skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thinking out of the box, I say work in the U.S. Odds are it your living conditions will be better. That's not an uninformed slight against India, but I think unless you have money in India, it is fairly factual. You can work harder than U.S. citizens in the U.S. and as long as your U.S. English is fairly good, you should go far, if you can find jobs that support your visa or better yet can find someone to sponsor your green card. If you don't have the opportunity to come to the states though, I apologize.
Because the article is interesting, even if the title is misleading. We vote on the content of articles, not just the titles, as you seem to believe (note that you ask "why ... did you vote this ... statement to the top of HN").
There's not much innovation happening in game development today. In the past -

* The Wii brought [1] 3d motion to games

* The iPhone brought multitouch to games

* The rise of GPS aware phones created location based games

* Facebook brought about mindless social games that involve clicking a cow

The only new innovation I've seen is the 3ds, and it's yet to be determined whether it's actually innovative or just irritatingly headache inducing.

[1] Herein brought / created refers to the first major commercial success.
Strange article. The author deliberately mis-quotes a bunch of sources to get his outrageous title, then calls bullshit on it. Then he goes in and actually reads the articles he's calling out, using quotes from them to support his point, which is also the point of the articles he's calling out.

Everybody knows that this statistic refers to people applying for jobs, not working programmers. Everybody who's ever tried to hire in this industry has observed it first hand. Every article about it goes to pains to explain that it's a problem involving unemployable programmers applying for jobs they don't deserve.

I'm not sure who this author thinks he's arguing with.
I disagree with your analogies. Good games tend to do well. The catch is a truly good game is not an easy endeavor. But if you can pull it off, generally you can reap rewards from it. Gamers tend to be pretty educated on their hobby, especially if you compare them to your average music cd or dvd shopper. And gamers always have room for another game if it's good (just ask any gamer about their "backlog", a completely ubiquitous concept in the hobby). Most people have no need for more than one social network. I've challenged myself to find a truly excellent iOS game that didn't sell well, and despite a lot of digging, I have yet to find one.
Thanks Jessica, pg, and team for such a wonderful opportunity. Great speakers and amazing people.
The decoy pricing plan was straight from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, though he could've cited this.

You can catch the gist of it from his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o... Starts around 10:00 in.
About pellegra - you're right. I added more examples.

Better example: When health-food advocates talk about how whole grain bread is more nutritious than bread made with just white flour* , they sometimes note that people favored white flour because of some elaborate cultural subtext about whiteness and purity. That's BS - it's because without refrigeration, the oils in the bran go rancid . Readily available whole grain bread is actually a modern luxury, thanks to transportation infrastructure and pervasive refrigeration. White flour has a much longer shelf life, so it was common historically - it's not junk people started getting fed recently due to some evil processed food conspiracy.

* Spoiler alert - it is, and it often tastes better.
The world is the place we live in populated by the people we live with. If you want to say that cancer would have occurred equally had people lived longer in the ancient times although, then you are right. However, that would be not a novel insight at all. The point that would be interesting to announce is that cancer only occurs in the modern world and has not happened before, despite lifespans.
It's a very awkwardly phrased recursion problem. The point is to find a unique x, y where x <= y. The algorithm starts with the set of all possible (x, y) pairs, and switches between the Bob and Alice stages.

In Bob's stage, eliminate pairs that give a unique value for x^2 + y^2. If such a unique value matches the value Bob was given, then obviously you know x, y for sure.
Otherwise, switch to Alice's stage, which operates on the remaining pairs from Bob's stage, and eliminates all pairs that give a unique value for x + y.

The weirdness in the question is both Alice and Bob are performing the exact same algorithm, but (to use CSP parlance) there is a channel from Bob to Alice in Bob's stage, and vice versa, due to the different information given to both parties. Alice must wait for Bob to declare if the algorithm has terminated or not.
Let's see how ok it is when something else comes along that everyone switches to using instead of Facebook. It is inevitable that it will happen.

I'd be the first to say, "Do something you believe in, not just something to make money." But, not factoring profit into the equation for a company like Facebook is like growing corn just to produce the ethanol to run the tractors to plant and harvest more corn. It's nuts.
Interesting, I would actually take the opposite approach. When it comes to startups, I don't think rockstar programming is really enough to set a company apart. While the company is small some bad code shouldn't send it to the grave. Code is invisible; the users will never see it and as long as it works it shouldn't matter if it's elegant object-oriented programming or unorganized "spaghetti" code. If a programmer is truly committed to the project, they will make it work and that should be all that matters.

The user experience however, needs to be excellent from the start. A startup may pick up some early, tech-savvy adopters if there is a very cool technology, but with a poor user experience the general population will never adopt the new technology.

