skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zed, you do not want to go anywhere near an education graduate school. All these opportunities are yours except D.Ed. — Attempt no landings there.

If you think you've been a poor fit at some companies, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Education departments attract some of the very worst students, people pathologically stricken with know-nothingness. The graduate schools then take the more craven among them, the ones that realize that their school-system contracts give them huge automatic raises for getting higher degrees, often paid for too. They often come out as worse teachers after having had the recently recycled fad pedagogies pumped through them, which they then regurgitate in a game of telephone onto their students.

If you want to work on some stellar CS education stuff, try to talk your way into Kay's VPRI. Stay the hell away from Ed schools, they'd make your blood boil.
Wargames as teaching tools
So that's why you never got banned from news.yc — you had immunity :)
Step 2: put your junk in that box...
I think the analysis is great but not factual. To assume that they're not good coder, or even coders is just based on nothing. Do you know that for a fact?
The Anandtech article only gives the straight-up dB (iPhone 4 loses up to 24.6 dB, Nexus One loses up to 17.7). The percentages I thought came from it as well but I can't find them now; I'm currently hunting for the article I'd seen them in.

At any rate, the question stands and I'll just rephrase it in terms of just the dB numbers: is 17.7 dB OK but 24.6 dB not? If so, on what basis? If not, where's the outrage over the Nexus One?

And that's without getting into questions like "is it OK to lose a bit more signal if the ability to keep functioning on reduced signal has improved enough?"
Exactly, philosophy and math provide proofs based on axioms - science is all empiricism and induction; it provides predictions based on our current context.
Which division do you work in? Would you care to talk a little more on methodologies, decision making, release schedules, etc are handled in your department?
Many people want one product that works really well instead of 1000 that are all flawed in different ways. Capitalism isn't helping us much there.
indeed. My only regret is not being able to downvote him
Really? A Ph.D. in education?

I'm not even sure what that would produce. Maybe a post-post-modern _why.
You're confusing different levels of analysis. The comment you're replying to was speaking on a very broad scale: The result is suspicious. Because of that suspicion, we might then look more closely and identify all the issues you're talking about, but we need that first spark of skepticism to get there.
I wish I could exchange Zed-rants for Yegge-rants.
The key is that 2^(10^10) is 1 mod 5^10, and 2^n is always 0 mod 2^10 (for the relevant values of n).
High Phenolic Olive Oil Changes Gene Expression
This sounds like the start of another Magic the Gathering type game, only with startups.
I think it very much depends on what you want them to do... However I have friends who have contracted with great success VA-type work to people who live locally (San Francisco in this instance but it could be anywhere you happen to live/work).

They're still 'virtual' in that they work from home - but the benefit is they are on the same timezone, understand local requests ("book me a table at that fish restaurant on the embarcadero") and can easily deal with the logistics of processing receipts/paperwork etc (better delivered locally than sent abroad or have to be scanned in).

I think the VA's tend to be stay-at-home mom types, etc and are found through contact network.

It's probably more expensive than paying someone in Vietnam $2/hr but allows them to be 'customer facing' if needs be.
And here I was wondering where he had all this time to be doing Mongrel2, play guitar, work at dropbox, blog about shedding bikes, etc.
1st 6 words: could be considered witty. Words 7 to 19: complete turnaround! Lesson: know when to stop.
- Define and prioritize your values. Most people never do this, at any age, and that's too bad, it helps you make and live with hard decisions.

- Read something, write something, and build something, every day.

- It all comes down to an old Arab proverb: Take what you want and pay for it.
Pretty boring team pic ... until you hover on each.
Start watching Alan Kay talks. He explains.
Netflix: Netflix Movie Viewer
My number one tip for making a great product
why ask for it then - esp if your co-founder doesn't have one yet you trust his skills enough to found a company together?

asks someone who barely has the UK equivalent of a high school graduation (because he was programming for his first startup at 16), no degree, and had a very successful engineering-orientated career so far
Announcing a release day before you build
If the people named in the complaint are executives of Hashrocket, then it has something to do with Hashrocket, however indirectly.

This seems pretty pedantic. If a VP at Google gets arrested for domestic violence, that hardly means that it "has something to do with Google".
True, but my question is in the general sense, not specific to my own site really.
List of Linux Filesystems & Clustered Filesystems
Ask HN: Russian Spies?
So there has been a lot of talk about these Russian Spies, but i am having a hard time understanding what information these individuals were gathering.
Any thoughts.
you can try to squint at the world so you only see evidence supporting your beliefs. Or you can continually refine your beliefs as you look at the world with eyes wide open.

Both are a lot of work, but only one is a joy. One makes you stand on your own two feet, while the other makes you want to stand on the feet of others.
Fantastic reference. I suggest you submit it as its own link.
BS. I was hired as a web-dev to do front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript at the ripe age of 18... and that was to work on one of the most prestigious websites on the Internet, the BBC News Website.

