skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:  What if I suck at consulting?
I'm a undergrad always looking to earn some extra money on the side. I often come across potential consulting jobs, but they usually are outside the scope of things I've done before. My question (and fear) is this:

What happens if I deliver a crappy product?

I understand I miss out on future work with said client. Beyond that, what are the consequences?

There may not be very big consequences. New clients = new start. Over time I figure it out. Yet I still feel like it's a risk to take on a project that I might not be able to handle. I like to take pride in my work. What are some experiences you've had with delivering a half-baked product?
Last I checked it wasn't all that difficult to find pictures of boobs on the internet. In fact, last I checked it was very easy, even using the US-based and supposedly-prudish Google.

It's really only facebook that has meaningful anti-boob policies (remember a huge fraction of facebook users are children) and while I am a big fan of boobs I don't think they would particularly enhance the facebook user experience.
5 Popular Startups and How They Got Funding
More people died from the 1976 flu vaccine than died from the 1976 flu. You seem to imply that the government should be able to dictate what people put in their bodies for the good of all of society, which is the antithesis of freedom as I see it.
Don't Get Excited About Android Tablets -- Yet
One of the main things that distinguishes sparklines from other small graphs is that they are "word sized" and can be integrated into a line of text. Because of this, the graphs tend to be wider than they are tall and also have a very clean appearance to them (not lot of background color or other "chart junk" as Tufte calls them).

I would say what you linked to would not be considered sparklines from the above.
Google Instant + Wikipedia = WikInstant.com
Inspired by the idea of ytinstant.com (instant youtube), I've built this during a rainy Sunday.
WikInstant.com will let you search very quickly through Wikipedia.
It's still very beta so all the feedback is more than welcome. Don't hesitate to share any code optimizations! Hope you like the concept :)
The words that leap out at me from the five-star list are "never" and "always". If ever a piece of data underscored the value of consistency, it's that.
From what I'm hearing, Android Market is the one that needs help with their search.
The Data Analysis BriefBook
I just have a gut feeling that Ruby will be a significant language for iOS/OS X development going forward. I really hope so anyway, even in its present state MacRuby is insanely fast against any other Ruby implementation. With the the resources of Apple behind it, the Ruby VM ecosystem will benefit greatly from thing like AOT MacRuby is bringing into the game.

I've looked on with envy at how Node.js is getting such a boost by leveraging a component of a heavily developed consumer product. Node.js gets such incredible performance for free because of the JS VM arms race. If Ruby has the weight of a giant behind it, hopefully it will experience a similar wave.
IMO Ruby is a lot better suited to async programming than JS, as it has fibers for example, making it easy to untangle the nested, continuation passing style of async code.

Ruby is such a beautiful, productive language, it really deserves a giant like Apple throwing their weight behind it.
haha, it matches my app's 5 star and 1 star reviews surprisingly well.

Most apps settle into the 3 star range for that reason.
> quite off-topic ...

On the contrary, under "What to Submit" in the Hacker News Guidelines, we find:

> ... anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

And, yes, it is interesting.

One thing I wonder about: apparently Albanian has the c-cedilla that is also found in French. It was my understanding that the cedilla was originally a small "s" drawn under the "c", to show that it is to be pronounced like an "s". However, according to this article, Albanian pronounces "s" much the way English does, but the c-cedilla is like English "ch". So it seems that, at some point in the distant past, Albanians began writing little "s" marks to show that a "c" is not pronounced like "s". I wonder why.

[EDIT: The Wikipedia article on cedilla is loaded with information. In particular, it appears that I was wrong; a cedilla is not derived from an "s", but rather a "z".]
Interesting. Could you cite some specific examples?
It's pretty straightforward to observe how iPhone's Safari is accelerated while Androids is not by using CSS 3D transforms.

Google's original 2D layer (Skia) can only render affine transforms and not perspective transforms in webkit (largely because it just hasn't been configured in WebCore). Mobile Safari can in fact render perspective transforms indicating that it is using a different graphics engine than Skia (in fact Apple's documentation says that it is hardware accelerated).

While this is only concerning the browser it allows for some benchmarks - try any transitions or 3D transforms in the browser and you'll find them much faster on the iPhone. Additionally Skia, which is used in Android's browser is used elsewhere in Android as well so its performance characteristics are more broadly relevant beyond just web browsing.
How well do you know the inner workings of all of the tools you use on a daily basis? Obviously you have a mental model of them. But is it accurate enough to make a similar kind of distinction between a web browser and a search engine?
Lack of vitamin D possible cause of schizophrenia
Jesus man... you don't get why simple maintenance is good engineering? You've got everyone cringing.
Well, templates is another issue, mixed with data island may make it more verbose.

