

Whereas if the fast-scrolling front page is the only way to access items, it encourages that sort of rat-hitting-the-bar behavior I learned about in college psych classes ;)
Show HN: Review my startup: Quora, a topic based question and answer site
Link to sign up: http://quora.com/hackernews

Quora is a question and answer site focused on getting really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.

The big idea is to try to get every question page to be the best possible resource for anyone who wants to know about the answer. One way to think about it is as a cache for the research that people compile by searching the web or asking others. The feeling you get when you see a Wikipedia article and you think "Oh, that's going to have all the information I want about that" is the feeling we want to create across a much broader space.

The best things you can do are asking and following questions you're interested in, answering other people's questions, and voting or commenting on answers.

Right now, you need to use your Facebook account to sign up. We might add other ways to join later on.

We're still in beta and are making a lot of changes and have a lot of work to do but wanted to get some feedback.

Thanks
well, i hear there are some jobs opening up at garmin.
As I mention below, I don't get why people are so focused on valuing an idea in-and-of-itself. Just because when some Joe says "I have a great idea" we don't attach any monetary value to that, doesn't mean that "ideas are useless". It's the combination of idea+execution that has monetary value.

Also, regarding your definition "Execution means taking an idea, any idea, trying it out and then coming up with new ideas at the same or lower level and trying them out", is this the accepted definition of "execution"?

I thought execution was (1) Using tools to build the idea, (2) Using tools like SEO optimization, web analytics, conversion tracking, Google AdWords, etc to make your site visible to the masses and make it "sticky" to users, (3) Using marketing, blogging, social networking, contacting tech media, etc, to get the word out, and (4) Adapting to user feedback to modify your main idea to make sure it is closer to what people want.

Only (4) is related to your definition, and is not the main thing I think of when I think of "execution" regarding a tech startup.

And people keep bringing up the act of morphing the initial idea into something that works. As I mentioned below:

(a) If the original idea gets scrapped, then, yes, it wasn't that great to begin with. That doesn't mean there are no great ideas,

and

(b) Did Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, change the original idea behind these sites? Yes, the details may have changed, but I think the fundamental idea behind each of these has not changed. Most of the great hits out there are still doing what they started out to do.
I've often wondered what would be harder, be blind or be deaf, and since I love music and love to program I really am stuck in the middle, no matter what I'd lose something that makes me in to who I am. Pretty disturbing.
The original poster (cullen) and I are behind http://ridewithgps.com, so this news is particularly interesting to us
> ... all I'm hearing is negativity about KC.

Which most likely comes from people who have never lived there. I think you can take it with a grain of salt.

-- Someone who has lived there, but doesn't right now
Winter: The Safest Time of Year for Swedish Drivers
Who would want to hire the kind of employee that doesn't care about causing a PR disaster?

AVOID, these cats are selfish prima donnas who are not team players. Garmin isn't asking them to relocate for fun, they're doing it because they face an existential threat on the consumer side of things from the Iphone.
You are welcome!

Here are some sites that aggregate tutorials:
* http://www.noupe.com/
* http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
* http://sixrevisions.com/

There are some Xara Xtreme tutorials on their main website. The free Linux version is not near as feature-complete as the Windows version, unfortunately, but you can still do quite a bit.
* http://www.xara.com/us/products/xtreme/tutorials-demos/

I do not know of a way to save vector (SVG) images from browsers either, but if raster (PNG) exports would suffice, then check out the Firefox Screengrab! extension, which allows you to easily capture screenshots of whole pages (regardless of scrolling). BTW, here is a fun JavaScript library:
* http://raphaeljs.com/

Keyboard input in Photoshop and Illustrator is something that I consider a core feature. How much it is needed really depends on the type of artwork/design that is being done, but every professional user that I have met makes quite extensive use of the keyboard, particularly when placing guides or dealing with vector shapes. (Unfortunately, keyboard input is not as core as it should be... For example, Adobe software does not support keyboard positioning of Bézier curve handles, meaning that the designer needs to create reference objects to snap to in order to have consistent curves.)

