skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been considering a forum for a while, and I've looked as several possible alternatives. One problem is that a forum could easily be a no-win situation for me: if I participated regularly, then it would become a huge time sink; if I didn't, then people would likely complain that I wasn't answering their questions.

I like your suggestion of having experienced programmers charge to answer questions, but I don't know of any successful pay-for-answers forum model. That doesn't rule it out, though, and maybe it's worth running an experiment at some point.

It's worth noting that there is a feedback form, available here: http://railstutorial.org/feedback. It's not as interactive as a forum, but it serves some of the same purposes.
PayPal Alternatives
Ask HN: What skills do employers usually ask for in internships
I'm a computer science student and I am going to start looking for internships by this fall so I could start next January if I find any.

I'm wondering what technical skills employers usually look for in students. I definitely have no preference as to what specific field I get into right now but I see myself getting into the networking/data communications field in the future when I graduate.

I'm no genius nor a hotshot programmer, just the average joe who's very passionate about programming. I know a little about a lot of things (Java, C, C++, Python, Windows, Linux, etc) because I believe that I have my whole lifetime to master some or a few of those.

If you have any general advice regarding getting my first internship, by all means, please pitch in. Thanks!
Ah, but it is even less optimal with a background of #777777
So most of Hunter's Point is crime free? Is this data correct?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Disney purchase of Playdom yesterday?

If Google can court Zynga, Playdom and Playfish it is a very worthy competitor to Facebook in terms of the social gaming aspect which is the most sticky part of facebook beyond the people.

But will people trust Google with their social information after Buzz and other privacy breaches?

Best bet would be to make a gaming site first that is public. I wish Facebook would do something similar in separate private and public profiles, the latter for all the game friends you want but not having to granularly set permissions for them not to see other groups of friends. Basically a Kongregate version of Facebook.
Email newsletters are serious business.
How are you precomputing the images? I thought GMaps provided a way to input data and get a heatmap, but apparently I'm mistaken.
And, if it's acquire, does "acquire subject to repurchase restrictions" count?

I ask because founders and early employees often buy at grant time subject to repurchase. From the company's point of view, it's just like vesting except it gets the money up front. From the employee's point of view, that purchase (and the 83(b) filing) lets them start the capital gains clock on their gain. The down side is that they're out the cost of the stock if the company fails. If you're early enough, that's not an issue because the price at that point is negligible.
I would guess that people just don't call the cops as much in bayview/Hunter's Point.
At the first Startup School at Harvard someone asked Chris Sacca (who worked for Google at the time) what languages/platforms would help to get you bought by Google. His answer was that pretty much anything was okay... EXCEPT for .Net.
FB questions is about as much like Quora as Quora is like StackOverflow.

Fair game in this competitive landscape.
Ruby On Rails Security Guide
The lack of anonymity is a huge differentiator.
Unrelatedly, PadMapper is excellent (better than other Craigslist mappers I could find): it has a great filtering system, seems to fetch fresh results more often, and can alert you about new places. I found my current place using it.
This is very interesting. A friend of mine who lived on Frederick St, just a few blocks up the hill from Haight, said that crime was much lower on her block. Her theory was that bad guys didn't like to climb hills. And in fact there seems to be a correlation between altitude and crime rate.

There are probably other reasons too. E.g. that the hills are fancier neighborhoods.

But her explanation makes sense. If you're walking around looking for someone to rob, why walk up steep hills?
If you want more details, sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org has them, or you can download the raw data from datasf.org. The hot spot at 16th Street BART is drug dealers and in practice there is no reason not to go there.
Not so sure about that: http://www.crimereports.com/map?search=94124&searchButto...
Microsoft Street Slide: Street view will never be the same
Ah yeah, I should specify that. The data window is the past 58 weeks or so.
I remember first seeing the MIT guide and it sparked my interest, however I didn't want to make homemade picks. Can you recommend a good lock pick set?
Assume you're in Apple's marketing department. How would you differentiate an iPhone from a 3G iPod Touch? Think hard about features, pricing and how the market is likely to react. Do you have two distinct products that can be marketed at the mainstream?

The iPhone is basically everything a 3G iPod Touch would be. When I hear people clamoring for a 3G iPod Touch it sounds a lot like complaining over the contract and high monthly cost associated with the iPhone.

