skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know the answer because I haven't been in your situation (yet). I'm thinking of offering support for worker demographics and the scheme I described is how I plan to implement it.

a. Do I know about the worker? Yes - go to c.
b. survey the worker with some demo questions and store them
c. Does the worker's demographics match what the user wants? Yes - let them through
d. Prompt worker--sorry, you're cute and all, but not what this user wants.
Ok, now I have to read the article. My wife has family in Shippensburg...
I'm pretty much in the same boat. Not really set up for life, just the next decade or so. It's been more than a year since I last faced the usual "office" issues. HN, reddit, slashdot, zerohedge, my twitter feed, stocks and my hobbies keep me occupied.

In any case, it's enabled me to step out of a regimented life, I'm going back to school for a masters in an interesting field and my hopes of making a significant contribution to the world have not died down yet :). I'm on track to accomplishing some life goals. Social interaction-wise, I've taken up a few language courses and find the people I meet there a lot more interesting than those from my previous life.

All in all, I'd say not having to worrying about money ( although I didn't worry much, earlier either) or the future is very nice and definitely very good health-wise.
$250k? That's disturbing.
Invites for No-Excuse Customer Care Management Tools
Rubinius 1.0 Webinar with Evan Phoenix (video)
Sure thing :-)
Getting the bang () for your buck ($) from BASH
I'd actually go a step further and argue Objective-C is actually closer to Ruby than to C. So close, in fact, that MacRuby implements Ruby's object system using Objective-C's runtime.

Syntax and naming conventions are another matter...
Putting Content Back on Top
Great Advice for Conducting User Interviews
"much hand-optimized 90s-era C code is now slower than more naive implementations, because the optimizations used to save some instructions often actively harm cache performance."

On the same hardware? That seems unlikely - do you have a specific example in mind?
This makes me feel old -- when I was learning programming/CS, memory management and storage classes were part of basic training. Now we've got a generation of programmers who've never had to worry about these things.
Lots of money brings lots of freedom, which can bring a lot of instability/chaos. You lose all the structure that you had from the constraints of working for a living. If the instability (and resultant stress) is too much, going back to "the way you were" could be a relief.
I thought like you once. SF was driving me insane.

But then I moved back to NYC from San Francisco and realized that art, music and literature is dying out everywhere in the USA. In New York, there's a lot more stuff like ping-pong clubs and designer boutiques and bike paths... but there certainly aren't as many interesting art, literary or music things happening as there were in the 1990s.

San Francisco was never really an artistic or intellectual center, it's always just been kind of a weird place.

I might be the only person on this forum who moved to SF to go skateboarding, rather than start a tech startup.

If you move to SF hoping it will be a cultural mecca you will be disappointed. But if you go with the flow, you might find something you like.I don't like burning man, either. But there's other stuff to do. I have never been happier than when I was skating or riding my bike around the city, or just goofing off. Why do you think there are so many bums there? Why do you think the beats moved there? It's a great city in which to "bum around." It's kind of bad for almost anything else. I view my time spent there as an extended vacation.
PR Experts: iPhone 4 Hardware Recall Is Inevitable
UK Labour party's deputy leader appears on Google Maps as a landmark
That aside I still don't think it's a good idea for young teenagers to smoke pot.
i don't know if i'd classify most of these things as "dirty tricks". i would put taking actions on behalf of or as a user without their knowledge or consent as at least a level higher than a dirty trick.
The 13-inch Macbook Pro is just a lot heavier than it looks. It's much smaller than the 15-inch, but not much lighter.
Huh. I just remember the media event where it was introduced them talking about the almost fully-automated factory and how that meant it could be domestic. But if the rest is still made in China I suppose that doesn't make any sense. Must have been a rumor I misremembered.
isn't it reasonable to assume that a project Foo written in C or C++ is faster than an equivalent written in Java simply because the author writing project Foo in C/C++ likely understands performance by choosing C/C++ in the first place?

