skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is the point. Not having a degree doesn't imply that one wouldn't be capable of completing a degree. Bill Gates is an example of that. People here also aren't saying that that a degree isn't "often a requirement" in job listings — they're saying it shouldn't be, not that it isn't.

Incidentally, I would bet most people who don't have degrees could have one if you gave them a full free ride. Getting a degree these days requires several years of your life and huge gobs of money, but that's pretty much it.
809 Ways to Monetize Mobile
Re: way to submit bug reports, did you consider email?
I haven't seen any real project (or any significant open-source project other than Parrot / Perl 6 itself) that's based on Perl 6. And it was started when? 10 years ago?

That sounds a bit like the No True Scotsman fallacy. (What makes a project "real" or "significant"?) Regardless, why should that matter? How many real projects do you know of based on Java 7, or even Python 3? (Python 3 is older than Perl 6.)
The loser pays the other party's cost in the UK system. How does it work when it is dropped in the middle of the case?
Dantheman isn't advocating killing people. He is advocating allowing people to to voluntarily experiment on themselves.

Kind of like what the Nazis did, except without the violence.
Excellent rejoinders. They do support the simile.

I think I did jump to reading it as a "love it or leave it" argument, though recognizing you are more on the "come and join us on the outside". But maybe you can see it was easy to ready it as "it's a waste to get riled up about this".

Anyway, I'm quite sympathetic to the build-alternative-institutions as opposed to work-within-the-system approach. I rewrote this response a dozen times and then realized I hadn't figured out what really rankles me about this whole conversation (the larger one).

I think it's that Apple makes really good stuff, when so often it's the people making marginal or crappy stuff that are making regressive moves like these. So I get torn, because there are real efforts being made on their part to make technology human, to meet people where they are, efforts that have gone further than a lot of others. And I can't see any basic link between the closed approach and that success.
I enjoyed reading the phrase "bunged up" in the mainstream press! ;-)
Well, yeah, the US govt has many of the same problems - but the US government is democratic (at least apparently). People can at least hold on to the hope that in 4 years, "Change" will be coming. They get to demonstrate politically, organise themselves, vote, etc.

No such safety valves in a totalitarian regime.
Win the Weather Station Pro app for iPad
What absolutely horrible infographics. The graphics part did more to obscure the data than to give it any meaning.
Out of curiosity, why do I sound foreign?
Maybe it is cynicism but I suspect that if drug research were deregulated the standard of drugs produced would decline rapidly.

It probably would. But that is irrelevant - the relevant question is, "would consumers benefit?"

A hypothetical - imagine that government regulations forbid the sales of laptops weighing more than 4lb, having less than 8gb ram and a 500gb HD (roughly a $5,000 laptop). Eliminating this regulation would almost certainly result in lower quality laptops (read: bigger, less ram) being sold.

Would that be a bad thing?
I hope the article is correct. From what I hear of people who have lived there recently, China appears to be so full of bubbles it makes a fresh pint of Guinness cheese look positively flat.

The tragic thing is, if China does blow up, there will probably be tens of millions of people who will die in the process.
No, no he doesn't. Ars gets paid when you load ads alongside a page. There's no metric that says "a person must notice and/or care about the ad for it to count".

You're more than welcome to email me if you want to talk more about it: kurt@arstechnica.com
Ask HN: What are your favourite Web dev/programming sites?
With so much information on the web, how do you guys keep up with the latest trends and technologies on web development or programming ?

What are the sites that your get info or learn from ?

Specially for web dev.
The documentary Helvetica was made by the same director, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_%28film%29. I was impressed that a documentary about fonts could be so engaging.
That was the original intention but (and IANAL) I read something recently that said it had been extended so that if something damaged your brand, then you got to say whether it was acceptable or not.
"The ability of markets to defy gravity exceeds your ability to short them."
Ning, free, eyeballs, layoffs
Wow, that sounds nice. Easy screenshots makes the quality of bug reports go up so much.
Israel Bans iPad
Agreed. It is unlikely that any violent action against domestic groups would incur anything other than stern rebukes internationally. Certainly nobody is going to go to war with China over Tibet.