It's a perfectly reasonable gripe, but understand that a poweruser who wants to use an iPhone sans phone for VOIP calls and mobile net access is not Apple's target consumer.
I'm going to have to disagree. Its accessibility via the muni and the bart, combined with the proximity to the hard-drug areas of town means that there are a number of quick and dirty smash-n-grab robberies of transient ne'er-do-wells. Admittedly I'm biased because I experienced a single one of those datapoints first-hand.
Interesting. I assume you did this when you were writing the code to attach people's twitter names to the @newsyc20 tweets of their submissions. I noticed that this morning and thought it was clever.
HTC Desire Froyo update - right now?
I couldn't find anything to that effect, so I wrote custom scripts. Basically, it creates an image pixel by pixel, with the pixel value corresponding to the crime density of that chunk of the map, blows it up, smooths it with a Gaussian kernel, and then uses some GIS tools to warp it and chop it up into tiles for different zoom levels.
Strange, I'm on HN and Twitter daily and still don't recognize half the list.
Thanks :-) Glad it was useful!
Have you seen the one that plots crimes as if they were elevation? http://dougmccune.com/blog/2010/06/05/if-san-francisco-crime...
I ordered the original ZenPad, before learning that it was essentially a scam. After I placed the order (along with others, I'm sure), they delayed the shipment date by several weeks, putting it after the 45-day return limit for Paypal (they required payment via Paypal).

After discovering this, I complained to Paypal who promptly canceled my order and returned my money. Enso has repeatedly had problems with having their Paypal account restricted because Paypal considers them a scam.

Since then, Enso has sent out numerous emails whining about people accusing them of being a scam, citing such "evidence" as the fact that their Paypal accounts regularly get restricted, their website doesn't really work, nobody has ever seen any of their products in person, their alleged manufacturers claim never to have heard of them, etc. These complaint emails are invariably stuffed to the gills with misspellings and poor grammar, and each time they send one I received 22 copies of it.

So, while this hardware _looks_ kind of cool, I am not going to preorder it. And I won't buy anything from them until they actually manage to ship something.
Modulo the funny.
Yeah, and both types of responsible whistleblowers probably end up getting arrested.
How many startups need hundreds of machines to get to ramen profitability though? Any time the licensing cost issue comes up, it seems that the goalposts move back and forth an awful lot.
I am not convinced. Somehow the 1984s still seem to be just around the corner all the time. Any kind of incident, and politicians try to make a case for 1984 laws and censorship.

At least if my neighbors amuse themselves to death, I am not forced to participate. I also don't think average people of all ages (as in centuries, eons) were usually preoccupied with highly intellectual endeavors. So the lament of us all becoming more stupid is probably also an old one.
OK, I shouldn't have dismissed it so quickly... there are some real issues there too. But I have spent a lot of time there without worrying about my safety.
Is philanthropy killing business in Africa?
There's also fewer homeless people the higher the altitude.

If you're walking around outside all day, and have no particular place to go, and are possibly pushing around a shopping cart full of stuff, it makes sense that you would tend to gravitate to areas with lower potential energy.
Nuts & Bolts: Storage
This is why I'd like to do violent/nonviolent versions. I've heard it described that the Tenderloin has a lot of non violent crime, and that Hunter's Point has much more violent crime. Ultimately, I'd rather be in the Tenderloin if that's the case.

I believe the data is correct, but I'm not sure what the SF police's data policies are. There could be some withholding, etc. The data comes from http://sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org/.
Cool. It's available on PadMapper itself as an overlay, so you can see where the apartment listings sit on the crime map. It's a bit buried - have to maximize Filters and then Super Secret Advanced Features.
I lived on Beulah, one of the flat streets between Cole and Haight. There were countless bums from GGP & haight street milling about my block, which was considered "Cole Valley", a relatively yuppie neighborhood. My apartment was burglarized and my TV was stolen. I moved up to Stanyan and Rivoli, considered to be the same neighborhood, but straight up a very steep hill, and never saw another human soul again.
No Callbacks, No Threads & Ruby 1.9
I think you misunderstand the parent post, HOAs are actually a perfect supporting example. Even the most tyrannical HOA rule isn't actually that bad, because you can just move a few blocks away to a less-strick HOA or a house with no HOA at all.

However, if a law is passed at the federal level, you're pretty much stuck with it. With local (or hyper-local like HOAs) you can vote with your feet by moving.
Yeah, it's definitely not all dangerous crime. I still wouldn't want to live in a drug dealer hotspot, though...
I don't think 300 people is enough. I'll add my twitter handle to my profile. I wasn't following anyone in the first 20!
Interesting. Maybe crime actually does flow downhill to some extent? It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between crime rate and relative elevation.
All I knew about SF crime was that the Tenderloin felt quite dodgy when I visited. So I opened the map ready to be suprised. Instead it turns out my feelings were right. Looks like the crime rate in SF is an inverse function of the distance from the Tenderloin.
Haskell on Horse would be more addictive.

(Actually, calling something $Foo$ on $Bar$ puts me off. It suggests the developers are not starting out looking at what makes the base language unique in its own right, and will likely make poor design choices from wanting to mimic something from a different, incompatible, realm.)
I would say the off streets right near the 16th street bart are pretty sketchy. I've seen lots of tweakers and crackheads fighting on Hoff and Capp. A crazy guy smacked me in the head "hit and run" style over there, and a roommate was mugged by 3 guys waiting for him in a car.
I'd question you even need to qualify your statement about perception of the police as "poor or ethnic minority communities".

