skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It continues to amaze me that so many companies, my present one included, recruit people with a lot of talent and experience, pay them a lot of money, and assign them exactly the same work as the interns.

In some cases, they end up having the interns build the new stuff and the seniors maintain the crap that the previous interns built... and they wonder why their systems are bug ridden, poorly thought out, and require gargantuan amounts of effort to fix.
Notice the difference between Iran - 39th place at the moment, just beside France, and Iraq - 160.

Among other interesting facts is the US not being in top 10, which I think is because the US is under the pressure of its own corporations and is generally not interested in the open browser that much.
'Bill Gates' strength is his curiosity'
In the past couple of weeks, I've been spending some time with a friend building a small Rails app in our spare time (which I don't have much of, since I have to work full time for my paycheck), and realized that I'd forgotten how pleasant it is to be DEVELOPING software, even simple software.
Dude hasn't been in the industry very long. Some weeks it's slack, some weeks it's deathmarch. It all evens out in the end.

The freelance model he suggests neglects one very important point. When I'm in the office, even if I'm goofing off right now, I'm available instantly should there be a problem with Production.
Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill
Lord Kelvin should probably have kept his mouth shut.
Aha! I knew there was a scientific basis for using all those <sarcasm> and </sarcasm> tags here at hn.
The ROI for large monitors is clear and well-documented (PDF)
In case you want a link that doesn't sap your will to live, try http://images.apple.com/displays/pdf/cinemadisplay30report.p... , which is what I originally intended to link to before Paul Graham's software fucked it up.
One instruction computer
Where to start - programming for mobile phones
I am not an engineer, I am a finance guy, but I did some coding in high school and college (so I'm not all bad). I do a lot of work with the wireless industry, and I am frustrated that there are more worthwhile mobile applications. I have gotten so frustrated that I want to start writing my own simple applications. How do I learn to program for Android? Where should I start? What programming language should I use? Can anybody recommend a good book on that language for beginners?
This is really a pointless gesture. For every 56.com that you shut down, three more todou.com's and megavideo.com's will take its place.
I agree about active reduction - not worth the effort.

However, I still like passive reduction efforts, like those newer monitors that don't draw any current when on standby. (I can't find a link at the moment.) Stuff like that can result in huge savings when adopted, because the tiny savings is multiplied over a huge number of devices.
Thanks for the link, Daniel. Excellent bulletin board material - for the far right hand limit of my bulletin board.
Die, Scribd. Die.
Mark Zuckerberg's Patent
Up next, on Scary News at 10: is cancer causing, radiation emitting nuclear power the answer to our energy problems? We'll interview several anti-nuclear activists masquerading as scientists to find out the answer. We'll also pluck the heartstrings by showing a mother and daughter who are dying of cancer, and vaguely suggest it's because of nuclear power without actually saying so.

And later: a miracle died you can use that lets you eat whatever you want, sit on your ass all day and still lose weight! Don't change the channel or you'll miss it.

I don't think nuclear is coming to the US any time soon.
Censoring people makes you right.
IWidgets thinks it has a way to monetize on the social nets. FriendFeed should steal it.
Slicehost - Redesigns and office pics
For information on android take a look at the videos from the google i/o conference.

http://sites.google.com/site/io/
Facebook is useful if you have enough friends to connect with. If you're struggling with it (and you want to "get it") then you need to meat some new people, probably younger people, who have real social lives in the real world. These are the people who add value to facebook by posting pictures, sharing their lives, and planning their next friday night out with friends. It's just another medium for communication. I'm sure there were people who didn't "get" the telephone because they thought "everyone I know is within a couple minute walk from me. why would I need a telephone to call them?" And I'm not saying Facebook is as revolutionary as the telephone but it does enable you to communicate with a greater number of people in a more efficient means. But if you don't see the point, then you probably don't have many people to communicate with.
This is not an issue of free speech. It's a matter of considering others. You are perfectly in your rights to discuss what you will, but some don't want to hear it and it would behoove one to respect their wishes. There are places to discuss this kind of material, IMHO HN isn't really one of them.

Anyway, there used to be three topics that one never spoke of in polite conversation, religion politics and sex, because they always held the risk of offending someone. We avoid two here pretty well and we might as well avoid the third.
Seesmic Raises Another $6 Million Round
I can't imagine of doing anything else. It is basically like fooling/playing around. At work, sometimes it gets repetitive and boring -- so what I do, I conjure up a small project at home or do some freelance or in some cases dabble with a programming language that I know nothing about. Then when it gets busy at work or when something comes up interesting, I take it slow on the sidejobs/sideprojects.