On the other hand, Japan has something resembling a defense pact with Taiwan - between those two, if I were the CCP, there's a pretty easy decision.
I presume there's a lot more to their business model than just an Outlook plugin (albeit a very good one!)?
Sun About Face: Out-of-Cycle Java Update Patches Critical Flaw
Sounds like a great idea. Maybe this will wake employers or even non technical people up that graduating with a computer science degree doesn't always (and usually they shouldn't have to) know everything from computer graphics, database management, system administration, application programming, and fixing your broken computer.
If you have Firefox, you can use the Screengrab! addon to copy the screenshot to the clipboard.

EDIT: Only webpage screenshot, not full desktop. Should be easy to implement an external (background) running program to copy to clipboard the screenshot, though.
I think this goes to show just how much thought has been put into small stuff like this. For instance, there is no need for the the sleep indicator to indicate anything when it's off - simply because you know the laptop is alive when the screen is on (the indicator lights up solid white when the screen turns off). However, the battery indicator button combined with a stripe of lights show a function - the level of battery capacity left - so they need to be visible even when they're off.

With the old Powerbooks and MacBook Pros, the hinges on the top of the lid would extend magnetically just before the lid closed. These are the small gems that makes you smile when you're interested in product design.

I haven't found minimalism to impact usability myself, but there's clearly some instances where they have given the user a task of figuring someting out. For instance, a friend of mine never figured out that the top button on his iPhone locked the screen until I told him.
Obama's speech on the future of space exploration (video).
I'm not sure if he does any blogging, but HN user tokenadult jumps into my mind as the most informed person in this community with regards to the state of the education world. If I were you, I'd try to reach out to him.
The Facebook Phenom – Advertising for the Now Generation
So this is a post covering Advertising for the Next Now Generation – Facebook ads are especially useful because they target a smaller, and potentially more likely, market for your products by focusing on factors such as location, age, education, etc., while weeding out the least likely customers.
I agree he phrased it too strongly, but you could accurately say that it's effectively confined to MSM, IV users, and those two groups' immediate sexual partners.

That sort of analysis is pretty common in epidemiology, describing a particular outbreak as "confined to group A and immediate contacts of group A". For example, when looking at diseases associated with health-care workers, people in direct prolonged contact with them but who aren't themselves health-care workers, like family members, are often counted as basically honorary health-care workers (or at least treated as a group separate from the general public).
With Xobni One, they could be Dropbox for contacts.

Having all contacts from a range of services well organized in one place plus having it synced over a number of different devices would take a ton of pain out of everyday communication.
OpenID logins would be fantastic.
Picking losers is a lot easier than picking winners.
Android OS 2.1 increases it to 5 homescreens. In addition, you can put folders on any of the Android homescreens that work almost identically (from what I gather from the description in the article) to the way folders work in iPhone OS4.

I think others have mentioned that you can get 3rd party apps for Android that increase the number of home screen to at least 7. These do not require rooting or anything else unusual, just a quick download from the Market.
Yeah, I've loved both of them so far. I believe there's a third coming too, although I don't know the topic.
Where are barratry laws when you need them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barratry
Student receives detention for using Firefox
Lets not come up with a crazy assed WRONG meme like "free is not a business".

Free IS a business, and has been proven time after time over the last few centuries if not longer.

Companies don't fail because they chose to offer something free, they fail for other reasons.

From the very little I've read about Ning, it's clear they took way too much funding for a start.
I agree in general with what I take to be your stance, that people who actually get it out there into the mainstream and do it well should be rewarded. And that open markets will always create competition so therefore some strict control is ok if it gets us there.

