skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This. Your child may or may not work in IT in the future - IMHO it'd be unwise to steer him/her down a particular career path so early.

What your child will need regardless of where he/she goes is critical thinking and problem solving skills. After all, all the desirable jobs in the world center around this.

Strong associative ability, strong spatial skills, organization, learning attitude, critical thinking, logic, all of those things you should encourage in your kid. Particularly learning attitude - if your child starts hating learning, you're basically screwed.
Useless Ecommerce Search Implementations
Monetizing business ideas
It was the Davenport Building, http://www.thedavenportcambridge.com/. This was originally the home of the furniture company that manufactured Davenport sofas.
>Netbooks just seem like a solution needing a problem to me. My kids have a netbook that I bought them for Christmas last year

So then the problem is what useless gadget to get your kids for Christmas.
(a) I'm afraid you missed my point. I purposely stayed away from all matters of interpretation, and only replied to factually incorrect statements. None of the counter-arguments I presented were matters in which interpretation could be done, they were all factually incorrect statements, on whose basis that video was making interpretations. Now if the basis of an interpretation is a bunch of factually incorrect statements, then what need is there to argue further on the validity of the interpretation of those statements? It is meaningless.

(b) Now addressing interpretation, you cannot legitimately interpret the Qur'aan either the way that video words it, nor "to be peaceful". Rather, as appropriate to its claim of being a complete life-guide, it will necessarily contain the laws, morals, and motivations of both war and peace.

(c) "Religious books aren't perfectly unambiguous"-- have you done an exhaustive survey of all "religious books" to be able to make such a bold, broad statement? It seems likely you're relying on very limited information regarding a few religious books and abstracting, without any possible justification, to all religious books. This seems likely to be more based on personal dogma than rational thought.
How are most emails sent over https? Emails are generally send SMTP (if you're lucky, your provider uses TLS, but there's no guarantees).
@jonnathanson -- I guess the point I was trying to make is that even as heavily invested (ie school loans, time, etc.) in one profession as I was, the lure of the startup overtook that. I think Michael Arrington's article a few days ago on techcrunch put it into words better than I ever could (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/are-you-a-pirate/), but my intention was never to say "look how smart I am."
Yeah, my advice was based on what I thought could work best. But the best idea is to do an A/B test (and not implement best practices directly). I'm glad you liked my feedback.
George Carlin on Voting: Garbage in, Garbage out
As far as I know, they have already borrowed quite a bit of Friendfeed's ideas, however, I can't vouch for how much code was actually re-used. While not real-time, the current newsfeed does update almost in real-time when new posts are made. Would love to see real-time commenting.
Mark Suster: Scaling Sales: Arming & Aiming – Objection Handling
so more importantly: how do WE get better prices?
Seems to me there's two questions here:
1) do I need to secure this / does it matter if people get spammed?
2) how do I secure this

I'd proceed until apprehended with #1. As long as it's simple to delete.

I like the confirmation idea, but which is more pleasing to the user (when a spam message is spoofed/sent in): to see dozens of emails coming in, or to see dozens of places suddenly added?

If it were me, I'd just implement a secret address code. If you're using gmail or something to host the email (and connecting via your web app), just use the '+' notation to extend a single email account. So submissions@app.com could be travis+submissions@app.com and go to the same mailbox (I'd change "travis" to a secret code... but the idea is the same)
Absolutely. I wrote a post about "Why Ruby?" a little while ago, but almost all of the arguments apply equally well to Python.
Here's a guy I know in NYC who can do wordpress: http://gregorygallagherdesign.com/
I was just talking to one of my coders about how nothing I have used in my career was learned from my computer science classes.

I guess I'm a "business programmer" - if I'm a programmer at all anymore - I'm not sure. I've definitely never delved into Scheme, Haskell, and OCaml.

I majored in CS, graduated from a California State University in 2002. I focused on getting A's, not learning or connecting w/ people or deciding what I wanted to do w/ my life. I figured I would graduate and a coding job would fall in my lap. Since graduating, I've worked at a real estate franchise, a hedge fund kind of investment place, and now ecommerce.

I don't know how a CS degree from a CSU looks vs UC or ivy league, definitely didn't think about it enough when graduating from high school. But I do know that my degree only directly served to let me pass through a filter to get my first job. And I probably could have had that with a vocational school degree.
I haven't heard of anything like this; there likely is no competition. Of course this is not necessary to qualify an idea, but I recognize the benefits of having a valid market when developing a product/service.

In this case I'm questioning whether there is one for something foreign and new.
For a very brief period this submission was killed. So I was wondering what was the intention behind killing this one. But it got restored immediately.

Edit: Its deleted again. It looks like any other 'Review my app' kind of a submission. Anybody knows why this is killed?

