skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
iStockPhoto - semantic, allows for moderately easy refining
That may be true. Haven't looked into it myself. (I didn't downvote you BTW).

I think the problem is that the world simply cannot sustain the entirety of its population living with first-world standards. Better medicine in developing countries makes this worse since they now have as many children as before, but more of them survive - taking up resources. The global warming alarmists are probably keen to bring down the standards of the first world and handing it over to the rest of the world via carbon credits and the like. That strikes me as a traitorous view to take given that most of them are from the first world.
> 75% of males approached said yes; 0 females did.

> Note too that variations among individuals are greater than variations between groups

This is actually my main problem with the idea. A few women will be on board with the campaign, but most women will feel like they're being "sold" to the men without really liking that idea. Secondarily, doubling the women/men ratio won't come close to doubling any particular guy's chances of having sex. So it's unfair and misleading to almost everyone.
Just read through this Scheme Edition: http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-bootstr...
+1 for the rating advice. Make the beer ratings 0 to 10.
"I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals."

The dilemma is that human language is staggeringly ambiguous. This works because human beings have an extremely sophisticated model of other human beings in their head and a really good pattern matching facility, which makes us really good at selecting the intended interpretation without even noticing the ambiguities. Presented with the languages we use to instruct computers, designed to be perfectly unambiguous, normal humans quickly get upset that the computer doesn't understand them if they veer the slightest bit from the tightrope of a language they're given to use.

In other words, if you have a computer that faithfully and consistently passes the Turing Test, you may have something. Otherwise, pointing and grunting might be less frustrating for normal people.

Another aside: pointing or at least gesturing is much better than even the perfect language interface for editing a photo or playing a video game. So it depends on the application.
When men are in general an oppressed group, you can call me and I will be excited about questions like this.
Regarding "to each their own": Programmers aren't necessarily the best source for an objective view on productivity. This here is a nice example of CS students claiming subjectively which programming style they found easier, contrasted by a more objective comparison of the actual number of bugs in the code in each programming style:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4070

Studies like this tell me to never trust the opinion of a developer about programming languages and programming styles. In some cases not even my own. ;) Of course in this case we had not very experienced developers, but if we look at what expert developers often claim and how widely opinions differ I often have the impression that expert developers' fundamental opinions about programming languages aren't much better than that of a student.
"I think the comparison is close as sometimes the product people are the MBA people."

One of the founding principles of Y Combinator is to make the Hackers the product people.
Maybe there's something to be said for those too lazy to get involved or to try and make a difference. Dave suggested he did get involved, he turned up to usergroups, created new GitHub projects in C#, what did you do?

I'm hanging around because while I don't seem to need the extreme, passionate, awesome, 5-million committer projects to keep me happy, I still contribute something.

http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/dotnet-zombies...
Nice work. One thing that confused me: I register for an account and sign in, but when I try to comment on a beer, it asks me to login through Disqus or Facebook or OpenID, etc. Having 2 different authentication schemes in the same site is jarring.
In some contexts, I belive they called those "National Security Letters".
You will definitely need to profile/optimize and hand code some queries. I ran into a bad one a while back (2.2.2):

@foo = Foo.create
@bars = Bar.find_all_by_some_attribute(:a)
@foo.bars = @bars #--> slow!

http://kevinlochner.com/rails-performance-inefficiencies
This guy totally called it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704293 :)
I agree with that call for students thinking twice before dropping out for a startup. If everyone is leaving school to start companies, just go the other direction. This is just a classical case of market psychology. You never want to enter the tail-end of a big wave of risk-taking like this. Education is one of the lowest risk, highest return investment you'll ever make.
Yet another blog post for the sake of a blog post.

Every educated software engineer know, that by respecting and following a fundamental programming methodologies, such as data-abstraction, modularity, encapsulation of details, and other basic techniques for managing the complexity of large systems, you will get maintainability and programmer-friendliness for free.

The problem is - most of in-house back-end developers and their public teachers doesn't have a even a basic engineering education.

People who have managed to understand the ideas on which the SICP book is based upon, let alone MIT graduates, never write such long but empty posts.
Intranets
How reify works, and how to write a custom type in Clojure
I read this and all I can say is the education system is not creating entrepreneurs. I belive an entrepreneur is a person who has clear goals and sheer determination. Persistance is the key to success, you dont have to go to harvard to become wealthy... you just need to know what you want and the world will bend around you!... Keep networking and you can allways find people who can help make your dream into a reality!
Which "UX guys" are these you’re thinking of, who don't have a competent understanding of graphic design? I posit that it is irresponsible to claim to be a "UX guy" and not try to learn quite a bit about spatial hierarchies, data presentation, human response to colors and visual relationships, etc.
Long lines mark the iPhone 4 launch in China today
My suggestion would be to take the "Added" activities off the main feed, as it looks a little redundant to say "Someone drank [X beer]", immediately followed by "Someone added [X beer]".

