skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They could do what every other similar organization has done in the past, create a trust fund to keep the organization running into the foreseeable future without having to routinely solicit donations. Whether or not their charter is set up correctly to allow that today is immaterial, they can found on a new charter if necessary.

If you asked people what the benefit of donating to the wikimedia foundation was I'm sure at least 9 out of 10 would respond "to keep wikipedia running". Indeed, that is the context of all of the appeals for donations.

What value does hiring more staff provide? Specifically, what value higher than the long-term continued operation of wikipedia does it provide?
Another diet blog post. If you want facts, buy the Good Calories, Bad Calories book, or presumably his recent book which I can't recommend either way as I have not read it. If Gary Taubes does not have enough facts, regardless of how you like his interpretation of them, you may give up all hope of ever understanding diet issues yourself now.

So as to avoid a redundant post, I make this point to KirinDave as well. This is not Taubes' argument, it's one particular small point, a marketing teaser. If you really want to dismiss him you're going to have to do a lot better that poking apart one blog post, you've got a book (or two, though I don't know what the overlap is) to dismantle.
I open source software when I feel it will benefit the greater community. But I've never felt pressure from the community to make any of my production code free. As a matter of fact, I think any pressure on developers to push their software free is silly - it should be a sincere offerring. Only sincere open source projects survive - otherwise you get the likes of half-assed licenses and crappy (but open, which isn't better IMHO) software.

Keep what you want to yourself, as a developer, there isn't anything wrong with that and open what you feel like opening up - that's your right as a creative individual and professional.
>We do? What is the citation for that conclusion?

Bah. It's around here somewhere. They did a study, and found that promoting people randomly within a corporation led to better outcomes than any other strategy. I'm sure someone could find the citation.

As far as promoting people randomly, no, they're not doing that. I'm not sure what Essjay has to do with your point; he was a guy who claimed to have real life expertise as a way of gaining prominence on Wikipedia. I'm not suggesting Wikipedia currently promotes based on claimed qualifications; I'm suggesting they promote x editors with ~3k+ edits and ~1 year (numbers are very maleable) to adminship at random, doing away with the RfA process.
You can also just your digital camera, my iphone 4's cam picks it up (it comes up as just normal white light).
This is probably referencing John Gruber's quote from http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/emotional_rescue:

"There will never be an Android phone that people line up for like they did for Windows 95 — or like they do today, once or twice a year, for major new products from Apple."

I like Gruber. I think he does some great analysis sometimes. And he loves to call "gotcha" on other peoples' "claim chowder". But his love for Apple gets the better of him sometimes, and I doubt he will call himself on this.
Most people find it very hard to cut significant amounts of calories and keep the number of calories lower over as long as 13 months.

Can you share what kinds of foods you cut out that were part of your aggressive calorie-cutting program?
One reason is that we want our developers to be part of a technology community. Attending (and presenting at) industry events, meetups, bar camps, and local user groups. There's a lot more opportunity for that if you're located in certain parts of the country than others.

I'm sure that Buffalo, Oklahoma is a fantastic place to live, but we prefer you be somewhere you can hang out with, learn from, and teach other geeks.

That said, if you're unbelievably awesome, hit me up anyway. We like smart people regardless of their location.
I use a windup mechanical alarm clock for critical wakeups. I've had batteries fail on battery clocks, and the power go out on plugin clocks. The windup ones have never failed me.
Ask HN: Simple and Elegant Graphics App for Novices?
My day-distraction-project Profile Banner went viral a couple weeks ago (even though I got no love from HN!).
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=117320678334654

I'm getting 200k impressions per day, but I don't want to put skeezy ads all over the place to pay for the servers I need to buy (or lease or whatever).

I was thinking that I could sell a really simple graphics app. I get quite a few requests for recommendations. My users want something easy to make the banner of their dreams.

I sent Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com) an inquirey (a few minutes ago), but I thought I'd ask here for recommendations. My users are young, international, and a little silly.

I'd love to find something that feels more like an iPhone app than a desktop one. I think $20 would be a good price point, hopefully with at least a $5 referral payout.

Any suggestions. I'd also be curious about open source ones (but REALLY simple), and other suggestions for monetizing. I am working on a system where users can pay to get their banners featured so they get more downloads. But who knows if that will work out.
Show HN: OpenCirclez (Feedback welcome)
Uh, somewhere in between, I think. I'm contending that one way is logical, conventional, and clear, and the other way is illogical, odd, and confusing. I think that's a stronger statement than just an aesthetic preference, but I'm not citing anyone else's prescription.
Clickables:

My App:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=117320678334...
http://apps.facebook.com/profile-banner/

Pixelmator:
http://www.pixelmator.com/
Related - I've searched for an authoritative voice on why the letter 'V' was used in place of 'U'. Does anyone know? I do like the story about U with its round curves being too hard to chisel, and I've not found anything besides opinion and speculation out there.
Boston, no remote work

Locately (early-stage startup, funded by Hacker Angels)

http://www.locately.com/

Our software analyzes location data from mobile phones to understand where people go. We then sell this research to large retailers (Target, Costco, ...), "out of home" advertisers (ie, billboards), and city planners and developers.