Edit2: PG posted an explanation for why this story was killed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861577. According to it, 'Rate my startup' submissions must be from older accounts. Submitter of this story is just 5-day old.
Maybe it's time to look at renting a restaurant for the dinners? It seems crazy to outfit an expensive kitchen just for one dinner per week for half the year, and I'm guessing that YC cohorts now are large enough that you could take over an entire restaurant (and thereby avoid the "YC speakers don't want to talk in public" problem, because there wouldn't be any non-YC people present).
Portland, OR

AboutUs is hiring.

http://www.aboutus.org/AboutUs.org/Jobs

We're a good team looking for at least one new member. We're a Rails
shop but you'll have to bring a lot more than Rails chops to make the
cut.

AboutUs is a startup, but it's a very stable startup. The company has
been around for four years and is venture backed. Many of us have
families and all of us have lives outside of work.

We write a lot of code. We pair. We test. We deploy to a live site
many times each day. We also wrestle daily against a tough legacy
codebase and awkward (but improving!) infrastructure. Greenfield
hackers won't dig it; refactoring hackers will.

The job is onsite (no telecommute) in
Portland, Oregon. Many of us bike to work. There is weekly yoga. Daily
ping pong. I think we have a vegan around here somewhere. And
sometimes beer mysteriously appears in the fridge.

http://www.aboutus.org/AboutUs.org/Jobs
Mission Motors startup to become OEM supplier of EV parts and softawre
I actually found a problem that the EeePC 701sd solved magnificently.

I traveled around Asia for six months with one backpack's worth of gear. A full size laptop would have killed me, but that little 9" (8"?) netbook was perfect. Although, once I got back, I had no use for it, so I installed Ubuntu server on and got OpenVPN working on it.
Python 2.7 and D support. Nice!
Tech events in Switzerland
You can attest to the fatal consequences?
Anyone who could possibly trot out the "a single vote doesn't matter, so whatevs" argument is either ignorant or hasn't been paying attention to the numerous high-profile extremely close elections in the last several years (2000 presidential election, 2008 Minnesota Senate race).
It is actually this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/upprev-nytimes-style-nex...
I was expecting an article on the status of Javascript Web Workers, and was quite disappointed.
What would I do with the screen when my I change my phone? I'd have to take my phone out of the case. Anyone who has a G1 knows this is a pain the ass.
I think you view the degree incorrectly. A degree should be a minbar of what one knows. It shouldn't be a scarcity measure. If someone has a CS degree I should be able to talk about garbage collection, threads, the pumping lemma, Amdahl's Law, control flow, NP-Completeness, etc...

Scarcity really should have nothing to do with it. Either you've acquired the knowledge, in which case the degree signals that or you haven't.

Your job as someone who hires people is to determine which vectors you put the most weight on. CS knowledge certainly isn't the only thing you care about, but a degree in CS may signal sufficient CS knowledge. In some cases maybe it requires a PhD in a specific field. Or maybe you want someone who has worked in the Linux kernel. In any case these vector weights should be job specific.

About the actual article, I must admit I don't know what the writer is talking about. As a consultant I've see a wide range of enterprise development. Some is as sophisticated as what you're likely to see at Google. Others are basic just people doing HTML markup. The degree requirement is a very pragmatic signal that the applicant has the basic skills required to do the job. I'm sure there are other ways to demonstrate this, but there's probably considerable investment in determining what they provide.

The thing that is somewhat interesting is that while there are probably just as many programmers who don't have degrees in CS/Math as those that do, most of the major breakthroughs, academia or industry, are from people either with these degrees or in the process of getting them.
The iPhone 4 and iPod touch fourth generation have support for VGA out via the dock connector while charging. It wouldn't be a stretch for someone in the jailbreak community to build a tablet shell.
This is depressing. It's 2010, and our computers have issues rendering Pong.
The interactivity was only getting in the way for me. And if the file was in a vector format, such as pdf, I could navigate in all the same ways using Preview (or another pdf reader).
Interesting. A big complaint leveled against Flash was that it steals keyboard focus. This causes problems when you're playing a Flash game and then want to tab away from the screen. In this instance, that it doesn't delegate control to the browser is a feature.
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.gi...
hmmm.. yeah, I didn't think of the repeat letter advantage. In english, at least, that does seem likely to be a significant advantage.
Same experience here. Cool concept, wonder how it matches up to silverlight?
A Survey of Unlikely Voters
The tablet market was dead for years

Aside from a robust but small market in PMPs (by companies like Archos), the "tablet" market is but an offshot of the netbook market: People just wanted to browse the web and consume media, and the iPad is Apple's entrant into that realm.

The Netbook market was all the rage until Apple decided to essentially hop on that bandwagon. Netbooks have suffered because the iPad is a decent competitor and brings some of the advantages of being a much lighter internet appliance of the sort that Andreeson really dreamed of.

