skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of the press implies that this lets you make payments by bumping phones. If you have actually used the application, you will see that all it does is send the person's email address to you.

Because Bump is not deterministic(ie, you could get a random person's contact info if you are say in an auditorium at SXSW), you still have to confirm that this is the contact you want. Overall, it probably takes more time than just typing the email in, and then you have to go through the normal payment flow anyway. There would be value if it transfered the entire vcard to your address book at the same time since this might be a lot of info.
An interesting and very different take on caffeine consumption strategy was posted here a while ago:

http://arvindn.livejournal.com/57651.html

The idea is that you should use caffeine when you're at your peak, because you want to maximize your productivity for doing really hard stuff that you normally would only accomplish when you're having a creative spurt anyway.
That is what I meant. It's dangerous to my productivity.

paulbaumgart does point out something funny. I added 'dangerous' in an edit a few minutes after posting. It does make the post more precise; I am talking about caffeine being a danger to productivity as a consequence of dependence not merely the truism that "Caffeine is a drug." However, it didn't get views (as evidenced by up-votes) until I added dangerous.

In being more precise I was accidentally link-baiting.
I am sure there will be security problems, but the basic starting point seems like it should make things easier to deal with. Every app is in a jail with limited access. I am curious how the common file area plays into security.
My suggestion would to buy a high quality laptop. It has been a long while (san gaming rigs) since I found a laptop that wouldn't perform every one of my needs.

If you do feel you need a desktop (if you want dual SLI graphic cards or TBs of hard disks in raid 1), I have to agree with the concensus and build your own. It is fun to learn, easy to do, and cheaper.
Nice work on the UI. It doesn't get much cleaner then that.
Bob sucked. The Cube was kind of a cool product in search of a market segment.
Shameless plug: if you think this sounds interesting, we are hiring: http://bu.mp/jobs. Feel free to email me (jake at bu.mp) if you have questions or just want to learn more. :)
Good point!

Taking care of taxes and red-tape should be scalable, though, right? Meaning that it should be possible for a company to set all that stuff up and then contract out the people. A consultancy for personal assistants.

New question: is there enough demand and margin to make this worth it for a company to do? Is there enough supply of people who want to be personal assistants? My guesses would be no and yes, respectively.
Maybe Regator?

http://regator.com/#feedsearch:section:20:0
And fix those drop-down menus for country where I have to scroll allllll....the.....waaaaay....dowwwwwwn to reach United Kingdom!
I'm thinking of quitting cold turkey again. I'm getting exhausted even a few hours after having caffeine and I'm very cranky in the afternoon. Also, I can't focus as well when I'm all juiced up.
The point that they list as "key", that it's possible for programmers to learn with just Hindi, but not just Romanian or Hungarian, I suspect is wrong. Using number of language-specific Wikipedia articles as a proxy for content on the web, there are:

- 158,215 Hungarian articles
- 141,637 Romanian articles
- 54,058 Hindi articles

Also note that universities use English almost exclusively in India and that only about 20% of Indians are native Hindi speakers.

I'm not saying that the observation about level of English is wrong, but the assumptions about the reasons for such are suspect.
Falcon Northwest has always made some outstanding PCs. http://www.falcon-nw.com
What Makes a Great Teacher?
I had a friend who I was talking to and he was having trouble with Firefox. I asked him to check what version he was running, he told me 1.9.1. It was a minor miracle I realized that that was his Gecko version, because I was stuttering around like a crazy man, trying to understand how his browser was that out of date.
Once you start to look at the problem, it becomes really hard. It is not only address and phone number formats. The name alone a very hard. American style is given name and family name I guess, and as a German that sounds very convincing. But then you suddenly stumble across a middle initial, whereas in Germany parents give their kids any number of additional forenames, from zero to five or so, not just one for the middle. Then countries like Spain and Iceland traditionally don't have a family name, but surnames derived from the father or the mother, or just the surname from both in a certain order. You have potentially two family-level names then (and potentially the same name twice!). So the person complaining in the blog post probably doesn't know what it means to get these things right, even if you only consider highly developed countries. Even if you only want the name.

Maybe someone should start a library for this problem, and then we all lay back and watch it grow to 50,000 LOC.
I disagree. A VC's job is to determine if he should give you money, not be a personal founder business coach. Isn't that why we would go to him in the first place?

Any information or feedback he gives should be considered a favor and is purely optional on his part.
Designer's block (Art Lebedev on where ideas come from)
Drinking even one cup of coffee in the morning makes me extremely jittery during the day, unable to concentrate. As the direct result, i now avoid coffee as much as possible. Preferring green tea as it makes me more alert without inducing jitters.
I don't think that hiding the portfolios behind an authentication wall is a good idea.