Seriously, when I think of it, I can do this my entire life. The only thing that can probably stop me is having my own startup -- still, I will still be doing some programming. It's weird, I can't think of anything aside from it.
Teens are spending an average of 11.5 hours online, yet...
Here are just a few highlights from a commercial report on Teens & The Internet -- the full report of course is for sale, but the highlights are interesting alone.
But if it turns out that these are the important numbers, you can fix them to an amazing extent. That's the very essence of the Pareto principle: Focus your efforts on the things that matter.

There are, if necessary, alternatives to the daily 5-minute showers of 5 gal/min. (Some people, as we all know but politely avoid mentioning, are used to the alternatives already. ;) It might be a combination of: fewer showers, cooler showers, shorter showers, better heat-recovery technology for shower water, more efficient shower heads that use less water but provide the same cleaning, improved shower techniques involving better soaps and high-tech sponges, special filters for water reclamation...

The transportation situation, of course, is more expensive and tedious to fix, but the answers aren't that hard: Design cities around public transportation. Live at higher density and/or with smarter zoning that leads to shorter trips. Build real bike lanes so that those of us who bicycle in Boston don't need such expensive insurance policies.
Ask HN: IS there a Fiddler2-equivalent for the Mac?
Fiddler2 is a great piece of software for analyzing site performance and finding HTTP request leaks. The only downside is that it requires .NET / Windows which I can overcome with bootcamp/fusion but would love to find a Mac-equivalent if one is available.

Thanks!
I still think that what Yahoo did with del.icio.us (or rather didn't do) borders on criminal. At the time, del.icio.us had the opportunity to be taken to a different scale as an information discovery tool. It remains my most used web service (thanks to the Firefox integration), but it's sad that there was such limited follow on innovation.
EBay CEO Donahoe a Deer in Headlights | Tech Jaws
No I was talking about the moderators here [dead]ing my posts. Turn on showdead here. If they don't want the topic discussed then shut down the whole thread but not just one side of the debate.

I apologize for double posting but I have requested some recourse for this censoring before and it is totally ignored.
Are the best entrepreneurs pertinacious* pigs or flexible fools?
Very amusing take on the dilemma entrepreneurs face with the evolution of internet start-ups. Is dogged determination better than shifting focus if things don't work?
> The transportation situation, of course, is more expensive and tedious to fix,

I just got back from a trip to Portland. Free public transporation in the city center! Whoa!

As one of my professors once said, one the big reasons public transportation won't work in the suburbs (car-owning individual attitudes aside) is usually you can't walk through backyards (e.g. no regular street/crossover grids).

Ralph Roberts, founder of Comcast, once said that Americans want three things "TV, sports, cars". Take away any of the three and you have a problem...
It is remarkable that so many people seem to think that MS was always a monopoly, and ignore the fact that before that, Apple was the big dog, and Microsoft was the puny upstart.
Like your analogy! :) The bigger picture is that we're approaching an energy crisis. That's why gas is getting more expensive, and that is why there is even an interest in these cars to begin with: the message isn't to "separate front end and back end" but to appeal to people who want to save money on energy costs, i.e. gasoline. But it won't work, because gasoline is just the medium, the real beef here is energy, and it's not going to get cheaper because we need more and more of it. It's not only gasoline that's getting expensive, my gas and electric bills are ahead of inflation as well.

"Solutions" covered by the press aren't really solving the problem, they're just shifting it around. "Wow! We have an air-powered car!" - without an explanation where the energy to compress that air is going to come from...
I sincerely hope this site doesn't turn into yet another online ghetto full of porn and cliches. Porn links are not news. "20 top anything" is stupid. Let's not feed into the lowest common denominator... not by voting, and especially not by discussing how surgically maimed women and men whose workday starts with viagra are a moral good resulting from anarchist libertine third-wave feminism.
Scribd has a lot of value in sharing documents online. The scribd API is implemented in a business application that I built and run. The documents automatically upload to scribd and appear as iPaper on the page. So not only can you download the file, you can view it with out having to leave the browser. The users love this feature.

It compliments the files... not replacing the format or w/e the argument here was.

I like to post videos to youtube, as do millions of other people do, to share with other people in a quick and easy way. If it was meant to be downloaded I would of hosted the file and done both. They both serve different purposes.

At the same time the proprietary nature of the formats are expect if these companies are ever going to make money. Apparently that's been a problem for these companies.

Anyway, lets not take an angry rant too seriously.
>more efficient shower heads that use less water but provide the same cleaning,

I think a lower flow but high pressure might be useful here; perhaps supplement normal water pressure with an electric pump. Another possibility is low flow with a trigger that lets you turn on high pressure/flow when you need it.
I enjoy the constant learning required to solve new problems.

To echo some other sentiment in this thread, take the problem domain you are most passionate about and find a way to improve it through programming.

