skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Give it time. Marijuana was legal; then it wasn't; and now after many decades, various stages of re-legalization are proceeding via legislation and ballot measures.

Prostitution was once legal in many jurisdictions where it's illegal now; some jurisdictions have tried forms of re-legalization, or tacit acceptance in various kinds of 'red-light districts' (real or virtual), sometimes as a means of sex-trafficking harm-reduction.

In 2008, a San Francisco proposition to decriminalize prostitution got a 42% 'yes' vote.

'Everyone' except for some rather heartless criminals is against 'sex trafficking'; views on the more general 'prostitution' are far more varied.
> Whatever the case, when I see a programmer doing a linear search through a linked list, I think you must agree that I'm justified in saying that I have no reason, based on that observation, to trust in that programmer's competence. In fact, I think it could easily be argued that in the absence of additional data, it would actually constitute a reason not to trust the programmer's competence

In Erlang, the most common data structure is the linked list. There's no way to search them other than linearly. You are claiming that in general we should suspect that Erlang programmers are incompetent?
On another note, the Terry Richardson accusations hardly seem to have been proven nor resulted in any prosecution that I know of.

Bashing Tumblr for what they've obviously done is O.K., but TR shouldn't be slandered on account of dubious claims.
Generalization: Entrepreneurs, as a group, come out worse than VC's, as a group, on these types of negotiations. The CEO/Founder is taking a much larger risk, and is much more committed (deeply invested), than the VC's that fund them because the VC's spread their risk across multiple companies. It's a shame that an argument as thin as "taking less salary shows commitment" when the investors are not similarly committed (their salaries remain fat as ever, regardless of their performance). People can get more money, but they can't get more time. And the CEO/Founder generally devotes 3 to 7 years of previous time. The equity upside is not a valid justification for below market wages because investors get that without sacrificing theirs. There needs to be some symmetry in the commitment between CEO's and investors.

$180K/yr for a first-round company ratcheting up with each subsequent round. If you're not raising enough to afford that, then you're not raising enough. Consider delaying the round to create more value if VC's are taking too big a piece of the pie.
not all "adult services" are prostitution.
Even if the decision should be "no", that doesn't make that comment unfunny.
World's hardest Rubiks cube?
If they design one such. With Marco's anti-Microsoft proclivities, such a thing might never see the light of day.
Users can't make up their own sections.
IOS 4.1 won’t transfer HD rentals from the iPhone/iPod touch to a computer
I think you are overestimating our capabilities in terms of logistics and engineering.

That's not to be fatalistic about it, it's just harsh reality that if we knew that a major impact was to take place in 6 months to a years time (which would leave an enormous amount of room for error in terms of things that look really scary but turn out to be misses after all) there would not be much that we'd be able to do about it at all, even if we we could get all the politicians to pull in the same direction for once.

Just imagine, at that distance the difference in trajectory measured versus actual would have be only a fraction of an arc-second to turn an all out disaster in to a spectacular display of fireworks.

So the timeframe within which we can determine with real certainty that there will be a strike and where it will hit is very short, short enough that you could evacuate all you want, you might be sending people in the exact wrong direction.

It's a cosmic crapshoot and the speeds and distances involved are such that we'd need to improve our game considerably before we'll be able to make an accurate prediction.

And then there's the next problem, which would be to convince people that this time the prediction is accurate (see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080129212723.ht... for a nice example).

Against such forces of nature we are but ants, and all our technological achievements of the moment amount to preciously little. It's possible that in the future we'll be able to do something about this sort of event.

My best bet is that we should spread to multiple places in the solar system first, the galaxy at a later point. After all, we have a single point of failure situation here, all our eggs are in this single basket called 'Earth' and if one of these cosmic freight trains hits us hard enough it could well be game over for humanity.
Bankruptcy can happen for a country.

Happy exporting something to Somalia and getting a Somali currency bank check as payment - No?

It's trickier to go bankrupt if your country use somebody else's money. Would you sell to Greece and accept euros you can spend in Germany - Yes ?
Sure, that and they're actually getting smaller. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1190395/Shrinking-Ma...
I must be totally out of touch but I haven't a clue who 'Justin Bieber' is...
Heather Boushey: Why young women earn more than young men
How to Price your Web App
Surprisingly, the other one only has 2 points. This is another example showing how heavily other factors weigh in getting upvoted, as opposed to just purely the content of the website.
He should have stipulated that the HTML5 version must have smooth animation, like the Flash version.
If you live in America then yes, you are fortunately out of touch.

