skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would be wonderful.

I would love to see a list of the simple things to do that are more or less trivial from a developer's perspective, but have a vast improvement on a disabled person's ability to use a website (alt tags on images is one that comes to mind). Especially if you were somehow able to demonstrate the improvement it makes for you (some kind of before/after thing would be great). I think most devs don't realize how hard it is for people with disabilities to use their sites.
And written by Aaron ("A Few Good Men", "The West Wing", the hugely underrated "Sports Night") Sorkin.
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How did Six Apart screw up? (The Complete Story)
How the Titanic tore apart
Actually $110k sounds pretty low for Microsoft, especially when you take into account differential cost of living (assuming their Redmond campus). In fact, most people I know who have been courted by Microsoft and Google got better financial offers from Microsoft (especially in terms of benefits).
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I didn't think about that. I guess policing the content that gets generated will be something to consider.
As someone who has been coding PHP for over 5 years, I don't see any obvious benefit of doing OOP this way in PHP except for making your code look clever. Any explanation would be appreciated.
May I be slightly selfish, and ask a question to all of you who have a CS degree? Did you learn programming as part of your CS education? Regardless, what's you opinion about the way programming was taught?

By the time I started taking classes, I'd already been programming for fun for a while. I continued self-teaching; it was both necessary and entertaining. In class, I was taught the basics of Java, LOGO, MIPS assembly, C++, Scheme, and Prolog, and course material also used BASIC (which my father had taught me), C, and x86 assembly (which I taught myself). The earliest classes spent a lot of time teaching the language, whereas later classes assumed that students either had prior knowledge of it or would learn it on their own (except for Scheme and Prolog since these were expected to be students' first exposure to functional and logical programming). I think the expectation of some self-teaching is really necessary to ensure that students learn to do so before they graduate. Putting together simple building blocks given on lecture slides only takes one so far; eventually, you'll have to do something you didn't learn to do in class.
I agree that YC are able to identify great hackers and great founders more easily because they are these things themselves. What's little recognized is how big a difference this is between YC and the other YC-like funds.
Apart from name recognition there's also the distinct possibility that the "super angels' " experience and connections in this area means that _whilst in competition with each other_ they're willing to invest at much more generous valuations than those with less ability to evaluate the potential returns from a particular hot startup would consider. If it was possible for them to collude, they can invest on only slightly better terms than the rest of the market would be willing to countenance. It would be equivalent to the industry's top payers agreeing to cap pay rises.

Just because there are alternatives and they're still offering a better deal than everyone else doesn't mean that such market manipulation would be legal or fair.
Zynga can have absolutely crazy growth on launch. FarmVille was growing few million users a week.

Also keep in mind interactive multiplayer games with persistent state are different beasts compared to usual web applications. Games are very write heavy and do not cache well.
How many frameworks is the right number? One is too few. One hundred is too many, it will just fragment people's skills.

Experimentation and inventing your own wheel is good for learning. But most of the time those wheels shouldn't see a wider audience - unless they have something new to offer.
It's actually that high. (H1B Visa, plus accompanying visa for family members)
there's really not that much guessing necessary. Google knows the click through rate of all SERPs, so after a year, if they see that 95% of your pages are never visited, they have no reason to hang on to them.

Because those pages weren't bringing traffic anyways, your stats don't change
You're not the only one, the SEO people in my company got onto this surprisingly quickly. I sometimes feel black (hat) has become the new white: for whatever reasons companies seem to be more willing to accept the less ethical sides of doing business on the web. Anyone else notice this or is it just me?
Nokia releases Qt 4.7 with terrific new mobile UI framework
I believe that Scalzi grew up in a household which was "poor", at least for some years, and that he was simply hard-working and lucky enough to be able to get out of it. See his comment on the OP here: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/#comment-64...

Which is not to say that he isn't doing well for himself now, and it's hardly surprising that this wouldn't feature prominently in his "brief bio".
Bubble Cursor, defying Fitt's Law
Hence "Yes, Mike, I Have Stopped Beating My Wife".
The offer in the manifesto is to be simpler. I'm not to judge since don't know all the other frameworks, but at least seems promising.
I thought one of the best quotes from the interview was Telling people to be careful is not effective. Humans are not reliable that way. ... You need a solution that's not about making people perfect.
Make sure you hit 't' to trigger the timing mode, and start trying to click on the teal bubble.
Autoloading will be harder than you think, but if you can that working then serialization will partially work.
I don't think any fonts are inherently evil... it's the people that use them you have to watch out for ;-)
Conversely, I have a tough time understanding anyone that spends inordinate amounts of time tinkering away on nothing, just because.