My social circle is mostly educated, upper-middle class white males. Most still see police as oppressors, many have had negative experiences with police abusing power & harassing them.
Words can make the Ugliest man the greatest lover
Sure. Sure.

Having an existing product gives you a framework to validate it, so makes things much easier. Yet, it is going to take more time and effort than thinking of the idea itself.

Someone outside of the field may still come up with an original idea (with much higher chance of it being a crackpot case), but would have no easy means to validate it, whether it relates to an existing product or not.
Does Java have something similar to .Net's reflection?
The issue is less about encapsulation and more about language-enforced encapsulation. Encapsulation is good, but encapsulation that's enforced by the language is debatable.
Probably the issue is that Hunter's Point has a lower population density than many other parts of the city. The Tenderloin is chock full of huge apartment buildings, SROs, etc... so even if the per-capita crime rate is the same (or lower), the total number of crimes can be much higher.
Easy. Because I'm laughing at it.
What Furnishing an Apartment Teaches Us About Feature Requests
I'm pretty sure they're referencing the Old Spice commercials and the similarity to 'Ruby on Rails' is only coincidental. The framework itself looks nothing like Rails.
HTC Desire Android 2.2 Froyo Update till tomorrow!
I've got 359 Twitter users from Hacker News profiles on this Twitter list: http://twitter.com/tlrobinson/hackernews

We should compile the union of our two lists.
Really?

Oh.

Tivo means I watch very few commercials ...
Well - when you're at some serious size, it makes sense... Kind of like special-casing the memory allocator in windows if SimCity is running: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html - how could they not be compatible with SimCity?

How can Java be not compatible with Eclipse?...
Pak plane crash: Reports suggest all 159 on board dead
Islamabad: Reports suggest that none of the nearly 159 people on board have survived this morning's plane crash in Islamabad. This is Pakistan's worst-ever plane crash.
This is a load of shit.

1. ASP.NET MVC2, which is what they're trying to replace Webforms with, doesn't have any URL mangling issues given that the pathing is determined entirely by the developer's architecture.

2. Yeah, a view needs to contain a .ASPX file - this is an issue because?

3. You can't figure out how to edit some basic configuration settings, therefore the technology failed? Having consumed more than my fair share of RESTful services using .NET (the vast majority of my code samples on my blog are about using tools to do that), let me tell you that LINQ-to-XML and LINQ-to-JSON (JSON.NET) blow every other tool out of the water when it comes to parsing responses, with the exception of RestSharp, which is even better.

4. What the hell kind of bullshit is this? Because Microsoft offers me tools that integrate and often come with things I've already purchased I'm somehow a blind code-monkey slave to them? And there are plenty of developers who hated the .NET AJAX Control library and used jQuery or something else, myself among them. Microsoft isn't perfect, and there are exciting new non-.NET technologies out there that a lot of .NET devs try. Ask Rob Conery about his experience with Ruby, which I think is now his primary platform.

5.And what's wrong with VB.NET? That's how I broke into .NET until I did C++ programming in school and switched to C#. Yeah it's a verbose language compared to C# and it lets you play fast-and-loose with typing, but the fact that it's different from other tools doesn't make it inherently bad.

6. If you use DataSets poorly than I suppose that's true, just like how you can clutter PHP with inline MySQL. Shitty code can be written in any language.

7. What? You mean like one-click deployment from Visual Studio to an IIS7 instance? Or the ability to easily setup mirrors and scheduled backups in SQL Server? Or the ability to host services with virtually any protocol in IIS7? Try doing any of that in the LAMP stack and then feel free to tell me about how MSFT can't develop "simplified engineering solutions."

8. Some definitely do, but "all good devs?" Bullshit. Ask Jeff Atwood. The idea that enterprise platforms attracts more medicore programmers is laughable, and I'll point to the fact that JAVA and .NET developers are paid more by the free market on average than any other type of developer as evidence of that. You don't get paid well if you do shit work.

9. SharePoint is an utter POS; I hate using it as an end user, and I will be a sad panda the day I have to develop for it. No contest there.
At Infosys, Cameron refers to Sachin, SRK
Bangalore: British Prime Minister David Cameron paid a flying visit to Bangalore today - making stops at IT giant Infosys and the Hindustan Aeronautical Laboratories.
Humanities academics can obfuscate meaning just as proficiently as any engineer. See: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
Why Summer Vacation Won’t Make You Happier
"I'm a millionaire." ?
There actually are companies that do ad targeting into email newsletters (industrybrains comes to mind), but I think you're kind of missing the point by doing it that way.

