skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
www.reilee.com

Disclaimer: The site is a couple of years old and doesnt have her latest stuff. She has found it almost impossible to have her work photographed, even by professional photographers, so she hasn't me put up the new paintings. But go for it.
From my experience with cycling I can say that cycling on painted cycling lanes feels 2x safer than on shared space, and cycling on bike-only roads feels 10x safer (by far the worst problem on separate roads is dogs). The problem with shared space is that cars don't keep enough distance from the side. They go around you instead of driving in a straight line. This is especially a problem with trucks and buses, because they are so big.

What I usually do is cycling without hands on the handlebars. This keeps the cars at a much safer distance.
InDesign is an absolutely awesome program, my favorite from Adobe next to Lightroom.

Mac OS X’s font palette (while sucky in general and in dire need for a makeover to improve its UI — it’s like vintage 2000 or so) also offers you many of the mentioned features: 1 and 3 are on by default everywhere (type ‘shuffle’ into the Spotlight searchbox, ‘ffl’ will be turned into the appropriate ligature), 2, 4 and 5 are accessible through the palette but I don’t think OS X is clever about line-breaks (at least there are no settings to fine-tune). Don’t know about transparency. It is available to you in every program which uses OS X’s standard method of text input (like Pages or Safari).
We both linked to the same article, so I'm well aware that my tuition costs are not what everyone else will experience.

A median of $9k is still less than half of what the GP used, and my cost of tuition is a lot closer to the average than the $25k the GP used.

Also, if we were to put opportunity cost into the calculations (because you could work/work more if not going to school), it would quickly approach the $25K figure.

Which the GP already did.
Yahoo Search was a good search engine with an ugly and distracting front page. It's actually still better in some ways - I had a friend who was a sysadmin at Inktomi, and his team managed to run the search servers with far fewer people than Google's team. Of course, that leaves out so many details that you can't really make a good comparison.
IOS 4.0.2 Released, Fixes PDF Exploit - And Breaks Browser-Based Jailbreak
"That content will be initially accessible only by the halo device, but from the sounds of things, these titles might be made available to other Android phones if their specs and button layouts meet requirements."
"in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing."

No offense, but hiring programmers for HR seems like a terrible idea. HR people's main capacity is to understand people and relationships, not exactly something programmers are known for being good at.
No, not really - that's not what cliche means. A cliche is an idea that's presented so much that its originality is lost. Lots of people saying they became interested in programming because of a simple programming language designed to teach kids means it was a success.
I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample--- a company that does things basically the opposite of Google, and is very ambivalent about being a technology company rather than a media company, yet is very successful. (One difference is that Apple seems to be very good at selling media/entertainment/image, whereas Yahoo was never a superb media company.)
Ask HN: What would I get out of attending the DC Startup Weekend?
So, back when it was first announced someone suggested to me that I should check out the DC Startup Weekend to try and network. There wasn't much on the page about what it was all about when I signed up. My only real conference experience have been things like Shmoocon, where you go and network while listening to speakers.

Well, tonight I look at the agenda and I find out what DC Startup Weekend is all about. It sounds really great, except, I'm not sure I'll get much out of it. I've already got a product I'm working on, www.unscatter.com. I suppose I could go there and pitch it, but with a 7 week old infant I'm not in the position where I could just drop my job and dive 100% into it as a startup now.

This is why I've been slowly working on it in my very little spare time, basically trying to bootstrap it myself. I'd love to sit and talk to someone about the direction I'm headed, which is what I was hoping to get out of this weekend. However, that doesn't look like that's something I'd get.

So, I'm trying to figure out if there's any value in attending. My wife suggested I go Friday night and check it out, which since I've already purchased the ticket I probably will do. Just curious if anyone here had any feedback or ideas of what I could get out of attending?
>Wondering if she has any sisters, presumably so you can marry someone who looks like her.

The implication is that the admired facet in the first sister is that sought in the other sister(s). Familial traits and all.

>Wouldn't a much better comment be "Wow, someone who codes SVMs, listens to Ulver, and reads 18th century literature? Sounds like my ideal girlfriend."

That's pretty much what he said unless you're trying to misread his intention to start a flamewar IMO.

Often when someone says "I don't have an interest in [something antisocial], but" then they expressly have that interest.
[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.]

I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill.

1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early."

Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral?

2. "If there was ever a time when Yahoo was a Google-style talent magnet, it was over by the time I got there in 1998."

Are you kidding me? You're implying all the current Yahoo engineers are idiots? Then how come each piece of code they release is revered, lauded and used by everybody?