You can "love" to program but that doesn't mean you want to do it all day long. The love can come from the act of solving a problem, not the act of admiring how elegant the code works.

You need to disassociate the enjoyment from the purpose; they are not linked.
Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
Can it generate enough money from ads to sustain itself.
You'd have to know all the other frameworks in order to know that yours is simpler.
These organizations are based out of countries with corrupt governments, where law enforcement from the rest of the world can't easily reach. You can track a credit card peddler to Russia, but you can't do much about them there.
This isn't the fellow who does BBC Radio 4's brilliant "More or Less" program is it?
Something like Netflix's personalization, but for movies out in theaters? I'd pay for that.
"They want the same thing that any founder wants-- a combination of happy users, business success, and an exit."

I'm sure the founders think that's what they want, but their actions say otherwise. Anyway I didn't mean it to be venomous, I was just trying to defend Dave.
Could you share what your utilities are?
That quote struck a chord. Just the right one for me to be better at work.

Did a google for that quote to find out that it's pg in this article http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
DHH is saying "do" rather than "try".

You can memorize every line of the emacs code base, but unless you have a problem with emacs itself that you'd like to solve, it isn't going to get you far.

On the other hand, if you can't find a web-app to manage projects that works for you, and you decide to code one, you will learn much, much more.
Founders Come First
As someone else has said making an ejection system that could resuce the crew at each stage of the flight is very difficult.

What's more troubling (although not surprising) is Nasa's 'news management' in keeping this a secret because of fear of bad publicity.

20 years later this attitude hadn't changed with the Columbia - when Nasa prevented any in-orbit inspection of the damaged tiles. Just in case they then had the PR nightmare of a crew that were likely to die on re-entry and no way of rescuing them.
John Scalzi is not reflecting on his own experiences.

But the point is that you can't decide that from what he wrote. A work of fiction can contain extremely accurate descriptions of peoples' experiences, as judged by people that have experienced what is descrined, even though the author hasn't lived through those experiences himself. The ability to conceive such descriptions is one of the skills that can make someone a great writer. You're basically arguing against that and asserting that someone that hasn't experienced something cannot and should not write about it.
Gladly, my style is poor written english.
Suppose I rephrase this, with a twist:

"You can 'love' to paint but that doesn't mean you want to do it all day long. The love can come from the act of solving a problem, not the act of admiring how elegant the results are."

Many people are drawn to hacking as others are drawn to painting or playing music (and these groups often overlap).
Comment value multiplier for LEGAL issues on HN:

Hacker with an opinion about what the law should be: 0

Law student: 0

Harvard Law student: 0

Experienced practicing lawyer, but not in that specialty or venue: 0

Experienced practicing lawyer in that specialty in that State or Federal venue: 1 to -1 (depending on what benefits his client base)

I am the State or Federal Prosecutor who decides which cases to pursue or not: 1000

then multiply by

I am not fully informed of all the Facts: 0

So far this includes everyone, including me.
Does anybody know the specifics of the interaction between treaties and constitutional law.

For instance if the senate ratifies ACTA and the president signs it, and then we pass a law implementing it in America can the supreme court disqualify the law or portions of the law for violating the constitution? Namely the first amendment's protection of political speech.

Wikileaks is as clear cut a case of political speech as has ever existed. If they can't be protected by the first amendment we're all more than screwed.
No. You would have to know all the other frameworks in order to know that yours is simplest. You only need a few points of reference to be able to say it is simpler.

FTA:
"To me, writing apps with Django or Tornado has always been much more enjoyable. MonoRail and MVC were big improvements over webforms, but still they felt difficult to me, especially if you aren’t using an IDE."
They also capitalize if you hold the key down briefly.

... I miss my blackberry.
Would you be able to comment on this website? http://www.looktel.com since it's important for us to target the visually impaired but wanted to get some outside validation to see if we designed and implemented the site in the right way for situations just like this.
> How many other investors can you recognize by their prose and style? how many do you talk about afterward?