To clarify, I wouldn't expect an academic to patent his work. He wants his works to be freely available to everyone. It's Steve Job's/Apple's right ethically and legally to leverage that. I meant it more lightly that it felt disrespectful that years later Jobs isn't paying homage to the source of inspirations.

I love Apple, they are killing it out there. I don't take nearly as much issue as everyone else does with most of their controlling terms. I come from the game's industry where Apple seems like the most gracious host compared to Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft and their approval process.

But as a Tools/Interface developer it's so frustrating to not be allowed to commercialize say an IDE that utilizes multi-touch to make software editing/navigation more efficient or enjoyable.
I've never heard this, so I'd be interested to see a citation.

Even if true, I don't see how this could constitute damage to Apple's brand. The fact that Apple's name is used to help understand what a competing product is doesn't do any damage to the brand. It seems equivalent to putting on the box "compare our product to an iPad".
As I grow older I want things to be simpler…
I don’t know. This LED has one function: telling you the device is still on when the monitor isn’t. That’s all it does. It’s obvious that the device is on when the monitor is on, so you don’t need a LED for that (ThinkPads really do have a frickin’ LED for that! As does my cheap Compaq.).

Putting a LED at a visible location and making it invisible as long as it is off seems like a pretty elegant solution to that problem. I don’t think it’s harder to figure out the sleep light than this whole row of LEDs on my old ThinkPad with their cryptic pictograms or the dazzling array of blinkenlights on my cheap Compaq laptop (complete with equally puzzling pictograms and including LEDs which light up in different colors so you presumably have to learn a whole color code).

Macs in general only opt for LEDs when displaying stuff in the UI is not possible (sleep light and battery indicator for checking battery status when the Mac is off), one exception being that darned caps lock. Spotlight’s icon pulses when your HDD is indexed. There are progress bars when stuff is unzipped or copied. Why the need for a HDD activity LED?

That’s a bit dishonest of me. There is multitasking, so stuff might be going on in the background, but I do think that in general it’s good to strive for a world in which we don’t need HDD activity LEDs. I also think we are pretty much there, I, at least, didn’t miss it. (Although not knowing why my good old desktop PC didn’t respond in 1998 because they decided to leave out the HDD activity light would have been pretty horrible. But that was then :)
More info on planes that have flown through ash plumes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM_Flight_867
Not saying his points are without merit or anything, but Gordon Chang is a well-known neocon writer. He regularly contributes to the Glenn Beck show.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_G._Chang

Many of his earlier apocalypse predictions didn't seem to take hold. Many journalists consider him a bit of a nutter.

Just saying.
Presumably the next step is to write Dwarf Fortress for this.
Vimium - the hacker's browser
With all due respect but I would encourage you to try exactly this with a recent version of a major distribution like ubuntu.

It is so much easier for non technical people to install applications with all those comfortable package management frontends alone. I recently have successfully "deployed" such an environment on an absolute beginner's PC. I would clearly say that everybody who was able to use WinXP is easily able to use a modern major Linux distribution. I have been an enthusiastic osx user for many years now but then again I originally came from BSD world and I am somewhat married to my workflow now.

IMHO Linux is a great option - certainly for casual users and programmers.
Once it becomes clear that Twitter has no viable revenue model, that Facebook's model will be undermined by the same effects that caused the videogame industry to crash in the early '80s, and that "Web 2.0" has largely turned into a fad, we'll probably face another Dotcom crash.

Meanwhile, genuinely emergent social media like IRC, Wikipedia, etc. keep chugging along.
Making outlandish requests in order to get a better deal is an old practice but even with that taken into account this is ... disturbing. I'd rather live in a world with no commercial content at all.
It's rather scary that engines can "start to thicken with larva"

Beware the volcano-born engine larva.
One way is shorting exchange traded funds invested in Chinese companies like GXC. Another way would be to short companies dependent on China's economics growth, or companies highly valued for their Chinese branches like YUM (owns KFC, etc..).