* They won't show up in search engine results

* You can't casually point a recruiter/hiring manager to view the portfolio - since it's likely they won't bother to sign up

* If you don't see an example of them, why sign up? Who knows what they look like.
The Patent System Does Not Scale
Ok, I realise this is meant to be some kind of joke.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's actually funny.
A large burst of caffeine does cause an adrenaline surge. As a matter of fact, that's all that does anything to wake people up who drink it in the early morning.

However caffeine is a competitive inhibitor of adenosine, a neurochemical that builds up late in the day making us sleepy. So if you drink it in the afternoon, especially in smaller quantities, as you'd see in an espresso (Which while having a stronger coffee taste, actually has much less caffeine per serving) or tea, you will find it quite able to keep you awake.
I used to work for a guy who was a family man, good at his (demanding) job, and ran triathlons. This is doubly impressive, as I see many fat programmers who might be successful in their families and careers but are neglecting their health. As far as I could tell, his method was:

1)Be very focused while on the job and have mounds of energy.

2)Be very smart.

3)Be very clear about your goals and what you want from life.

4)Do not care about appearances. He would regularly come in and leave at odd hours. But his superiors didn't care because he got good results.

5)Be insanely likeable. Maybe his superiors or his clients would have grumbled about his hours if they didn't think he was a swell guy. Note: being good at your job and likeable is a killer combination for being able to bend the rules and get away with it. Either quality alone is probably not enough.

6)Pick reliable underlings and delegate. This is related to point (5). Everybody wanted to work for him, you couldn't know the guy and NOT want to work for him, so he was able to choose competent people for his team.

I don't know that I could be like my old boss. Right now, I can barely keep grad school and my health together. But I have an example to emulate.
Yahoo is shrinking further and further, it's like watching a very slow collapse of an old building.

From the #1 website in the world in 2008, now dropped to #3 or #4 depending on who you ask. Still gigantic but if they don't find a new direction I don't think they'll be able to continue to operate independently.

The current management seems to have only one solution to their problems, which is to chop off divisions and to shut them down. If they would at least sell them they'd make some money, but they followed the exact same pattern with Geocities (for which there would have been plenty of takers).
Does your city have a Fry's electronics? Last time I was there, they had HDMI cables on sale for something like $4; I bought a gaggle of them.

If you don't have a Fry's, you're missing out on something wonderful. Every Fry's about a hundred people who absolutely and completely despise every single aspect of their jobs, and have been forced to wear white button-down shirts with ties.

Fry's sells everything. From green laser pointers, to 2 post telco racks, to embedded computer parts, to washing machines, to televisions, to cheap chinese toys, to candy bars, to tasers and pepper spray and home security gear.
If it's an HTML <select> element then you can click it to give it focus then start typing the name of option you wish to select.
Sorry, I am still not getting this - if the data is local then why not run the app on a server running on the local machine.

Alternately you are trying to access local personal data using a remote app - so you need Google's or HTML5's support for a local database (SQLight I think but in a wrapper).
A joke ? You wish:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=toilet
Yes, but if you over-validate you also risk losing sales. What to do doesn't seem obvious at all, at least to me. You'd want to do some kind of cost-benefit analysis

Also, wouldn't a phone number in effect be validated for most online credit card purchases? I thought credit card processor often match the phone number you provide to the phone number on record for your account to prevent fraud. Skip the javascript validation, and let the cc processor validate the phone number.

...but I have no idea what I'm talking about, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I usually understand "dangerous drugs" to be ones that have the potential to cause permanent organ damage. So my first thought was, "Oh shit, I drink a lot of coffee. Now you're telling me it's dangerous?"

Then I actually read the article and got a little peeved that I'd been link-baited (inadvertantly or otherwise)- hence my comment complaining about it. :-)
It's curious how many forms do not allow spaces and dashes in numerical data like phone numbers and credit card numbers. Given how easy it is to strip characters out of a string, one wonders why people bother mandating a particular pattern.
10 Mac Apps I Can't Live Without
Hmmm, then this plugin is broken because it doesn't crash any browser _except_ IE6!
James - I assume you would be the other co-founder. What expertise do you bring to the table? Business, marketing, technical, ideas, etc?
The problem with taxes per person is it doesn't take into account how a country spends its money. If, as a percentage, we spent as little on the military as those other countries our taxes per person would drop significantly.
It does, that is the first/primary function of the app. This is just talking about a PayPal implementation of their API.
Start-Up Aims to Be a Hub for Location Data
There are other countries which are good resources of competent developers but not as popular with the two countries mentioned. One example is Philippines.