Paul Graham comes to mind:-)
Soaring valuations in consumer web companies?
I agree with a lot of advice here, especially those that point out that your own initiative is most important, but I would recommend my site: http://everymentor.com/ A lot of folks around Hacker News are probably aware of it (because I bring it up in almost every thread.. :-) but you might get lucky and snag someone that is interested in working with you.
The article makes the false assumption that all angels are the same. Super-Angels aren't super angels purely because of the money they control, but rather their expertise and connections that make them the first choice for startups looking for investment.
Btw, I am actually finding the push for net neutrality as awkward, because government regulation can do more damage than an oligopoly can.
Hiring a Nanny
this has to be the ugliest blog post ever, especially coming from a hardass like Dave. +1 nphase. Who writes like this? - I don't care who you are, how much money you have, what companies you've helped...his writing stands on its own, very poorly written.
I find it rather funny that there was just a submission two days ago answering precisely that question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1708777
Save your venom entirely. The internet doesn't need any more

That's one of the best things I've read in a long time.
That breaks some things.

i.e. the escapist thinks you're a scraping bot and bans you from viewing their videos for a week.
If Birdman got into angel investing, I would take his money.
Gabriel Weinbergg (@yegg) just wrote an awesome post about this

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/how-to-get-that-...
Yes, it's 100% opt in.
I don't know - I tend to notice that the people who say "smart people don't swear" are offer people who aren't really that smart themselves - or know many smart people. I know a lot of smart people, and they all fucking swear. ;-)
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Would you provide us five specific examples of how their actions say otherwise? Since 90% of startups exhibit this kind of behavior, it should be easy to come up with five.
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Exactly - 250M potential users is what they mean. Right now they probably have very few consumer opt-ins.
Well, it's not my framework, I just posted the link. So, I'll not judge if it's simpler or not. All I say is that it looks promising.
Are we still "United"? Lately we don't seem to be.
One key difference may be the sheer amount of metrics that Zynga tracks. I've heard they keep stats of every (however mundane) action each user performs. It racks up to a huge amount of data.
Nope, that's Tim Harford ("the Undercover Economist"): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more_or_less/1628489.s....
It is 100% opt-in, but there is no "app" needed on the actual phone - so you're totally right if by "per app" you mean "per developer" or "per use case." So I might allow one company to locate my phone for a family-finder scenario, and another company to locate my phone for local weather alerts, for example. No app required in either case. Hope this helps.
His gangster persona is brilliant marketing.
I didn't say "don't swear". I do myself, and have nothing against it in the proper context. But if you overdo it, you come across looking like a bit of a horse's ass.
Their contracts with the carriers allow for remote pings of the GPS chip (if there is GPS on the handset). Otherwise it's just cell tower triangulation.
I do wonder how much of that simplicity is because of dynamic languages and not directly because of the framework. I've done quite a few projects with ASP.NET MVC and in my opinion it makes most things pretty easy. But there seem to be some things in Rails that make life easier, but they are really features from Ruby that you can use in Rails.
Fix for the ‘update failed’ error while installing Android 2.2 on Droid X
May I be slightly selfish, and ask a question to all of
you who have a CS degree? Did you learn programming as
part of your CS education? Regardless, what's you opinion
about the way programming was taught?

I learned about programming (aside from some casual observations) as a freshman EE student. After my first year I decided that the heavy math and physics requirements of EE would kick my ass, and that I much preferred the opinionated reality offered by writing software. So I changed my major to CS.

Programming per se was poorly taught. There was little emphasis on long-term code management, and only moderate emphasis on writing clean modular code. So I learned better coding practices from more skilled developers while school taught me language syntax and concepts.

All through college I was fascinated by cellular automata and artificial life, so every time I had a new language class I went off to write CA code, trying to make them run faster, cleaner, and provide nicer options. Pscal, Fortran, C; never got around to doing CA in COBOL though; dropped out of that class. :)
Bike ride, accident, and ambulance trip tracked on Runkeeper
I can take a quick look, but you may want to contact me privately if you'd like a serious review.
Gotham has been used so much in the past couple years that I'd be very wary of using it for anything. In ten years it'll immediately scream '2009'.
Broker vs Brokerless
the difficulty isn't just making this accident survivable, it's making any other accident at any other stage of the flight survivable.

So any escape system that would work for the specific Challenger failure - supersonic but at regualr aircraft altitude - wouldn't work for say a pad explosion, or a failure at higher altitude, or a failure where the boosters didn't separate, or a crash on landing or .....

Fitting a dozen different ejection seats to swap between during takeoff and landing is tricky!
This was definitely about this book and this doctor, but I'm pretty sure it was a much longer and detailed article, the kind you find in the New-Yorker, and get posted to HN.
Learning to program is a function of interest, need and willpower.

It is fun to dabble and be curious, but curiosity will not get you through some of the minutia that it takes to build a real app, and thats when need and willpower get you through to learning.

