skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1Password is an awesome app, I swear by it, but the it's horribly over-designed. The interface screams "look at how clever I am" when what the user really wants is to not have to think about it at all.

/rant
A few years ago I started helping out making user generated content for a HL2 mod in my spare time.

The mod got quite popular and a couple of us got invited on an all expenses trip to the US to visit Valve's HQ and meet Gabe etc along with the mod's creator.

Helped re-write the entire thing from scratch to eliminate the myriad of bugs which had gradually crept into each subsequent update, still in my spare time.

A few months later started selling the mod on Steam.
I think so far it's sold in excess of 500k copies.

In case you haven't guessed, the game was Garry's mod.

I didn't make anywhere near as much as Garry the mods original author, who's pretty much set up his own fully funded game dev studio with the proceeds, but it was a fun summer nonetheless.
> a declining rustbelt city

Your opinions are about 30 years behind reality. Why do you think Obama picked them to host the G20?
$ git instaweb --httpd webrick
Doing this will run a quick web server, open a browser, and show you your repository.

$ cd [your git repo]

$ git instaweb --httpd webrick

Thanks to forrst for this: http://forr.st/~iGZ
I don't want to get shot but...

Have you tried looking for jobs in the science/research/R&D sectors? The work isn't necessarily always the most challenging technically (compared to some of the HN fare) but it is exciting in other ways - you get to pick up a bit of scientific knowledge and work to advance the human frontier. And while the pay is not the megabucks of stock options or Silicon Valley, there are other upsides (often job security, and sane working hours).

Canada has a lot of vibrant universities and research organisations, there are definitely jobs around.
If you just look at the functionality delivered by some of those apps, you're really only paying for the design. $20 for a graph? €19 for VLC?

EDIT: Massive props to Transmit and Kalaideoscope, that goes without saying, but there are some crazy pricing strategies at play in this list.
>Actually the name was very much accidental.

Spur of the moment isn't really accidental, any more than Mel Gibson accidentally said the N-word. There's a bit of a history and a thought process that leads to such a decision.
I mean I am about to do this (in Cleveland at CWRU instead of Pittsburg at CMU) but the principle of the thing is the same. These cities have some of the lowest costs of living to be found anywhere in the US. I would also note that Cleveland has the same problems mentioned in the article to a degree, but is managing to retain bio-tech firms. This is mainly due to the top notch institutions (hello Cleveland Clinic) which are in the city.
Ruby on Rails and the importance of being stupid
"Schwartz notes that most Web programmers don't understand how to use SQL or what the RDBMS is doing underneath."
Must everything become a platform?
I would want to know how you got my info like...

'Hi there, I was checking out Wonka Corps website for what issues their customers were having so we could address them in our product and say your issue and thought...' etc etc.
Let's see a similar list of Windows software.

I've been away from the platform for years, but WPF has been avaiable to developers for a while now so I'm curious to see what the state of Windows software is these days.
If you are planning on trying this, this may help:

http://code.google.com/p/ergoemacs/wiki/adoption
Review of Android's App Inventor
Further: SQL is not composable. If I have a fragment of SQL in my hand, there is no reasonable way to insert that into a larger expression. You can further tell this is a problem by the way any nontrivial SQL function degenerates into an enormous hellstorm of SQL that any Haskell programmer will see as full of redundancy. This is because SQL is almost immune to abstraction. (I have to specify the "Haskell programmer" bit because of the characteristics of this sort of language is that working in it directly for a long time causes you to think natively in that language and thereby miss the opportunities for abstraction that you no longer see. FWIW, Erlang also bothers me this way.) Yes, the "bad programmer" issue is in play too, but as a good programmer who has tried to write good stored procedures and has experience in numerous other languages I can not help but notice how much SQL fights me on this front.

SQL is very difficult to debug in general, which combines rather poorly with the previous characteristic. Perhaps there are nonstandard extensions in Oracle that make it easier but there's nothing I know of in the core language.

SQL has fooled people into thinking it is equivalent to the Relational Model, when in fact as kunley points out elsewhere it is merely inspired by it.

SQL dates from the 1970s and it shows. There are syntax quirks around every corner. The behavior of NULL is sensible, but it is merely one of several sensible choices and there are reasons why the SQL choice is not the one that has "won". Why is "value IN ()" a syntax error? It's perfectly reasonable. What's with the syntactic drama around subselects, which ought to be a core part of the better language that we really ought to be using? (A language in which the equivalent is probably going to be so simple we won't even believe people had a special syntax for it.) What's with the rigid specification of the order of GROUP BY and ORDER BY and everything else, when those should simply be instances of some sort of combinator that applies in order, in a sensible manner. Why is SELECT used both for data queries and aggregate queries when in fact the two operations are so different they should have entirely different keywords? Why is it so hard to mix an aggregate and non-aggregate query together when it's obvious to me exactly what I want?