I already had been doing front-end stuff for several years. I wasn't any less able to perform the job than the CS graduate peers who started in the same role the same time as me.

11 years later, I've not done badly for someone with no formal CS training.
The New Hacker Hobby That Will Change the World
One page read: http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/02/facebook-microsoft-apple-te...
Black Sarees – A Complete Fashion Statement
The all black designer Saree generally has embellishment with black sequins, or black bugle beads, the black beads, and sometimes black kundan with black stones. These designs are mostly done along the border. Small motifs or ornate patterns are designed throughout the body of the Saree.
I'm a Devo fan so as I was reading your last sentence there my brain was auto-completing it as "a post-post-modern man.... 80's-keyboard-riff"
"My startups, let me show you them!"
My "Fury of Naggum" beats your "Song of Stallman"!

(I can't for the heck of it remember who trolled comp.lang.c in the mid-nineties. Same guy, always went on about assembly etc.)
Perhaps I'm weird (I've been accused of that before :-D), but I organize bookmarks into folders on the bookmarks toolbar (the folder is some topic which groups the links together for me according to some connection between them that is logical to me). For most bookmarks, two clicks and I'm in (even for those URLs I only use once every month or two). Even with the location bar searching on every keystroke, I still think I'd lose efficiency if the bookmarks bar went away. Plus the location-bar-based search doesn't help me if I know what general 'topic' a link fits into, but I can't remember anything about the site name or URL. Location bar auto-searching is nice, but I don't think it solves every bookmark-searching scenario.
s/AVC/MVC/
Seeing as how Levy went from writing the excellent Hackers in the 80s to writing a book about how awesome iPods are in the 00s I was wondering if he'd suffered severe head trauma of some kind. Glad to hear he seems to have things figured out.
could we stop with the "you don't need no damn degree to do them codin' jobs" comments? if you truly feel that way, then on your own company's hiring webpage, you don't have to put that as a requirement.

Yes, I don't.

but obviously the dropbox folks decided that it was a reasonable requirement, for one reason or another. we can debate the merits of that decision all day and night, but to ad hominem one of its co-founders doesn't seem constructive

The issue is a legitimate + important discussion point IMHO.

What you are saying with your entire comment is "mind your own business - you do what you want on your job req and let others do what they want theirs". But this is actually a community issue - it is self-reinforcing to see people put endless lofty requirements on job reqs and it needs to get called out. As an industry we are missing out on massive talent entering the sector because our job reqs look out of their league.
I suppose I am being too hard on Weblocks because it is the most "successful" of the CL frameworks. If it wasn't Weblocks, it was going to be something like UCW, which is truly horrible.

It's interesting that you think that the Weblocks ideas will continue to be relevant. I'm convinced that HTML5 canvas will make UI issues history, just as I'm convinced that AJAX makes using continuations for managing web app state a really bad idea.

The real point here is that Lisp makes it possible to combine the tools you want to build web applications in ways that are appropriate. Almost all frameworks in other languages are there because that is something that is really hard to do with deficient tools otherwise. Almost all Lisp web frameworks are there because somehow some Lisp programmers became convinced that you need one to write a web application. We're just borrowing stupid ideas from stupid collections of hacks written to deal with stupid tools. "Framework" should be a dirty word.

I don't think most people care about RoR. It's to PHP what PHP was to Perl. Next someone is going to choose another stupid personal language to build a framework with really nifty canvas widgets that interfaces to a no-SQL database and that will go big (hmm, time for me to abandon my principles and become a famous "framework" author?). The only real winner in all of this is O'Reilly, who get to publish 50 different books about all the stupid tools involved.
What Does Microsoft Know About You?
Check my profile for email.
This is practically what I do for a living.
Classic case of common sense, at least when it comes to political questions. You can be sure that any politically contentious issue will generate scientific studies on both sides, and the mere existence of those studies means nothing unless you are able to assess the validity of the research. Therefore, if you're an ordinary person who isn't capable of critically assessing the research, science doesn't help you resolve such questions. Disbelieving contradictory research is not the cognitive mistake; trusting research that supports a political belief is the mistake.

The effect on general belief in science is clearly evidence of bias, but the bias of the writer also shows, in his one-sided condemnation of the folks whose faith in science was decreased by the exercise. After all, they just had a reminder of how easily (from their point of view) science can be hijacked for political (or economic) purposes. They also may have a more pragmatic approach to the question than geeks like us; when we are asked if science could be usefully employed to answer a question, we imagine designing and executing a valid scientific study. A normal person is more likely to imagine reading about a study in the newspaper or hearing it on television, in which case it's much more reasonable to think, "Science will never answer this question for me," because they have no authority they trust to tell them which studies are valid and which are distorted by commercial or political interests. The validity of a study is irrelevant unless you can assess it yourself or trust an authority to assess it for you.
Want to do a startup? I'm available
>if Area 51 had their druthers, they would have fragmented the community into five niches

I agree. I would see these new stackexchange clones every other day at /r/machinelearning. It would have hurt the ML community if all of the sites started competing for eyeballs.