Besides that, on the About page, the word "remember" is misspelled and I would capitalize Miller/Coors/Bud to make it look more professional.

But I like the idea!
At the start of the program there is a for/in loop that goes over the properties of the canvas context, and adds a new property, with a shorter name, for each of them. It took some experimenting to find an abbreviation algorithm that doesn't have clashes on any of the methods we use---I ended up using the first letter of the name plus the the 7th letter, if any. So lineTo becomes l, and quadraticCurveTo becomes qt. I can then use these short names to actually access the methods---without ever having written out the full name.

Clever.
Around this same time frame, we had troubles with our site and domain(http://sleep.fm). Whatever it was brought our site down. I wonder if anyone else experienced an attack or had issues around same time frame with their site?
I've had very bad luck with routers. Apple Airport Expresses freeze up every week or two, I bought one horrible Netgear, etc.

Finally I did some searching and found that Buffalo makes routers which ship with stock openwrt firmware.

I bought one (it was $70) and it's worked wonderfully. It has only crashed once in the 3 months I've owned it.

I wish I'd kept the original Linksys router I bought 10 years ago and replaced when I upgraded to "G" a few years later. It never crashed.
I think there is a market position for this service. If you are currently a non-savvy blogger, then the current feedburner homepage:
http://feedburner.google.com/
is practically indecipherable and unlikely to result in a lot of conversions.
I also believe that a smaller operator who concentrates on adding value to a product such as this would have a high chance of success versus Google where a product such as this can, and probably will, be easily lost in terms of internal development priorities and management attention.
Why was this voted down so harshly?
How to Raise Boys that Read
Article in the WSJ titled "How to Raise Boys Who Read". Ultimate premise is "Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially."

So, question to the hackers from a new father, did you grow up playing video games or reading? Do you see one as mutually exclusive to the other?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704271804575405511702112290.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTThirdBucket
Sometimes it takes courage to quit school, sometimes it takes courage to stick with it. Instead of outright quitting I'd recommend using the resources (discounted housing, compute resources, etc.) with a light course load while bootstrapping.
It's really so much simpler... they are both right.

While in college, start a startup!

It's the optimal time of your life where taking such a risk is really no risk at all. If your idea takes-off, great, figure out what to do then. For everyone else, finish your degree and try again soon (you'll be that much more experienced).
If they're describing the Moody paper I'm thinking of, this is _Chains of Affection_.

Here's a link (PDF!): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.131...
Writing About Michael Jackson for Thesis, Dissertation and Music Term Papers
Term papers or theses about Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, are a common writing assignment, especially one year after his death. Many students will find this assignment, an interesting one. By understanding how to incorporate information into the assignment, they will be able to submit a well written document.
Ask HN: Two VC pitch videos. Which one is better?
We're just about to launch our new startup, Page99Test.com, and we're submitting an application to a startup competition. If our application gets their attention, we'll be invited to pitch to VCs.

We'd really like to get invited to pitch. But getting that invitation will depend on submitting a great demo/commercial that explains our solution to our customers.

That's where we need your help, please.

Can you go to http://page99test.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/we-need-your-opinion-on-2-demos-for-vc-pitch-contest/. You'll find two 2-minute videos there.

Please watch the videos and tell us which you prefer. It'd be great to hear WHY you prefer the one you do, too --- or any other tips you might have for us.

Much appreciated,
Lance, Steven & Joanna at Page99Test
Yeah, I was surprised not to see your sample XML in the article.

I really hope this appeal gains some traction. Pinning and jump-lists should be seen as Windows 7 features, not IE9 features (which runs on Vista too).
Another word for programmers who "make products for people who make products" are systems programmers.

I'm sure Apple values systems programmers. And Google. And Oracle (at least they certainly should). Microsoft could not possibly build their products without systems programmers. Amazon could not have created its cloud products without systems programmers.

In Apple's case, their products would be impossible without the capabilities that the systems people build. Without an operating system that they could strip down and fit on a phone, while keeping much of its core functionality, no iPhone. Likewise if they didn't have the technology underlying Safari under their control.

Much of the eye candy that wowed people in Mac OS X came as a thin layer on top of the technology built by systems programmers. Like the graphics APIs underlying Expose. And the fast, system wide indexing behind Spotlight.