I once ended up in a rut where I was not learning and I had been on the project too long (I was still passionate about making things better, but I was swimming against a tide of corporate inertia). I went back to graduate school part time to address the boredom, and moved to a project that I liked and had enough unsolved problems to be interesting for a while.
'Your' post was made twice, by two people with accounts under an hour old. If you're not willing to stand by your words, why should we listen to you?

BTW, the second one wasn't moderated, I don't think; it was karmaed to death I believe.
They dead some accounts permanently. How am I supposed to stand by my words if I can no longer reply and no one can reply to me?

Both are dead'ed. Just look at it.
Your initial assumption that someone who disagrees with you is probably doing so for irrational or biased reasons is meaningful.

I have in fact thought about these issues. It certainly is possible that I've made a mistake. It's also possible the mistake has something to do with bias. On the other hand, it's also possible you have made a mistake. You are married. Why shouldn't we assume you are biased?

It's striking that you admit marriage has many unpleasant parts, but find it strange that someone would question its value for legitimate reasons.

Anyway, it's a large subject and I'm busy atm, but if you are genuinely interested then email me curi@curi.us and I'll get back to you.
Wow! A summary of privacy settings. Amazing! It's so original and clever. Boy, I wish other software could have a summary of privacy settings. We could even generalize this to summaries of other sorts of settings.

My head spins with the genius of it. I think I need a lie down.
I suspect you're underestimating efficiency of both types of engines. Diesels, for instance, are always above 30% and air-compressed should be a lot higher: they don't have an enormous energy loss in a form of heat compared to diesels.
Guess what? The broken robot: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/illustrations-vector... and home page illustration: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4237042 are also stock images.
Scribd conversion is done automatically when someone submits a PDF to HN. I find it annoying too, but its not their fault.
Ask YC: Working around Cross-site scripting Restriction
We have a browser and another iframe that loads within it. We want to capture information within the iframe but are unable to do so because of cross-site scripting.

How do we workaround these issues to capture data from the iframe such as URLs and images?
My longer post and my short response to you were both jokes. That's all. Please don't read too much into them; they were certainly not meant to hurt anyone or state an opinion on anything.

Since the OP was lighthearted, I just went with the flow and had a little fun. After all, hn is also my little break from moving bits and bytes around all day long. Sorry if I confused anyone.

xlnt, thanks for the email address. May I suggest you put it on your profile, too. I've noticed that you're posting lots of comments these days, some controversial, some not so much. I'm sure I'll want to engage you offline sometime and I imagine others may want to also. Looking forward to it.
And both accounts are less than an hour old. If one of them truly is your main account, then you seem to have had dubious reasons for signing up. If not, it's clear that they are both sock-puppets. If you hadn't of used sock-puppets, I suspect that you wouldn't have been deaded. Your remark certainly wasn't offensive enough in that regard. But, sock-puppets are almost as bad as porn spam and go right against the principles of this site.

EDIT: I've noticed more posts of yours that were deaded. You seem to be a troll with contempt for HN and those who use it. We don't have to respect your opinion if your just going to insult us.
> I don't know what, but evidence (Wikipedia, Facebook, Yahoo, Digg, Wordpress, Drupal...) seem to say that there is something PHP is doing significantly better than all of these.

I think that PHP is doing precisely what I said it was good at: wrapping high-performance C libraries with a higher-level syntax for doing fast dynamic web content generation.

It's not a good systems language, and features trying to make it more like one always feel a bit "bolted-on."

> For something to be useful it doesn't have to be useful for everyone who use the language.

Actually, changes to core language syntax aboslutely need to be considered in light of their relevance to the entire user community, not just the most experienced developers.

Most programmers spend far more time reading code than writing it. If you increase the complexity of a language, (note: I mean semantic complexity here, not syntactic) you increase the difficulty involved in reading it.

In my not-so-humble opinion, PHP works when aimed at the lower end of the semantic complexity scale. Trying to turn it into a general-purpose language for "programming in the large" seems a rather unfortunate use of energy, given (as you pointed out) its obvious success in its existing niche.
Intel Develops Programming Language For Multi-Core Computers
As Intel (INTC) and rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) increase computer performance by adding cores to microprocessors, software makers are left with the daunting task of writing applications that take full advantage of the complex environment. Intel hopes to lend a hand through a new programming language -- called Ct -- the chipmaker has developed specifically for multi-core computing.
Well, Popular Mechanics was technically right. I am writing this on a computer that weighs no more than 1.5 tons. Quite a bit less in fact.
"If it was meant to be downloaded..."

That's the problem. The original author/publisher DID mean to have the PDF downloadable, and people posting to HN DID mean to link to that PDF.

HN/Scribd throw themselves into the middle of that. They redirect you to their online version, and ask you to register before you can download. It's annoying and not what people want.