That said, your point about the UX needing to evolve is well-taken. Do you think users preferred Facebook over MySpace because of its programming or because of its user experience?
I once worked for a company who had to maintain 508 compliance (accessible to people with disabilities) for their flagship product as many of the clients were government agencies or agencies with government grants. Unfortunately this is exactly what our product was like with a screen reader, probably worse. Basically everything just needed to be accessible correctly, couldn't use a clickable div/span for whatever crazy reason just anchor tags. It's sad that the blind have to live with crappy software, I always felt bad for them when hearing from our managers to check for compliance a few times a week.
FWIW, I've upvoted a story or two in the past, simply because I hoped that other people would comment on it and I was genuinely curious as to what the community thought about the story/post. It could very well be the same case here.

And please do keep in mind that an upvote on HN doesn't necessarily mean that the person behind the vote agreed with the story (let alone the title).
Well, I think the content is misleading, too. Sorry if that was not clear.
I'm definitely planning on adding import/export into a future version, particularly from existing desktop apps like MasterCook and MacGourmet, but also from a plain text format.
The trick with the plain text format is making sure the recipes are consistently formatted so I can pick them up and differentiate the relevant sections.
I can't help but mention... un-unlimit would be better written simply as limit.

"It is very hard to go back and limit your plan."

That is definitely smart advice though, it's always easier to increase limits than to decrease them.

My issue is, how valuable is a web service? How do I determine a reasonable price to charge? Pricing is something I feel is hard to test.
So confused by your question :)
As someone who's created a number of open source projects, not many of which have even been the slightest bit successful (even though a few have), I can say that just throwing things out there is fine, but I always wonder how much more successful one of the projects would have been if I would have devoted all of that time to it.
Thank you to the YCombinator crew and BASES for creating the event, and to all of the awesome people to came as well. Hopefully some of you will be on that stage in the next couple of years!
I'm not a big fan of ad-supported apps as they leak so much info: http://appanalysis.org/demo/index.html

So was avoiding them on principle...
Self-Balancing Unicycle Only Half as Dorky as Segway"

Wrong. It is at least 3x more dorky.
This tacky, sensationalist film, reminiscent of YouTube conspiracy videos, encourages public ownership as the solution. People on this site should be starting corporations, not demonizing them with rhetoric more appropriate for a college dorm room. We have Reddit for that.
The Beautiful Fractals of Benoît Mandelbrot
While you're absolutely correct, it's worth noting that for most of the disciplines you mention, the actual work takes place on paper too. A mathematician, physicist or engineer will spend most of his working life scribbling on paper, so it makes a lot of sense to interview that way.

There are plenty of other fields that don't work quite that way.

You wouldn't interview a baseball player by asking him to describe hitting a curve ball on paper, or a nurse by asking him to draw stiches on a piece of paper. Every field has its own medium of expression. For many fields, that's paper. For programming, it's a text editor.
Peter Norvig's article

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

has a funny photo related to this statement.
So as you all know, there was no support for PNG transparency in IE6. People came up with many solutions including using the filters in IE (or using VML). When it was time for IE7, instead of working on actually fixing the problem, the IE-team just started using the popular solution in IE6 (i.e. filters) for fixing IE7 PNG problem . So now instead of the web developer calling the filter, IE7 will do this for them.

Anyway it turns out that the CSS property opacity is also implemented using filters in IE. Also, it turns out that things will go haywire if more than one filter is applied to the same element. This is happening in the above mentioned blogpost.

Now the author of the article found that using VML instead of filters will solve some of the problems in IE7. There is no known way to fix this issue in IE8 other than using the Emulate-IE7 tag in the header (shudders).

What the author is about to discover soon is that VML + JQuery does not go well either. Calling element.type on VML elements (JQuery does this internally all the time) may cause your browser to freeze up and require a restart (in IE6, IE7, IE8) or cause JS error in (in IE9).

More stuff will break if you try to animate things around in the screen using either of the solutions. And don't get me started with zooming in/out elements with PNG transparency with opacity.

All I can say is that I wish you all the best.

BTW Here is an explanation from the author of the feature in IE7: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2005/04/26/412263.aspx

EDIT: Note that the issue with VML + JQuery is not just when you refer to a VML element. It can happen even if you are referring to some other element in your JQuery selector. The solution is to change your selectors randomly (i.e. being more/less specific) until the selector does not give an error, but this is not guaranteed to work all the time. You can try editing JQuery itself to fix the issue, but there are many places you will have to edit, it is just a PITA. The JQuery team may fix this issue from their side though.
Same here. This at least the third time I've seen this kind of article in the last couple years, and that same brand of shoes has eventually been mentioned each time. (I remember the articles because those shoes are really ugly.)