*edit, cannot type
The next two weeks will tell if it's real, but this article might have kicked me into doing a nice little niche webapp :)
This is the most incoherent, vapid, meaningless tripe I have ever seen get on the front page of HN.
Well put. I think there are very few examples of when people actually implemented a spec that didn't provide an immediate, personal benefit.
> The main difficulty in estimating time is that you don't know what you don't know, so you have to actually get into the nitty gritty of implementing it, and if you're smart enough you'll hopefully catch all the requirements before you actually launch it.

That's certainly true for a low-level, high-precision estimate, which you can only make when you've got detailed requirements. Prior to that you still need to be able to deliver an estimate, and the best approach to take is to provide an estimate with Quantified Uncertainty. The phrase is important, because the estimate is for managers and managers are all about quantifying risks, and uncertainty in a development estimate is definitely a risk.

When you say "I don't know how long this will take, because I don't know how much I don't know about the solution" you're giving an estimate with uncertainty, but you're not quantifying the uncertainty. It's got no bounds, it's limitless. Managers can't make any decisions with that, so it's useless information. But if you say "This will take 4 to 8 effort weeks, and I'll be able to give a more precise estimate after 2 effort weeks of investigation" that gives your manager something to work with. You're still uncertain, but you've quantified the bounds on the uncertainty, and decisions can be made. For example, solving the problem might not be worthwhile unless it happens within the next two weeks (eg: to meet a release deadline) so the manager can just delay the work until later.

The trick with this approach is setting the bounds. The man who taught me this style of estimating called it a Surprise Range. The lower bound should be an estimate such that you'd be surprised if it took less effort than that, and the upper bound should be an estimate such that you'd be surprised if it took more effort than that. Given whatever information you have about the requirements, you just keep pushing your bounds until you can honestly say "I really don't think it would take less/more effort than that."

As you get more experienced, you'll naturally start accounting for the unknown unknowns, because your past experiences with them will be nagging in the back of your mind while you're trying to come up with an estimate for some new task. This is especially true if you're estimating work on a project you've worked on before; you'll have a feel for where the trouble spots are and whether or not the task in question is going to get into those spots.

The other trick with this approach is the "more precise estimate after some investigation" bit of the statement. You need to provide some estimate now, buy some investigation time, and commit to another estimate later. Most of the time the second estimate will fall somewhere within the bounds of the first one, but not always, and your manager should be aware of that possibility. But with experience, you'll usually wind up within the original bounds and narrower than the original bounds too, which is quantifiably less uncertainty than before so you can show progress.
Rate our startup: Exorbyte Commerce
Ask HN: How is Loopt doing these days?
They were the hot stuff for a while but I havent heard anything from them for a while, anybody know the situation?
Hello,
Thanks for checking our web site and providing feedback.
We are a Germany-based software startup. After a number of years experimenting with our high-performance database search software in the enterprise market, we have decided we couldn't keep betting our future on the next big custom system deal. So we are going small business all the way with this new service.
The premise of our service is that many online stores have poor catalog search which research shows is one of the top reasons visitors leave without buying (http://tinyurl.com/2ebfw4w). As you can see our hosted search and hosted autocomplete is fully SaaS configurable. We would like to know what do HNers think of it.
Thanks again,
Dan
Or to running over images of children playing in the streets. Also, tourists are going to be really scared when a cab driver just ignores one of those.
Every state has public sector employee unions. The UAW is also in most right-to-work states. But the vast majority of employees (public and private) are not members of those unions and I'm positive that teacher contracts in RTW states are not collectively bargained.
I built something like it a few years ago:

http://drupalmodules.com/module-finder

No autocomplete, though.
You just responded to the developer.

I use SearchYC all the time; it works great.
Fidel: 'Cuban Model Doesn't Even Work For Us Anymore'
From some Rails/Ruby guys (who are also Django people) Rails, and the Rails community gets the same criticism, or at very least the same themes. Python core gets it too, etc, etc. Sooner or later Node.js will get it, and so on.

I think accusing the Django core as being incestuous attributes a lot more malice to what they say and do then is warranted. All communities have scaling issues, and all open source communities have growing pains.

The sad part about this is that people who didn't get "their thing" into core is going to use this as self-validation, even if the idea really was bad to begin with.
Depending on what's at stake, it may be possible to prove that changes were made after the article was written, IF the free hosting keeps - and makes available - reliable access logs.
Europe, nl.
Yes, it's fictional.
...and yet it spoke to me as if the composition of our atmosphere could conspire to produce prismatic arcs of blended color in the sky.

(You're probably strategic in your approach to life, but if this is the most "vapid, meaningless tripe" you've encountered on HN, that speaks volumes about the site, because this article attempts to codify exactly what makes "vapid, meaningless tripe" the currency of our collective culture... if you are strategic in your day job tomorrow and aren't merely swaying in the breeze of office dynamics, I'd love to hear a brief outline of your day if you have the time)
Seems to me the blogger is saying that if you can't get started without the 'just get started!' advice, don't pollute the pool.