Why can't my columns contain tables themselves, recursively? The fact that there are databases that can do this proves it's not impossible.

SQL needs to be replaced by a combinator-based language that backs to a richer data store that is more sensible, both from a relational model point of view and from a recursive point of view. LINQ points the way, but still is hobbled by LINQ-to-SQL being the flagship LINQ product. (And I don't think it's complete as-is.)
It's especially mad since there's no copying taking place at all.
I hope I'm wrong. Because the alternative suggests that our tech media is, by and large, as useless or even more useless than our traditional media (our, meaning the United States'. Apologies to the other 6.5BB people worldwide).

The people who are seen as the true 'luminaries' of tech journalism are simply the ones who've been able to make the most noise:

Steve Gillmor writes the most incoherent essays I've ever read.

Robert Scoble is simply excited about everything (but occasionally takes time to call me an idiot when I criticize his photography).

John Dvorak has admitted to and seems proud of being a professional troll.

MG Siegler...I don't even know where to start with him. Frankly, I would probably believe he was a cunning piece of software had I not met him at WWDC 2009.

I could go on, but you get the idea.
I got through page 11 before loosing the plot, and it seems to be a very light mathematical treatment of the subject. More of a "what if we thought about it this way?" then a "here's the proof" type paper.
I wonder if he's referring to experts-exchange with that dashes comment?
Can someone explain the dashes reek of desperation bit?
This title is editorializing a little bit: it refers to a throwaway comment in a longer, more interesting article.
June ComScore Search Numbers Out: Google Down, Bing And Yahoo Up
Are there any (more suitable) alternatives to SQL?
Couldn't the same be said about Zuckerberg?
Well, when the name is "NoSQL", I think it rather much invites being pitted against its namesake.
> Though I do still think I have a chance. My design is kind of unique

In case you did not yet see this practical, inspiring testimonial:

"How I sold 172 copies of my HTML iPad app in the first 8 days"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1466246
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html says:

"If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids.""
Quote:

Google's culture has no respect for successful social applications. YouTube's office is still far from the Google campus to avoid the toxic attitude described by a former Orkut employee, "[Google has] an environment that viewed social networking as a frivolous form of entertainment rather than a real utility, and I'm pretty sure this viewpoint was shared all the way up the chain of command to the founders."

I am not social networking's biggest fan - far from it. But the totally weird thing for me has been how Google has stepped away from even search-related functions of social utility, eg. withdrawing Public Calendar Search. The above statement would go some way towards explaining that - I'm still so baffled by the whole thing.
If you have to use dashes in your URL, then you must be desperate for that name. A business would only register shirlaws-coaching.com if shirlawscoaching.com were already taken, and the business was desperate for those words.

The OP's opinion seems to be 'if you need dashes to make it work, it ain't gonna work, move on'.
Gah... Aesthetics is not Design!. There's no such thing as "Smoking Hot Interface Design". Something can be Smoking Hot, or it can have good Interface Design, but the two properties are entirely independent.

There certainly is a correlation between the two. People who pay attention to design also tend to pay attention to appearances. And if your aesthetics are particularly bad, they may distract the user and have a negative effect on your UI.

But you can still find examples of apps that lack one or the other. I personally dislike the appearance of Spotify, but it still has a great UI. And while the iPad Notes app may look pretty cool, it lacks strong design.
The problem might be that subdomains are often assigned to people/groups affiliated with the university who can then run their own mail servers under that subdomain. This makes it trivial to give an email address ending in .edu to people who aren't students.

Since in my experience Amazon's customer support people are actually people, they might be able to make an exception for your particular domain if you contact them.
Experts Exchange's dash is important because it disambiguates a potentially (comically) mis-read URL: Experts Exchange vs Expert Sex Change
nope, works with my mail.utexas.edu email.
Andy Grove:  How America Can Create Jobs
This was fantastic. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.
I've been looking for such a beast in the wild for quite some time. I've seen a few on CPAN that'll take a regex (or some type of expression, or some limited dialect of regex) and spit out a few random strings. Even Microsoft's REX tool (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/rex/), which is the best I've seen, gives nondeterministic random results.

Having a tool that would take a PCRE (or some subset of the language), apply some constraints on repetition operators (like *->{0,2}, +->{1,2}) etc., spit out a deterministic list of values (don't care how long so long as it's reasonably finite) would be extremely powerful for software testing. Even the rather limited capabilities in REX have helped me fix some invalid assumptions I was making about valid inputs.

It's always seemed strange to me that regular expressions are described in the literature as string generators, yet I've pretty much only ever seen them used as string acceptors in practice in the form of a predicate (s in set <REGEX>?).
Avoiding and Escaping Rip Currents
If you're wondering about the reference to being "Influenced by Ries and Trout", it's a reference to the book Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, which I've recommended on HN before and will continue to do so - http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/007...