Jim Chanos in a Businessweek (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_16/b41740106...) interview recommends the following:

"There are ways to play Chinese companies outside of China. Either they trade in Hong Kong or New York. Probably more important from an investment point of view, this has implications for the people selling stuff to China—cement, glass, copper, steel. "
It's Dieter Rams, and he's been a big inspiration to a lot of designers (including Jonathan Ive). He actually said "only a few companies", and then mentioned Apple.

There are other companies, but few in the computer / consumer electronics business.

I think the key is that most companies treat design as an afterthought, or an expense. It's completely irrelevant to most users, but look at most PC laptops - they have a nice, glossy lid and front bezel. But the bottom cover seems like a minefield of stickers, covers, fan openings and screws. There is no design there. The design job ended with the obvious, visible parts.

Again, completely irrelevant to most users as they will never look at the bottom cover. But it speaks a lot about how these companies think about design - and why Apple is still the only company with a unibody laptop design.
For my company it's pretty much any expense related to an engineer. Salary, rent, power, computer, etc.
Take the example of vBSEO. Since 2005, their main product has been a plugin that addresses the missing SEO element in vBulletin. You would think that vBulletin would either build this functionality into newer versions or buy vBSEO, but it hasn't happened yet. In fact, with several patents for SEO technology, when it does happen, they'll probably have other products and services ready.

I think starting by improving an existing moustrap gives you enough of a headstart over startups building entirely new mousetraps, that once you have market share and profitability, you can branch out into other areas.
The Rest Of The Details On That Monster Groupon Financing
I would think it would be more about the fact that it's an obvious derivation (i->we)
The new multitasking model, recently used app switcher, and folders are sound a hell of a lot like the equivalents in Android. (which isn't a complaint by the way... ) I wonder why they didn't also adopt a notification system similar to the pull down notification drawer in Android?
There are only two phases of a person's life: before Civilization, and after.
Dev #1, Highly productive developer, careful and detail oriented: "Well, I can probably only build a large system in about half the time that a competent developer would think possible. Better not waste my time with this one."

Dev #2, Highly distracted developer, careless and sloppy: "I can put something together 5 times faster than that old guy down the hall who's always reshuffling his paperwork. Hey, I'll give it a shot. They're always hounding my case here anyway."

Result: Cadabra HR had too much to drink on the weekend with not enough sleep and Dev #2 is hired monday morning.
10 Lessons From The Pwn2Own Hacker Contest
So buy puts. =)
Worth pointing out:

a) Facebook used the same 'fat' strategy and is winning big.

b) Swinging for the fences increases the odds of striking out.

c) Marc Andreessen is not interested in creating 37 signals.
Sorry, that came out wrong.

I actually took a look at Parrot ... great tools for language designers, flexible type-system (oh god, the type system in the JVM is horrible).

I really hope you guys can pull it through.

I was judging from my POV ... I want to implement a language than I can use as soon as the parser is finished (I'm not enough of a man to implement my own VM or to deal with non-mainstream choices, although that may prove to be better long-term).
original video source: http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/4/14/oral-history-of-gaming-g...
Another example of (a) how schools break the minds of kids, and (b) why America is doomed.

A working class hero is something to be.
Welcome to the Troposphere
"Tropo pretends to be a cloudy voicy serious businessy thing, but really it’s just a big fun toy written for me and all my fellow geeks who have always wanted to hack a phone system but never got around to it."
thanks! that's pretty neat.
It may not be obvious that it was a joke, given that impossible requirements have been asked of before. Case in point: requiring 3 years of rails development when it had only been in existence for 2 or so years.
Probably the least sophisticated way is to buy shares in an inverse ETF. There are a couple bear market ETFs that target Chinese indexes (FXP and CZI). (I'm not endorsing anything here; please understand whatever you invest in before doing so.)
Thanks, that's a good point.
Some years ago someone figured out how to build logic gates in Quake 3 maps out of doors and shooters (entities that shoot a projectile when triggered). This was actually used in some single player maps and to create special game modes that aren't present in vanilla Q3.