The idea of the data island is to have the data separated from the content and let consumers use the data whenever they need it. I am now studying the possibility to use a link tag and have the data island external, like rss/atom to save bandwidth when 90% of consumers won't care about the data. And for those who care, they just load the external link and there you have it, all the data without scraping.
Prostitution is 100% legal here in Australia so long as a number of rules are followed. No soliciting near churches / residential areas.

It's safe, the workers are protected by law, they declare and pay their taxes. The brothels pay their taxes, local services are improved as a result.

It's a no-brainer, those who want the service can get it in a safe manner, those who do not still benefit from the taxes that are paid.
I wrote a distributed sat-solver in Erlang (good old fashioned search problem). It was my intro project to get to know the language. Has been great fun and now Erlang is in charge of computers talking to each other while Java takes care of the heavy lifting. Also a similar problem solved with Erlang (nothing to do with me), and featured here on hacker news...

http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/08/tour-of-preach-distributed-er...

Great stuff. Erlang may make you smile (again).
Quote that sums up the article:

The study, published this week in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry, used Denmark’s blood bank, which contains samples from almost every baby born in the country since 1982. It compared the blood of 424 people who developed schizophrenia to an equal number of those who did not.

The lead author, renowned schizophrenia researcher John McGrath, found that babies with a low level of the vitamin during fetal development and infancy had nearly two times the chance of developing the disease.
Inspired by the idea of ytinstant.com (instant youtube), I've built this during a rainy Sunday.
WikInstant.com will let you search very quickly through Wikipedia.
It's still very beta so all the feedback is more than welcome. Don't hesitate to share any code optimizations! Hope you like the concept :)
The web outside of Facebook and the like? I don’t think so. It seems to me that the US have one of the more liberal laws with regard to that.

I’m also not sure whether stricter rules on Facebook and similar sites ruins anything. If you want to there are always ways to get nude pictures of yourself on the web. Use tumblr or Blogger or Flickr or whatever else.
Nothing is going to fall apart if you write everything in full .txt files. Word, iWork, Google Docs, and generally everything will open the file and it isn't formated with the likes of Word.

If you feel truly and honestly feel that you need to use a piece of software to appease a group of people, you have some deep seated issues with creativity. Of course I use the word you in reference to people who feel this way and not to anyone in the thread directly.
- we wrote the backend of http://bidit.eu in Erlang (front end in Rails)
- we're writing the backend for a TV co-viewing chat application for the iPad in Erlang right now
- we're rolling out a new Nitrogen-powered website for Inaka Networks this weekend
craigslist, yahoo answers
I rather use Javascript and the Nitro engine (like google's V8) and explode the iOS ecosystem ten-fold of what objective-C has done already.

Palm is already betting on JS, google too, so it is just a matter of time when the mobile world uses a flavor of JS for apps.
> Yes, this is the nasty little secret at the heart of feminism.

The straw man version of feminism you hold in your head is not the one that exists in real life. Google "patriarchy hurts men, too".
The problem with illegal prostitution and drugs for that matter is that since they are illegal a lot of other illegal activities come along with it. In the case of prostitution you have kidnapping, violence, and forcing people into underage sex (and from what I've read most prostitutes start very very early by being forced into it). If the girl is already doing something illegal and gets beat by her pimp what is she going to do? Pimps prey on this thought that there is nothing she can do.

Drugs are similar in that by making them illegal you bring in gangs, guns, and even move violence. If someones pot dealer screws them over what is their only recourse? Violence. You also have the violence of territory to sell on, etc...

IMHO, the illegality of things like drugs and prostitution actually causes the social effects to be worse then if they were legal.
I use Word from time to time (but not if I don’t have to) because I don’t want to be a total douchebag. Life involves compromises. Working together with other people involves compromises. I can’t always convince everyone that we really should be using something different.

Oh, and while I am more than willing to agree with you that Word sucks I have no qualms using and liking other software which ultimately doesn’t give me text files. I absolutely adore InDesign and see no reason why I shouldn’t.
Sorry, but give me a f*cking break. This is terrible "science" on a trivial topic from an utterly pedestrian institution. A total waste of tax payers money. But worse - far worse - is that this is being broadcast as science. It gives science and scientists a bad name.

I really really wish people would a) stop doing this kind of "research" and b) the media recognise this kind of nonsense for what it is.
Anyone who thinks that thieves want the contents of their hard drive, rather than the machine itself has an awfully high opinion of his own self-worth. Most thefts off that type are all about the hardware. We use whole-drive encryption because the pain surrounding the accidental disclosure of client data is so great. (I work for a bank.)