We're looking to add two engineers. We use some Java and lot of Python (with Scipy), though if you don't know these that's fine, we just care about hiring good hackers.

You get to work here:
http://plixi.com/p/60698580

Email me directly: drew+hn@locately.com
You might feel that way, and certainly there are others who take issue with the general tone of Wikipedia. My advice is simple: try to fix it if you think it's a problem. Wikipedia is generally democratic, but not entirely. it's not majority rules. Come up with convincing arguments and get yourself taken seriously.
Abandon resolutions. Stop looking for a soulmate. Reject positive thinking.
I find that knowing what to do next helps. Also, I try to make a habit of getting to work when I first turn on the computer (rather than going to Hacker News and whatnot) in the morning. This helps me get some momentum, which helps keep the work going throughout the day.

I can still get work done without the initial early morning momentum, but I get much more done by focusing on work first thing.

For "what to do next," I keep a task list. I've been using "The Hit List" on Mac and ToDoList (by AbstractSpoon) while in Windows. I find that part of the trouble with "getting started" is not knowing what to do next sometimes. So keeping a task list is quite helpful, in my opinion.

The other thing is, setting up timeboxes and being resolved to work diligently during each timebox. I guess you can try the Pomodoro technique -- just remember that you can adjust the timings to whatever work best for you. I personally prefer the longer timeboxes (1.5-2 hours each).
I've read both Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. There is significant overlap, and it is most notable in the less technical areas, where he lays out the arguments against the conventional wisdom.

That said (and I say this as a very technical reader), there were aspects of Good Calories, Bad Calories that went over my head because of their presentation and placement in the (very long) book. Why We Get Fat's treatment of LPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipoprotein_lipase) and HSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormone-sensitive_lipase), in particular, were described more clearly in the latest book, and the concepts related to them really make a difference in understanding the larger point.

Probably the most important thing that I got out of Why We Get Fat is a better technical understanding for one of his core arguments (that the arrow of causation in calories in, calories out may be the reverse of what we expect). Specifically, he clearly describes the mechanism by which fat cells may pull in energy from the bloodstream, resulting in additional hunger and lethargy (ad infinitum). His new treatment of this subject, which starts with animal models of obesity, is extremely helpful and worth the price of the new book, in my opinion.
Pixelmator is great but I'd also highly recommend Acorn[1] (for Mac users).

[1]: http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
I'm sure it's not related to this guy's problem, but I was surprised to find that Kinect puts out some visible light; you can easily see it when looking directly into the emitter, and if you get close enough (think centimeters) you can actually see (what I assume is) the dot pattern.
Our NP just got accepted into Give Camp. They're telling us we're going to get a lot of support (if only for a weekend).
http://givecamp.org/

FYI, ours is Remas:
http://www.sendremas.org/

We're doing price comparison for sending money overseas. So obvious, but so needed.
Free software has been around far longer than any of the apps/websites mentioned here.
Looks like a very useful and nice app. Being a picky interface person though, I do have two very minor complaints: your wood texture for the nav bar is overly saturated. If you could tone down the saturation and maybe implement some custom nav buttons, you'd have yourself a much better looking interface (not that it doesn't look good already, though). The second is that the wood does not match that seen in the icon.

Solid app otherwise, though. Thanks for making it free.
I mean no offense to the author (who I do think is right) but I find it terrifying that the startup world has come to the point where "Have a business plan that doesn't rely on you having millions of users to be profitable" is considered an insight and not just plain common sense.
Thanks for the feedback. The ups & downs of doing a start-up(one that began in Jan. 2007).....

We intended to push out a better designed app by Nov., but things occurred prompting us to put our focus back into our start-up's(http://Sleep.FM) original concept, The Social Alarm Clock(let friends choose your alarm sound). A concept we put on the back-burner as it got a lot of flak & thus we focused on creating an app that wakes you to weather reports, flight status & more. During app's long development process(8 months) we saw reaction to a competing Social Alarm Clock on Rocketboom's Tumblr (http://bit.ly/bSgGdl), as well a large company attempting to use our registered trademark(they probably never heard of us so we notified them & they ceased use immediately). Also, our server got hacked & a month later another Social Alarm Clock app was released, except this one's execution was a mirror of the mock up we had in our server. Thus the iphone redesign was pushed back and we finished & released site's original concept in December, though to deaf ears & losing many users.

Overall Im at a crossroads with my start-up; not sure if i want to invest any further of my monies into it. Im skilled at front end coding & pay others to do design, back-end & mobile development.

