skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
do you know if there are any successful bootstrapped startups in field robotics? for instance, 1 or 2 guys in a garage who succeed into designing and selling their own UAV? or maybe design a new wheeled robot toy?
They're called "thrush" but many of us pronounce them "thread" and "thread end".

(-> x expr1 expr2 ... exprN) evaluates x, then takes the result and puts it as the first argument in expr1, evaluates that, and puts the result in the first argument of expr2, repeating until exprN, where the result is returned.

(->> x expr1 expr2 exprN) does the same thing, but instead of making it the first argument it makes it the last argument of subsequent expressions.

Clojure's culture generally agrees that the "subject" of function calls should be the first argument, so in general the -> operator is all you need. Sometimes you're shuttling data around, and then ->> comes into play.

Please note that multi-ping in this is atypical and constructed that way for didactic purposes (i.e., to be transformed later). Usually you'd see it as:

(defn multi-ping [] (apply str (repeat 16 ping)))

For readability, some people might prefer to use a let. I think with only 2 levels of nesting, it should be pretty easy to see what's up and I wouldn't bother, but that'd look like:

(defn [] multi-ping
(let [pings (repeat 16 ping)]
(apply str pings)))
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> I mostly comment because I like to get a bit snarky.

Come to reddit, they'll love you there.
I consider myself an evening person...I get a second wind from 10pm to 1am...however, I do find that I am more productive when I get up at 6am and am in the office by 7:30am.
While I was still in college, I had a resume up on Dice, hoping to land a job after graduation. It apparently flagged the recruiter bots, because I'd get calls... for contracts starting in a week, months before graduation.

I know these things aren't human screeners, but you would think that a human would look at them for two seconds before the company spends money on the call center worker who has to call and find out that the prospect is unavailable.
I have to second all the other answers. I guess the term "social network" carries a lot of (crappy) connotations with it, but if it lives up to the promise, connecting like-minded tech people to hang out and share knowledge: Sure.

I just have some difficulties to imagine what it would need to look like to
a) don't end up copying FB and
b) not copying HN itself

So I'm on the edge on this one. FB et all don't interest me, this is interesting because of the (controlled, on-topic, interesting) contributions. How are you planning to build a social network with the same merits? Are you going to build a new, different Identi.ca? (which, imo, is a failure in terms of adoption, and they mostly targeted the "tech" demographic)
Ask HN: Is there a way to get absolute numbers from Alexa stats?
I've been trying to find some way of determining actual uniques and pageviews for a given domain using Alexa's API. However, the data returned is relative to the number of Alexa toolbar users.

Since Alexa does not disclose the number of active toolbar users, is there a way to determine the absolute number of uniques and pageviews given Alexa's data on a domain?

WolframAlpha seems to be able to determine this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=daily+page+views+news.ycombinator.com . I've tried to determine how many Alexa toolbar users there are by using WolframAlpha's data on 10 domains at random but there seems to be a considerable variance (up to 500M), so it seems that they are using some non-linear formula to extrapolate daily page views from Alexa Stats.

Any suggestions or anyone done this before?
I hope this article of mine may inspire you a little bit: http://programmingzen.com/2010/07/04/the-pursuit-of-excellen...
That's true to a large extent as far as I can tell. I've seen reports on emacs-devel of commits taking a couple of minutes, and of having merge issues you'd never encounter in Git.

Bazaar wasn't chosen for Emacs for technical reasons, and they appear to be suffering the consequences of that.
a related book, the story of Patagonia and Black Diamond:
http://www.amazon.com/Let-People-Surfing-Education-Businessm...

My experience:
I tried to start my company in the sports field, but I failed. At that time I was surfing 2h/day and running a bit. Now I'm employed, I gained 10kg, and I'm not really motivated and looking for a better way of living.
It appears to be a Persian name.
DIY Drones is pretty successful at selling parts to make your own UAV: http://diydrones.com/
Thanks :) I agree ;)
What are the advantages / downsides of CouchDB compare with other schemaless DB like Mongodb, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet etc. ?
That's very kind of you! Thank you. It was my pleasure.
why so?
competition? or the physical standards are so high barely nobody can manage it?
5 Game Extensions in Chrome to Waste Your Time On
Yeah microbenchmarks are cool to stare on when your farm of those jboss instances for another very important project is crawling. Very motivating.

Wake up, this is reality.
Windows XP will never die
Google makes plea for broadband conduit on new fiber website
Sorry about that. Purposely didn't link Viewpointr for that reason. Thanks to @engineyard we are humming again. We are also having a little Twitter bug that we are working on. Sorry :S
Anyone going to systematize this and create a curated list of vetted apartments for a fee? Maybe something like $9 for a month of access to one geographic area.
The more obvious question might be, "What can I do that combines physical activity with what I do now?"