You've got a list of people who are very interested in a particular topic. Hopefully you know some more about them too (read: you should be asking questions on the signup page that advertisers want to know the answers to). You can probably tell what kind of ads are going to do well with your audience better than a text analysis algorithm. And ideally you want advertisers who understand the value of an email newsletter over other media, not ones who are willing to appear next to certain keywords, wherever they may be.
The problem with blocking the intended side-effects in side-effect-driven programming is that the programs will break. A script to re-write all Java into Clojure would be useful, too, but really kind of not the point.
Ask HN: How do you talk someone out of a bad idea?
I have some friends in a marketing company who have created their own content management system. The programmer actually works for one of their clients and that client trades marketing services for programming services (I assume they are not loaning out their best programmer).

So now they have a CMS that is constantly needing to be updated in order to meet the needs of their clients. It often takes about 7 seconds to load a page (there is no cacheing, probably a bunch of redundant and unoptimized queries). They have also branded it under a pretty generic sounding name and a Google search reveals a bunch of other products, but not their product.

I have suggested that marketing is their core competency and not software development. I have suggested using open source or white label CMS systems and even branding those with their process, etc. They tell me that they have invested too much to turn back now (sounds like chasing bad money with good to me).

I don't want to tell other people how to run their business, but this seems so black and white to me.

What would you do? Have you seen someone make this case really well somewhere?
Private tax arbitrageurs are faster than the regulation-writers. It doesn't have to be ownership for the effective benefit to flow to larger, more established organizations.

This might encourage lots of outsourcing to 'startups' that qualify for the tax advantage. But since a guaranteed flow of big-company business removes all risk, the big companies will negotiate a lower rate and/or exclusive deal to make the 'startup' a de facto division -- capturing much of the tax benefit for themselves. Then, acquire the 'startup' at year 5 to make a tax-free payment to the 'startup' management.

It doesn't even require conscious scheming to achieve this -- the nudge of the tax code will generally push certain kinds of business in these directions, for certain timeframes, regardless of whether that's the wealth-maximizing (or even jobs-maximizing) outcome.

One low tax rate for all economic activity lets the essential factors of production -- as changed over time by culture and technology -- influence organization choices, rather than the passing favor/disfavor of legislators.

There should be a strict complexity budget applied to the tax code: let's say about 10KB ASCII text. Adding new special treatment would require taking old special treatments out.
Iterative Algorithmic Plastic Sculpture: Fimo Fractals
Lean Thinking and Restaurant Operations
I had no idea! And I've been parsing them myself all this time.
Steganography and Piracy in the Age of Digital Distribution
There are some newsletters that charge directly for their content, though those are the exception. You couldn't do that for just any market. For example, The Hotline from National Journal is a paid email newsletter that lots of politicos here in DC subscribe to.

I've even seen people who charge for the newsletter, but you can get it for free if you fill out an extensive questionnaire and "qualify".
Encapsulation is completely orthogonal to access modifiers.
And for all crimes they commit which violates someone's rights, they should be prosecuted. If meth or any other substance has a high probability of encouraging someone to perform violative acts, there's a strong deterrent from doing them in the first place.

Example: If I hold a knife in my hand, it is more likely that I will hurt someone than without it. This deterrent causes people to be more careful when holding knives.

Holding the knife itself is not a deterrent, just as using a substance is not in itself a deterrent, but the possibility of hurting someone else is greater.
We are on a MS stack: http://www.iactionable.com (our landing site is Wordpress)

We use ASP.NET MVC 2 and most of Azure offerings. The reason for the lack on MS based startups probably goes back to using what you know and where founders come from - we were both working as .NET devs for a few years before starting IActionable, which is probably atypical. There are definitely other .NET startups here on HN, probably due to perceptions that it is more expensive and people generally start out on something else, like an interpreted, as opposed to compiled language.
I'm really the wrong person to ask; this is something I play with on my desk while I'm thinking through a problem and I'm sure the picks I have would be considered trash by a real locksmith.

That said, the first set I had (which I loved) were things I made myself. After those got ruined by people coming into my office and squealing "LEMME TRY" which resulting in them bending them to the point of uselessness, I bought a set at a "spy" store in Phoenix; they seem to work just fine for my purposes.

Honestly, I wouldn't get too caught up in buying "nice" picks. They're incredibly simple tools and I doubt that you're going to notice any difference between a good set and a cheap set if you're doing what I'm doing.
If your data structures can be serialized using 1/10 of the space and you can identify what you're not going to use for a while, then why not serialize it into RAM that way and let VM serialize it to disk if needed? You accomplish the same thing, but with less code and fewer system calls.

To me the big reasons to serialize to disk are as a way of sharing data between processes, and as a way of making data permanent. But not for performance. Because compared to RAM, disk has none.