skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone should read this and think about it. We all do it from one degree or another, especially when you think about the ignoring example. The web connects us to more people than we can imagine, but we often act as though we would never meet them face to face - and that is where true connections come from.
At the risk of sounding flamebait - you don't have a phone? What made you even want to comment on a post like this?
If you don't need to provide persistence and flow control it is amazing how much faster you can go...
Wow, awesome. I never knew you could restore a minimized window with just the keyboard (without the aid of another app). Previously I just never minimized any windows, electing to hide them instead.
There are several legitimate reasons for requiring users to enter in their address in separate fields. The two main ones are:

1. If you need to integrate with third party systems who require you to break up the address. In case you've never tried, parsing addresses is very hard -- if not impossible -- depending on how many formats you need to support. All it takes is one third party library that requires you to break them up to make your life miserable.

2. If you need to categorize your users by country, state, zip, etc. For example, if you need to handle different tax laws for different states or if you need to generate reports on how many users you have from country XYZ.
Looks like not everyone has read the rules of Netiquette! It really amazes me how often people can write scathing letters and not realize that they are going to hurt individuals that are responsible for maintaining / running services and websites.

The only conceivable explanation is that these are people that have never been responsible for something public facing and hence have never been criticized unfairly.
Make your webapp more personal
Same thing that happened 15 years ago,perhaps?

I have a gorgeous SGI Indigo in my basement office courtesy of the company I worked for when they were tossing them (lots of them!) in the dumpster. Back in the day, you needed a "Workstation Class" PC to run the big CAD applications and many mechanical engineers had a computer whose only purpose was to run that CAD system.

I don't think we'll go all the way back to "a computer only for CAD" but we will have computers sold that are optimized for CAD, music production, etc.
Ahmen, I'm aware of my inability to grasp "design" myslf, but it's application by skilled tradespeople always delights me. When I found AL I too spent unreasonable amounts of time trawling through it all! My favourite would have to be the studio lavatories: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/toilets/

Time well spent for time well spent ;)
Thanks! There hasn't been any real profit although there's a story to be told about how to make a profit. Most of the necessary R&D has already been done.
C/C++, Python ?
Kleiner Perkins Doubles iFund to $200 Million
Grad school is writing and reading papers, not writing code (most of the time). Learn LaTeX and subscribe to ACM digital library and get to reading. You're expected to have programming skills in advance (at least where I went) but you should be language indifferent. Read SICP and learn the basics of C, C++, Java and Python.
Clojure:

- Functional programming is sufficiently different from C# to expand your mind in a good way. New paradigms will make you a better programmer even if you stick with C# in the end.

- Open source foundations allow you to get all the tools you need for free.

- Java interoperability gives you access to libraries you'll need for specialized projects.

- Clojure is growing and has an excellent community on Google Groups and on Freenode IRC.

http://clojure.org/
there are some significant libraries in java, like swarm
I dont think so... my understanding was that that was strictly a search deal. Yahoo is going to continue to sell ads against Bing results on yahoo.com.
High-Tech Cheating Abounds, and Professors Bear Some Blame
Well, yes. When you state a medical fact they teach you in elementary school, it's not going to get much attention.

When you make a deceptive and link-baiting title, it'll get some more.
"Life is pain, anyone who tells you different is selling you something." If you need the performance boost for a certain period of time, fuck the withdrawal. It's not that bad.
I suspect you're going to get downvoted for saying this, but I'm going to upvote you and give people a reason to think about this.

If someone goes through the time to program in C and release their source code for free, shouldn't we be thankful, rather than being upset at their autoconf tests they haphazardly threw together? I can't imagine how people can see these as being completely necessary.
Its interesting, but no - I wouldn't do it. I'd rather try to accomplish my goals without taking any money - especially feeling like I'm literally selling part of myself.
The idea that people other than Americans are real consumers with real money to spend is inherently funny; the idea that it might make good business sense to not put gratuitous hurdles between them and your checkout is practically hysterical. It's not like the US has an external trade deficit larger than the GDP of Taiwan or anything.
re: "The next big question is: Can you scale it ?"

I would like to suggest a potentially more interesting question (or set of questions) :

_Should_ he scale it?
If so, why?
Why would so many HNers assume the next step to be scaling it?
Might he not instead tend to his business like a garden, to ensure that it continues to be healthy, and use his remaining time to enjoy semi-retirement?

I think a lot of HNers could do with considering the above kinds of questions a bit more often. Why are you _really_ doing your start-ups? What are you _really_ looking to get out of them? Is it just to hear the 'ding!' of the cash register more frequently? I hope you're looking for more/different than that.
One instance where it would be nice is if you have your own "browser" written to use XULRunner and want some custom local database for something (say your use of XULRunner is to provide a test harness for automated testing and you want to store the test sequences and value transformations in the database). You have javascript to work with in a sandboxed environment, but isn't hosted on a webpage anywhere. Being able to directly access a database dramatically increases your capabilities and doesn't sound unreasonable. It only sounds unreasonable if you're talking about javascript that gets pushed out to a user's web browser.

