skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Considered more as a thought-experiment (where it is an interesting question, regardless of author's opinions), this could really use a decision tree.
Take your money and move to the Valley. Network, join meetups, and tap into the community. Try to get into a startup that is founded by someone who has been successful in startups before. You will have to convince the founder you will do anything asked and then bust your ass. Don't expect a lot of money from a startup especially if you don't have the skills they need. If you are hungry and stay focused you will gain experience, knowledge, and the connections needed to do something on your own one day. My advice for you on going technical is only go this route if you truly enjoy technology, coding, etc. because you will be spending a lot of time on it. You can become a startup founder without technical skills but if your product\service is web based then find a technical partner.
The article is a bit meaningless since there are no benchmarks for these so called "best practices"

Are you going to spend hours optimizing your stylesheets to only save 50ms?

Does anyone have a link to a article with true benchmark numbers?
It's easy in principle if you focus on the supply side of the equation instead of just the demand side. Instead of decreasing the number of people looking for affordable housing, increase the supply of it.

In reality, so many people have a stake in the current level of housing prices that doing this will probably be impossible in practice, even if you have some stern court decisions backing such a push.
if (false) {
self.the_one_language_I_should_learn = "the best one";
} else {
delete(self.the_one_language_I_should_learn);
while (self.could_improve) {
self.programming_skills_and_insights_struggled_with++
}
}
Are these dares or MPAA advertisements?
Can you monetize via apps? Seems like an obvious way to go.
I think Bray is absolutely right to suggest that it's churlish to blame one corporation for the inevitable consequences of our energy consumption. We all like to turn a blind eye to how energy is produced, but ultimately it is a dirty business, whether that dirt is in the form of spilled oil, nuclear waste or conflict over rare earth metals. I certainly hadn't heard of a blowout protector a few weeks ago and I don't imagine too many of you had either. Much like sausage and laws, I think we just don't like to think about how our energy is made.

California's ongoing electricity crisis is the obvious example - given the choice, we tend to point-blank oppose the production of energy in spite of our own consumption. The economist Robin Hanson likes to talk of the modern age as being a sort of Dreamtime, a collective delusion more real than reality itself. I think our attitudes to energy are the most obvious element of this delusion. Most people reading this will live long enough to see us use the last of our gas, coal and oil, but we seem blissfully unaware of how dependent we are on these dwindling resources. The fact that oil prices have fallen substantially since the start of the Deepwater spill suggests to me that we have a completely myopic perspective on the value of our energy reseres.

Of course we should push to produce energy in safer and cleaner ways, but I think we all must come to terms with the fact that our energy consumption has inevitable negative consequences. If nothing else, we are consuming it at a completely unsustainable rate and none of us really have a workable plan for the future - if you think you know what the answer to our energy future is, I strongly recommend looking over Dr MacKay's book Energy Policy Without the Hot Air, which sets out in plain numbers just what a difficult problem we face. http://www.withouthotair.com/
These launch a special intent type android.provider.Telephony.SECRET_CODE. You can define your own in your apps by registering the appropriate intent filter.

It's just a way to allow an action access without explicitly putting an icon in the launcher.

This website has a little more information on it: http://android.amberfog.com/?p=422 I imagine there are a lot more that could be discovered by scanning through the various manifest.xmls for the system apps.
More on piracy from the same author:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389499
The quest for frisson
WHO seeks clampdown on tobacco ads targeting women
Personally, I think the best thing he could do would be to opensource the project and finally allow it to be ported to Linux. If he's worried about revenue or whatever, add a donate button. I'd pay _more_ for a FLOSS version than I would for a proprietary one.

Right now, I love TextMate. It's the best text editor out of the box, but the fact of the matter is: OSX is not my only development machine and the hassle of learning Vim keybinds is less painful than only using OSX for development.
Hmm, one thing Apple could do is to seed a company that does this, but only for Intel x86 chips. This would be a great way to attack the margins of their competitors while ensuring their own iPad is immune.
Research Paper Database with good quality Will Sure to Make Your Work Easier
Research paper database is a very useful thing. This is especially true for students who are not proficient with submitting high quality work. The database will provide them formatting help, structuring help etc. Understanding the usefulness of these databases will help students when it comes to their research paper writing.
This is Premature Optimization: CSS Edition.

He buries the lede further down: "That Mozilla article I linked to at the top? Literally 10 years old. Fact: computers were way slower 10 years ago. I have a feeling this stuff was more important back then." and "I think the lesson here is not to sacrifice semantics or maintainability for efficient CSS."
I think what this comment means is that the title should have (2001) and [PDF] in it to provide useful information to the readers.
If 1.5kg and 2 hours battery life is acceptable, just buy a tc1100. It's industrial design of a different philosophy, but on a part with Apple. The form factor is from 2001, and is still competitive. Oh, and you'd have to use a stylus.
One of the two of you should link to an actual study before I'll believe claims like that.
I think you can improve by design & copywriting. There's too much text on the homepage for such a simple tool. Can you explain it in 1 sentence? Spend a few hours mangling a sentence together. That's one.