I find that doing everything in a text editor is great for some projects and not for others. I use Asymptote (within LaTeX documents) for technical drawings, and one of my favourite benefits is being able to use revision control. Postscript itself is Turing complete, BTW! :) For more artistic works, however, I find that using a GUI suits me better. My philosophy is to learn many different ways of doing things and use whatever you feel works best for any particular job... I use Python extensively, and sometimes I even break out POV-Ray!
The Economics of Blog Aggregation
Remove p21 Gene = Grow new limbs like lizards tail
Tim Hartford: The hardest logic puzzle ever?
Agree. Maybe that would happen when the Nexus One is available on both Verizon and Sprint.
I could see Facebook extending on facebook connect on this front:

For sites that had facebook connect available for login, they would be able to serve ads customized on a per-user basis - provided the underlying http ad request can include some sort of unique per-session hash, instead of being funneled through the traditional facebook connect API.

Their problem, of course, comes with attempting to monetize areas of their site which do not require a facebook connect-enabled login to continue.

I'd be frightened of this for a few reasons:

- FBC may become required - not optional - on many sites which do not currently require it. The flip side of this is it forces the sites which wish to fully monetize to actually come up with interesting and unique ways to tie into the user's social graph (in order to drive uptake of FBC as a protocol). On the other hand, it provides single sign on - which many, many users have been clamoring for (even if they didn't know it), for years.

- I dislike the FBC protocol, and wish they had gone MySpace's route with OpenSocial. It's much more sane to deal with. If the FBC protocol and widget mechanism were more sane, it would drive up adoption on many current platforms that don't currently offer it.

- This potentially has even greater security and privacy concerns than Google has ever had to deal with. This may turn out to be a good thing.
The Canaries of SXSW
That's one team of Java developers for one year.

Big companies are big, and this kind of money is pocket change, especially when their Intranet has 300,000 users.
Use readability.
Make More Mistakes
The Garmin logo only appears in example screenshots; referring to their former employer by name is unavoidable, as on a resume.

The Garmin-derived name ("gcteam") could be a problem, but it's not clear that Garmin is (or should be) unhappy with this sort of team-marketing. Garmin may very well wish the best to their soon-to-be-former employees, and be happy for them to showcase their Garmin work/affiliation as they look for a new employer.
This is awesome. I'll buy it today, but I want to know when you're going to add in some simple sampling tech so that the sheet music can respond when you hit the wrong notes, or move the page ahead...
"Even Google, often touted as the canonical "idea" company couldn't sell their technology, even though they tried. They only created Google after futile attempts at selling the idea to among others Yahoo."

Yes, idea+execution is what matters. But, without the great idea, the execution doesn't amount to much, at least in the high-tech area (in the industrial/manufacturing/oil business, there is not much room for new ideas, so of course execution is the primary determinant of success)

Before Google came out with their search algorithm, there were lots of companies trying to do search. I believe Altavista was considered the best at the time.

What did Google have that all these other search engines didn't? Was it execution? I doubt it. A lot of very capable people were and are working on many other search engines, and yet none has the market penetration that Google has. What Google had was a much better algorithm, i.e. a much better idea on how to rank search results.
I was just trying to empasize my point. Just out of curiosity, how would you go about identifying me?

Thanks for the linked article. Interesting indeed.
People like this are just not going to be team players.

Is this the context where "team player" means "someone who will bend over backwards for a company that likely wouldn't do the same for him"?
And Garmin is a team player for conducting what is essentially a mass layoff? Employers can have no expectation of loyalty unless they are willing to demonstrate it in return.
And you can edit which apps show up here - I, for example, almost never make outgoing calls on my phone - at least, compared to previous phones. I don't know if that says something about me.. or if it attests to the saneness of the iPhone's SMS app.
Social media experts are best considered as the power users of the stuff being built by the hackers and designers. They have an audience and can be an influencer for you, but at the end of the day, they're squarely on the consumer side of the divide. As such, it's important to reach out to and build relationships with these folks, but not to act to surprised by the uberconsumer behavior, which we all display at some time.
"Google did spend a lot of dough trying to roll this out."

Where exactly did Google spend all this money? I see DRIOD and iPhone commercials nightly and have yet to see Nexus One commercial. I also don't see any Nexus One advertising in stores or anywhere else a typical consumer might go looking for a phone.

Google did some web advertising and had some business news sites cover the phone because well they are Google. I have yet to see any sort of advertising from them that even comes close to the iPhone or DROID (which incidentally has also done very well).
Google Brings Nexus One To AT&T, Rogers Wireless
They seem like a strong team, but the list of client technologies feels more like a skills list you would put on a resume than a reasonable design choice. Is there a javascript framework they didn't use?