Anyway thanks a lot for the initiative. I wish you all the best.
If there are any (other) veterans on this board, they'll probably tell you the same thing I'm about to: think OPSEC ;)
Good Freely Available Textbooks on Machine Learning
> Either that, or getting a Ph.D. in Education.

Is this a Heinlein reference?
I love inDinero... but if I didn't know I have some decent check on their way I would shoot myself looking at the dashboard :)
Yes! They are very much played out. As far as the "fashion" of web design, gloss and web 2.0 is fading.

Alternatively, there's always people in design who make old things work and make them new. It's technically possible to work that type of badge into a site and make it look nice! Yes, really... But I wouldn't recommend it.

As for what will replace them, that's more complicated. There's many different design styles in use each day and the world is always changing. I think the topic is most irrelevant. I don't recommend using them, but no need to go figuring out the best fit for a replacement.
The original commenter has pointed out all of the technical issues I see with your post, minus the tone. I felt you were overly harsh. I can understand being frustrated with the situation, but, come on... in 3 months it will either die away or they will have succeeded (for some amount of success) and we can easily move on with our lives.
Oh I know Education departments are mostly crap. Thanks to Constructivism and the influence of stupid communist dogma from Paulo Freire.
www.solvate.com. Like odesk/elance, but curated so as not to suck. I'm not affiliated with them but I'm a very happy (so far) customer, since April '10 on a variety of projects. Good luck.
The point I was trying to make: someone out there was the first to use Ruby for a web app, and went out of her way to write a library to do something that web app needed to do. This functionality was already present in PHP and Perl, so there was no reason for them to build those libraries, right?

Someone has to get the basics in place. Trying to do a web 3.0 startup that may or may not succeed, using clojure, will have absolutely no impact on getting people to use clojure for web development.

"There are 10x as many potential library writers for Ruby/Python etc because it's 10x easier to get up to speed in those languages."

Why? Clojure is smaller, simpler and more consistent than either Python or Ruby.
Not without an existing community to build off of you won't. You'll fail miserably. The people in the Area51 proposals are generally meeting there for the first time — they didn't know each other already.

MetaOptimize is building on top of an existing well-targeted community like MathOverflow did. Really, just like you did originally with your and Jeff's blog communities. AskMetafilter is successful because it was an outlet for an existing community — it wasn't attempt to start a new one.

Area51 is scavenging small clumps of people that happen to overlap with your existing main sites. That your sites are so QA-focused makes it very difficult for an actual community to grow within it — there's no outlet for chat and friend-making, for fucks sake even your moderation site is the same QA format! At least you've integrated it a bit more so that Meta isn't a completely separate community with it's own account system…
Speaking from my own experience, the form was a little disorienting because the contrast on the grey/white was low enough that I didn't notice the text right off. I'm just guessing that the parent experienced a similar moment of confusion.
so by veteran, you mean ex-military or just people that have been around for a while?
I appreciate your suggestion toward the direction of OPSEC, but would that imply that its not generally clear what their intent was or that i am a moron for not getting the subtle here is your answer "wink"?
Yeah! Defective by design - but still folks would use it. Amazing...How many companies can get away with this. Just ONE if you ask me
That's kind of missing the point. The content isn't 'free to everybody' because there is always the spectre of getting caught and sued hanging over people's heads.

If the authors/content owners themselves said, "Here's this place where you can get all my content for free, legally, but still buy my albums from the store if you want to support me," then we could have a debate about the results of that.
he only discusses controversial ideas

Seriously? Zed Shaw loves to rant about people. Ranting about people brought him into this tiny, niche internet spotlight in the first place. And have you even looked at http://oppugn.us/? Apparently not.
r-statistics.com needs to turn their text to black.

There is zero contrast with light grey text on white!
I should have qualified that by saying it's true to roughly the same degree as the claim that a tree's mass comes from the air. I.e. if you wave your hands and ignore a lot of potentially-important second-order effects, it more or less holds water :).
Congratulations on your newfound independence! I would highly suggest watching the Founder Dating events—they definitely seem like something you'd be interested in.
Wufoo does.