It's sneaky, because by even bringing the issue of running barefoot up, they get to look like the pragmatic choice, unlike all those members of the Evil Shodding Conspiracy.
PR2 Robot Autonomously Delivers Medication Using UHF RFID
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799545
Thank you, Zev, that makes me far less preoccupied (honestly)! My voting strategy is simply on what I think is important (from my individual standpoint, naturally), to know - hopefully, for others, too. However, you take of "testing the quality" of a story as a voting strategy seems actually quite genuinely interesting.
"Do you think users preferred Facebook over MySpace because of its programming or because of its user experience?"
I think it was a combination of the two, but that is my whole point to start with. As someone who was a member of facebook when it was still "thefacebook" if you remember in the beginning the UX was very basic, people flocked to it because of its exclusivity to an extent and they stayed (at least in my opinion) because they weren't having the constant downtime they were used to experiencing with a site like "friendster". Facebook was the site that people stayed on because it was fun "facebook stalking" became a hobby for many, that had much less to do with the UX then most people would lead you to believe. My basic point is that while a good UX is a necessity in the beginning a great one is not, because your users will demand what they want in usability. But with a faulty system or code that is constantly being chopped and hacked the growth of your system and frequent downtime for fixes could very well be your downfall.

EDIT: I would also like to say that I do NOT think your "code is invisible" statement really holds true. Good code is elegant in itself, it allows for subtle flaws to be hidden, and neat little tricks that a good hacker can make happen is what excites users and makes them come back for more, even if they don't know it is code doing it, they can see it and it does make a diffrence. (at least in my opinion)
Here I was thinking it was satire.
How Do Browsers Scale?
But, do fluorescent bulbs cause electromagnetic fields to fade? Probably true also, but how would you prove that?
One of my first screen casts was an HTML5 primer (http://nobulb.com/2009/11/html-5-primer/). I also found a really good slideshow on what's new in HTML5 (http://slides.html5rocks.com/).

(Not certain that the quality of information in my screen cast is nearly on par with the other info presented here, but it was a crowning achievement and something I'm proud of. Let me know if this is bad form, I'll remove this comment.)
Why do people keep talking about IE8? Is it true for IE9?
The airbnb presentation is excellent, just watching it now, interesting because I've already heard the most of the story in other interviews but it's still worth hearing again.
The hash is also the only way (AFAIK) to insert an Ajax request into the browser history, thus enabling the use of the browser's back button.
I suspect oil prices are going to collapse at some point in the next several years, once there are enough battery powered cars on the roads from Tesla and Nissan and others to reduce the demand for oil a bit. That may have some effect on the economics of organic vs not-organic farming.

Of course, that doesn't make organic farming pointless. Some people are willing to pay for quality. If organic farming reduces water consumption, there is also the issue that there are parts of the country that don't have unlimited water supplies, and I don't know of any plans to dramatically increase the water supply, other than perhaps there being a small decrease in corn farming as battery powered cars reduce the demand for ethanol to dilute gasoline with.
I didn't vote it up. But FWIW, I open a lot of HN links in tabs and read them throughout the day so I usually just vote up ones I'm pretty confident will be interesting from the title alone. This example had a catchy title for sure and perhaps a lot of people were caught by it.
Because IE9 has 0% market share, and IE8 has around 28%. And no, this specific issue is not there in IE9.
What about Opera?
Without a doubt.

It's NYMag...
Fair enough; I will jokingly call your post misleading too, then, before continuing onwards.

How is it misleading? Going through, it seems to (sort of) address the one issue you mentioned ("cancer IS a disease of the modern world; We grow about double as old as a few hundred years ago"):

"Almost all the mummies and skeletons were of people who died before the age of 50. "Ageing is one of the major causes of cancer," says Schüz. ... "In men today, 90 per cent of cancers occur after 50," he says. "So if you examined the bodies of 1000 modern men who died before 50, you wouldn't find many cancers either." "
Most of the talks were great. Some of them felt like a waste of time to me, but maybe that's just because they felt like so much rehashing of stuff I've read on HN time and time again. If that's the case, then maybe it was really useful for some of the people that haven't been hanging around HN for so long. I kind of have kneejerk reactions to anything I perceive as a "pep talk."

My favorite quote from all of the talks was something Reid Hoffman said. I don't remember the exact quote, but he said something like "A startup is a set of hypotheses that must be true in order for it to meet success."