Scribd is pretty nice, I like it. But the autolinking at HN is a bum idea.
Absolutely not. My point was very specific: namely, that PHP as a language has a reasonable level of complexity for the problems it is designed to solve. Much of the value of PHP as a language is due to this very simplicity.
Context switching has a cost.

Mood also has a cost. Task-switching may improve your mood by either switching to something non-work related every half-hour for five minutes, or just by easing the feeling of droning away into bog details.

If you really don't want to task-switch into nonwork, a long-term planning/short-term work task-switch may improve mood and productiviy.

(Full disclaimer: I am bipolar. The kind you medicate. Sometimes work brings a heavier toil because I'm depressed; sometimes I won't be able to concentrate because hypomania (enough that I take Ritalin, which calms me down))
Where is the infamous "640KB ought to be enough..."?

I'd also add Edison rejecting alternating current for powering cities, although can't find explicit quotes about it.
I didn't realize the second one was a joke. I knew the first one was a joke, but I thought it had some truth in it anyway.
The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.’
- Robert Metcalfe, internet inventor

Perhaps he was talking about the Eternal September?
I am tired of all this thing called science.... We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.

- Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, 1861

With the Intelligent Design debate, one could see this quote coming from a representative in this century.
So did anyone else assume it was 11.5 hours per day?

And then wonder how they managed it with 8 hours of school, and 5 hours of tv, per day?
Magic Toolbox: High-quality JavaScript Image Effects… for a Price
The way we suck at predicting the future is terrifying and even kind of insulting to humankind.
> So not only can you download the file, you can view it with out having to leave the browser. The users love this feature.

Perhaps your users should get a browser that supports plugins to allow in-browser viewing of PDF. Then again, since _all_ browsers support these plugins and even ie/windows users can get a good pdf handler like foxit I really don't see why you would want to use scribd.
Sounds like a good candidate for the EFF patent busting project:
http://w2.eff.org/patent/

Anyone know of any prior art?

(I don't know if they pick patents to bust on their own or take requests)

EDIT: If the above poster osipov is correct and this patent is legit/novel, please disregard my comment.
If this patent weren’t from the founder of Facebook it will almost sound funny. I have never seen anything like this.
I've been using this all morning. I really like the live results search thingy. Seems more accurate that others. We'll see.
I request everyone to donate to EFF.
I'm not a shilling for Zuckerberg but you are being too hard on him. First, the patent isn't for "summary of privacy settings", it is for a systems/methods to generate the said summary. Second, a patent isn't supposed to be original or clever. The criteria are 1) novel, which can be a non-original, i.e. a derivative work. 2) non-obvious (to one skilled in the arts) or in other words non-obvious to a patent examiner who doesn't know much except for some prior patents in the field.
I thought it had some truth in it anyway.

It has to or it wouldn't be a joke.
Are you serious?

Its a business application. All my users still use IE6. Nothing like enterprise IT.

I've managed to convince 5 of them to FF3 at a meeting yesterday.
Network Solutions Suddenly Opposed To Domain Hijacking
I agree that we're not going to break Americans of their love of cars. Indeed, the love of cars is spreading! One of the reasons gas is getting expensive is that people in China love cars, too!

What could happen, though, is that cars will become a luxury item for more and more people. That's slowly happening now, as oil gets more expensive. Cars will get smaller. They'll emphasize efficiency. They will still be bought, but will be driven less and less. Perhaps there will be one car per household rather than two or three. A lot of cars will just be for show: They will look really fast, sitting there in their beautiful garage.

Eventually cars might end up where horses are today -- a few high-tech racecars, some recreational cars in upper-middle-class garages, some working cars in poor areas of Third-World countries, and a rich literary tradition -- tales of the wild Carboys and their lives on the highways of 1960s Las Vegas. (Come to think of it, we've already got the literary tradition.)

Or, cars might just become passe. People's tastes can change on a dime, if the price is right. Some of us were hip enough to hate SUVs before it was cool [1], but everybody is starting to hate them now. Large numbers of people used to be really into horses, square-rigged sailing ships, steamboats... but once gas got cheap there was no turning back.

Or maybe somebody invents Mister Fusion and we're all saved. Or it turns out that plug-in electrics plus breeder reactors plus solar panels make the car culture work for another two hundred years, which is rather more likely but hardly guaranteed.

[1] Or, rather, before hating SUVs became so mainstream that it was no longer hip. Perhaps the hipsters of the mid-21st century will all own enormous nuclear-powered SUVs.
Aquamacs 1.4 is out
Charles. http://xk72.com
Except that a biochemist learning Python to solve problems he/she has in protein folding research (or whatever) is a useful skill to get things done in his/her field. A programmer learning about basic lab equipment probably isn't going to help too much in developing software (although it might help him/her get more attractive dates).

And protein folding is much more useful to humanity than compiler optimization. Does anyone even work on compiler optimization anymore?