Speaking of talent: Yahoo got best paper at EVERY data-related conference in 2010. No single lab(Google,MS) or university(Stanford etc) has ever done this. Clearly you can achieve this without talent, pg!

3. "In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture. Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007."

Which company is responsible for inventing the term "Hack Day": Yahoo. Which is the only company to _promote_ hacking culture to students? Yahoo. Yahoo != Hacker-friendly? WTFFF!!! (edit:goog does soc, but it doesnt have engineers travel around the world teaching kids hands-on like yahoo does)

4. Google and Apple are shiny and get all the attention. Yahoo's the internet's underbelly. It's audience may not be SF hipsters, but they exist and there are a lot of them. Just because they're not like you doesn't mean they dont exist. Just because Yahoo doesnt cater to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

5. pg's product got hosed after inclusion into Yahoo. This happens. Reading a Yahoo critique from pg is like reading a Google critique from Evan Williams (Blogger), or a Google critique from the Dodgeball guys. It's a biased opinion.

6. It's a miracle Yahoo has survived for so long despite being criticized by the media /market for more than half its lifetime. The only other company that has had it worse was Apple, when they fired Steve Jobs. Yahoo doesnt have a Steve Jobs, and has been managed badly, but the engineering is SO GOOD that it STILL does a good job overall.
In 2002, Yahoo! began a serious effort to compete with Google in search by buying Inktomi (plus Altavista and FAST). In what must have been early 2004, I came over with the rest of the Inktomi crew to work on search. The Inktomi people were top notch, Yahoo! seemed earnest about doing what it took to go head to head with Google, and the integration efforts were done really well. While I was there I worked in an island of Inktomi people (plus some from Altavista), and I repeatedly got the impression that Y! people, technical and otherwise, were a little soft, maybe even complacent, relatively speaking.

I do feel Y! did a great job -- and made a great decision -- in integrating its search acquisitions; but those acquisitions threw into sharp relief what Y! really was. It's hard to get into too much trouble when all you're doing is throwing horoscopes onto web pages; but Yahoo! never struck me as being serious about software, and as Paul says, they didn't seem to think that was a problem.

Somewhere in 2005-2006, Y! made an attempt to revamp its search ad services with a large-scale software project called Panama. It was going to do a lot of things, including ad ranking refinements to improve revenue per query, and allowing advertisers to create more complex ad campaigns. This project seemed to undergo huge troubles, and I wonder if it was ever completed in any real sense, because I heard so little about it, and everything I heard suggested disaster.

Honestly I don't know if the fruits of Panama -- such as improved auctions for ads on search result pages, which is a critical thing -- were ever deployed. But a couple years later they made the Microsoft deal. Over the last couple years, select people at Y! have moved on to Google, and many many others are now at Microsoft.
Mmm combining this. Something that generates green energy at home or any other location.
Gmail plugin that lets send (or receive) email later [invites]
I've noticed that when I speak Spanish (or Japanese) I become a much more outgoing person. I've suffered from fairly bad social anxiety most of my life, but when I switch to another language I don't run into the same mental walls that I do when I speak English.
That's funny--Colombia was one of the few places I visited during a 9-month trip through Latin America where I was routinely mistaken for a native. (My Spanish is good, but definitely not native.) I chalked it up to people being lighter-skinned (at least in the cities), like me, and also the lack of foreign tourism to accustom people to gringo peculiarities. That, and going to places most tourists didn't bother with (Barranquilla anyone? :) Other places (esp. Cuba) it was much harder to blend.

FWIW I definitely feel like a different person when I speak Spanish. But I think that's mostly I have a very wry, subtle sense of humor which does not translate well. Even to other Americans sometimes :)
More than that, Yahoo's deliberate strategy at the beginning was to not build their own search engine, but just to buy the services of whatever was best out there. At one point that was Alta Vista. Later it was Inktomi. After all search was a well-studied problem, and they thought it was pretty much solved. So why put a lot of energy into building expertise in how to build what they thought would be a commodity.

Then Google demonstrated that search was not a solved problem, search was not a commodity, and it was too late.
Grafts allow you to do a bunch of other neat stuff. I use Git as a backup system for SQL dumps, but since the repository will grow a lot I want to throw old dumps away.

So I just create a graft and rewrite my history so that it only contains 7 commits (7 days):

git rev-list HEAD | sed '7q;d' > .git/info/grafts &&
git filter-branch -f HEAD
If most (all) of your early employees are hackers, how does it not make sense to hire a hacker to manage HR?
Bing is great. I only REALLY miss two things on it. A spell checker like google has with suggested correction and a calculator along with currency converter. Also, I haven't found/don't know if bing has a suggestion based search like google has?