I had a professor in college who decided he was going to work construction during the summer. He's obviously in a different situation than you, but I still liked the idea.

A few thoughts:

1) Read "Shop Class as Soulcraft:" http://www.amazon.com/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/... . I have no idea if it will help.

2) Have you thought about an IT job that requires, say, moving around computers (as colleges must require somewhat regularly), or maintaining systems on ships, or something like that? I have no idea if any of that would work.

3) Could you combine two part-time jobs? An IT job that pays bills, perhaps, with a job doing something else?
I will! Thank you for the tip.
But what's objective? The best way to marginalize an opposing viewpoint is to paint them as extremists who shouldn't be taken seriously.
interesting, commenting about not having much karma got me a karma point! -does a happy game mechanic induced dance-

I had been reading HN for about a year before making an account, and honestly I think it is one of the "nicest" communities online I have yet to find, and I think the self-regulating ability of 'karma' is part of that.
I sure will. Thank you!
It's open source. Knock yourself out.
It (like the rest of the Closure Library) is designed to be used with the Closure Compiler:

http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/

The general philosophy is: for development, loading lots of files is ok and in some cases easier to debug. For production, the compiler will often strip out much more code than just minification would.
Apple's brewing shitstorm
consulting, where you travel a lot a do a lot of presentations
consulting, where you travel a lot and do a lot of presentations
Foursquare Founders Take Home $4.6 Million From Series B Round
* I wouldn't wish the curse of Maven on anyone, let alone someone who hasn't been force-fed it by the Java community for a while, so I'd recommend trying to learn sbt and then port the solution posted in the above link to your own sbt project. I really wish the solution were simpler, but Java tools have always focused more on server-side web deployment and have always been weaker in the area of client-side deployment.*

I've only ever used maven for Scala projects, but I've come across this sentiment a few times -- it always strikes me as odd, given that I have very few significant maven complaints.

It has all sorts of great tools for automatically fetching dependencies, and doing "the right thing" via some fairly simple conventions. It's really easy to wire up something like tomcat:run to run a war in-place -- or your own custom self-contained code.

I also really like being able to have a local maven repository where we can store our own build products (and declare dependencies against them); server software like Artifactory makes this very nice: http://www.jfrog.org/products.php

Maven isn't wonderful, but build tools never are. I don't understand why you would hate it. Why do you hate it?
My personal favorites revolve around Tuscan Whole Milk[1] and Uranium Ore / Yellow Cake[2]. Especially the top-rated milk review, and how often the uranium ore shows up when you're searching for yellow cake mix :)

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/product-r... [2]: http://www.amazon.com/Uranium-Ore/product-reviews/B000796XXM...
I found out last week that using incognito private browsing mode in Chrome (and I assume in other browsers too) I can log in to Google, Twitter, etc, without logging out my girlfriend (my laptop was broken, so I was borrowing hers).
Organic farmer. Done right, if you have the skill, it can make enough money to live comfortably on; takes you closer to nature than you'll ever otherwise be; and in general makes for a Very Happy Athletic Job.
seems like quite a bit to take off the table.
Validation of the Social Enterprise: Atlassian raises $60 million
* ahem *

IT'S HUMOR.
I wonder if this applies to people who have nervous energy and move around when at their desks... I've read about studies that correlate your amount of nervous energy (tapping your toes, etc.) to your likelyhood of being obese.

Maybe they're talking about movement on a different scale.
> Not only does GitHub use twitter, but they also have status.github.com hosted on EC2. Heroku has a status site on Slicehost.

Heh, that's a bit funny:

Github's hosted on Rackspace Cloud. They have a status page which is hosted on EC2 via Heroku. Heroku hosts a status page on Slicehost. Slicehost is... wait for it... run by Rackspace out of the same data center as Rackspace Cloud.
Way, way too much competition. Besides being the one gov't occupation the public has unalloyed respect for, firefighters get great pay and benefits and a lot of free time. Plus there aren't that many positions available, and many of the ones that do open up often go to 'legacies' and others with insider connections. Even before the recession, advertised positions routinely got hundreds of qualified applicants.
It looks like Drupal just picked up a lot of themes developers. Talk about a way to shot yourself in the foot, going after developers and threatening them with lawsuits is a sure fire way to kill momentum.

I mean a theme is just glorified HTML it is not like it provides additional functionality. I think he would have a more valid argument if he was going after plug-in developers but themes is a bit ridiculous, in any event he has showed where his head is at and anyone developing a commercial product on top of Wordpress should take notice.
When I looked at doing that many years ago, their attitude was that splitting it into a library was not a useful thing to do and that everybody should be editing text files.
Half the fun of having an API is letting third parties do your feature viability testing for you. :)
Woops, sorry!
Respectable Countrymen We Will
Get student loans from the gov'ment.
surgeon. military.
1.0 is a magic number for versions.