I'd like to say I do too.
Googling around, you can toggle this feature on a 3G (or earlier) by jailbreaking the device and grabbing a third party utility called SBSettings.
I prefer this version, since it lists each item in the pictures, as well as breaking down the expenditures by category:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5005952

Some interesting bits:

The German family spends more on vitamins than any other category. The family from Chad gets $24.37 worth of free rations from relief organizations. Almost half of the Americans' expenditures are on Fast Food and Beverages.
I need a volume control (especially when using multiple applications with audio).
They not only send personal e-mails, but go far and beyond. I had coffee with one of the co-founders for no reason other than for them to get to know their clientèle
Agree. Just starting to learn pre-programming - unlearning bad habits from school where every year we wrote the same bunch of programs, once in BASIC, Pascal, C etc. The only thing I had liked then was Logo. :)
I should hope that anyone who feels they are extremely qualified would apply regardless of what's in the requirements section!

That kind of initiative is a positive trait.
The Toshiba Portege R700/R705 is a nice one - cool and light (3.2 lbs). I was considering it but wasn't satisfied with the price to performance/build quality in the end. Not too expensive though.
The DSL snippet is every bit as verbose as the PHP code sample, yet somebody had to write the DSL in the first place. Not sure mission was accomplished. I think a better solution is offered by Mustache logic-less templates.
Instead of building a Twitter-centric device, why not put in a Web browser? It will open a whole range of possibilities, including Twitter streams.
We are definitely going to improve on the text color contrast

EDIT: We've improved the text color contrast! Apologies to everyone who had to tilt their monitors or squint. The page should be much clearer now.
Dan Lyons has been covering tech for a long time, so he'd hopefully get some things right. And this isn't the first time he's been spot on--his blogs on Schmidt's involvement on the Apple board are amazing and hilarious.

But every time he's right these days, I think it's karma balancing out how wrong he was on SCO-Linux.
It is, only if you make up an example quite unlike the one at hand. If an exec of a firm gets charged with fraud, it's not a piece of information you'd ignore when doing business with that firm, even if the fraud charges are regarding another venture. Suppose you're negotiating a deal with some company and in the process they tell you 'Oh, a couple of our key executives were just charged with fraud. But, really, this has nothing to do with us'. Your business partner mumbles 'Hmm, I'm not so sure about this...'. Do you reply 'Oh, quit being pedantic!'? Probably not.
Listening to Richard Stallman live on 2nd September. My life is complete.
You don't understand — those are the good parts

The rest is far, far worse.

Say what you like about the tenets of Constructivism, Zed, at least it's an ethos. I'm surprised that you'd have beef with it — you don't even like Papert's Constructionism?

As easily misinterpreted and misapplied as liberation pedagogy can be, at least it gives the non-subject-matter-experts something to apply themselves at, something they could actually help children with even if they're as dumb as a bag of rocks. It's definitely not a good fit for you, but it's far from worthless.
Verbose how?
Thue may chu,Thue Server,Dedicated server,Dedicated server
Do you intend to analyze the users taste/preferences?

This is just a suggestion and in all probability you guys must have thought about this. So I'm sorry if I am wasting your time.

Why don't you make a desktop application like last.fm that analyzes the music lying on a user's hard-drive using local resources and then uploads the info to you? I think that it may be possible for you to take a speech recognition API and modify it to recognize patterns in songs instead. Something like Pandora's music genome but automated, and then as User data builds up you can use it to predict what the user would like on your end.

Thus, this way you save server load by using the user's PC for some of that heavy lifting (i.e. analyzing their library) and analyzing the music on your server using your scheme would be a one off effort. You could make something like custom info files denoting details about a song that can be picked up when you run the app. It would be so cool to have a service like this.

P.S. - Thanks to you guys I am now in love with Yael Naim.
Women's MBT Kisumu Sandal Chocolate - MBT Shoes Sale at MBTShoesSale100
Yeah, I dunno if this area is pretty going to be successful for the SO guys, it makes a lot more sense for the community to run their own not for profit system.

One of the problems with the area51 process is that most of the people participating are from the current SO sites, meaning that it is always going to be very biased towards tech based setups without looking at what could also be mainstream successful.
ex-military.

And by 'think OPSEC' I mean if someone had legitimate knowledge of what these people were "spying" on and why, it probably would be a very unwise idea to disclose that information on a public message board. In other words, both.
IANAL, but you can check Exibit A at the end of the document embedded in this blog post: http://avramc.posterous.com/united-directories-federal-court...

Facts:

- They clearly state that it's not a bill/invoice.

- The fine print explains that there is no obligation to subscribe.

- The fine print explains that they are not affiliated with the actual Yellow Pages.

- The fine print font is larger than your typical bank statement fine print.

- The typical Yellow Pages logo is prominently featured in the solicitation. This is probably not illegal, but can be seen as potentially misleading.

- The first line of the return card is addressed to YELLOW PAGES (as opposed to Yellow Pages United). Probably not illegal, but again, potentially misleading.

Opinion:

I think they (United Directories, not Hashrocket) adopted an unpleasant business model that I wouldn't want to be associated with. But considering Exibit A, it appears that as far as the solicitation goes, they may be operating within the borders of legality. It will be interesting to see what the court will decide.