Second, focus on talking to the few users you have, see what they like/don't like. Even while keeping it minimal, I am reasonably sure you can still improve the experience a lot. Don't add features, but polish polish polish. Is the entry field perfect. Can it be faster? Etc..

Once you do that, and once you start to hear feedback that your users really truly love it, then you can start worrying about promoting it :)

In other words: it's not because you want to keep it minimal that you're done.
Yup, and all those Memorial Day road trips are only going to fund more BP oil wells.

The disconnect people have on this issue with their own actions is amazing.
Featured Google Chrome Extensions for Web Developers
Personally, grammatical mistakes like this have always bothered me, but most people don't even realize it's wrong. So it's odd to think that this would have an effect on the populace at large.

Perhaps this site caters to an overly literate part of the diabetes-suffering population? I guess those who are technically inclined tend to be more educated.
That breaks down when you use your private key [aka the "key"] to encrypt/sign something when you send it out. It proves it came from you because your public key [aka the "lock"] can decrypt it.
Perhaps the indication is that your app isn't as generally appealing as you thought?

Have you received any feedback on "missing" features? Done any measurement of what aspects your existing userbase does use?
I think the article somewhat belies some of the assumptions underpinning your comment. It's pretty clear that Tolkien was not being terribly _original_ in creating his universe; his style was quite directly a pastiche of historical styles nearly the whole way through, and all the things he included there are pretty direct adaptations of the Northern cultures and folktales he liked so much. Beowulf and the Anglo Saxons, Germanic folklore and the Germanic tribes, et cetera.

Not that this is really a knock against Tolkien. But I think it's important to deal with the notion that instead of creating something new, the man mostly was very, very adept and very _dilligent_ at synthesizing the epic poetry and folklore of the various northern traditions into a huge and accessible tapestry.

Which is good, and is very appealing to the sort of kid who spent much of his childhood eagerly reading RPG sourcebooks and monster manuals (like me). But I think it's very short-sighted to claim that all fantasy is a Tolkien rip-off. <i>Tolkien</i> is a Tolkien rip-off.
I hope people don't start holding off on their submissions for the "optimal" time. I'll have to find a different way to procrastinate in the mornings.
This author is to be commended for such a fine example of how to use an apparently objective procedure to justify a pre-conceived notion. Developers: next time you make a presentation to senior management, study this article carefully for tips on how to get your way!
The author of this critique, more than once, refers to specific Tolkien passages and mentions which specific historical styles or texts these are pastiche of. Why do you think he doesn't understand Tolkien's field of study?
Diet and the evolution of the brain
Done! Ask HN questions now work. You can also get to the "Ask HN" and "New" questions by clicking the link in the header. I'll work on the contrast problem. I noticed it too, I'm just a horrible designer.
Did your doctor say you have 6-9 months to live?
'DIY U' and the future of public education
Homebrew and “trusted computing” / antipiracy
A new direction for homebrew console hackers?
Not sure if this counts, but: http://www.welfare.ie/EN/Publications/cta/Pages/chapter6.asp...

"Two other factors, family in receipt of state benefit and IQ categorisation, also have significant predictive powers, but are somewhat less important than a deviant classification. Respondents with below average IQ are less likely than those with above average IQ to pursue third level education.
Those groups in receipt of state benefit are more likely to leave the educational system without completing second level.
However, those in receipt of state benefit with above average IQ present a similar pattern of educational attainment as those with a below average IQ but with families not in receipt of state benefit.
This finding indicates that socio-economic advantage can benefit individuals educationally. A similar pattern is evident for both the deviant and non-deviant groups but the deviant group is less likely to complete second level and go on to third level education."
I've had my iPad for only two days and I've only used it as a 'window on the web' : I have apps like ft installed but Almost never use them. After getting the iPad I realized that a 100 dollar slate with ONLY a browser would be enough for me.
No matter what your audience size, you ought to write as if your readership consisted of paid subscribers whose subscriptions were perpetually about to expire.

Presumably that advice applies here on HN as well.
Agreed, get it on the Android and charge out of the gate. Maybe have the web version be free and entice people to buy it on Droid or iPhone???