The biggest problem? If certain system files become corrupt you lose the whole disk. It's not a decision to be taken lightly.
there are different ways of pursuing public health.

and just saying public health efforts were successful is not the same as proving that coercion improves health more than cooperation and at a reasonable cost

I can restrict everyone to their homes and stop all disease transmission. yeeaa, we found the correct approach. not
how big or how cool should a project be to warrant putting it in the list?

Work on the assumption that anyone reading this is not going to actually look at more than one of your projects. Assume by sod's law that whichever one they look at will be the weakest, and they will judge you entirely based on that project. So leave off anything that you wouldn't be comfortable basing your entire reputation on.

Also, leave off school projects.
I raised the same question as the the first commenter on this post a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341852
I think most people bought it as an annoying joke gift for their friends. I know I did.
I'm sorry but Heroku is far from being free, unless you mean free as in Free Software.

Google App Engine is another awesome PaaS which is really free, because the free quotas are huge compared to Heroku's tiny 5MB database.
Facebook is developing a great places database
Arduino - "We are cooking something new for you."
Humans are not automatic models maker.

That being said, it would be interesting to see how beginners learn and explicate their models of how to use a computer.
When were computers fast enough? Each computer I've gotten is exactly as fast as the previous one, from the 100 MHz pentium I had in 97 to the quad core I have now. Programs do more things, but that's why the speed has remained the same.

My only hope that this will change is with SSDs. I swapped my laptop's SSD for a HDD and now it's a dog, which reminded me how big the difference in performance is.
We can debate this all day probably, but slow-playing is not a valid strategy if you actually want to make money. By not betting in early rounds you are giving up a lot of value in the hand. And more importantly you are not setting the appropriate price for other players to continue in the hand. Very few hands that are best on the flop are unbeatable on the river. Unless you can put your opponent on a very tight range of hands, it's not a good idea to slow-play, and I rarely do it. I've had much better success just betting for value.
Isn't that a line in the movie Boiler Room?
http://goo.gl/IM7r
Lets just hope it doesn't turn into another JScript or MSJVM,
All the pocari sweat I can drink? Sold!

Hajimemashite
Good parsing of the numbers here.

The stat that is traditionally used to show socioeconomic diversity (or lack thereof) is the % of students receiving Pell Grants, and in this department Yale remains weak, but it's not for lack of effort...

While median / average family income at Yale remains fairly high, financial aid is huge. I'm someone who gets crushed in the fuzzy middle range, but I still appreciate its generous policies. Wish that they were more generous, or that the cost of living in the greater Boston area was lower so that my family income was lower and aid was correspondingly higher. That's one big bummer - something reasonable in one part of the country might make you rich in Oklahoma, but that can't be, or isn't, taken into account.

:(
GnuCash http://www.gnucash.org/ works well as a simple (personal) accounting system and I believe it will do what you are asking. If not, you can augment it. :-)

The user interface is somewhat quirky - I'm not an accountant, so part of that may be just my lack of knowledge. The interface it isn't a clone of QuickBooks, so accountants will find it quirky too.

One thing that I found really nice about GnuCash that I didn't find in QB (as of a couple revisions ago) is that you can make sub-accounts. I've used this for "restricted funds" that are co-mingled in a single savings or checking account. GnuCash rolls up the sub-account balances into the primary account's balance so you can reconcile your bank statements directly against the account/sub-accounts.
It would be fun to expose this data (perhaps with a few additional dimensions?) and hack up an extension/greasemonkey script to rip out reviews that fit a certain criteria.
Scrolling on an Evo or a Droid X is choppy, especially on a large webpage (zooming in and out as well). It's incredibly noticeable when comparing the most high-end Android devices next to an iPhone 4. If this isn't a priority, I don't know what is.
If I could do things over, I think I might have given economics a try. Unless you really want to do "CS" kinds of stuff as a career, you can figure out programming on your own, most likely.
Never confuse microdata or microformats for API substitutes.
Microsoft antipiracy efforts caught up in Russian political scandal
Ars: Weird Science programs its future robot overlords to deceive
Podiatrists are doctors to the same degree that dentists are doctors. (Which is to say, they don't obtain the same degree obtained by physicians.) I think that research prestige is orthogonal to clinical prestige. Even then, I think that clinical fields do not have a linear order of prestige. It's more like individuals carry their own prestige (for research or for patient care).
You can really tell that erlang evolved to run self sufficient on special hardware and not in a supportive unix environment.

Well yeah, it was written to run telephony equipment. It's not a general purpose language, though it has been moving that way.
Too bad I'm not a software hacker, and don't speak Japanese!

