skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't say it was off topic, I said it was "thin". Ryan (and 40+ others) agreed, hence the edits that make it much more robust.

I agree hardware is important, but yesterday on the front page there was a story about Arduino driven video game controllers. There are regular posts about cool stuff people make with the platform. The word is out. My point was that simply saying Arduino is addicting at this point is kind of like saying "Rails is empowering" its not really "news" anymore. To his credit, Ryan added some interesting content in his edits that make it a much more useful intro for anyone who hasn't yet heard about Arduino.

Re: my Threadless post, it was an original data driven analysis of the customer behavior of a prominent user-generated content startup. You may not care, but it least it was new information presented in a visually compelling way. Heck, Cromulent's comment on this post was more data filled than Ryan's PRE-EDIT post.

Yesterday, you felt the need to publicly encourage people to keep "Offering" things, Today, I'm publicly encouraging the submission of more content rich posts.
Clickable: http://www.thankthanknotes.com/
The Unfortunate State of Canvas Animations on the iPhone / iPad
Ask HN: Recruitment freelancer vs. permanent position
Hi there, at the moment I am looking for a web developer for our Start-up in Berlin, Germany.

My initial plan was to hire somebody on a permanent basis but I am wondering if I should consider freelancers, too.

A permanent position offers us an employee who can grow with us, somebody who will identify himself with our company. Further, it will take some time until this person familiarises himself with our processes and systems. I guess I am afraid that a freelancer could just leave at any time respectively that a freelancer doesnt consider himself as a "real" part of our team.

On the other hand its easier to find a freelancer and I am kind of convinced that even a freelancer could be turned into an employee as soon as he feels home and loves what we're doing. And an employee is not really an insurance for something permanent because employees can also leave at any time (more or less), right?

My question would be: does anybody of you guys made any experiences within this area? I'd appreciate your input.

Cheers from Germany

Tino
But it is also the only regressive tax we have, as all income over a certain amount is untaxed. So it ends up being a really complicated curve of who gets what return on their money, so the super rich and the super poor get the best deal, while the middle class gets hosed.
In the US, congress has been extending the terms of copyrights quickly enough that they effectively do last forever, despite an explicit "limited times" requirement in the constitution (which the supreme court unfortunately made meaningless).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_copyright#United_Stat...
I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

Quoted for truth.

I learned C++ during the Meyers/Sutter era. Then Andrei Alexandrescu came along and I had Boost libraries sprinkled all over my code. My beard is growing grey and these days my C++ looks more and more like straight up C.
Although I am sure there is the opportunity for this kind of depravity among sea captains, for the majority of them it was probably a crime of convenience. It is easy to say "he is a criminal, let him die." It is much more difficult to say "I am going to take a free man from his life in order to make an incremental amount more in my business."
Sure, if you don't need to breathe or maintain a 37C body temperature it's not too bad at all.
You and I are gonna have a private conversation about it. Can't have a Flash hater in my circle of friends, no Sir.

(yeah, that "bigthingism" thing is one part Flash :-)
Meet WePay, the Startup That’s Been Trying to Ice PayPal
Web Linking Gets Deeper With New Standard for Link Relations
Do you also hate people who voluntarily kill their own brain cells using other means, or in any other ways damage their own body ?
I'm not a coder; but I had a friend who would often code high or drunk. And in a very competitive CS program; he was very very good.
Life imitates art: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1256039/synopsis

(spoiler alert, in case someone missed Big Bang Theory)
National Rail Have Killed My UK Train Times App
There's no argument for marijuana prohibition that does not also apply to alcohol prohibition, and we all know how that turned out. We're wasting billions of taxpayer dollars to prosecute what is at worst a poor personal health decision.
Do you follow the same policies about people who have a glass of wine with dinner? That kills brain cells.

Do you hate everyone who drinks coffee? Caffeine is actually chemically addictive and can kill you if you overdose, whereas pot cannot kill you no matter how much you have.

How about Barack Obama? He's admitted to smoking pot. Do you hate him because of that fact? Or Carl Sagan, one of the 20th century's most loved scientists? He was an avid pot smoker as well.

The best athlete in the world, Michael Phelps, also smokes pot. Do you hate him?