One breakthrough for me was realizing that programming is now a social activity. You have to meld with the hivemind to really get anything done, and while its good to have a mental framework of whats under the hood (I recommend the book 'code' by charles petzold for those without formal engineering training) it's more important to realize how to model all the abstractions that are part of modern software.

As paradoxial as it sounds, understanding abstractions is often works out to be alot like 'code monkeying' than theoretical computer science.
I learned to program to solve problems or create things. I don't enjoy learning a new language for its own sake; I might invest some time doing proactive learning because it will help me solve problems down the road, but that's it.
Zero.

Remember there is no need to make an accident survivable because an accident can't happen "Failure is not an option" and lots of other macho chest beating.

If the Titanic had been built by Nasa it would have had no lifeboats, a crew of 10,000 safety inspectors but would still have hit the iceberg.
Tasty [healthy] beverage
I work at home and by happenstance there is a dollar store one minute away which sells pop/soda at a cheap price. This has led to quick temptations while programming and reading.

Does anybody have any recommendations for a tasty, healthy beverage as a substitute for pop? Aquafina Vitamin Waters (no, not the Glaceau ones which are ironically not very healthy) are a great alternative but they're not commonly available and unless on sale, aren't cheap.

Location: Canadia.
About the Challenger accident, don't forget to read the fantastic report by Richard Feynman : http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html
GOG fakes out gamers, is back and fully revamped
From the middle of the article:

"Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.”

That's interesting, given that Gosling now decides to quit 'of his own accord', which is probably a lot cheaper than to lay someone off.

Technically Oracle may not lay people off that readily, but I don't see how you could interpret Goslings treatment in any way but to force him out of the company. He had his compensation reduced, they clipped his wings and on top of all that used him to act at being a trained parrot.
I think this is generally true of anything not involving mortal danger. If you want to learn how to do something, just do it. You will always fail at first, but you will learn.
Even then, it's limited to a kind of "cramped technical pen" lettering that would be expected in alternative or underground comics. There are other comic book fonts that would be more broadly applicable.
It's zero maintenance.
For 'serious' bike riders who care about efficiency and clean/oil chains it's useless.

For riders who use the bike for one week/year, put it away when it rains and never touch it otherwise it's great
Inspired by the lettering for Watchmen, if I remember correctly. Which is why I found the font itself much more palatable, you just have to read everything printed with it in Rohrschach's voice.
Request Rate Limiting with Nginx
And following LeCarré, I could easily envision some entities searching for and holding certain of these acquired credit card numbers in reserve, should there be a need to charge p*rn or some financially questionable charges onto those account holders they care to call into question.
I'm sure your Dad is an awesome guy, and I'm sure that being axed was a difficult thing for him, but....

If he was the president of a division of a multinational company, I'm sure he had to have been making a healthy 6 figure salary, had a good retirement plan, some good severance pay, etc.

You've got to admit that clearly, getting axed (as difficult as it might have been) was much easier on him that it would be on a low level line worker making a middle five figure income?
There is nothing preventing a SaaS company from also running a publishing operation. This is my core SEO strategy, and I wish I could convince more people to execute on it. It is ludicrously more effective than AdWords, and you can do both.
Sell things to people for money.
better narrative, grammar, and spelling

Doh, in school you get brownie points for spelling right.

In business as an investor, you don't.
If I were to start calling out individual companies I'd only do it on my blog under my real name, not as a pseudonymous blog comment. As it stands though I wouldn't feel comfortable blogging this only because it's not my idea, I stole it from someone else.
Some quotes:

> Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said.

Says something about how they value technical people.

> The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any money because the money had been spent – so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn’t the ‘Oracle Way.’ On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million
Skip Incorporating as a Freelancer Unless Your Accountant Tells You To
Yes, you can make enough money from ads if you have a lot of traffic.
Lovely! Great way to make something beginner-scary much less beginner-scary. Could have used more info on installation and a few more links to examples (there are tons of IM cheatsheets on the IM site.)
Obie owns/runs Hashrocket which I recognize as a RoR shop, so that part is true.

As for the correlation between the movie's success and the growth of the web startup world, I disagree. I would guess that people will see this movie because it's about a website that's a part of their daily lives.

Even if I didn't know who Obie was, I don't think his comment warranted getting downvotes or being called out as bullshit.
Gosling's layoff concerns were probably more about his friends and the people that worked for him.
The web is horizontal; one of the biggest problem with it is the lack of established hierarchy.