It seems now with this article and the iPhone's alarm clock short comings we should have focused on updating our app. It's all a crapshoot & Im somewhat exhausted...
mHealth for iHumans
I was confused by that too esp since they don't appear to link to anything, so whats the point? Maybe good taste correlates with literacy and the subtle genius of that page is something that's lost on the book worms of the world.

Is it even possible to make something so ridiculously ugly by accident?
That's really interesting. My recent viral app, Profile Banner, also utilizes tagging of photos without people. How long did it take before your app was banned?
I seem to remember other programming languages (and programs that run code not included with the application) being banned on the app store. Did something change? Or are you compiling down to JavaScript to get around the limits?
heart.py: String macros in Linux with Python
I find the long f confufing and hard to read. Pleafe do not revive it.
I think the direct link to the page on the Apple Store (which includes a good description of the app) is far more valuable than a link to a blog post that says "Hey guys, I made this app free" which may or may not include a link to where you can download it.

I don't have an iPhone anymore, but this app looks quite useful and I've forwarded this thread to a few friends. Thanks!
Thanks for the tip. I was still on 4.1, so I updated yesterday. It's better, but a number of apps are still a far cry from usable.
I guess there might be a social aspect to it, but it's absurd to stand on line to purchase a commodity piece of hardware.
Do something hard that nobody else wants to do.

Get so far into the project that you get past the ugly parts and can start doing things nobody else is. Aim for critical mass in terms of learning ideas and skills.

When you are at the point where you no longer know how to explain it to somebody well from scratch, that's when you can start getting other people involved. It's impressive to watch a guy try to explain a project he obviously knows way too much about.
2010 Retrospective
I was thinking about doing something like that not too long ago, glad to see someone's doing it. Where are you getting your events?
I'm exaggerating the horribleness of the codebase for effect. Lots of it is in good shape, and we've been working on incremental rewrites to fix up the worst legacy spots. There are certainly bad bits, but they're also working bad bits, whose badness largely comes from being hard to bend to new use-cases.

However! I see a lot of developers who would have a hard time fixing a bug / making a small change in an area which has a lot of legacy cruft present without going and rewriting the whole thing. Now, they are right that rewriting it is probably the best course of action from a codebase-health viewpoint... but it's not necessarily the actual best use of their time. If code is working then it's not an urgent priority that it get rewritten.

To be slightly trite, "perfect is the enemy of good."

That's why we'd like to get developers who are okay with the idea of working on a codebase that contains legacy code. And that's why I'm a little bit over the top about it.
One other thing a lot of people don't know about Rubinius is that its fundamental concurrency primitive is Rubinius::Channel, similar to channels in Go. For example, see Rubinius' implementation of class Mutex: https://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/blob/master/lib/thread.r...

Quoth MenTaLguY: MenTaLguY: Channels are the basic communication primitive in Rubinius; everything else is implemented atop them. The fundamental concurrency model is more or less the asynchronous pi calculus minus replication and a few common extensions like non-deterministic choice (which potentially requires channel operations to be centrally arbitrated). I advocated pi calculus channels because of their simplicity, which generally translates to performance and maintainability.

http://www.infoq.com/articles/actors-rubinius-interview
One idea that comes to mind to deal with the wikipedia / stackoverflow problem is result clustering. With Google News, they have done a pretty good job of clustering articles on a single story. They are getting better at deriving the original source in many cases. The simple act of duplicate detection should enable them to identify sites that scrape content and show them as duplicate results.

In the interests of results diversity, you don't want the same content repeated ten times on the first page, although this has the side effect of pushing the original source onto the second page if you guess wrong.
Well, my claims about the working environment being filled with puppies and kittens are obviously a bit hard to stomach.
Oooh. That does look good. I will look into it. Thanks!

I did want to find a cross platform product so I could unify support and tutorial information, but I can compromise on that.
I'm afraid I have to agree with this assessment, having worked in that area before, and having also experienced the relatively glories of downtown Palo Alto.
It is low entropy relative to a theory which explains only one of several correlated things.
It would be great to have that for all fields, regardless of discipline.

Sadly, I'm not sure how many people would be up for the task as the writer of the blog post, David Eppstein, is a machine when it comes to reading/writing papers.

As one of his doctoral descendants, it was more than a tad bit intimidating to see how prolific he is.
Show HN: A little app for crossing off days towards a goal.
http://sccssn.heroku.com/ or (sccssn.com whenever the DNS kicks in)

I built it for myself, but maybe someone else will find it useful.

It's dead simple: A calendar with days that you can check off.