If someone is setting out to make a career and betting their whole life on it, then 'just get started' is really bad advice. If someone is testing the waters and wants to find out if a career is for them, then 'just get started' is the perfect advice. There's no quicker way to find out what you're getting into than to get into it.

Yes, you'll likely choke on your first time. We learn from failure better than success. "What doesn't kill you will make you stronger."

I start new hobbies all the time. I just jump in and start playing with it. I've found some that are really nice, and some that I apparently just don't have any innate skill for. (That hasn't actually stopped me on some of them!) And at one point, my current career was just a hobby.

Just get started.
Are we talking about opinions here? If so, I have mine, and: I agree with him. I might spend 500ms waiting for my search results but my greatest annoyance is still having to spend 10 minutes trawling through SEO 'content' to find a legitimate website.
If the Django community is so closed why are over a third of the attendees new to Django? If the community was closed and insular we wouldn't be seeing so many people who are at their first DjangoCon and who are eager to contribute to Django.

The current setup is not perfect. The core team, especially Russel, have been very forthcoming about this. They are openly talking about things that need to change and how to change them.
Some cottage cheese mixed with natural whole milk yogurt and sour cream. A small cup of coffee with a tablet of sugarine.
blekko lets you slash out individual sites from the search results. The exclusion just applies to you so spammers can't downvote reasonable sites. Has been popular to eliminate ehow.com from results. ehow isn't enough over the line for us to ban from the crawl entirely, but a lot of people don't ever want to see them in their results.

we're still in private beta, but happy to give invites to anyone here who wants one. just email me rich at blekko.
What an NFL Training Camp is Really Like
I think #1 is going to experience the most amount of scrutiny. I'll be more conservative if the pre-launch/pre-revenue amount is under 1m. It'll probably be closer to 40-60k
If your site has been down recently, then that's what removed it from search results, not Google Instant.
Except that the unemployment rate for those with a college degree (IE: the "highly skilled") is only at 4.6%.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hDbvr90jK7...

I need to do some more digging for salary implications...anecdotally I know that salaries for top-end software folks are still very high.
A little off topic, but was anyone else bothered by the fact that his picture is overlapping the navigation buttons on Ubuntu Firefox so that I can't click 'Home', 'TL;DR', or 'Archives'? This plus the fact that I'm looking at a web developer's website made me think twice about what he had to say without even having read it.

Edit: having read this, the guy sounds like a hack. While I don't use Tumblr myself, the author makes a lot of baseless assumptions about Tumblr's systems as if they were fact. For all he (or we) know, there might be good technical reasons why things aren't aligned with his own blogging nirvana.

Having been on the author's side of the table (the customer who is also a developer) along with Tumblr's side (the big company with a probably complex back-end), I want to say that when the author makes totally unverified assumptions about how a site's SELECT queries work, pulls percentages out of thin air, and smacks the table and shouting "BUT THIS FEATURE SHOULD BE SO EASY TO IMPLEMENT, ARG, LOOK HOW THEY 'HACKED' IT TOGETHER," it just highlight the author's ignorance.

Edit 2: Wow, bashing them for having their picture taken with a celebrity you don't like? Saying they're a bad service and calling them slackers because they don't have a revenue model yet? Really?! How did this even get on HN?
Wait until you hear the awesome propaganda music we play every morning.
Are they finally fixing their nomenclature?
From Yehuda on twitter: "BTW: Those who have brought up issues with exceptions/status codes re: flushing, you're right, but it's not specific to the fiber solution"
With link-hinting, it's quite possible to be off the page in under 3 seconds. Of course, the percentage of Google users who use link-hinting is... very small.
Sweating Your Way to Success
You can get servers that can house 512GB or 1TB of RAM from HP/Sun/Dell. Scaling out your app servers and scaling up your DB is common in systems that don't need to be truly "web scale".
Of course. If revenues begin to cover our own salaries, then we'll increase to market rates. But until then, we're all committed to making our seed round last as long as humanly possible.
The expected value of working on a startup is positive? Can you support that argument with evidence?
No actual numbers but it's been up and down quite often. What's more important is that the users FEEL the downtime is annoying.
I thought there were bodies of government[1] out there that specialize is certifying companies who use 'inches' and want to mean inches. If you are not certified, I don't think there is a guarantee that what they say is 100% accurate.

[1] http://www.iso.org
The Politics of Bedbugs
To start with, the fact that it's comparing some self-reported statistics between teachers and "other professionals"? And mushing them together into some total minutes worked figure?