I guess this could, in theory, be used to create a Turing Complete computer. It might hit the entity limit of Quake 3 though.

PDF: http://www.skore.de/images/stories/Q3A/Q3A_Electronics.pdf
there's also vrome https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/godjoomfiimiddap...
And don't forget the USA and the Taiwan Relations Act.

I don't think China can so overtly attack Taiwan any time soon.

Plus, based on my experience, mainland Chinese sentiment seems to already be against Tibetans and Uyghurs (more so the latter). They feel that the party has already given them a lot in attempt to promote their success, yet they continue to protest and generally cause trouble. Anecdotally, the majority of pickpocketers are supposedly Uyghurs.
"The planned release of a blockbuster motion picture should be acknowledged as an event that attracts the focused efforts of copyright thieves... Enforcement agencies (notably within DOJ and DHS) should plan a similarly focused preventive and responsive strategy. An interagency task force should work with industry to ... react swiftly with enforcement actions where necessary."

Looks like the movie and music industry thinks that file sharing is a threat to society along the lines of terrorism.
DiBona: Google will hire two Android coders to work with kernel.org
I think the trick is to have a long term plan that makes you less tied to the platform, if not get out from it entirely, but use the advantages of whatever platform you pick to jump start you into cash flow and notice that lets you find a market and then build from there.

Trick is figuring out how much time you'll need to move out from under the shadow of the service you are hooking on to, and that I'm not sure if can be easily figured in many situations.
Yeah, but you won't see a TeX editor very soon.
Thanks; that makes it clear. Yes that aspect is indeed not addressed.
Ah yes, the good old days of sharing email accounts with your spouse/partner. When I search for my name on Google, most of the results are for recipes my now-wife posted to rec.food.cooking back in the early 90's.
I have long assumed that it will eventually be a moral quandary as to whether or not it will be ethical to turn off dwarf fortress.
It's on the web...the author deemed his story to be compelling enough for the world. If he wants to avoid unintended audiences, he should seek a more private forum. Otherwise, opinions will follow.

And, I'm not saying the author has committed any fault. I am pointing out a problem he has: his ego.
While I tend to roll my eyes a fair bit at how... set the 37 signals guys are in many of their opinions, the whole lottery idea I agree with completely. Even if FB has hit it big, what were the odds going in of them being the billion dollar winner, vs another failure that left them with unhappy VCs who they didn't make money for.

To me at least, swinging for the fences seems to be something you should do after you've already made some sexy cash on other stuff or at least made a name for yourself, if you REALLY want to go that route.
My wife did that for a while on a bunch of amazon forums bashing the Twilight series.

It was one of the driving factors for me buying her a laptop of her own that I never log into. I really need a prospective employer or friend Googling my name and seeing that I not only read Breaking Dawn, but that I felt strongly enough about it to bash it with a bunch of other ladies.

EDIT: Just to clarify: the forum was 99% women according to my wife. I am not implying that Real Men don't read Twilight, just that I'd feel like less of a man if I read it. To each his own.
which would make this the google wave killer killer?
This makes the investment understandable -- I had only seen the Outlook plugin on the xobni homepage and didn't know about One.
volcano larva are quite cute (like human and dog larva) it's only when they become adolescent volcanoes they become dangerous.
Maybe you're already planning this, but you should consider putting some explanatory 'what-is-this-site' text somewhere prominent. Much of your potential audience has never seen HN, Digg, or Reddit.
Vimium brings me one step closer to never having to use a mouse. Hints mode and vim-style navigation keys are my favorite features. ? (shift-/) brings up a handy shortcut overlay. A must-have if you live in vim.
And they're one of the most visited sites on the planet. They can't hide behind the "We choose growth over revenue" anymore since they're already so huge.

If they can't capitalize big-time on the users they have now they have a serious problem.