Your opinions of hate are horrible. Please re-think how you feel about marijuana and maybe read some science about the drug. It's much less damaging than alcohol.
Where I work we tend to bring people in on a 3 month freelance basis with the possibility to hire at the end. This allows us to get familiar with the person without having to go through all the hassles of setting up a new employee just to terminate it if they are not what we were looking for, or the other way around. Just make sure you know what the freelancer is looking for - some enjoy the lifestyle of being a full-time freelancer and wouldn't even consider a full-time position in the end.
I feel like we need a script to recite when demanding a patdown that explains to all the people around us why the porno machines and the whole process is so objectionable. And request to have the patdown out in the open so people can see what you're willing to put up with to avoid going through the scanner.
The Maersk Dubai incident is a real-world modern-day story of a captain killing some stowaways:

On March 12 1996, two Romanian stowaways, Radu Danciu and Petre Sangeorzan, were discovered on the container ship Maersk Dubai and ordered overboard on a makeshift raft, approximately 70 kilometres off the coast of Gibraltar. On May 18 of the same year, en route to the Port of Halifax, another Romanian, Gheorghe Mihoc, was found hiding in a large cargo container and forced overboard at knife point by Captain Sheng Hsiu and four of his officers. A fourth stowaway, Nicolae Pasca, was discovered by Filipino crew member Rodolpho "Rudy" Miguel and kept hidden until the ship arrived at Halifax, where eight Filipino crewmen (including Miguel) jumped ship and reported the incident to the authorities.

Upon arrival in Halifax the Maersk Dubai was stormed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Captain Hsiu and his Taiwanese officers were arrested and charged with first degree murder. The radio operator attempted to escape by jumping into the Halifax harbour and was later arrested. Captain Hsiu attempted to deny access to the ship under international shipping laws...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Maersk_Dubai_...

I learned about this story because it's part of the theme of the concept album Magellan's Wake, by Savatage (which is largely the same as the more popular "Trans-Siberian Orchestra")
Marijuana does not kill brain cells, and humans are not exactly running short on them either.
I'm not sure where in latam you're thinking about, but at least in Brazil these numbers are way off. Yes, you can live with $500 a month, but you'd go without many luxuries such as internet connection, cel phone and so on.

Major cities (the largest 2 or 3) in Brazil have a cost of living very close to cheaper cities of the USA. If you move to smaller towns, you begin to deal with other issues (lack of infrastructure specially for kids) and so on.
Apparently "real men" can't be pacifists. Good to know.
NPR had an excellent segment on this, this morning.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1308913...
I totally agree that incentives are great, but sometimes laziness beats incentives. I was told by someone that they paid workers in a 3rd world country by the amount they did, thinking they would do more, but instead they did the same amount in less time and then sat around for the rest of the day.
Well, if the other country has income taxes. For example, in the British Virgin Islands the income tax rate is zero.

I don't get why more Americans aren't enraged about the United States' treatment of emigrants. For citizens of most other countries, if you don't live there and you don't make money there, you don't pay taxes there.
Thanks for the link, cocos2d always needs more tutorials. And you're probably talking about versions 0.99.5 and 0.99.6.
and are not a woman

There are plenty of us fathers who can fully appreciate it, as well. Truly, it's just one of many (seemingly) little things that takes on a whole new meaning after child birth.
Announcing MooTools More 1.3
By the way, you can see the engineers working on the next bigger, badder rover here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasajpl
1. An API/plug-in: no. A service where you do most of the work: yes. I.e., I upload a spreadsheet and you make the magic happen. I don't want to have to do any extra work than I have to, especially since I'm paying you money. Still, this would be very valuable (akin to Shoeboxed entering all my receipts digitally for me).

2. There's only one feature that is important to me: there must be no doubt whatsoever that this letter was sent by anyone but me. I'd expand on this but I think you already have a pretty good idea of what this means and how to solve for it.

Great use of the Woothemes template by the way. There are definitely some UX improvements that could be made (see: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bette... for tips. Original conversation: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1836538). But overall you seem to be on the right track.

As a small business owner, this definitely solves a noticeable pain point. TTN is a service I would use, at the right price point.
Marginal utility.
Current alert: Airport security remains relevant
One party (the government) was paying another party (the captain) for their services and then they figured out the best way to do it to get what they wanted. This is not an example of governmental regulation.
There are a lot of tech meetups in London, you could literally go to a different one every night if you wanted to. Finding out about them is slightly trickier as they're all organized in different places (mailing lists, facebook, meetup, etc.)

I've found the best way to find out about them is to follow tech people on twitter.

If your looking for startup events check out this blog post I wrote about the startup scene in london:

http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/06/london-startup-event-g...
You can disagree with legalizing marijuana, and even hate the drug, but don't hate the people who use it.

I personally have never used marijuana, nor ever intend to do so, but I don't hate the people who use it because I don't who they are, or why they use marijuana. The ones who do (that I have heard of) use marijuana for medical purposes.

Say instead that you dislike (or don't approve of) the abuse of marijuana.
My beef was PL/SQL and too much of the transactions/storedprocs thing. Foreign keys can be a good thing.
It's hard to put into words how insane these are. Is the TSA merely a jobs program? Are the devices just corporate welfare? Is there an actual concerted effort by the inner party (who ride in carriages--private jets) to psychologically subjugate the middle class? Are policy makers actually under the impression that these are good rather than evil/ridiculous/unAmerican/insane? (???) Really? I mean, what is the simplest way to prevent another 9/11? Steel cockpit doors and a communications shutoff between cockpit and everything outside. No physical threats possible = no terrorism. Problem solved.