So, if you want to be appreciated as someone who "makes products for people who make products," work for a software company that makes products requiring innovation in systems software.
haters gonna hate, players gonna play and the FBI is gonna investigate
Clickable:

http://page99test.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/we-need-your-opin...
The 3 Keys to Success with Freemium
Comments (on both questions and answers) cannot be edited by anyone except the author, but can be made at any time.

Questions and answers can be edited by anyone with enough rep, and a clear and detailed edit history is shown, including the names of all those involved. Anyone with enough rep or the author himself can also roll back any edits with two clicks.

It works very well, in my experience. I don't know what anyone is complaining about.

Moreover, editorial feedback on how the website works can be done on a "meta" site that is linked with the stack site in question.
Didn't like the music on #2 - too aggressive. Music from first was less 'in your face'.

Both could stand to be a bit shorter, imv. The 'setup' phase is a bit too long, and I don't see enough of what the feedback process is to help improve my writing.

Also, I think the 'improve your writing, connect with readers, self publish' angle should be pushed more than 'have agents clamoring at your door to publish you'. The notion of being 'published' is going out of style some, and you have an opp to stand as an agent of change for the self-published and indie publishing revolutions.

Good luck.
I agree with many of the things said in the article.

I'm so annoyed with people who make open source projects that don't comply to the principles that Zed listed. (Clear code, documentation, easy to get started, reasonable defaults, support, etc.) It happens so often that I interact with such OSS projects and it's so hard to work with them.

I feel bad for all the honest effort that these people put into the core parts of their OSS projects, without realizing that if they concentrated a bit more on the things that Zed mentioned, their project would become so much easier and fun to work with, and they'd have a bigger healthier community around it.

<Sociopathic rant> Sometimes when I see one of these projects, (let's call it, as an example, project FooBar and say that it converts between image formats,) I fantasize about forking the project, fixing up all the documentation to be good, make a good UI, give installers, make a nice logo, etc. Then rename it, sell it as a commercial project and become a millionaire, without crediting the authors of FooBar. Then I will drive in my fancy car to visit the core developers, and I will show them a wad of $100 notes and tell them: "You see this? This could have been yours. This could have been yours if only you documented your freaking code. You worked so hard on this code, and if you would have only taken care of the things around it, like documentation and binaries and design and UX, you could have made a lot of money. But you didn't. You suck." Then maybe for their next project they'll write freaking documetation. </Sociopathic rant>
I see this column is called Critic's Notebook, but I was mildly irritated by the author's relentless and pointless negativity.

Other than that, fascinating.
Yeah, exactly right.

I've been having that though lately that opensource software has been killed by Apple and its appstore.

Before the appstore, open source software was the future, and the appstore killed that dream. Now, everybody is coding apps to make money on the app-stores.

IMHO the Open Source revolution _is_ over.
It didn't deserve -1, but I guess it was downvoted because it's wrong?

Why would the existence of this feature lead to a remote compromise? The specific implementation maybe, but the idea??
I feel your pain writing SQL Queries is bug prone exercise. And trying to optimize a SQL query shows that it is a leaky abstraction.

Things that I think are a better option are:

1. Object Oriented Databases (OODB) A database that behaves like your objects. I like Gemston(Ruby & smalltalk) and db4o (java & .Net)

2. Graph databases: http://neo4j.org/
Neo4j is a graph database. It is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables. A graph (mathematical lingo for a network) is a flexible data structure that allows a more agile and rapid style of development.

Try this alternative databases... I think they are close to the answer.

PS: ORMapping is not a solution... it always ends up being messy: "Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science" http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/06/object-relational-m...
Newegg. The Power Search, in particular. I find the ability to specify certain features for a product extremely useful. The guided search is also nice to quickly narrow down on more common criteria.

For example, here's the video card power search: http://www.newegg.com/Product/PowerSearch.aspx?N=100007709&#...

It allows you to specify manufacturer, port types, memory/memory type, chipset, etc. When I'm just starting to look for a new part or device being able to narrow down the list that way is very helpful.
I'd toss in another piece of media, Elizabeth Gilbert's short (20-minute) TED talk on creativity and "genius":

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

(I tend to re-watch that one whenever I feel like I'm stuck in a creative rut, have run out of ideas, or just aren't talented enough to achieve my current artistic goals.)