Right now it displays a full year, but if I find that others are using it, I'll put in the effort to allow folks to customize a bit. Same goes for the styling.
Let's say I have two kids, can you show me on a google map, a neighborhood I'd be able to afford on a 1010data salary?
You can still find IIII on many grandfather clocks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IIII#IIII_and_IV
Two variations on old themes
Different standards here in China - people were literally fighting with the Apple store employees when the iPhone 4 came out
1) Run a marathon in under 3 hours
2) Earn some money
3) Start publishing my projects/works online
4) Be better with my social interactions
5) Quit alcohol
6) Do more hiking and fun travelling
7) Help people around me to the best of my capabilities
As far as I know, the story about V being easier to carve in stone is accurate. Also, there is no U in the Roman alphabet. So there's that.
Ask HN: How to identify potential of a person?
Is testing his/her IQ+EQ a reliable measure?
TIA
My first smartphone was the Nexus One. Using iPhones infuriates me, because from my perspective, the iPhone "does it wrong". There are a lot of little Android things that I know and expect, and it rubs me really raw when they aren't there. The iPhone has much prettier transitions and smoother scrolling, and that's about it, as far as I'm concerned. In literally every other way, I prefer my Nexus One. I know, intellectually, that the way the iPhone does things works (after all, other people have no issue with it), but from my perspective, it's less usable than my Android phone.

The first device you really use is naturally going to set expectations for you, and it's difficult to get past that comfort when another device does things differently. The iPhone is not a better Android phone than my Nexus one, and Siegler's Nexus S is not a better iPhone than his iPhone.
Fixing XSS on a bank website - A customer's saga
Lidar scanners use IR lasers. AFAIK the Kinect uses IR LED which wouldn't be nearly as harmful.
I found it very interesting to see how the 'ſ' directly followed by a 's' were combined into the ligurature 'ß'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ß
As someone who moved to their first foreign country at 6, the second at 14, and a couple more later in life, the neat thing is that you discover a new homeland, or at least your own people - expatriates.
How do you keep 2 separate notebooks to work with? How do you access your mail, code libraries, music, important files etc... on both? Do you sync them with dropbox or something?

I have 2 laptops - a Vaio for Windows related work and a Macbook for mac/iphone related work and I'm always struggling about which one to take when I go on a trip (when I don't have any specific work but like to keep a laptop handy anyway). The Macbook is lighter and more convenient but the Vaio has most of my mail and personal files.
IIII persists on clocks. 7 of the 8 roman numeral clock faces I found in the house just now use IIII.

Unicode does not sanction it. There are unicode codes for digits 1 through 12, plus L, C, D, and M, but all my "ROMAN NUMERAL FOUR" (0x2163) are rendered as IV.
Ah, I've always stayed in friendly/social guilds, just not the hardcore guilds anymore ;-)
How to make flash drive that copy's users files silently and automatically
Dzil: a casual walkthrough of Dist::Zilla
http://1r7.net/

Not technically inspired by Launch An App Month; when the story about Delicious broke, I sat down and write a clone that evening. First line of code to launch was < 24 hours.
I learned a long time ago that I could cure the pain of procrastination by opening an editor and typing

int main(int argc, char **argv) {

I still do this... just opening the appropriate program -- emacs, MS Word, whatever -- and typing a line that looks like it might actually be useful is enough to get me started doing real work, even when I have no idea how to complete the project (which was what was stopping me from starting in the first place).
A welder's mask is much too dark to play a game with.

There are, however, IR cut-off filters. They're used in photography. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_cut-off_filter
The "entire free software movement" has nothing at all to do with Evernote or Skype, and everything to do with gcc, perl, Python, Ruby, sendmail, database engines, emacs, the Gimp, and a whole raft of other tools the world would grind to a stop without. I'll stand aside and let anybody bash the freemium model if they feel like it, but confusing that with the free software movement is a serious error.
I think you're mixed up about what Freemium is. Freemium means having a free option which allows people to become familiar with a product, and then paid plans which add functionality. Examples are Yola which is free unless you wat your own domain, Highrise which has a free "solo" package, Acunote which is free for a certain number of users etc.

This is very different from "build it, they will come, figure out the money later" which is what Facebook, Google, Twitter, Tumblr and the like do (monetising these services inevitably leads to an advertising based revenue model).
The other category to consider are those domainers who hold websites which are _not_ typically covered in ads; they might just have a notice on them saying "contact firm X for details." In many cases, I have even written such outfits saying, "is XYZ.com for sale?" and been told no, it isn't, or something like that. I have seen this for some domains which are more high-end, more generic useful words and less just pure spam.

This said, it's still a disgusting waste of internet real estate.
I can't figure out how to change my location from Manhattan (I'm in Australia)
I recently got into it.
Proficiency with C++ is highly valued.
Knowledge of low level networking is valued as well.

Experience in telecoms, embedded systems, and video games industries is looked upon highly.

The following is a list of firms that engage in proprietary trading, a good deal of them hire software developers for automated trading systems:
http://www.quantnet.com/quant-internships-graduate-recruitme...