It would be like using the web to get the eye-balls, and the devices to make the money.
High frequency traders do not have MBAs.
Agreed! And brush up on your English writing skills.
It's not that great. You just got lucky with Lifehacker. The world doesn't need another web todo app. You should move on to something else.
I visit the page and have no desire to use it. It is very unappealing.
I would choose what I want to do first (web, enterprise systems, mobile apps, etc) and then learn a language that is actually useful for that.. And of course the best language changes every 5 years, at least for web. The biggest part is learning the libraries and frameworks anyway, not just the language.
He shows that apple is in a position to make safari the next ie. I'm not really seeing any evidence here that apple is, in fact, making safari the next ie. In fact, the first several paragraphs of are all full of evidence that apple is embracing the web, but those are all dismissed without a solid reason I could detect.
Why is Mars' Moon Phobos Hollow?
The Zen of Trading
If you are using Django, http://bitbucket.org/tabo/django-treebeard/overview, is a great app to use. It implements several different tree storage methods.
I would argue Java is not necessarily verbose, J2EE is usually, but Java not necessarily. And it can be quite productive using the write libraries so I wouldn't rule out #1 also.
Monthly uniques versus domain name length:

http://images.rdujour.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/uniques...
Let's say the experts do a 6 month review, starting today. That takes us to 11/30/10.

2011 is totally unreasonable?
What Smalltalk haven't either is coherence. See Squeak vs Pharo...
Really? I don't think so at all. Libertarians are generally proponents of a whole swatch of changes that would knock large corporations in the US down a few pegs. That's in addition to greatly limiting the power corps have to do business by legislation.
Don't bother with a landing page. I'm guessing that most visitors bounce right off it. Put the functionality on the home page, with a small amount of explanatory text.

What do you need to do?

<< I need to _____ which will take me _____ <b>Remember</b> >>

When you have some time, tell us how much, and we'll give you something to do:

<< I have ___ available right now. <b>Give me something to do</b> >>

((grayed out until you've entered something above))

Also I'd recommend bolding the important text as indicated above-- users scanning the page will be able to at a glance exactly what the app offers. The arrows as buttons feel too much like hierarchical navigation (esp on the top navbar) and it isn't clear that I should be clicking them).
We must be operating under different definitions, then, because every libertarian I've ever met expresses their policy goals specifically as being against government action to prevent harmful externalities. "The market will work it out, and it's not government's job to make my decisions for me". From motorcycle helmet laws on upwards (we all pay for head injuries via insurance). It goes on up to a default position of being against regulation on almost everything -- against sarbox on principle, not just the implementation, against regulations regarding offshore drilling most likely until 4 weeks ago and now they're re-evaluating. If your default philosophy is to approach every issue with "less government" as priority #1, you're going to be against government taking action most of the time.
No could mean I have lack of motivation for their success, or presence of motivation for their failure. This is where I like the geeky preference voting instead of yes/no, because it includes motivational nuance. The scale is:

+1 strong yes
+0 ambivalent, prefer yes
0 ambivalent
-0 ambivalent, prefer no
-1 strong no

in this case I would put +0 as I don't want them to fail and leave me unemployed, but I can't put +1 because more success means more customers and we can't scale customers without more effort, so more success means more work and stress for the same pay, which is worse for me.

My ideal is enough customers to keep us afloat, minimum viable effort, the company's ideal is max customers everyone at full effort, max profit. That's a conflict of interest right there.
Web app ideas
A proposal to tighten patent utility requirements
It is important to distinguish between inspiration and ripoff.

D & D mythology is a direct ripoff of Tolkien. It was not the inspiration for it, it was a direct ripoff. Tolkien = humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls, dragons, etc. based in a medieval timeframe with magic. D & D = humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls, dragons, etc. based in a medieval timeframe with magic.

And a lot of modern fantasy games are direct rip-offs of d & d or tolkien (practically the same thing).

Northern European folklore was the inspiration for Tolkien. A lot of different sources of inspiration. There was no one story where humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls, dragons, etc. were all protagonists based in a medieval timeframe with magic.

It's very, very different. You seem to have a penchant for words, I'm surprised you don't see it.
Unfortunately, this piece is affected by typical science journalism that hypes up everything a titch. Fundamentally, this treatment is a textbook case of applied RNA interference (RNAi). While it is really awesome to see RNAi used in a medical context (these nano-payloads of RNA are really interesting), all the caveats of RNAi apply.

If the virus has a highly variable DNA sequence, different RNAi sequences will need to be designed, validated, and grown up in lab for each viral strain. Viral strains will need to be identified upon infection so the right RNAi sequences are used, which can increase time until treatment. We won't be seeing this technique used on a highly variable virus like HIV or the common cold anytime soon, because these viruses mutate incredibly quickly within the host.
S-Expression based markup language
The discussion around criteria might be useful. Yet another language thread probably is not.

The interesting things that I noted about criteria is that there wasn't a direct mention of installed userbase: languages with a million users have a tendency to have tremendous resources available while ones with small userbases have a tendency to have support limited to a few high priests.