Also useful advice: Find ways to hang out with a peer group. Try browsing meetup.com in your areas of interest.
You know you've gone off the rails when what you're saying was better said by C. Montgomery Burns:

"I'll keep it short and sweet: Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business."
I lived in Kenya in the summer of 2000. Back then, Tanzania was popular for gonzo tourists (and hunters) because they had more relaxed safari regulations.
* shrug * it's been working flawlessly for me everywhere I've used it, and it makes the sign-up process easier. The one complaint (and it's a big one) is that it makes it very hard to have multiple OpenID accounts on a site. You have to log out of your "current" one, and into the one you want.

I can see no reason this can't be changed with a plugin, but it's still a PITA.
Ask HN: Any way to monetize a simple game?
Hi,

I have a simple math practice game at http://zetamac.com/arithmetic/.

I've had it up for about 5 years now and have never made any money off of it so I was just wondering if there's any reasonable chance of me making anything off of it. It gets played about 5000 times a week (~500 uniques).

I've tried applying to AdWords, but have been rejected because they claim the site is "Under construction". Presumably it's not enough text content, anyway. Are there any ad networks that would be better for this sort of thing? Should I instead look for specific sponsors who can just sponsor a single ad for a while? (Also, about how much would you expect would be reasonable to make from ads from a site like this?)

I've thought about adding features and charging for them, but I couldn't really think of any that would be interesting enough to make me want to pay for them, so presumably most other people wouldn't want to either.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
(Clickable link: http://zetamac.com/arithmetic/)
Nice HTML5-based Online Modeling Tool
I was reading up on database design esp. 6NF and came across this website on Anchor Modeling. It has a HTML5-based Online Modeling Tool that looks nice and fun to play with.
Did you mean to link to something else? 4070 brings me to "Is Transactional Programming Actually Easier?" which deals with concurrency. I'd be interested in what I think you intended to send me to, but I can't find it.
Chaos in the Brickyard
Great! I found piwik.org but not the other. I'll look into it. God point about performance. I'll keep that in mind and use caching or something. Thanks!
Here is the problem with Arrington’s logic: students may come up with great ideas and start a company, but they aren’t going to be able make it big unless they have the educational foundation.

Oh really?
Most domain registrars will show their own parking page full of ads by default when registering a new domain name. Could there by chance have been eBay ads on the Godaddy parking page for your domain?

If the page didn't resolve at all, it could just be eBay going down the list of domains that end in "bay" and sending out scary letters from people who don't have last names.

I always recommend putting up a one page website with something like "Coming Soon" rather than running the risk of stirring up a company because of the registrar's parking page.
I know, right
There still is a stigma for putting university on hold or dropping out. Trust me there is. All you guys (Arrington included) in the valley are in a bubble, which is fine, because it works there but the rest of society doesn't feel the same (good or bad).

Anywhere else, your family, your friends, your colleagues, they will not take you seriously until you finish your degree.

The stigma will only die when every single college dropout has found success. So.. let's not egg people on to quit school because social pressures aren't there anymore, that's not true.

Secondly, I don't thinking you have to quit completely. I am a HUGE supporter of taking a year or two off after high-school to explore the world, read books, grow up and develop a character before pursuing post-secondary education.

This is what I did and I can tell you every word that came out of my professors mouth made sense to me, and if it didn't I would challenge him and raise my voice. I understood the subjects better. I felt compelled to challenge myself and take on TA roles. If I had gone to university straight out of high-school, I don't think I would have benefited the same way.

This expectation that you have to choose a college in your senior year, getting accepted, doing four years and moving on to a job has made student numb. not dumb, but numb to the fact that they're merely a tiny spec in an automated process. No one really grasps the subject as long as they memorize enough to pass the course, and eventually get handed a piece of paper which they can get a job with.

Break out of this cycle and start learning. You will then see education as a tool that will broaden your horizon and open a lot more opportunities.
Evidence for many (maybe most) cases is gathered at the interrogation stage. The larger the group the likelier it is that an investigation involving talking to the people there will uncover everything.

Cops can be good at their jobs.
Take this a step further and join! I was an active member of ToRCHI for a few years and it was an amazing experience. Alas, it didn't make me a fully functional UX professional or even competent, but it did make me consciously incompetent, and that was valuable early in my career.

http://torchi.org/

Now that I think about it, what was valuable then that isn't valuable now? I just rejoined!
One problem with college is that you start to develop interests that are completely out of touch with what users want.

The more educated you are, the less practical your startup ideas.
Because of the large geographic spread of "Europe, Asia, and both North and Latin America". These regions all price phones differently.
I think Yelp is a good example. When you're looking for a local business, you have a category/search term in mind, as well as a location. The single input field in Google search is awkward when trying to fulfill this need.