A lot of people will magically start to treat you as a real contender when you release it, even if you've been viable for several months or even years.
I stepped down to working 80% weeks, not because I hate my IT job, but because I love having 3 day weekends that I can spend on myself. The pay is still good enough for me to live on.
"Oh, ya see there? The molex connectors aren't plugged in to the RAM. Let me get my electrostatic bracelet, and I'll have that screwed back down in a jiffy."
I saw that, and agree with that philosophy, but does the compiler also pull in all the extra files too? I didn't see it spelled out... I'm guessing yes, so I'll play around with it later tonight.
Ask HN: A solution for "How to recruit?"
How many startups, established companies, and prospective employees would be interested in a new way to evaluate/recruit talent?

LinkedIn fails due to the eBay problem. You can't publish the connection graph or text-based recommendations and maintain any sense of reporting balance. The results are always biased and too many people are attempting to game the system.

My proposal relies on a system similar to page rank as calculated over a set of hierarchically arranged skills. The more highly regarded the reviewer's related skills, the more certain the system is that the reviewer is a real person, and the more similar their opinions to yours, the more weight their opinion carries. Because it's based on skills, searching for contacts is easy; you simply select the requisite skills in order of importance and can determine a minimal value. For instance, you can look for a software engineer that is skilled in PHP, PostgreSQL, and French whose French is at least fluent.

There are a number of analytics approaches I'm considering to limit the ability of individuals to game the system. Further, the system seeks to incorporate a "humanness" factor. That is, each user's identity is verified as much as possible. For instance, by validating a credit card (and checking it's name against the user's name); the charge on the card would be used to send a certified, restricted-delivery letter via USPS with a confirmation code.

The data would use the ZKDB (zero-knowledge database) design to ensure user privacy and security and no data associated with a user and their opinion of another would be stored on our system. This should allow the user to be confident in their assessment of an individual as being private while allowing the system to rate the opinions of "guest" accounts very weakly. Businesses would be similarly identified.

No reporting would be available for an individual until a certain criteria has been met (number of reviews, et cetera). Thus a user can't easily track changes or attempt to deduce who provided what review to the system. This would help alleviate the eBay problem wherein I'm above average, you're above average, and we're all above average.

Sophisticated analytics would be employed to identify mathematical oddities which indicate gaming attempts like disjoint sets and orbits. To be responsive, the analysis would be done in a distributed fashion on a cloud and then stored in an easily-referenced fashion. The incentive for people to add information is basic quid-pro-quo. You all want an easier way to hire people; the cost is simple, you must evaluate coworkers and employees. Because the system hinges upon aggregate opinions of people and since no one person or group can significantly impact the reputation of an individual, there should be no legal concerns with libel. We're merely rating an individual's skills on a relative scale according to the analytic system of our software. It's the same for everyone and thus cannot target an individual.
They had to've. In fact, Drew cited the following in his YC app:

# What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn't exist yet?
Email themselves attachments.

http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html
nice write up.. just today I asked for a service that would do this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514991 ( sorry for thread hijack) but basically I didn't want to do image processing on the same instance as the app is running because of the constraints of cloud instances.

Based on your steps listed here 1.Handle request 2.Fetch original source image from S3 3.Resize/apply effects 4. Return result back to user. Why not just resize/apply at time of upload and store in S3... are you resizing and applying effects on every request for an image ?
I don't know about a garage, but university spin-offs are pretty common. Couple from my university off the top of my head: http://www.aeryon.com/ http://www.clearpathrobotics.com/
The chicken came first, not the egg.
a human would look at them for two seconds before the company spends money on the call center worker

Did your resume have "NOT AVAILABLE FOR WORK BEFORE [MONTH]/[DAY]/[YEAR], AFTER WHICH I AM AVAILABLE" written across the top in red ink?

Presumably not. But, if not (and maybe even if so!) it would take way more time and skill for a human to (a) read your resume, (b) parse it, and (c) deduce that you were not available than for someone to type your contact phone number into a call-center system, awaiting the day when another human would deploy automated call-center software to place a call to you, ask "might you be available for a contract on date X?", and note down your answer.

The other problem, of course, is that it's incredibly easy to represent a phone number in a database, and it's fairly easy to represent "we called Prospect X about Potential Contract Y but she said no" in a database, but it is awfully hard to represent "Prospect X has a resume which suggests that he will graduate on date Z, and most likely that means he isn't available before date Z, unless he is down on his luck or has gotten bored with school or we misread the resume" in a database.
Fascinating! It looks from Google Scholar like Karpinski has spent at least 10 years studying reactions like this in Arabidopsis. Biological systems are so densely packed with survival information.