It talks about the importance of standing out in your marketplace, because consumers want simple purchasing decisions so will only, at best, compare the top few.
> I don't want some data in a relational model. Yes, I could put it there, but I would be doing so solely so that it fits in the relational model.

Almost all data fits in the relational model. And it's an excellent way of organizing data. A lot of NoSQL solutions are simply unorganized blobs. That might be fun at the beginning of projects (or for small projects) but it's a step in the wrong direction.
I see in your TODO you want to open stories in a browser. My two cents'? Shell out to Lynx. (Or, of course, whatever someone has BROWSER set to.)
While block based programing environments like this make programming look easier at first glance, I'm unconvinced they actually make things easier. For instance, I don't really see how the example screen is different than something like the following:

when Button1.Click
do
TinyDB.StoreValue(tag: SearchQueries, valueToStore: TextBox1.text)
Label1.text = TextBox1.text

Text also has the advantage that you can manipulate it in standard ways - such as copying and pasting it.

The difficulty in programing is understanding the abstraction, and thinking algorithmically. Displaying programs in a nice GUI won't make that easier.
I'm more of an audiobook person myself but I have read 2 books on the iPad with good results. The only drawback is the temptation to hit the home button and do something else which isn't a real problem on current e-ink devices since they don't really do anything else. Which is also the same reason I wouldn't buy one. I don't read enough text to justify a standalone device.
First they came for Comic Sans, but I wasn't a 41-year old administrative assistant and mother of three…
Scripting News: An end-user app development tool? Pfui
You'll get a refund for your "unused" paid portion of Prime if you sign up.
I had a friend who actually managed to burn down his parents home as a kid. They ended up moving cities, so I suppose if his original street is ever targeted in a nuclear explosion he can claim the inverted lottery!
Completely agree. And about the actual article... isn't debating the merits of the domain names publicly going to attract domain sitters to buy those names as they are discussed? Especially given the emphasis on .coms, they are cheap to own and sit on.
However one very useful thing this tablet can do that the iPad cannot is serve as a notebook (because it has a resistive and not a capacitive screen). I'm a student and I would love to have a cheap portable device for taking electronic notes in class; this tablet looks excellent for that.
I think most of these apps make for great screenshots, but I'm less sure about long term, daily usability. In my (very personal, subjective) opinion I find that apps that use standard widgets make a less exciting first impression but are usually a lot more usable. The best example I can think of offhand would be Twitteriffic vs. Tweetie.
Being able to only see 6 at a time is annoying. Great stuff though.
I'm surprised that in 2010 accusing (or even stigmatizing) other people of racism based on vague assumptions is still acceptable.

You know what? You're right. If you read my comment carefully you'll note that it was actually directed at just about everyone except you. But I exploited your exceptionally unfortunate choice of words to make a point, and that was wrong.

However I really do wish that people would stop telling themselves that they'd be helping people in the third world by depriving them of work in favour of people closer to home (people who probably have a much better safety net).
Agreed. Mahalo is good, thisweekin is great.
Look, honestly sometimes ORMs are very helpful for developers, especially when they're built directly into a framework (e.g., Django). They may be more useful if the database itself had knowledge of what you're trying to do (hint, hint). If you're arguing that they will have necessarily worse performance characteristics, you're wrong.

Source: I'm currently a SDE intern in the SQL Server team at Microsoft.
I completely agree with every word you said.

But why do you want columns that contain tables recursively?

Aggregate and non-aggregate mixture is supported in the standard and Oracle with the analytical expressions (if I got your meaning correctly).
I think the right gear has a lot to do with it, a good mouse/mousepad and keyboard can be the difference between night and day. I had a lot of stress with my old mouse because the movements were not precise, that and the right mouse button was hard to click, my hands had to compensate a great deal and this caused a lot of stress.

I think that with the right gear and proper technique, you can easily avoid RSI, just look at typists they do 300 apm easy :)
Cool idea. Interesting tool. Site looks pretty good in general, just needs refinement.

Few quick thoughts:

1. If I knew nothing about drafting, the Designer wouldn't be very attractive to me - it would scare me away. I'd prefer to just send you a picture or two (which I see is available now after looking around). Make it easier to see.

2. The picture slideshow isn't especially effective. Instead I'd have a few pictures of your proudest work.

3. Homepage: I don't know where my eyes should go to learn about what the site does. Have a single focal point.

4. The login form on the front - I don't know why I'm logging in and what it does for me.

5. The radiant blue with the gray boxes with text is a bit ugly and reminds me of 1995. The "Sale on Waterjet" text is the same.