Philippines is an English speaking country and have excellent developers. Sadly, a lot of senior developers were pirated by large banks and firms in Singapore.

The problem is outsourcing individuals/companies often look at price first rather than the talent of developers -- money matters at the end of the day.
I've argued many times for making address one big text field. Let people who live in the country, who own the address, format it how they know it should be formatted.
The author, John Taylor Gatto is the former NY teacher of the year. I found his against school piece more compelling.

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=tea...
I am not sure that is completely true. I thought ZIP codes could not cross state lines (at least in the US). And after looking at them, I couldn't find any that were not unique.[http://www.aggdata.com/free/zip-code]

Edit: Sorry, There are a few that cross state lines, when using the first two digits as the state code. However, each ZIP code is unique to a town; therefore, one could use it in the above scenario.
There is still a qualitative difference between digital and analog signals. With analog signals, you can always get higher fidelity by upgrading components (until something else becomes the bottleneck). With digital, there are gradients of "wrong" but there is only one "right." Once you hit the threshold of bits not being flipped, getting more expensive and higher-quality components will not get you better-sounding playback. A digital cable can achieve literally perfect playback. Analog cannot reach perfection, which means it's always possible to improve.

I'm not an electrical engineer so I don't know what the threshold of perfection is, but if the consumer reports can't tell the fancy cable apart from the Radio Shack equivalent of two-buck chuck, I'm not going to worry about it.

On an unrelated note: this is a listing on amazon for 6 feet of digital audio cable for over a thousand dollars. Read the comments. Comic gold. http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B0...
Ouch, the Google ban stick does not sound fun. An alternative for spidering high-risk avenues like that might be 80legs.com, in essence a legal/opt-in crawling botnet =P I've used them when they were in open beta and the service was free -- now you need to pay, although it's pretty cheap for smallish jobs.
Flash Player To Come Bundled With Google Chrome, New Browser Plugin API Coming
Well, I suppose you could just validate numbers from the most common countries you see and hope the rest don't make mistakes. Call it the Amdahl's law of internationalization.
I would like to hear anecdotal evidence from regulars here who have used services like eLance. Did it work out for you?
http://seekingalpha.com/ syndicates a whole bunch of financial blogs. They don't have feeds for individual contributors and I'm not sure of the quality of their topics feeds, but if you crawl carefully you may be able to find your way to the original blogs of many of their contributors.
I think google's tasks can do what you need... it has more than what you probably need but you don't have to do that.
Wufoo is pretty good for pre-made forms. And they advertise that they can do US and International phone, mail and currency fields.
I've been looking for job opportunities w/ the big 4 and was having trouble sifting through all the big 4 job listing sites (whats with enterprise job listing platforms, they're so clunky??)

Anyhow - the other weekend I whipped up an aggregator/filter that lets you easily and quickly search over all the big 4's job listings (the job list is updated 3x a day). I find it pretty handy keeping a tab on new job ops and wanted to share with all yall.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to make it better, leave a comment.
If you are looking for a 20-something MALE who likes Atlas Shrugged, you are in luck.

I think there are only three females on the site at the moment, but it appears you would be better off there with Anna Karenina.
>The real lesson for me is this: People want the basics done well.

What "the basics" evolves at varying rates of complexity as technology changes. To the users this is mostly invisible except when it is directly related to the UI or when some new technology seems like magic.
I think I may have portrayed my view wrong, then. I don't have problem with the "bump" thing as a generic interaction. I can see it as a very handy way of doing certain things, like playing a game with a friend. At the moment I'd have to look for all nearby phones(/DSes, etc.) and figure out which one is my friend. Just nodding our phones together seems a great improvement. There are tons of other things I imagine it would be great for.

I do have a problem with its use for transferring money. It just seems pointless. That's what cash is for, and paypal is most useful because I can use it where cash is not an option. I don't see any benefit to using this kind of interaction here.