I think that's kind of a stretch.
To expand on this comment, I strongly feel that without deep domain-specific knowledge, new software engineers will mostly windup in IT dev/support roles in enterprise software shops - a tenuous choice for a long and satisfying career.

For new students, I would recommend that most people should probably get a major in another field with a either a second major in CS or even just a minor in CS. This is mainly to make sure you have an acceptable credential to signal potential employers you have the CS "chops" to do the dev work. I wish I had done this as an undergrad.

I work directly on a bioinformatics team and almost everyone doing interesting work has a biology degree (MS or PhD) even though they are mostly doing software dev.

I'm also continually surprised by new CS grads who think their job will consist of being handed a list of requirements and told to write some code to solve the problem.
Zsync: Client-side rsync over HTTP
More women lured to pornography addiction
Hah, oops. I think Sean meant at a previous employer. All of our mobile devs are seriously skilled (f.e., Brendan Lim delivers talks all over the place about mobile dev) and check out our work (Mashable, Oil Reporter, etc.). Er, point is: our mobile devs rock. :)
Not exactly -- the reactor did shut down "safely", just not fast enough to avoid a steam explosion. Chernobyl was dangerous because it had a positive "void coefficient": the more the coolant boils, the more reactive the core becomes. It's easy to see why this is a bad thing.

SL-1 had a negative void coefficient: as the coolant boils off, fewer neutrons are slowed down to speeds where they can be readily captured by fuel and the reaction slows down, creating a negative feedback loop. This type of passive safety is all but mandatory in modern reactor designs. SL-1 blew up because the feedback loop lagged behind the pressure buildup by a few milliseconds, and it spontaneously disassembled (kaboom). No meltdown, no china syndrome -- just a bunch of fuel all over the place and a guy impaled on the ceiling.
I really liked the very last one, the one with Yoda.
His explanation was pretty good, roughly: you can say FU while you are still on the phone with someone instead of after you hang up.
I suppose 46 could also be someone looking for (e.g.) a cell-phone tracking service for parents.
..or leiningen http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/blob/master/README.m...
Special Report: Can Data Centers Harness Renewable Energy?
> Has your life changed in unexpected ways?

Not really. The most unexpected thing is how much the same life is after FU money than before. The main difference is that a lot more people line up to try to take your money from you. One way or another you pretty much have to deal with the same old shit.

> Has there been any change in the way you interact with strangers?

I probably feel a little less insecure, especially when I talk to other people with money. But I don't think anything else has changed, at least I hope not.

> Has the number of things you have to endure increased or decreased?

The number of things I have to endure has definitely decreased. In particular, I don't have to stress out over making the choice between "enduring" a job that I hate or going without a salary. But other problems have arisen to replace those. I call these "nice problems to have", but they are still problems.

> And is "FU money" all its cracked up to be? e.g., is your life an order of magnitude more enjoyable now, or is it pretty much the same etc?

Neither. Life is definitely better with FU money, but it is no panacea. FU money gives you extra options, but the fundamentals have not changed: you are still faced every morning with a choice of what to do with the resources you have at hand. And even FU money has limits. It's amazing how fast you can learn exactly where those limits are.
Apple Duct-Tapes Over Consumer Reports Review
Hunny Do is a nice collaborative application for sharing lists.Works great with your spouse. And it's free for iPhone.
I just edited the blog post for clarity: Sean was working for another company when he first learned Obj-C. I don't think he specified that in his post initially, because it probably seemed so obvious (to him) that something like that would never happen at Intridea. :)
Supercomputing Videos: Inside the NSA's Data Center
I haven't.. It looks awesome! But I'm with the others.. Craving NYC :(
Leiningen's goals are slightly different than clrj's. Leiningen is more like a Maven type project descriptor/build system whereas cljr is more like an easy_install-esque tool. cljr can be used without creating a project.
Slight alternative to the Mission and SOMA are the Potrero Hill/Dogpatch neighborhoods in SF. Technically Dogpatch is a subset of Potrero that runs along third street from about 16th to 23rd, on the East side of 280.