I thought there was a lot of insight in that line. A big part of what we entrepreneurs do is make predictions about the market and, more broadly, about people in general. If our analysis is correct, and our prediction on the best way to exploit that analysis is correct, we have a very high probability of success. If we're living in a fantasy world (for various values of fantasy) then our analysis is flawed and it's much harder for our predictions to be correct. In order to be successful, an entrepreneur must see the world as it is. (Yet, as Brian Chesky illustrated, they must also possess tenacious endurance.)

Dalton Caldwell gave me a peek into a market that I've only heard vague stories about, which I thought was very interesting. As I've never sought funding, Paul Graham's talk did the same for a very different marketplace. I really liked those.

However, the most practical talk for me, personally, was probably Andrew Mason's talk or Adam D'Angelo's talk (despite its lackluster delivery). Those had the most takeaway for me.
Yeah, thanks to YC for organizing it and to the speakers for volunteering their time. I have almost never learned so much in one day for free. You guys have really made me think about what I want to do with my life.
> The web site I'm working on at the moment will reject IE altogether.

Don't. What you're doing will be no different from what some of the sites do when they say "You need Internet Explorer" installed.

I'm not a web developer here, so I don't know how much effort will be required but the end result is the same frustration that I encounter when I visit a web page which says "You need Internet Explorer" installed.
"After having my usual hair cut at supercuts..."
And, for the record, high school has never been engaging, even for really really smart people.

I'd argue it is particularly not engaging for extremely smart people. Most classes move forward at the speed of the average student.
I am the same way. I often find the HN discussion more useful than the article in itself. I think there are many people that feel the similarly.
If you want to sell a Windows Phone 7 handset, you have to pay Microsoft.

If you want to sell an Android handset... you have to pay Microsoft.

They're pretty direct about their legal strategy.
I've found that odd numbered pricing - particularly 79, 95, & 99 - outperform even numbers almost accross the board.

Definitely test both - but that's accross quite a bit of data, and different products -
How does typekit get them to work? Do they just hand-pick fonts that alias less terribly on windows?
Full version of "Programming in Lua", available for free on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZV5hXZ8QPKIC
I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year.

I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker.

Am I just missing some information in this regard?
"What are these uses of JavaScript that are increasingly sophisticated and powerful?"

JQuery and node.js alone are perfect examples.
No, from what I've seen I think the main box has links disabled while comments have linkability.

How about making a Blackberry version?
"The best tools aren’t always that cool. Groupon chose e-mail because it’s simple and universal."

We see facebook / twitter / rss integration on nearly every website in the universe, but seems that good old fashioned email list building often takes a back seat.

In my experience nothing drives consumer actions like email - FB is casual, twitter gets clogged for people using it, etc - if you're going to get somebody to click somehing feature email!
:)

Although Norvig's assumption that Fisher probably died of colorectal cancer because of smoking is not necessarily true - after all, prostate cancer and then colorectal cancer are the most prevalant cancer in males (and not lung c., as you die of it), and col. c. is one of the four most deadliest cancers. Oh well, only my smoker-addiction can keep up this argument to keep me doing it, I guess. ;)
That book is a little dated because it deals with Lua 5.0 but is still good. The differences between 5.0 and 5.1 can be found here http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#7 and new version of the book can be found on amazon.
"of the modern world" is ambiguous. You assume that the phrase is primarily referencing modern lifespans; others assume the phrase is primarily referencing environment.

There clearly is some interest in whether or not there are recent environmental factors -- i.e., factors other than lifespan -- which are contributing to cancer rates.

To your more general question, HN is full of programmers, programmers tend to think of themselves as "system" people, and since (in their mind) every discipline of science is just an attempt to understand some system, programmers tend to think that they can comment intelligently on those systems without any prior expertise in them.
Wouldn't that be some kind of a contra-indication? Not a definite "don't hire" signal, but pretty close.
Anyone working on transcripts or summaries? Would love to pitch in.
Great list! I laughed because many of those links are already marked as visited.

I also like http://jsfiddle.net/ as a sandbox.
They will definitely lag in number of handsets, but will also completely destroy the Android players in terms of profit. If you consider the ecosystem as a whole, I am betting that Microsoft will also knock Android down into third-place in terms of third-party developer profit as well.
> Am I just missing some information in this regard?

A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support.

Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.
All headline simplify but this one seemed completely disingenuous.

99% of people would parse "cancer is a disease of the modern" as "cancer is a disease of modern lifestyles" Certainly lifespan is less popularly understood. But every point someone might raise here is merely refining the fairly well understood point that cancer is a disease of the modern world.

My summary of the article would "we'll make three or four fine, hair-splitting distinctions to keep an unpleasant truth at bay"