We'd better figure out artificial food production before we discover that plants can feel, suffer, and care about their own future, or I'll end up starving :)
"While he proudly says there’s nothing he can’t gamify"

“This is probably a 10-year trend,” he says. “Then it will morph into something else.”

I'm not sure I agree with game mechanics only being a 10 year trend. Who knows what the internet will look like then. It will for sure look different than it does today, but people will still want things to be fun. I don't think our natural tendency to turn things into competitions is going away anytime soon.
I find it highly suspicious that the linked writeup doesn't include pyevent (barebones libevent wrapper).
My father loves working on elevators. It's a very active job, but it requires lots of troubleshooting and innovation. You have to be able to troubleshoot OLD relay based switching equipment, tape reader programmed controllers from the 80's and fancy new digital controllers.

He has to be able to engineer support and rigging systems to move old/new equipment out of tight spaces, knocking out walls, contracting out metal workers to add in support beams (elevator generators and motors are very heavy and big). I got him setup with autocad to draft some counter weight plates he had cut via a fire cutter (laser cutter but with cutting torch).

Lots of fun projects, lots of problems, lots of solutions. It pays $55 an hour i think, top scale, and you get something like $15 an hour in benefits. It takes around a year to get called off the bench (it's a union job, but not a shitty union like teamsters. People can and will get fired for not doing their jobs).

Finally, for the workaholic, overtime is always available and it's double time. $110 an hour an extra 2 hours a week can really add up.

Basically, if I wasn't programming I'd be making elevators go up and down.

Another option I have considered is an arborist. Kinda funny, but I love rock climbing, and being an arborist is basically "the same thing", in that you get to harness up, jug up some fixed lines, rig up lowers (can't always drop branches), etc. Looks like alot of fun at least for a while!
Thanks, good to know my money is safe :-)
> you would think that a human would look at them for two seconds before the company spends money on the call center worker

I bet dollars to donuts that it's cheaper to just call everyone on a list, rather than take the few hours to sort through the resumes and throw out all the chaff.
This isn't about how sophisticated researchers are. The limits to research into real world human behavior are pretty much inherent in the complexity and interrelatedness of said human behavior. Doing statistics is extremely hard because behaviors and conditions correlate with a many things at once, making the causal factor very hard to isolate.

There have been a number of clever and rather specific ways in which research psychologists have gotten around these problems. But being an expert doesn't make you superman or give you unlimited bag of tricks dealing with this inherent difficulty.

One obvious way that the study might be flawed could be that the respondents were more honest about how much TV they watched than about how much working-out they did, so TV-watched actually correlated better with exercise level than claimed level of exercise (and that's just one of hundreds possible problems).

IE, until we know some specifics that researchers might have gotten around untruthness in research based on only survey data, we're entirely justified in being somewhat skeptical. "They're expert, they can do it" isn't enough.
How often are the job applications filtered throught some kind of an automatic process?

Does it happen only in the big companies, or is it a common practice?

Is it effective?
Any money you don't lose gambling will just go toward the downpayment on a $100k pickup truck anyway, if the parking lots of Grande Prairie on a weekend are any indication. =)
I've been dying for the inverse of lilypond;an app that would allow you to take a picture and turn it into text notation/MIDI would be awesome.

That said, I used lilypond a couple of years ago and loved it.
CouchDB Case Study iWantMyName
I have so many friends in the industry and it blows my mind that movies ever get made. The inner workings of the movie business with its 'extreme personalities', on-set politics and its ridiculous accounting processes would likely drive any computer programmer to madness.

That said, the camera operators at the top of their game get paid really well. Its a total racket too, if you're good and in whatever guild controls the camera operators you can command ridiculous amounts of money.
Breaking up & divorce catching too?
It sounds to me like he has a lot of room to grow in his day job, if he wants to be a software developer.

If he doesn't want to be a software developer, then sure, he can duck the issues of maintenance, legacy code, low-level code, and all that. He can hobby-code his own projects and avoid other people's code. That means finding another career, though. If he wants to revive his programming career, he needs to face up to his weaknesses, which is exactly what his current job is pushing him to do, if only he'll commit to it.
From the article:

"For performance, each of our image servers cache the source, and any resize, locally to disk. Since images are never updated (only created), and get a unique ID for each one, we don’t have to worry about cache invalidation, only expiration. We can then write a simple script to remove images from this disk cache with files of an access time greater than a certain threshold (say 30 days). That way, if we change from one size thumbnail to another, eventually the old thumbnail sizes will get purged."
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