Still relatively unknown (Zynga and Digg have figured it out though) more residential and less crime - if you stay on the North side of Potrero Hill (the South side is mostly residential anyway), Dogpatch can be a bit more sketchy. Weather tends to be gorgeous and its actually got fairly easy street parking in most areas.(almost unheard of in SF), and it has a caltrain stop right in the middle of the area.

For those looking for something a little less urban and more affordable then the Mission and SOMA this area is quite a gem.

About

http://www.sfgate.com/neighborhoods/sf/potrerohill/

Map

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=111...
Looking at the headline, the theme here is "dirty tricks". Evil intent. And while I agree that you can use dirty tricks to make people not do something they'd better do, I fail to see how the examples given by the GP speak of evil intent.
Thanks for the feedback. I think I definitely need to address some of the issues you've raised. One of my apprehensions to posting my "Review my App" post is that my app doesn't instantaneously provide any functionality (other than viewing apps looking for testers).

As a developer, you submit an app and it appears on the list. However, it may take hours/days/weeks to get any tester requests (based on whether or not the site is being used). Similarly, as a tester if you apply to test an App, you aren't granted access to that app (or the ability to provide feedback) until the developer accepts you, which can take hours/days/weeks itself.

I will definitely take some screenshots and make the 'internal' features of the site more evident so people aren't forced to create an account in order to see whether or not they'll want to use the service.

As for whether this will become a business, my answer is: Not yet. While I have some ideas for monetization and where to grow the feature-set in the future, right now I'm just interested in getting users and feedback to help guide the direction of BetaBoom in the future.

For now, its merely a free service (and learning experience for me) to help Developers find/manage testers and feedback.
I don't understood why people think automatic deallocation = garbage collection = slow language. You can have reference counting without garbage collection. It's pretty obvious to a compiler when a variable has gone out of scope and can be dereferenced (and deallocated immediately at 0).

Using a language like obj-c where you have to do memory management manually just seems so archaic after using modern languages. Plus there is strange property duplication syntax, split header/code files, a GUI editor that doesn't easily wire events to code, named parameters, c/smalltalk calls mixed together, etc.. it's just a mess.

In my brief stint using it the whole time I kept thinking this would be so much simpler if I could do it the XYZ language way. Obj-C is a language that you have to try really hard to like. If you have to convince yourself then maybe it's not that good.
Well it rules out a glossy screen, but as long as you've got one that's LED-powered it's fine. Course it's nicer in the shade, but it still works in the sun.
We're getting close. Sub-$200 with decent processors and capacitative touch will get us to another Cambrian explosion of hacker/hobbyist tinkering platforms.
Yes, and then you would also be able to install libraries without editing a shell script.
ok, if you're really sure ;), i guess next step would be to look at the immigration side of things. creating a biz or moving the biz should be straightforward, consult a corp. lawyer, etc. immigration would be the most challenging piece of the move i expect.
In theory garbage collectors could do a good job maintaining locality of data structures initially allocated in a local fashion. In practice, they don't, but compacting GC may be better than fragmentation for the average non-cache-aware program. In the case of Java, you have the additional problem that everything on the heap is boxed (except primitive arrays and primitive members of objects), which definitely strains memory (both capacity and bandwidth).
Spot on. I probably should cross the rivers more often, but hey, two trains. I'm actually not complaining about difficulty getting laid; it's easy enough that it's gotten boring. The real difficulty is finding girls you want to do more than sleep with.