Hope it works out for you! Can tell you've put a lot of work into it.
An astute article.

"Understanding those concepts is not easy. It takes lots of practice, and lots of patience, and lots of learning."

I think that's an important precis of the article. Google's engineers are used to designing and doing what's "right". They inherited the concept of search and have built a sophisticated algorithm around that established notion same with mail and their more successful products.

Social on the other hand is a fuzzy science, it's hard to know what works and why ahead of time. It's much easier to do it in hindsight, but by then it's too late.
Yea you're right. Relational data is awesome because it enforces consistency which makes everything you build on top of it so much easier.
One of the more colorful, stream-of-consciousness opinions to appear on News.YC. Some interesting observations in the prognostications.

> Google FAILED in acquiring and integrating other social products. Blogger, Picasa, JotSpot, Dodgeball, Jaiku. None are their category leaders now. Some are dead. Why?

Metaphorically, foursquare rose from the ashes of Dodgeball.

> Google cannot hire a Head of Social because no individual can change Google's DNA of building applications for pandas, not lobsters.

I wonder what Marissa Mayer thinks about Google's role in Social. I'm sure they have something in the labs... but you can't grow a social network in a petri dish.

Now I can see why Facebook probably won't ever merge with Google. It would be like an arranged marriage.

Android is the wildcard wildebeast. Mobile phones are inherently social.
Hedge funds want to use check-in data to predict retail performance.
I got the real dead-tree edition of Hacker & Painters that someone left in the book exchange rack at the Green Tortiose Hostel in SF. Just another reason I love that place.
interesting. i use dashes in non-customer facing domains all the time. suppose that doesn't really count. still....
It is editorialized, but I would not have followed a link titled "Domain Names" as it does not convey the quality of the article.

I think it's reasonable to use one of the more interesting points of the article when the original title is so vague.
Aus company investing in 10 Web Startups this year
Bring a monitor to bed with you, or on a bus, or on a plane, and then we'll talk.
The headline tells us that we will be reading about how DNA solved yet another case. The twist being a son's DNA being good enough to convict the Father. So why exactly do they include tidbits about how blacks will be disproportionately affected?

At the end of the 5th paragraph you get "A disproportionate number of people with profiles in the database are African American." So? What does this have to do with the DNA convicting a serial killer?

Seems more that there really is not much of a story so lets stick in some race baiting flame war topic to drum up the story.
i like the premium section. smart move $4 for 100 in 1 zip. well worth it.
Ditching the iPhone
Relativity started with "what if we thought about it this way?". Just saying.
No, it was actually my idea of a comedy routine. Around here, attempts at being the forum comedy act are frowned upon and thus end up somewhat similar to masochism, but it's therapeutic in the end.
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I've seen a pretty large number of similar looking "apps" on Windows. But usually in specialty software. The UIs on VSTis or a fancy schmancy Photoshop plugin for example are typically like this.
So basically linkbait works, and it's just lucky that this time it pointed to something worthwhile?
Sadly, this is pretty much done by the citation count bit. People that write quality papers were either scooped up by a quality institution, or could move to one. Good work is done at a lot of places, but its more visible when done at a famous place.
Nagios Community site hacked
Don't hold your breath. Apple has forever only released one model of each product at a time, with usually no more than 3 different options of slightly different specs. And it's not like this is the first time that a model has problems; long-time Apple users know to avoid the first revision of any redesign because of issues like this.
Find all the who's hiring threads on hacker news. I remember seeing at least a few interesting positions in Canada.

Buy the book "What color is your parachute". A lot of people swear by it. Personally I was too shy to find it of much use.

Look for jobs on the Joel on software job board, and the 37 signals job board.

Start an interesting blog about your programming passions.

.. just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
They are using an old Wordpress version, which probably explains how it happened.

Note that the site is currently hacked and doing these weird redirections. A heads up and reminder for everyone to check their sites and make sure they are updated/clean.
There's an American warcraft3 player who does around 120apm(as I recall) called Axslav and he was quite good, not a top pro but good enough to beat other pros with good strategy.

On the side note you can actually see how pros are micro-ing by spamming ctrl-c (at a good apm) when watching replays, it centralises the screen on what the player is currently selecting and can be fascinating to watch.
Looks interesting, but the background color, and font makes it hard to read.
dashes can be effective tools to eliminate ambiguity, as in these examples:

www.salesexchange.com - "sales exchange" or "sale sex change"
www.sales-exchange.com makes the meaning clear.

But I agree with you about spammy domain names like http://www.black-and-white-digital-photography.com.
This is a good point but at the same point not many employers have this strategy so I suspect there is plenty of underemployment among people writing open source given the level of skill. The hiring strategy that pkrumins advocates seems pretty sensible for a business that is already deeply familiar with the open source world.