Heck, you could even say that the iPad was a me-too entrant in the eReader market. While this has been largely forgotten, when the iPad was introduced the comparative focus, including by Apple, was against products like the Kindle and the Nook.

Apple blew everyone away with the iPhone, but two years later the cloners had finally honed their game and now Apple is watching themselves get nudged towards the luxury niche they're so comfortable with.

Luxury? Really?

People with McJobs have iPhones. It isn't a luxury item. Apple sells products at or below the low price end in virtually every market they touch.

They are the perfect definition of a mass-market, consumer product company.

In any case, after leveraging the huge ecosystem of iPod tie-ins and mindspace, Apple managed some good inroads into a quickly evolving smartphone market (which, it should be noted, they feared would take away from their MP3 player market). They got some good momentum, but now they're seeing vigorous competition.
That's excellent. Is there any kind of auto-import feature? Eg load the event tag photos from flickr?
I'm really excited about this feature. Here are some fun example URLs:

http://lanyrd.com/2010/startup-school/coverage/

http://lanyrd.com/people/paulg/video/

http://lanyrd.com/topics/django/slides/

We're using http://embed.ly/ to pull in the Vimeo / YouTube / SlideShare embed codes.
Not a direct answer to your question, but the fact that your son has a father who is asking himself that question already gives him a huge head start.
"Rate My Startup" Post Policy
"Rate My Startup" posts have increased dramatically in the
last couple months, to the point where spammers started to
post links with "Rate My Startup" prepended. Obviously we
can't just allow any newly-created account to post a link
to any site, no matter how offtopic it would otherwise be,
with the claim that it's their startup (or weekend project,
or whatever). And yet I would not want to ban RMS
posts entirely. We need some way to separate legit ones,
and it seems like the simplest policy is to allow them
from established accounts but not newly created ones.

I'd been planning to consider ways to embody this in the software, maybe with a new type of item that (like polls) had a karma threshold, but I've been postponing dealing
with it till I was done reading YC applications. In the meantime
for the past several weeks I've been killing RMS posts that
weren't from established accounts.

I really need to get back to reviewing applications, since today
is the last day. In a couple days I'll revisit the matter.
The major problem that I see is the opposition of incentives.

Your core idea is that, "there's a piece of information you want someone to know, but you don't want them to realize that you know that they know."

This builds uncertainty. Can't say I would ever use it, but that's fine -- I'll hold my disbelief.

Then your monetization model is to pay money to reduce that uncertainty. Said uncertainty is the only reason you used this site to begin. So you're looking for people who want uncertainty, but want to be able to reduce uncertainty within that specific instance? Seems like your target customer has split personalities, which is going to make your idea really hard to sell to them.

The other problem that I see is your explanation isn't very clear or concise. The best I can figure out is this:

"there's a piece of information you want someone to know, but you don't want them to realize that you know that they know... for things where the first level understanding is unbearable... but then you fool yourself into thinking the other person doesn't know if you know that they know."

Can you come up with a good elevator pitch for this? I'm still not quite sure what the core idea is. Examples would be greatly beneficial here, too.
Advocating that people take themselves out of the pool because they may not understand the entire situation would eliminate every possible voter.

It'd eliminate all of the candidates, too...
I already applied the patch, so can't show the difference between unpatched Fedora and Ubuntu, but you can see it yourself.

Open this page: http://www.infinality.net/files/font.html, set the font to "DejaVu Sans", and scroll down to 14px.

Compare to these screenshots:

- Fedora 14, patched as above: http://imgur.com/Y2JV1.png

- Ubuntu 10.10, default: http://imgur.com/2WgdM.png

- Mac OS X 10.6.4, Firefox: http://imgur.com/KGK7T.png

I'd appreciate if someone posted screenshots of this page with default unpatched Fedora config, and with unpatched subpixel-enabled Fedora.
I had to refresh the page a couple of times for it to work. Using chrome on Ubuntu 10.10 x64.
Well, that strategy seems to have worked for EVE Online. On the other hand, that's the only MMO I can think of that started small and kept growing successfully.
From bad correlation to a false conclusion and a straw man argument. You're a pro.

There is plenty of room in the setup of US elections for one party to have an advantage when turnout is low but still have varied results from year to year and region to region even when voting is mandated. But more importantly, even when you can get 60% of the popular vote in a 100% turnout election, lower turnout can still increase this percentage if the low turnout meant proportionally more of the winning party voters turned out, resulting in more than 60% majority.
On Vimium I just hit 'i' to go into insert mode.
Cool little detail: the eraser actually removes a layer of "chalk dust" from the chalkboard as well. Very nicely done.
Ask HN: Moderately successful founder, diffident because I can't focus
Throwaway account for reasons that will shortly become apparent. Apologies that this is long and somewhat whiny.