NOTE: I wouldn't use this approach, and there's probably better ways, but I can see the potential benefits of it.
I have worked with multiple Indian groups on projects while working full time at different companies and I also have some experience outsourcing tasks for my startup through Elance.

Here are my rules with for working with Indian companies:

1. Never outsource the whole project or even a majority of it. I've seen companies do this because it's cheaper than hiring a staff of full time in-house developers. The projects usually fail.

2. Never ask them to do a task that you wouldn't know how to do yourself. You should never outsource a key piece of technology just because you don't know how to do it. You should only outsource something if they will get it done faster than you can or you want to work on something else. You will still have to review and test every line of their code to keep the quality up.

3. Expect communication issues. From my experience, Indian consulting firms try to communicate the best they can but you do have to stay on top of them.

4. They are much better at coding than they are at design. I've always been happy with the code they produce but not with their graphic design abilities. Never leave the UI design up to them.

I'm a single founder of a startup and the only way that I'm going to get my product off the ground in 30 to 60 days on a shoe-string budget is to outsource pieces of it. If you want to keep up with my progress then go to http://sqlmover.com to sign up for the private beta that is going to be launching next month.
Ask HN: please review my app - html to pdf API
"Each ZIP code is unique to a town"? No, not really. Small towns without their own post office typically share a ZIP code with the closest city because that's where the post office that delivers their mail is.
The Apple of University
That sounds like an incredibly nice suburb. Most aren't that good. There is nothing walkable from my parent's house. Though they do have FiOS and I can't get it in the city.
I'll second this. If you never get into LaTeX (I didn't) you'll always feel vaguely embarassed when showing your .doc thesis alongside the LaTeX formatted papers presented by your peers.

Now that I'm out of school it rarely comes up but while I was working on my Master's it was a constant irritation.
What makes you think they would have sold ~300k units if it was $4.99? Do you know what the average age group of justin.tv users are?
Sass users will enjoy the following features:

* No more = needed to use SassScript
* $ instead of ! for variables
* Support for CSS identifiers. E.g. solid instead of "solid"
* Dashes can be used in place of underscores in variable names and sass functions.

There are a number of features planned for Sass 3.2 and beyond that address your other concerns, but Sass needed better infrastructure to do those. We have that now so we can go full steam ahead on new features. Expect the following in future releases:

* Defining custom functions in Sass
* Keyword arguments to mixins and maybe functions.
* Support for a new directive called @extend
that implements selector inheritance.
* Optimizing compiler
* Support for new core datatypes like List and Null
Please refer me to an employer that will let me take paid vacation whenever I want, and however much I want. I will send you my resume today.
what if the destination/shipping is different to the billing, or where you buy it from? Using geoip here is mostly irrelevant and incredibly dangerous if you want to get a strong opinion of who your customers actually are, as opposed to where they are buying it from.
I think you're kind of missing the point. Because caffeine binds to adenosine receptors, it prevents you from entering the deepest phase of sleep, so even though you sleep, you don't get your full rest. Caffeine half life is 6 hours, so imho it should be done ONLY in the morning so that by bed time, it's gone and you sleep properly. I have verified this in my own experience. It basically makes caffeine much, much less useful.
You need to put a email address in the profile notes section of your profile. I was going to send you an email to ask you a few questions.

While it's illegal to not pay someone for useful work in my country (US), if you were a match I'd look into internships and paying intern wages once you showed any capacity to do work we could use after bringing you up to bare competence via starter projects.
This is how all drugs work... my understanding is that 300 mg per day for three weeks leads to full caffeine tolerance and you need to cycle clear at that point.
If you REALLY want to do something, given the options you listed, I would answer their favorite product question with their April Fools product. Something along the lines of "Well I'm partial to the new Google Time Machine... but in all seriousness I spend my life in Gmail".

It's the most benign thing you could do, breaks the ice a little, and it actually demonstrates that you've paid close attention to what they're doing.

All that said, I personally wouldn't do anything.
Seriously - I do! It's great. I can leave my preference settings alone and conserve my power & screen life with a single click on the mac bar. Plus you gotta love the little coffee cup that switches between empty and full. :)
Facebook CAPTCHA : "Sexless Day"
Correct. They messed around with the local authorities where I live last year - I was in Cheshire and I'm now in something called "Cheshire East". My neighbours are in "Cheshire West and Chester".