They're estimating the hours worked by a teacher at less than 40. I've never met a teacher who put in less than 40 hours.

Then, as I said upthread, the fact that it's mashing young teachers (the topic at hand) together with running-the-clock 64yo teachers really brings it all together. Maybe this explains the sub-40 hour workweek. Unfortunately, a 5-page PDF report with 4 graphs doesn't summarize the be-all of teaching.
Good thing someone invented the Uniform Commercial Code to solve this problem, then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code
a) was also the case previously

a) and b) contradict each other
So no Indians can produce quality code? I find my experiences suggest the opposite.
The apps stuff is dead on, even Drupal does this better (but they have their own problems), the "Design decision needed" and "wontfix" attitude is another one of those 'signals to the community', for the most part the community is forced to patch the django core after each release in order to keep going.

It's a pity, django could go a lot faster than it does. I would not be surprised at all to see a mambo / joomla style fork happening to django if the core team does not heed these warnings.
Jeez, they gotta just get it out there.

The one thing that is almost certain is that whatever they schedule for 2012 will probably not appear in 2012 but rather in 2014 or 2016 by which time several more "essential" features will have made it into Java and hence we will be reading a blog post about how it is now clear that the original schedule wasn't realistic and we should decide whether to split the release or combine the schedule with that of the newly acquired Duke Nukem forever and go for a big 2020 splash. Sigh.

Right now, JDK7 is seeming to me a lot like Microsoft's Vista release.
Ask HN: Real estate tech start up looking for a co-founder
I am a YC alum (S'08) and am looking for a technical co-founder to work on a start up with myself and my business co-founder. The start up is in the real estate space, and has a very unique/compelling idea. We are based in SF and NYC. The product is already live and built on Django, MySQL, MongoDB. We are looking to speed up our development cycles and experiment with a few ideas to identify a monetization strategy and would like to bring another person to help us get there quicker.

Any suggestions on how we can go about finding a third technical co-founder?
How can scientific experiments help us to answer questions of philosophy?
I've been wanting to hear more about this type of business, but don't really know a good source that covers it. For example, the other day there was a story on here about a site that had just reached 200 subscribers paying $10/month after I believe 2 years. It was a lot of work and more successful than most apps will ever be. It was a really interesting read, but got me thinking: wouldn't it have been easier/more profitable to get into e-commerce?
America's Clothing Inflation
I wonder what is better, being unemployed, or being employed at minimum wage being saddled with tons of debt from a useless education...
It's a lot easier to get the 'top stuff' from the community to the top if it the core team is inclusive rather than exclusive.

The examples you give are from communities that have for the most part learned how to deal with those issues (python itself especially, in the talk GvR is actually quoted as having reversed his position on specifically that point).

Communities tend to be one or more orders of magnitude larger than the core team of most projects, and to disregard such an enormous pool of talent is a loss. So what if 90% is junk, let the community sort it out and come to a consensus on which things deserve to be part of contrib or core, and then respect that decision, unless there are really earth shattering reasons not to.
Letter to a young pl enthusiast
You have a valid point but I'm guessing they avoided kl-divergence because it's 1) harder to explain 2) it's not symmetric, e.g. kl(asian, white) != kl(white, asian) 3) it needs a smoothing function for comparing distributions where not every element is in both distributions.
Please Review my Startup: Synnk.com
This is actually somewhere in between a startup and a side project. It's for those times you want to get together, but aren't sure when, where, or even who will be there. The group can propose options and vote on them.

I posted it a while back, but have done a total redesign and added some important improvements since then.

Please try it out! Thanks for any advice or feedback.
Either (a) there were legal changes in Apple's contracts with the record labels, or (b) they might get be sued for enabling this feature.
I know, I'm a member of python-core, and I was happy with the change. And Django core is here, and listening, and was in the audience of the talk.

It's growing pains - and even python-core, despite guido's recent change of mind, is still learning, and finding ways to reduce friction. Django core is listening, and will change. There's nothing much to worry about.

And if they don't, they die, and we move on (see, past python web frameworks, and other things which wander into the woods to die).
Clickable: http://synnk.com
The importance of getting started in anything boils down to this:

Until you start, you only have other people's knowledge to work with. You're always going to value firsthand information more than what you can read in a book, or on HN, or whatever.

Until you start, your skills won't improve because there's nothing to sharpen them.

Of course, you should look before you leap. You don't want to "just start" by quitting your job with only two weeks of living expenses saved and nothing more than a "Learn Ruby!" book tucked under your arm.

But you can decide that, tonight, and every night, you're going to put at least 60 minutes into making progress on whatever you want to do, whether it's learning programming, starting your project, planning your business or anything in between.