I started a startup about a year ago making enterprise SaaS. We are moderately successful now (12K/month) with another 12k/month worth of deals very likely to happen in the next two months.

We currently operate in a niche where our software solves a very painful problem. The thing is, there are at leasts two other generalized versions of the same problem in non-niche markets which are far more lucrative, and technically easy for us to solve, but where there is a lot of competition. I tell myself we are avoiding entering that game because we need to be a force to reckon with in our niche first, but I am afraid I am just rationalizing out of fear and I am scared of expanding because I fear I am not capable of coping with the pressure / living up to what the game requires because I have a severe problem with focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.

Background: For the past decade or so, I have been struggling with a severe case of inability to focus. In grad school when I almost failed a class because of this (I also got A's in a 75% of my classes), I forced myself to go to a therapist who told me I almost certainly had ADHD and should get the officially diagnosed at a test center and take medication or therapy. I am very wary of drugs and very reluctant to open up in front of a stranger (therapist) again. So I decided to build support structures that would help me get through this. I have a very supportive significant other and have made quite a bit of progress. My productivity has improved after I quit my day job and started the startup, but I still can't focus for shit except rare hacking sessions late at night which screw up the next day. Whatever success I have experienced is attributable largely to just not giving up and trying different things until something worked. On a day to day basis, I flit from one task to another and I feel like I am doing may be 1/3rd of what a normal person would be able to do. Still, I am enjoying being able to work for myself, delivering things at are useful for a lot of people and that keeps me going.

I don't like having nagging doubts and would appreciate your help 'debugging' my thought process, fears, complexes. Feel free to ask questions, offer ideas, criticism - anything that may help solve my dual problems - an inability to focus and a reluctance to enter the big game.

Thank you.
Good luck with that. I made an attempt at a novel (not during NaNo) where I had an intro situation/scene in my head and an idea at the ending, but that was it.

Around 30k words I was in a hole I had no idea how to get out of, so I sidelined the story until I have the time/energy to go back and fix it, building a proper plot structure with an attempt at keeping as much of what I'd already written as possible. But it's low priority compared to NaNo and a series I've had in the back of my head for something like a year.
How much did you know about CS before going to college?
Ask HN: Where to code in Houston?
Just wondering if there are any places in Houston indoor/outdoor where you enjoy coding.
Any places to share ideas/projects?
Not sure I conceded it at all. I think that voting is futile and a waste of time. I also think that not voting communicates dissatisfaction with the current regime.
I just got a call this morning from a client asking about a charge from "AETRION LLC." for $3 on their company credit card. I was about to tell them I had no idea until I saw this post and remembered I started this DNSimple last month as a test for them. Note to DNSimple: Don't make me guess about credit card statements!
I'll assume that it's best to put in the check after you've found a bug. Perhaps something that the monkey triggers that isn't very high on your human-customer buglist.
You'd go to a post office. If a homeless person can't figure that out, then they are uninformed. The US system doesn't work with uninformed voters. So, that's a win IMHO.

"Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree." --Thomas Jefferson
We were originally going to do photos in the same way as WildlifeNearYou - ask people to auth their Flickr account and associate photos using a picker.

It's pretty clear that the "paste in a URL" mechanism is much more approachable than we had thought, so I think we'll probably try and do something sensible with the Flickr URLs we are getting at the moment combined with the Flickr API.

Embed.ly actually supports Flickr URLs, but it returns weird Flash slideshow things that weren't really what we were after so we turned those off.
I'd suggest that well-chosen defaults means: Make a pretty good guess at the most common usage patterns you expect most of your users to follow, and have your defaults do that by default.

I can't comment on whether or not svn/hg/bzr/git/darcs have well-chosen defaults. I only know that I hear it's a common complaint about git.
Teaching how to program may be a fun experience, and I think it is valuable, but I don't know if it is such a big advantage. Because programming takes a lot of time, and that is subtracted from other activities that may be more important in the long run, like reading, socializing and playing. In my case, I will show my son the basics, but I don't think it is important that he really learns that at an young age.
I don't know too much about face detection, can you anyone tell which algorithm the author is using? It doesn't work on a lot of pictures so I was wondering if this is the best face detection algorithm available?
when you say "think very hard about schooling" - are you saying you should really focus on it or think very hard to delay schooling?
I'm a pretty smart guy. Degree in math from a top university, started a few companies, etc., but I am totally, completely confused by what your product does.

And you're expecting someone who hasn't decided they're really going to make a go at understanding your product (i.e., the average, time-starved consumer) to not only understand but hand over money to use your product?
Good citizens can be lied to. (For example.)
Technical Options. Opportunity and Confusion
good advice, but i dont think it works in 100% cases. do you think wufoo guy was sooo passionate about online forms?

sometimes you just can clearly recognize some opportunity (or need) and start from there.