Also I noted that many of these questions are dealt with in a yes/no fashion when in fact it's a relative thing. So, for instance, F# may run on mono which gives it cross-platform support, but performance might not be as good, which was enough to eliminate it here. I would have been happier if F# was given partial credit here. I'm sure that observation is true of some of the other points the author makes. It would have been better to use a weighted matrix.
“Though it has a lot going for it, the Lisp syntax will still be an issue for most people (#8, #10).”

It is irritating to me that it is so. Most modern lisps have less matched decoration and only slightly (1-2 levels more) nesting that algol-derivative languages.

As far as I can tell, the sole real point in the “lisp syntax sucks” camp is that prefix arithmetic is unfamiliar. Which may be true (although it is more regular), but how often do people really sit around writing a lot of arithmetic code? For the vast majority of dock-this-with-that programmers, lots of +-*/ arithmetic is rare.
I definitely don't think the app is generally appealing. I don't expect that it could replace a normal "todo" system for all people. It's nichey for sure. But there's definitely a subset of people that this system resonates with. The hard part is finding more of those people. I guess it's true of any niche. There may be thousands of coins laying in the sand, but how can I possibly scale finding them all? People (personalities) that may benefit from the tool don't know to look for it, and it's not like something you would share with all your friends (e.g. viral). Thus, I don't see how to grow it.

Feature wise, we're using Get Satsifaction, and have had a decent amount of feedback. Most common features are things like making apps (mobile/desktop), APIs or integration (e.g. with RTM) -- these things make sense. Then there is another class of feedback which is like "add priorities" "let me see my tasks" "add recurring tasks" etc. These don't make any sense to me because there are already apps that perfectly fulfill those needs if people have them.

Measurement wise, I'm only really tracking "active" users (and tasks entered/completed etc). There's just so little to do, that I don't know if there is any action to take based on it. Anyway, the bigger problem is traffic. Only ~30% or so of my traffic are new visitors. It's really just beginning to boil down to a group of dedicated users and no traffic driving for new visitors.
Upvoted.

I hate being a grammar nazi -- but I find I can't help myself. Must have something to do with working in computer code a lot.
DARPA's Little Mechanic Dog can navigate nearly any terrain
It's not what you know, it's who you know. Invest in your network and everything else will fall into place.
I don't see how you can simplify key exchange to make it very easy for the average user.

Google/Microsoft/Yahoo posts a blog post containing the following: "PGP keys for all addresses can be found at https://keys.example.com/k/foo%27example.com . This is recorded in a TXT record in our DNS in the following easy to understand format.

We invite other mail providers to adopt this standard. We will periodically check your DNS records prior to sending mail and, if set up properly, transparently encrypt all mail sent to you."

Essentially, solve key exchange like HTTPS solves key exchange: the user never has to worry about it.
Seriously...the bottleneck is NOT the CSS...
The common cold is caused by a variety of viruses and strains that identifying all the possible DNA sequences to target would overwhelm researchers for years. This treatment is incredibly targeted, which requires the exact target DNA sequence of the pathogen to be known, siRNA snippits designed and tested against that sequence, and then for the siRNA to be put into a drug.

Ebola was probably chosen because it is a rather stable virus and has only relatively few serotypes.
Hey, I can see my house from here!
Adam Savage on problem solving
Motivating Newcomer Contribution in Social Network Sites
But this is clearly a faulty analogy. If I download a file then the original owner still has the file. Stealing is where someone literally takes something away from someone else.

Sure we can argue as much as we like about lost sales and that's where this argument should live but to say that it IS stealing is surely fibbery.
Ask HN: Is the Android Developer Console not updating for any of you?
It's been 4+ days for me since my Android Developer Console has updated download or sales counts.

Sales are coming through and people are able to download my apps, but the "counts" don't seem to be updating anywhere.

I haven't seen a response from Google. Maybe this will get their attention, the forum thread below doesn't seem to be getting any internal feedback as of yet either.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?tid=62421154b5203024&hl=en
Limiting unscrupulous funding seems like the better option. There's no reason for DARPA and NIST to be what funds all the coolest tech, it could be some other govt sector.
Ask HN: Is the source code for HN freely available?
If someone is interested in starting a HN clone but for different content/subject matter can the HN source be d/l'd? if so, where? thanks
Thank you for making that content freely available. Nothing there floats my boat but thank you nonetheless.
Repost. Also, retarded.

If you only had to have one power tool

If you only had to have one user

If you only had to read a single book

Perhaps the OP should look for a new line of work; perhaps one doesn't require so much... learning...
I don't have it off hand, but search http://searchyc.com/
Gödel in Hong Kong
I don't know Lisp, that being said, for most of the languages on this list I can look at a program written in them and basically understand them.

With Lisp I've found this rarely the case. I've also found this with many Perl programs as well, and I've actually worked professionally with Perl.

Of course YMMV