JavaScript, XHTML, CSS

Prototype

JQuery

Ext

Scriptaculous

YUI

Seam

JSF & Facelets

RichFaces

Google Web Toolkit

Adobe Flex

Adobe Flash

Google Maps API
I'm a freelancer somehow surviving in Honolulu right now. It's expensive as hell. You'll figure it out! One cool thing to look forward to... Django was birthed in Kansas! I'd love to be surrounded by Django/Python jobs!
Indeed. The MapSource Windows app shipped with their GPS units is an abomination - awful usability packed into a 1996-era UI that looks two notches above an MFC tutorial. The map interaction is modal - you have to switch tools to choose whether you want to pan or zoom! And the logic for road labeling leaves plenty of room for ambiguity - the labels aren't rendered along a path, but are rather in straight lines at some randomly chosen tangent to the road, and sparsely enough that you have to guess that roads near one edge of the screen still have the same names they had on the other side.

The built-in updating mechanism has never worked for me - it helpfully indicates that the update "is estimated to take 3 hour(s), 38 minute(s) to download on a 56k modem". A 56k modem, for a piece of software bought in 2009, whose About box indicates a copyright of 2008.
Did you read that before you hit publish?
If I can get some VC funding, then this group would be a treasure trove of hires for my company.
"In the offline world, agents involved in an investigation can’t impersonate a suspect’s spouse, child, parent or best friend, the Associated Press notes. But online they can."

It's pretty hard to pull that off convincingly. I guess if the goal is just to get on the friends list for long enough to see a person's pictures and recent messages, sure -- provided you know the name of a close relative or friend who doesn't already have an account. But trying to carry on a conversation under someone else's identity is pretty difficult.

I would think it far easier to pose as a distant friend or acquaintance from high school -- which could also be done offline.
Does Nexus One's Poor Numbers Mean a Strategy Change?
I liked it. Good job 37s. They constantly work to grow their brand and have fun while doing it as well.
So, does that make it a valid question what evolutionary advantage was gained by losing that gene ?
In an organic chemistry class in '85, a (admittedly fairly bright and clued in) professor described to us that while people were worrying about saturated fats, research was starting to show that partially hydrogenated oils (aka "trans fats") might well pose a much larger health risk.

It only took 20 years to work its way into the public/popular media. (In the meantime, a lot of margarine was sold -- and a lot of angioplasties and bypasses.)

Running was supposed to destroy one's joints. Now, we learn that when it is not overdone (too much in too short a period of time or with too little prior conditioning), it actually strengthens joints.

I've become increasingly skeptical of new health effect claims, particularly when they aren't backed up by detailed, specific (to the aspect of health under consideration), and longitudinally significant evidence.

(Oh, and remember when vitamin D was considered one of the less significant vitamins (once you had enough in your diet to prevent rickets)?)

[Meta: Sigh, I have indeed become that "grumpy old man".]
The icing on the cake is the Amazon affiliate links to Garmin products (see right side-bar below twitter feed: http://thegcteam.com/about)
Infographic: Comparing the 100 Largest Sites on the Internet
I don't think good founders are "terribly generous" giving out stock, by definition.
ShopSavvy Wins at SXSW Accelerator
No.

Facebook already has enough of my data inside its walled garden. It's not getting control of my logins to other services. Add another signup method and I'll give your site due consideration.
In all fairness, I grew up about five miles from the Garmin headquarters, and most people in that area don't believe Jesus rode a dinosaur to work (that would be in Wichita).

However, Olathe is a town of suburbs and schools and not much else. I wouldn't want to move back there, period, let alone from SF.
Quora rocks. It's a great product, i'm using it a lot. Once you start to using, it's addictive.
Aging, Debt, and the End of Innovation
You forget that their "singular vision and balls" would be useless if no engineers every actually implemented it. The point of stock allocation is to get people to do the work that needs to be done, and it's risky because at the time of hire the engineer doesn't know if the idea will be successful. Generous stock allocation, in my mind, is a token of good-will to the engineer and a recognition of the importance of the engineering phase of the project.
Most Facebook users can't even find facebook.com without Google: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo.... Am I missing something?
I don't know if you made your point badly or not, but your tone surpised/confused me. You begin by saying, "But he doesn't track down the source of the quote, only of a famous usage of it by JWZ." Later you add that Friedl as the author of such and such "is only interested..." in so and so (my emphasis). In both cases, I read that as criticism - as if Friedl failed to do the important thing that you were now doing. In this post again you you say that Friedl is "not really interested" in the source.