But of course, terrorism isn't actually a problem and never was.
It doesn't matter. You see, in business, there is no "cheap" or "expensive". There's worth the money, or not. It doesn't matter how many commodity servers I could buy for the cost; no matter how cheap they are, the money would be wasted if that simply the wrong technical approach.

Because you can't compete at this level by chucking increasing amounts of anything at the problem - people, dollars, spindles, nodes, you name it.
It's actually a really good point. Things is so desperately in need of cloud-y syncing, I can't even begin to describe it. Apparently they're working on it. Still, embarrassing. All the others are getting it right.

Well, maybe there's a feature in store that makes up for it...
* ... because the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack -- a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.*

This is a good point, but I don't completely agree with it. If terrorists can smuggle a bomb on board an airplane, they can probably smuggle tools on board that will allow them to break into the cockpit. Then (as we've seen), the plane itself can be used as a very large bomb. (Note that I am not venturing an opinion on whether backscatter imagers are a solution to this problem or whether the invasion of privacy is worth it even if they are.)
I'm guessing one of the following reasons:

1) Invite begging
2) Usage of the contraction "pls"
3) Usage of the term "asap" which could be considered rude when you're begging someone for something.
> If my son gets upset, I plan to tell him "this is why you're going to take trig seriously; do bad in school and you might end up with this crappy job".

That is a horribly disrespectful thing to say in front of someone who is doing their job. Would you say something like that to a proctologist as they stuck a finger up your butt? I doubt the TSA people like this either, perhaps some will even resign over it. But that person has a job and they are doing it as they are instructed to do. That is the job they use to pay their rent and bills, so that they won't need to go on the dole and have their bills paid by your trig-savvy son.

Bitch about the policy all you want, and do what you think needs to be done to change it. But don't belittle the TSA worker, they can't change anything.
PJ is a way to do your JavaScript coding using a less horrible syntax.
The Spartan Student's "Dare Mighty Things" Scholarship
About the drunk part, that Ballmer peak XKCD comic?

I've found it to be more or less true for mental tasks. When I (and some classmates) have been lightly buzzed, we seem to work better (in certain respects). For example, when solving physics problems, we become much better/faster at coming up with solutions (granted, we'll probably end up making more calculation errors).

This led me to doing all my assignments first buzzed, and then recopying them out and rechecking the calculations (my writing is horrible, the recopying was required anyways) later when sober.

Of course, when finals rolled around, I had to spend 3 solids days practicing physics while sober again. It was weird.
My favorite reply to a HN thread (titled "What are your productivity hacks") was "The right mix of ganja and caffeine"
fair enough - but to be clear I'm hardly begging, I met the AdGrok folks a few weeks back and would be a real customer if the product is awesome.
They were marked as 99.99% available, that's nothing to feel bad about. "Both Bit.ly and Goo.gl delivered perfect availability, and Is.gd came awfully close."
If you have the job that forces you to feel up the crotches of children in order to encourage their parents to send them through a machine that takes naked pictures of them without probable cause of having committed any crime, then I suggest you quit that job.

Are plenty of hardworking people going to have their feelings and self esteem hurt by this process? Good. Systemetized violations of our most private areas should cause all sorts of pain.

I might feel differently if these were sworn law enforcement officers we're talking about, for a number of reasons. I'm generally very respectful of law enforcement. Fortunately (or not), I'm not forced to confront that conundrum, since these aren't police officers, but low-skilled "security" contractors whose sole purpose is to harass citizens in order to create the illusion of control.

By the way, in the history of all-time worst rationalizations for behavior, do we even need to talk about "that person has a job and they are doing it as they are instructed to do"?
Go contract to hire. It gives you an easy out if they end up not being a good fit. It's really the way to go with new folks regardless of how the interview goes, IMO.
Why is Microsoft suddenly so hot for HTML5?
This is true, Chrome works no problem. Real slashes are the right method, though. Running it through Firefox (I'm on 3.6) would have revealed the issue.
Fair point.

My guess would be because in the PC world it's expected - people demand a certain level of choice and configuration. Beyond a very basic level (capacity, colour), I'm not sure that demand exists for mobile devices.

But looking at the site in more detail, it does seem price competitive (I made a phone spec-ed to the HTC Desire and it's pretty much bang on the same price), though obviously you can't get it on a contract.

We'll see. One thing that does occur is that their phones will presumably ship with vanilla Android rather than a network / manufacturer modified version. I know people who'd pay extra for that.

UPDATE: Just realised that the HTC price included tax, the custom build didn't. Wouldn't be huge but would make it maybe 10% more than the Desire,
Coincidentally, so am I
That is probably what he meant, but it isn't rooted in reality.