The address "52 High Street, Northwich, Cheshire West and Chester" would reflect the correct local authority name but is incredibly confusing - are we in Northwich or Chester? "Cheshire" is still correct.
So if I offered you 1 million for 3% of your future earnings, you wouldn't at all be tempted? What if the 1 million is tax free, cash in your account today?
These sort of lists always kind of amaze me. I don't think I use 10 mac apps total. Chrome, iTerm, Mail, iCal, Adium, Twitterrific, iTunes, uh...Unix? I guess that last one is kind of a multi-parter, but still.

Are the apps in the article addressing problems that don't really exist, or will I just put up with anything?
The main differences I've noticed in recent weeks: (1) the presence of 4-5 bars of signal strength is no indicator of whether a call is possible or stable; (2) wild swings of connectivity even without changing position; (3) the presence of the '3G' icon and bars is no indicator of whether a data connection is possible.

That is, it's gotten worse -- less reliable, and the indicators of service have become less connected to the actual level of service available. (This is in San Francisco.)
well maybe he SHOULD be ... ;)
HN has fixed that, can only vote up once. Damnit, genius!
Marshall Kirkpatrick asked his internet friends for OPML files for his birthday:

http://marshallk.com/its-my-birthday-you-should-make-me-a-pr...

It could work for you too...
Oppugn.us: Where The Rants Go
If you look to hire coders/designers/writers on freelance marketplaces like Elance, Rentacoder and Scriptlance, hire those that ask questions.

On any project above $100 you'll receive 20 or more bids, but 90% them will simply be a price and a list of references. You can be pretty sure most didn't even read your project description.

The 1 or 2 that ask meaningful questions about the project, no matter how small it is, are the ones you want to work with.
Sure, if being able to actually call someone reliably isn't a distinctive feature.

Every technology that's newly introduced into the mainstream is distinctive at first. I don't see LEMS or NMT phones around anymore.

Yeah, multitouch on a glass screen, that's the killer feature that will make mobile phones popular.
I often don't have the exact cash I need to give someone. Do you?

Are you sure you aren't just trolling?
As others have pointed out here, you will be the best judge of what a good life is.

The article was referring to your "increased capacity to contribute to the world."

That may not be your interest or you may be doing it a whole different way. Again, you will be the best judge of "how much" to contribute.

But if every smart person was contributing enough, we wouldn't be in a mess like we are today.

Something to think about.
The SQ3R Reading Method
Just 90 People Preorder Doomed JooJoo Tablet, 15 Return It
I used to be on the other side of phone some time back. Don't do it.
See the first Google result for a casual [search](http://www.google.com/search?q=take+paid+vacation+whenever+I...) of your phrase.
Slicehost adds Chicago datacenter
Apple's iPhone 4.0 to support multitasking via Expose-like interface
Facebook Bug Exposes Users’ Hidden E-mail Addresses
This seems to miss the one rationalization I saw most in my college days for 'technological detachment phenomenon'. That being that "in the real world, it doesn't matter how i got the right answer". I don't fully agree with the statement, but its worth a thought at least.
This is true, but if it's an implied deficiency in the original post, I disagree. Both here and at the blog, there have been many defensive comments along the lines of "well, maybe they're happy with their lives and we shouldn't judge them". The author specifically addressed that in the very first paragraph:

> When you talk to them, you will realize that even they want to go somewhere, be someone and do remarkable things.

The post should be read in that context. There are a tremendous number of smart people leading mediocre lives, not because of choice, but because of bad decision making.
There is a gap between where they are and where they wish they were. They want something better, where better is defined strictly in terms of their own desires, but they can't make better happen. And the follow-on points laid out by the author are among the most common roadblocks these folks encounter.
Thanks @jacquesm. You're very right on both occasions.

@akrymski - I might be interested in the first of those. Got any contact details?
On the other hand side, people should just man the hell up and stop caring. OMG somebody sent me an angry email. I've gotten dozens, who cares? OMG the girl on the dating site didn't respond to me, along with the other 500 I messaged, who cares? All I care about are my goals. I'll manage the client and if I lose him, move on to find another. I'll keep messaging until a girl responds to me, then go from there. People need to understand that there ARE hundreds of people online and just chill out about reacting to things like that. I don't bitch people out because it's counterproductive, but who cares, seriously.
You don't say what you are going back to grad school for? Masters in CS?
Nope. Counties are.
Remember when your mother told you "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."? It still holds, except it's even simpler: Keep it professional. Just because you feel wronged, doesn't mean you need to bring someone down. Try to resolve things like an adult, it will probably yield better results anyways.
The New YouTube Revealed [PICS]
Are there any promising open source libraries to fill this niche? Or startups offering it as a service API?