For it to be useful, we have to be in the same room, I'd have to not have any cash or cheques, or alternatively be required to use paypal. It also has to be something that has to happen soon, or else I could get cash later or use paypal regularly or something rather than going through the effort of us taking out our phones and looking like goofs. We also both have to already have the relevant app installed, with a compatible model of phone. I actually have to make sure of this, too-- I have to ask, "hey do you have that paypal app", etc., which takes more time. This is a situation I do not foresee happening very often at all. There are just so many limiting factors, and it's just so easy to have enough cash in my wallet.
Schell's followup talk at GDC allegedly gives some important context. Unfortunately it's not online from what I can tell. Gamasutra talks about it in passing here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27754/Opinion_Fear_and_Lo...
I guess it depends how you drink it, but I found yerba mate to be more stimulant/jitter inducing than coffee. At least if you drink it the Argentinian way with the gourd and straw. The official story in Argentina is that yerba has "mateine", which is basically indistinguishable from caffeine if you ask me. So not sure if you are really combating the caffeine addiction by switching to mate.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't pour sugar in that mate...
They certainly can include multiple municipalities.
The street I grew up on. I am not shamrock on any other site.
You'll probably regret this when something breaks and you have to get your hands dirty to fix it.
I've never used bump, but what happens if I am bumping in close proximity to two other phones bumping?

Anyone ever play with distance thresholds? How close do you actually have to be when you "bump" for it to make a match?
I wouldn't be too scared about the presentation. Mr. Schell is a super smart guy, no doubt, but his sense of what will be popular in the future is way off. He admits to being blindsided by the wii, almost all the games he mentions in his talk, and he makes a joke about how everyone hates the iPad, which has already run out of stock for new preorders. His taste != the taste of consumers. Which is not to say there's anything wrong with his taste, just that it's very hard to predict the future when you are shocked that people find wii sports fun.
Me too! I've been arguing this for years, and I have yet for someone to reply with a good reason why it shouldn't be handled this way.

Bad reasons given:

- Safeguard against users who can't be relied on to format their own address properly. Fix 1: Don't worry about that. Fix 2: If you really want this, leave the rest of us an option to use a freeform address instead.

- "Out webshop database has these fields." Fix: Change the database, then.
Unfortunately, no, you can't.

There are plenty of zip codes in Missouri that have a dozen small towns that all have 1001 Broadway as valid addresses.

There are at least 5 zip codes (possibly more, there used to be a list on wiki) that cross state, county, and city boundaries. So it's entirely possible that without the zip+4, you'd have to have both the city and the state to correctly locate an address.
I think the complaint is more about the HN post title than the content of the blog itself. Personally, I clicked it thinking it would be about some study regarding negative health effects of caffeine, and I think that's the most obvious interpretation of "dangerous".
How about Puerto Rico (in those cases where Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of a state-like entity, which is how the US Postal Service treats it)? Hungary? Japan? Germany? Anywhere else that doesn't use a state in the postal address?

"State" is really just equivalent to "second-level subdivision" (a bit like how "ZIP code" can mean "postal code" in general, as long as the box allows freeform input). Most countries don't call their second-level subdivisions "states" but counties, municipalities, council areas, and the like. Puerto Rico has municipalities and Japan has prefectures, for instance.

the other areas of the world that the US Postal Service (and law) considers part of the United States?

The places you mention are all unincorporated organized territories, meaning they are not considered to be "part of the United States proper." The word "proper" is somewhat important in this distinction, of course, and the USPS's definitions do nothing to help clear the waters on this one.. :-)
Very cool idea. I've long wanted something that gets me to the employer directly, rather than routing me through a recruiter. One failing of most sites is the sheer number of recruiter ads I've seen. Want to disrupt? Get rid of the middleman.

I've noticed that companies often list their postings though a third-party site like taleo.net or apply2jobs.com (two I found by clicking on your site). Those sites also make it hard (probably intentionally) to get to the actual job listings from what I've seen, probably to prevent scraping.

How do you manage to get those listings you your site? Are you pulling a feed, polling the sites, or something else?
You might find YQL (Yahoo Query Language) useful for parts of what you want to do.
Which would make so much more sense in the first place. I don't even know why did they make them in separate fields in the first place. To give you a huge listbox of all states to choose from?! Oh, wow!
Absolutely. Your dreams (figuratively) are shaped by your daily interactions as much as they are by your personality.

For instance, reading HN has made it clear to me what I want more so than I could have ever found out on my own (I've yet to reach it; though).
I'd like to see a larger sample set ... 1980 to present?
Reminds me of http://twitter.com/pooptag
[author of the post]

Those numbers are mindblowing- is there some kind of India-specific Wikipedia analogue where articles in Hindi tend to go to?
But it would be easier for the customer if the website guessed from the customer's IP address which country they were in, and put it at the top of the list (as well as in its normal position).
it does support minification of CSS in production. See: http://beta.sass-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.SASS_REFERENCE.ht... and http://beta.sass-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.SASS_REFERENCE.ht...
A technical look at Intel's Moorestown. Game changer?