I have a lot of experience selling Pocky and Ramune to teenagers, and speak Chinese fairly well, have studied in China... anyhow.

Sounds like great fun. Share stories, whoever joins!
That is a definitely a good idea. I will look into it!
At least in my experience you're usually ok so long as you refund any money you've taken from them, every gig is a learning experience.
Good idea. I think that is totally possible through HTML5 right?
Would you pay money for this?
It's absolutely critical that he a) realize that there are much, much more "badass" people out there, and b) learn from them. College is a good way to do that, but not the only way.
Thanks. This is awesome. I think I will continue working through others too.
Microformats.org abuses <abbr> and title="", hurting usability and accessibility.

Microdata provides a less horrific way to express the data in question.
even if these schol projects were proposed by me to the teacher (not like HW assignment #3 from CS101)?
In my experience the #1 cause of "crashes" is being killed by the memory watchdog. An app I publish deals with photos, and I ran into such a problem with people trying to load in massive photos that I had to enforce an artificial pixel-size cap to stop it.

The iPad has a memory fragmentation problem. The longer the unit is up, the less you can guarantee that a request for a large amount of memory won't be met with a watchdog kill. What works once when it's from a fresh boot may not work a few days or a few weeks later.
One thing that worries me about the android-as-tablet platform is that it's one space where a less strict control of the OS/hardware combinations means that there will be a lot of BAD products that come out, especially those that are racing out now before Google has released what sounds like nicely polished updates to Android.

I hope they don't do serious damage to the branding / concept of the Google Android tablet-sphere, since I am sure that a lot of great innovation could come from the combination of freely innovating companies and great Google software.
VOIP FREE - A guide to stealing(kind of) home phone service
Hope you guys will check out my most recent blog post and my new site!
That doesn't make sense. Care to elaborate?
The words that leap out at me from the one-star list are "actually" and "says", words indicating that real behavior differed from expected/advertised behavior. The app says X but actually does Y, and therefore sucks. This strongly underscores the value of consistency between what your customers think they're getting and what you actually deliver.
Post your resume here for more feedback... or e-mail me, happy to offer suggestions.

It's hard to say which projects you should or should not post without having some exposure to the scales you are talking about. What I can say from firsthand experience, though, is that school projects are definitely great if they showcase interesting thinking or ability.

Something isn't bad or worthless just because it was done for a class; plenty of companies, even, developed that way.
This was definitely an interesting case - I think I am angry at MSFT for not trying to do more to stand behind civil society groups.

For those interested, here is a direct link to the NYT article that Engadget just has a blurb about: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/world/europe/12raids.html?...
Is apple going to let people compete in this space? Or is this a "system" level thing like the dialer that can't be replaced? Seems like someone could do a great job here.

Also, how does google docs fair on the iPad? Anyone given it a shot? How about vim on a jailbroken device? Could be fun..

There is a lot of ballyhoo about the iPad being only for consumption but I think people are dying to create on these things. If only they are given the tools!
I think it's only make sense for average people who don't need to exploit computers to the nth degrees.

But for people who require more power, the computer should shift to a system that let them easily learn and than manipulate that power, like emacs or like early computers that create whole generation of hackers.

For most people, computers are an appliance, not a tool that you master over time. It is awesome that computers are progressing to that "easy" way, but it is not so awesome when other dimension of computers as tool slip away. It's like the computer becoming more easier for grandma while raising the barrier of entry for those who want to learn and create on the computer.
Why do apps get killed for requesting memory? Can't malloc return NULL and the app act accordingly ("your picture is too big, so i am not going to edit it").

Now, it seems most people never handle malloc returning NULL, and "you can't do this today" is a bad user experience. But crashing is what happens in the first case anyway, and being auto-killed is a bad experience too.
Let me clarify, my comment was in regards to personal exploration and nothing beyond that. Most add-ons have a basic, very limited, free option. The same goes for the pricing on Heroku's platform. If you're rockin' an app that needs to be production scale, baseline won't cut it on Heroku; frankly, you get what you pay for so I don't expect it to be free.

Point for point, GAE's baseline quotas are obviously better but it's not an apples to apples comparison in my opinion.
with careful consideration and scientific rigor, I'm sure
Start-ups are where the real job-creation is
Possible, but very unlikely. More education is good advice either way.
I don't consider this a Facebook security flaw. The person with the Facebook account added your email address to their profile.

It's tantamount to them giving you a copy of their house key, you using it to get into the house, and then stating that there is a security flaw in the door.
You're clueless. That's OK - all high school seniors are.

Go to college. You'll have fun. You'll grow up. You'll make friends that you'll have forever. You'll learn more than you think.