But, in fact, Friedl did track down the source of the original quotation - to a reasonable degree of certainty. It's the same source you found. So I guess I don't see what Friedl didn't track down.
I'd say that legislation is more important than ever; privacy can now be violated in ways that were technically impossible 30 years ago. I agree that enforcing privacy laws is problematic, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, nor that it isn't worth trying.
Away3D Lite and Haxe - Sprite3D
I hope people don't get the wrong idea from the site being called "fakepad." This is a seriously deep insight and the site is not a prank.
Are you claiming that Dan Brown and JK Rowling are the best in the world at writing their type of fiction? Maybe they are, but from what I understand, from a literary standpoint these two are not the best writers.
Addiction and liking something are two different things. People like watching TV, so they do. People like watching porn, so they do. If either go away, they will read a book or something. (Some people do have addictions; like to caffeine. Take away the caffeine, and they feel strange psychological effects for a few weeks. But since everyone else in the world is addicted to caffeine, it's pretty easy to feed the addiction.)

Think of all the other things people are "addicted to" by your definition. Going to work every day. Eating. Brushing your teeth. Bathing. If you don't do those things, you will feel weird right? By your standards, routine == addiction, which makes your use of that word meaningless. Nice try though.

Pornography steals time, productivity, and money from its users; it is not a wholesome, upbuilding recreational activity as some here say, it is not comparable to video games. It is degrading to its subjects and its users.

Reading the newspaper steals time, productivity, and money. So does seeing a movie, or reading a book, or watching TV, or replying to trolls on HN. People do it anyway because the day is long and there is plenty of flexibility in most people's leisure schedules. An hour spent doing something enjoyable every few days is well worth the time cost for many people. For some people, that's porn. So what? Honestly, "getting it over with" probably increases people's ability to concentrate on something more interesting, since that part of their biology that needs to have sex is satisfied. So porn is probably good for productivity.

Companions feel inadequate compared to the airbrushed, artificial bodies their companions lust after.

I disagree. I have found everyone I've dated to be more attractive than anyone I've seen in porn. Outside of porn, though, I've definitely seen some girls that I would like to have but never will, perhaps unrealistically setting my standards. The reality it that any media or exposure to real life changes standards; porn affects those standards no more or no less than anything else.

They desire harder and harder material.

So what? Perhaps they wanted it before, but didn't know it existed? I have come up with a lot more interesting fantasies in my mind than I have seen acted out in porn. Does this mean I'm addicted to thinking?

Pornography has a large negative effect on its users. That's absolutely true and no amount of studies, hopes, oblations, snarky comments, or any other thing can change that.

You certainly haven't proven this in any of your posts. If anything, you are just projecting your fantasies onto others, just like you claim users of porn do.

But anyway, the good news is that your opinions on this don't matter. The rest of us will continue to enjoy porn. Sorry you won't join us.
One place to check out in your job hunt is Perceptive Software. A lot of the really good people I knew from my undergrad days (I went to KU, which is about 40 minutes from KC) ended up there. They have a dodgeball court, and seem to try and be a fun place to work.

Another popular option is Cerner. From what I have heard they have good pay and benefits, but expect lots of hours.

Whatever you do, don't work for Sprint. They employ a ton of people in the area, but there is a running joke that the halflife of a job at Sprint is about nine months. They are constantly hiring and laying people off, and the people they lay off seem to be totally arbitrary.
"[In Windows Phone 7 Microsoft is] dictating screen resolution, GPS, accelerometer, memory, CPU, even the number of physical buttons that can exist on a device...

...[Android has] not established a strong design language, which has led to a hodgepodge of app quality and interaction metaphors which makes it difficult to just "know" how a new app works."
Stats Bug In A/Bingo v1.0.0 and earlier
By taking the vocabulary (with frequency) of your comment and matching it against the vocabulary of all HN users.

It's a pretty large sample of text and I'm fairly sure that it is large enough that the match will be a close one.

Then there is 'stylistic' analysis, another angle of attack, mostly to do with the way you write, not just the words themselves.
Honest question: Is rendering really a bottleneck in a browser? It seems to me that the overhead of one or two HTTP handshakes would surely out-weigh any performance benefit in the rendering code?
signed up. "Click on the best photo" showed me my profile photo (the same photo) 5 times.