Maybe an online PDF/PPT viewer would be nice also for links that lead to those files.
I wish people would make themselves familiar with examples before citing them as evidence of vague general claims:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonalds_Restaurant...
Ugh, how is this going to work with AOSP, CM, and DRM?
Another interesting data point. My brother speaks English as his first language, but Mandarin is his primary language.

One thing that he found is that when he immersed himself in Chinese culture, he had no problems. However if he went through a period where he hung out with other Americans and Canadians, he shifted back towards his Westerner persona, and would start to have trouble with the cultural differences.
The same reason why many engineers are unhappy - it's a professional that demands a lot of brain time and clock time, both leading to underdevelopment in other areas of your life.

I'm fairly active in the volunteering community here in Seattle, and there are certainly many "meat market" volunteering groups here (read: ones where the implied purpose is dating, as opposed to just strictly doing good work). I've had them come through the places I normally work at, and the demographic usually breaks down to:

- doctors
- other medical professionals
- lawyers
- engineers

Rarely do I see any other type. I suspect demanding professions make you a bit of a loner/shut-in/hermit, and thus unhappy.
Seems like a strange criterion. Would programmers hired to do HR be fulfilled in their jobs? Would they last very long? How does that even work? Do you slip a javascript requirement in the HR position posting? It just seems like you might be missing out on some great HR talent with such an arbitrary requirement.
Or for extra juice: "Our source, who requested to remain anonymous, wanted us to know that many democrats were concerned with the Obama admin's decision to..."
This might help: http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/983-html-5-overview/

This as well: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/256953/html-5-versus-xhtm...

Basically, the spec says, for example, that HTML5 has an 'html' element, and it may contain a 'head' and a 'body' element. (I'm winging it here.) And the 'head' element may optionally contain one or more 'meta' elements with attributes ... whatever.

So far so good; the spec defines the structural items. But it also says, look, you can manifest, or serialize, this using XML (i.e. XHTML) syntax, in which case you need to have true, proper XML (and that means, for example, that empty elements such as 'meta' or 'br' must be closed, typically using the ' />' stuff). Or you can use HTML syntax, in which case there are a set of empty elements ('meta', 'br', 'img', for example) that do not need an end tags or that ' />' thing.

Also see: http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

It comes down to what you think browsers are going to do based on what you send them.
This article got me thinking a little. I know base pretty well; whenever I'm writing some code, I always end up hitting the "source code" link and checking out the implementation. I never really wonder "how does this work" as I'm programming anymore.

The question is, how can one go from knowing a library to contributing to the library? One of the problems with HackageDB is that you can see everything, but you can't see where you can make changes.

I had a problem with C2HS a few months or so ago; it didn't work on Windows (because DLLs use "stdcall", not "ccall", and the "ccall" string was hard-coded). I clicked the darcs link on Hackage to get the source. Dead. So I just edited the source on my local machine and moved on.

A few months later I noticed that darcs was working again and there was a new maintainer, and I did get to contribute my patch. But it was kind of dumb luck, I could have easily had never noticed, and this bug never would have been fixed.

So right now, it's easy to find libraries, it's easy to understand libraries, but it's not always easy to improve the libraries. And incidentally, the biggest problem with libraries in Haskell is that they never get out of the "rough draft" stage, by getting contributions from people other than the author.

Incidentally, I don't have this problem with Perl, because everyone happens to use Github. This has created an interesting effect where libraries that aren't on Github become very difficult to work on, and people seem to favor rewriting instead of fixing things "the old way". (diff + an email to the author.)
One caveat: best technical recruiters are former programmers (it's an automatic plus if a recruiter tells me "I'll take your LaTeX resume, I used it a lot in grad school").
Well, I'm here... but I'm not sure where the rest of us are...
No offense meant to the wonderful HR people who are no doubt out there, but from my experience HR people are good with:

* Processes, procedures and forms

* 401K, health insurance and other benefit programs

* Buying salary surveys

* Finding template bonus programs, performance evaluation programs and hire-a-friend programs. Adjusting them a bit to fit current organization.

* Employment and immigration laws

I've never found them to particularly understand people and relationships. I've worked for 4 years for a corporation where I never once managed to talk to an HR person. Everything was done through support tickets. But even in smaller companies, I found that HR folks are more of systems-people than people-people.
And what will Facebook overlook? Maybe location? Was Facebook's failed acquisition of Foursquare like Yahoo's non acquisition of Google?
You're probably right, but for a significant other just trying to show a level of interest it is probably the easiest place to start and just absorb anything at all about tech.
Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral?

How is this a metric for success?
How Not to post a job posting.
I never implied all the Yahoo engineers are idiots. In fact I explicitly said the opposite: that the quality was uneven. Uneven means some good, some bad.