If that was the case, then you would expect to see most of the rich as republicans, but in actuality a lot are democrats. Taxes are not the most important issue for a lot of people in the upper class.

Lets forget the social issues which can be drivers of that, and focus strictly on the numbers.

A rational person wants to maximize the amount of money they have in their pocket at the end of the day. If government policy had no influence on the economy then obviously the best way to do this is through lower taxes.

But what if government policy does have an influence on the economy? I would rather pay 35% taxes on $100,000 than 30% taxes on $80,000.

This effect gets magnified at the top, especially when bonuses are in play.

Believe it or not, history has shown the economy to be better under democrats than republicans in the post-war period, and this will only become further exacerbated because this data doesn't include what has happened in the last 2 years.

http://www.slate.com/id/2199810/
Thanks, this has been extremely helpful :-)
Book About Mishandling Of Digital Priced Higher As Ebook
What earnings reports have revealed about ads
Gotcha.

Is there not any scope for improvement on this front using alternative HTTP auth schemes though? (As far as I'm aware the standard has room for schemes other than Basic and Digest, although I suppose limited to the challenge-response format)

At any rate, it'd be nice if there was an effort to work with the HTTP standard (or if not possible, propose extensions to it) and aim for clean protocol design where at all possible when driving to improve API security.

SSL + HTTP Auth has been pretty good for us, and it's a good fit for the RESTful design goals of the protocol, so I'd be sad to see it thrown out, rather than improved where necessary.
Show HN: I made an Instagr.am spoof
I made InstaKenny http://insta.ericwillis.com two nights ago as a joke. It was one of those ideas you get at midnight that seem like a good idea until it's 3am and you have to get up soon.

Things I learned/found:

* AForge http://www.aforgenet.com is an amazing .NET computer vision library. I used the less exciting parts of it for image effects but the complete feature list is really cool.

* Uploadify http://www.uploadify.com is a great jQuery plugin for wrapping the file upload dialog with Flash.

* People will immediately upload porn and S&M images of the Giants' Pat Burrel

* I turned off linking to images if the referrer didn't match my domain name which meant I annoyed a lot of people who just wanted to link to images. It was about 3am when I did this and it seemed like a good idea. I wouldn't do that again; rather, I'd deal with the bandwidth overages if it happened.

* Short URLs are key. Who the heck uses a GUID as an identifier? :)
You may be right, but there are some hurdles. Networked games on individual devices don't replicate the social experience of the living room with a console, nachos, Madden and some buds. Sitting at a computer is solipsistic.

An issue with the iPad and iPhone for serious gaming is that unlike a wii controller, neither is replaceable for $25 after an over enthusiastic gaming session (durability in general is also an issue).

From a business standpoint, I'm not sure how well games fit into Apple's strategy. The market for sophisticated games is mature and growth would mostly come from capturing increasing market share rather than an expanding market and small games are easily delivered to the desktop via the web. The life cycle of a game is also much longer than a movie.
Yes, at this point we've been working with software developers to make sure we provide the support and licensing model they need.

Thanks for the feedback.
On 'empowers' - what has caused people to learn that empowerment hurts?

On the data - I see that the last NIST was 2006, they cite one 2006 source, a 2008, and a 2009. That seems pretty good to me, considering that the oldest one is a paper, and not an annual report.

On problems:solutions - their product is the solution, and they haven't launched it yet. They can't really describe something that hasn't launched yet.

On not knowing any better - two things.

(1) you underestimate how important timely feedback is. I can't find the link easily, but when people have a light installed in their home that goes red when they're using a lot of energy, and green otherwise, people conserve more energy. When you don't find out until the end of the month how much you used, you can't adjust (this is also covered in any controls class. Introducing a delay will usually cause instability)

(2) I have <$2k on my credit card (and pay it every month), and I hate how opaque things are. I have to log into my credit card site (already annoying) and ignore the big 'balance' number and hunt for the number that is what I have to pay. I can't imagine how hard it is for people that don't/can't pay their balance in full every month, automatically.
Microsoft Is Said to Be Buying Canesta, a Chip Maker
Damn, I really hope Prop 19 passes. I'm not even American, but a passage would mark the start of the end of the dreadful war on marijuana around the world. Other states would follow, then Latin America (the former Mexican President said "May God let it pass" about Prop 19), countries in Europe (Netherlands, Spain, Denmark) and slowly it would be legalized around the world. Defeat would be a major setback.

I urge all Californians who're reading this to do their absolute best to make it pass in these last vital days. Join the phone banks, make sure all your friends are voting, campaign at universities. It could make a large difference, larger than you probably think.
hospitable relative to say venus or an econolodge. obviously it's not San Diego.
Thanks very much, Tim. That means a lot.