Honestly this seems like a problem that could be solved once and we all would benefit... And like any good problem, there is probably a profit to be made from it.
Sorry, it is a masters in CS, corrected my question.
Wow, I love the clock http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/segmentus/
A possibly apocryphal story about Quad using a surprising source of speaker cables:

http://www.zerogain.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1464
If you force people to enter a phone number in a format they don't have, you will just end up with a bunch of 555-555-5555 numbers. Either way, you are going to get incorrect information.

It's much better to realise that your information will not always be 100% accurate no matter what you do.
Thanks for the heads-up. We're just re-deploying (today) some of our website on a new platform, and still working out the kinks.
Now we just need The Wizard of Oz implemented with the NES graphics chip!
I had to deal with International phone numbers before. Obviously, I had to deal with other issues, too, but the phone number was the important piece. Early on, before PayPal or other services caught on, we created a system to verify credit card users with their telephone. They would enter their telephone number and we'd call them. It was simple.

The problem was with international users. The system was simple: it would call the exact phone number the user entered. This meant we really wanted to get it right the first time. The other problem was that we had a single call center setup out in New York. This meant international callers needed to be called with special country codes and what not.

Now, I feel it's safe to say if you ask someone in Europe to give their phone number, they are going to give their phone number like they would to any of their friends. They aren't going to enter in the country code, and they aren't going to know to prefix it with a special code so that an automated system from the US can call them.

The thing is, it's not fair for me to simply provide them with the requirement "Give us your phone number so we can call you from New York, USA." It really isn't professional.

So, I spent some time (lots of time) reading up and learning about international phone numbers, and coding together a system that went a long way toward fixing this problem. A user could enter in their phone number, and if they didn't enter in a country code, we'd be intelligent about it and add it for them. How did we know where they lived? Two sources: CC Info and the IP address. We could be intelligent and assume the two should mostly match up. Obviously, if the CC address was the US, and the IP was somewhere off in Asia, red flags beyond just the errors for phone numbers would popup (but, even then, you had to be careful!).

I spent a lot of time fine tuning the system, working hard to make sure that a phone number would get through however the user entered it, and we could call. We had a really good success rate with numbers outside the North American norm. Enough that the cases that did fail I couldn't even figure out manually.

I was a bit saddened that it was all for nothing when we eventually removed the 'feature.' and the requirement for a phone number. I understand the reasons, but from a problem solving point of view, it was a lot of fun.
I think that point is that those apps already exist and need to run on PCs. Porting them over the 'simpler' devices takes time and money that most businesses won't be eager to spend.
I gave it a shot of my own. I didn't do all the permutations, and surely left out big swaths that I've never even thought of, but it's a start...

http://hicks-wright.net/blog/stupid-american-website-owners/
"Fort Campbell (ZIP code 42223), primarily in Kentucky, also has some roads in Tennessee."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code#By_geography
Not really, I have 2 $12 25 foot hdmi cable that work just great. I bought the cheapest one I could find because, hey, if it doesn't work I'm only out $12. But it's been working great for a couple years now.
Heart: a planet-scale RDF data store
I'd agree with you, but then I realized that I already switch browsers and computers so many times in a given day that I have this problem within a site, never mind spanning two.

So I asked myself: When do I use the visited link colors for? And I think the answer is: only when I press the browser's Back button. I want to see where I left off clicking. If I have to click an extra link and say "Whoops, already saw that", then oh well. As long as I know where to start reading when I return.
| When a web page tries to get the computed style of a link (or any of its sub-elements), Firefox will give it unvisited style values.
yeah, because that happens now when people do drugs all over the place...

How about instead of made up bogeymen, why don't you look at the horrors the prohibition of drugs has created.

1. Militarization of police

2. Attack on civil liberties

3. Funding illegal organizations, and causing gang crime

4. A gigantic waste of money

5. Ruining countless numbers of lives through incarceration

Or perhaps you might want to look at Portugal: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-dr...

Or perhaps you'd like to take a look at the hell in mexico that drug prohibition has caused: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/23/mexico-drug-wars...

So I have the cause of freedom on my side, as well as all the 2nd and 3rd order effects. Perhaps you should change your position.
If you're just kidding then why the posting. If you're not think about whether or not you really want that job...

A phone interview is limited in time and scope, if you use it to pull an april fools joke it says that you are not able to see when is the appropriate time to be serious and when not.
For me this article boils down to this one bullet point:

"The industry is finally ready to sell things that make geeks feel frustrated instead of things that make normal people feel helpless. What does this mean for geeks and our role in society?"

It'll mean great things for geeks. A userbase who no longer fears computers or hates IT departments will allow for more interesting applications, better collaborations and the end of geeks as second class citizens in many organizations. That is, as long as they play along.
It's a surprisingly small world, and the person you snub today may be on the other side of another table a year from now. You only have one reputation, don't soil it.