Also, Viaweb didn't get hosed after being bought by Yahoo. It prospered enormously. I don't bear them any ill will.
You can try Flippa, just sold a site for 5 figures. Everything was smoothly transacted.
I like it as well. Maybe integrate it with existing project management software out there (37signals.com).
"Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers."

Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days.

But why does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?
Laser-Firing Backpack Creates 3D Maps of Building Interiors
Isn't there a contradiction here:

"I don't feel the need for us to be equal. If feel that the idea that we're not is often a cop out..."

If the evidence supports the conclusion, we must accept it regardless of our personal biases. My general claim is that each person has a range of capabilities that they are born with, and that this range is ~ normally distributed across the population. By definition these ranges do not overlap for all n. This is supported by both anecdotal, population data and experimental animal and human models to the best of my knowledge.

As for your second paragraph, well as you can see I never claimed to the contrary. I completely agree that one should find a method of learning to maximise their individual potential, and that the range of what is possible for an individual is quite large - see my claim above. In fact I am very close to someone working on this very topic - determining the optimal learning strategy for children to maximise their learning rate.
Thank you for your response. I'm aware of OPT and H1B but from what I have heard, H1B is nicknamed indentured servitude for a reason. The employer is often aware of the fact that the employee has to comply with any of his requirements as if the employee gets fired, and he is unable to find another job soon enough, he'd have to leave the country. Furthermore, I'm not exactly fond of the idea of being an employee, I'm leaning more towards self-employment or founding a startup. But I guess beggars can't be choosers.
Ah, "Hacker" news.

Three days ago, Zed Shaw told us how to take a poo. Yesterday, walking. Today, mowing the lawn. Where will it go next?
The ethics of scientific betting
"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered."

In any conflict, there is always a risk of fighting the last battle. I see today many companies, inspired by the lessons learned from the first dot-com bubble, making the opposite mistake; thinking that they need to be a technology company when they're really a experience providing company.

Twitter is the refutation to pg's thesis. Despite their initial technical incompetence, they managed to attract a top-notch technical team because they managed to deliver a crawl-over-broken-glass experience (it's so compelling people are willing to crawl over broken glass to experience it, see also: craigslist, plentyoffish).

It was interesting attending the YC work at a startup day and seeing RethinkDB present. Their pitch, in not as many words was basically "Look, we're the only company here that is actually working on a problem that demands world-class engineers (in the non-debased sense of the term)". For most of the other startups, despite all their bluster, the technology platform they were using was commoditized and technology was not their differentiating factor.
Definitely not at the college that puts you 200k in debt.
Not everyone goes to Harvard.
What most developers who code in Java does is to use object pool and manage memory manually, its a huge pain in the butt.

How is this different from C++? Oh yeah, instead of objects you get "big blocks of RAM".
Respect for the end-user.
I prefer my possible future employers to contradict themselves in the posting rather than after I've started working for them. Makes it less messy when you decide you don't want to work for them.
Yeah. Maybe he meant? - "The pursuit of short term profit is a common theme in all of the documentaries I have listed, which is what ultimately led to the predicament we are in today."

Meaning that instead of building a brand that people trust and will bring in wealth for years, they are using tricks to swindle people and make a lot of money in the here and now. Like what the mortgage companies did before the recession.
I wouldn't say I deify him but that is a fair point, it would be easy to do so though so one must always reflect.
Tens years from now, will you be writing the same article with the title "what happened to Google?". I'd say likely. Companies come and go. Just like assuming Facebook is the THE social graph because somewhere somehow another entrepreneur is working on that next Facebook or Google.
mail / calendar: try Zoho applications. They're not as great, but they're quickly getting to a really good quality. I'm quite happy with what they're offering and considering moving my domain's emails there. Especially now that they've got basically everything included there - document viewers, notes, planners, etc.
>I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample

Check, but it's quite far off from being Yahoo and IMO wouldn't add to this article.
They can't do any worse than the N-Gage
Presuming you're from the US it seems that HR fills a somewhat different role over there. The people I know in HR in Denmark are very people oriented.

the point remains the same though. I don't think hackers would be very good at processes, procedures and forms.

Hackers create, this is administration.
But not to everyone. One of the benefits of working in SoMa is that people who care about good food can get it, and people who just want to grab a burrito from the taco truck can do that too.
In Italian is almost like that: "tu" (familiar) and "voi" (very formal) or "lei" (less formal)
Three Simple Changes to Get America Back on It's Feet
Warning! Pictures contain EXIF data. Camera phones frequently geo tag photos.

In other news, your computer broadcasts an IP address.