Incidentally, Brooklyn is hardly a panacea. A girl in Brooklyn once kicked me out of her apt at 3AM after, while discussing life I accidentally revealed the size of my savings ("enough to travel around India for a few months"). (This was when I was an academic.) While Brooklyn is certainly better than Hoboken, there is no shortage of "artistic" types hoping to meet a guy with enough money that she can live the "bohemian" life without ever suffering materially or worrying about selling her art (and similar stories).
Just thought I'd mention http://rubydcamp.org/. The people who wrote this post are sponsoring it (I'm not affiliated with them at all).
I get this a lot when talking to semi technical people about a project I'm working on. Their side of the conversation normally goes something like "Well how did you think of X? But where did Y come from?", to which I reply, I wanted X, X needed Y to work, so I created Y".

The question is always asked, and the answers are always similar and I always feel awkward explaining things that are second nature. It's akin to someone asking - so why did you exhale?
Link to demo: http://demo.qooxdoo.org/current/showcase
Designing iPhone Apps – "Expenditure" app
Bearhug goes head to head with Get Satisfaction
The company wants to make it easier for companies to engage with their customers, while still keeping full control over their data and their users' experience on their site. By offering companies a hosted solution for engaging with their customers and solving customer-service issues, the company is taking on GetSatisfaction and similar services.
I was really surprised they didn't launch a fark style "TotalReddit" with a monthly subscription fee.

Learn from them - allow the subscription to be giftable so popular users get memberships from people who dont mind paying a lot per month. A recurring payment, not a 'donation' to a massive corporation. Have a separate subreddit for these pro users where the non paying users can't access.

With their large core of highly active users, I would hazard a guess this should generate them 500k annually.

Still - with their insanely high numbers of pageviews they should be able to monetize that traffic reasonably well. Their ad model just seems to work against normal advertiser campaigns, and they stated they didn't have anyone in sales until recently. This seems so bizarre to me - most big corps monetize products into the ground leveraging their existing ad channels.
Personality traits can't predict entrepreneurial success
Seriously, the desperate product placement was extraordinary. iPad made a showing in the headline, and 5 times in the text.

You would think that the iPad invented 3G data access or something. What a ridiculous distraction in an otherwise interesting story.
Some good points mixed with a fair amount of foolishness and surface thinking here, as usual for Brooks.

You can make some good points about schmoozers vs. makers and how our economy values social climbing more than actual productivity. The golf-shirt wearing MBA's take a paint-by-numbers approach to business. They tend to do well when things are going well and somehow avoid consequences when things turn.

The rest of the article doesn't make much sense.

> Princes can thrive in a period of slow, steady growth, but grinds need a certain sort of psychological atmosphere. They need a wide-open economy with plenty of creative destruction.

This should be rewritten as, "Grinds need a wide-open economy so that princes will give enough money to grinds that they'll be worthy of my attention." There are plenty of Grinds doing amazing things, but Brooks can't be expected to seek them out when he's so busy eating lunches with the wealthy princes.

> The princes can thrive while the government intervenes in the private sector. They’ve got the lobbyists and the connections. The grinds, needless to say, don’t.

I known tons of grinds (professors, researchers, contractors) that make their living through government grants and contracts. In government contracting and grant writing, schmoozing is much less important than in the private sector. (There's still a "councilman's nephew" problem, but I'd contend it's much milder than the "COO's golfing buddy" problem in private business.)
Mutillidae/Samurai WTF/OWASP Top (Irongeek)
There is a great link buried in the comments of that blog about UI design and providing feedback to user: http://www.danlockton.com/dwi/Lenses
Yes, but it does have a repl command, and a swank plugin, and I like using it as a virtualenv-type tool even when I'm not working on a project. (And most of the time I am. I find the best way to learn is to attempt to write a real piece of software, and it has the added bonus that I might be able to add something to my portfolio.)
It's not for money, it's for security. It's really no worse than what guys do.
Intended audience of article is Rubyists and other users of dynamic languages who are unfamiliar with having to code in a C style. Probably small subset of HN readers.

I would recommend use of Objective-C without Apple frameworks to anyone who must build robust modular systems while retaining C compatibility or performance characteristics. I use it myself in a game engine.
> "Mobile phones, maybe, but pocket computers?"

If it has a data connection, then yes.
If it does not, then no.

A PC has all sorts of utility; none of which dilutes its "social-ness" once it has a data connection.
It's worth mentioning the accompanying blog post too: http://khinsen.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/euroscipy-2010/
He is at the first stage of Cocoa development. Learning a new language is fun, and you can create some really cool stuff with the Cocoa frameworks. But once that wears off you are left with Objective-C, a vestigial language that isn't suited for a majority of application development.

Here are some reasons I think Objective-C needs to be retired:

- Header Files: These are archaic and require you to repeat code unnecessarily. Compiler's shouldn't require humans to do something that computers are better at.

- No Automatic Garbage Collection: In ObjC 2.0 we have this, but not on the iPhone. Unless you are making a high performance game, there is no reason the phone can't handle Automatic GC.

- No NSDictionary/NSArray literals: [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:@"value", @"key", @"value2", @"key2", nil]; // Enough said

- No regex: You kind of get regex's in 3.2+, but they are very limited and require around 3-4 lines of setup to get anything done.

- Xcode: You are pretty much required to use Xcode and I don't like Xcode. Even if you use the "xcodebuild" CLI, you still have to create the project through Xcode.

- Closures: I guess we will be able to use these soon, but it is going to take awhile for all the API's to get updated to accommodate them.

- No dynamic variables: It's handy to be able to shove data into objects sometimes. It's a hack, but as long as you treat it as such you can save a lot of needless code. (You can do this via the ObjC runtime, but it's messy)

- Unit Testing: It barely exists and is difficult to use.

- No namespacing: ObjC handles namespaces by prefixing class names. Blah, that is so 1978.
I'm supposed to be impressed because Obj-C does reference counting?

It really is sad that so little of the state of the art in GC is available in mainstream languages.
Retrospective, arbitrary construction of funnels. If you need it and you know you need it, their implementation is jawdropping.

If you are tracking a single funnel which doesn't change much, that probably isn't that spiffy for you. For example, you configure Opens Trial Page, Trial Signup, Opens Plan Page, Signs Up For Plan as a funnel once and you're done.

However, if you're doing more sophisticated things, it can be a lifesaver to not have to tell the engineering team "Yo, we're reconceptualizing our funnels: you guys now have to do annoying modifications all over the site." Lets say you have a Facebook game with a Valentine's Day promotion and you want to see whether people who sent their bonnie lass a cow to show their affection are better or worse customers two months later. No problem, with a few clicks on the interface you can whip up a funnel that tracks purchasing the pink cow as a stage and then watch conversions after that. You don't have to tell engineering about it, since they already fired the "bought a pink cow" event. You don't have to wait a few weeks after the experiment to collect data (most funnel analysis software I've used requires a do-over any time you create a new funnel or alter an existing one except by concatenation) -- you have the data, you're just slicing it a new way.

The notion of preventing a turf war between the analytics side and the engineering side is really popular with some companies. They also typically have lots and lots of money to spend.
It's true in some cases the name of the product is far less important, but in my point of view it's only true for more or less traditional products and doesn't apply to new, innovative products (and even then).

Some people may like to push a product without giving proper tought to the name/branding but I'm sure it will decrease their chances of success, maybe not a lot, but still. As I see it, today everything is getting more and more connected, a product without a twitter account or facebook page is possible, but imho you're missing out on a great chance to market your product.

After you're done with development, it's getting users/attention that counts, and as it's already pretty hard to do that it's best you take every chance you get, even if it's not much.
There have been extensive studies into radiation exposure. From Navy nukes to Japan's survivors (which are numerous), there's a ton of data but we are dealing with a hypothesis that cannot be proved one way or the other. Low dose radiation's effects appear to be negligible, but just in case we adhere to the linear no threshold theory. This is fine, except for when it is abused and cited to stop progress.
Sprint's Hesse: There's Logic to a T-Mobile Merger
How (and Why) to Use Game Mechanics to Power Your Business