skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you've never bothered to look up statistics on the poor.

In the 1970's, the bottom 10% only had a pot to piss in - they lacked a toilet. Today, the poor live in houses with 2 rooms/person, drive at least one car (70% or so), sometimes two cars (25%), and have all manner of consumer goods not available even to the middle class of 1970.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

Not only that, but the poor manage to achieve all of this, for the most part, without even working.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf

There might be a small number of poor people in bad situations, but the majority of the poor are doing very well by historical standards. Please go read the actual numbers before criticizing others who have already done so.
There is actually a problem when organizations are focusing too much on tools.

In order to efficiently address a disruptive innovation, a corporations need to change their processes and since tools are connected to processes, these good tools make that change even harder.

Yes, it good to have good tools for developing the current product, but organization needs to be ready to eliminate internal tools without hesitations.
It's a bug, not a feature.

I'm not sure that's right... would the web have caught on and be as well-loved if everything used "system" colors and designs? Maybe you're envisioning something different, but I'm not sure where the middle ground is between the web as it exists today and a classic Windows 3.1 / Mac looking app - what would a "basic toolkit" look like beyond the HTML elements and form controls that we have?
Very cool. I don't use twitter myself but I really like the visualization idea.

The GUI doesn't seem to work here, though, I cannot change any of the radio buttons such as "Satellite" instead of "Map". It simply doesn't respond to mouse clicks (Firefox 3.6.13 Linux).
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6.html would be a good place to start reading.

Additionally, even if you take the OP article at face value, nothing in it constitutes an argument that current temperature shifts are not man-made. All he's done is shown that there has been natural temperature variability in pre-industrial times. This is clearly not an argument that current warming is not man-made.
If user satisfaction is mapped on the X-axis of real numbers, doing beyond-the-call-of-duty service for a customer with negative user satisfaction is equivalent to multiplying by -1.
I have never sent a thank you note. Not for any job I've ever had. Not for those who really wanted me and fought for me and made me great offers, never. Perhaps I am rude, or perhaps companies looking to make money are not looking for "polite" developers?

And cellphones are rude, but it is not rude if you can not or forgot to turn yours off and it rings. It is not rude to apologize and briefly take the call if only to explain why you can't talk on the phone now. It is not even rude to strongly apologize further if the call turns out to be important and you have to take <5 minutes to deal with it. This applies equally to both sides.
Get a refurbished thinkpad. Mine was 3 years old when I bought it, it's now 4 years old and runs fine.

When it dies I'll get another refurbished thinkpad and once again save hundreds of pounds.
a very large percentage of those that can't function are war veterans. I stand by my point that acting like those people don't exist leads to insane statements like the poor are blessed.
Yes, the same techniques can be used to varying degrees in any language with a decent REPL.

Why do you use an edit/run development cycle with Python? Coming from a Lisp background, interacting with a running program through a REPL seems to have no disadvantages and does a lot to make debugging and interactive testing easy. Is it a lack of tool support, or did it just not seem like something that would benefit you to try?
Real users. Nothing will be more motivating than having real people use and love your stuff. Build something you're not completely embarrassed of and start showing it to people and asking them to try it out. If one of them picks up, you won't need to talk yourself out of anything. You'll be too busy fixing bugs, adding features and improving the overall experience.
The Top Questions Tech Entrepreneurs Ask
Whether that's true or not, do the benefits of stopping the ice caps melting outweigh the negative effects on us for the future? Just because something is going to cause us a whole bunch of problems does not mean the solution will not cause more problems and implementing a solution blindly is likely to be profoundly disappointing in the long run.

Every decision must be weighed against the effects of both making it and not making it. I am unconvinced those who say "We should do something to prevent global warming" fully understand what we may be doing to our future in an effort to solve a problem we may not have. On top of that, our political class is probably unable to have the type of discussion required to make that decision anyway.
I'm a skeptic about any claim of understanding climate at this point, whether pro-GW or anti-GW. I just don't think the science is there, and I think the politics have gotten way ahead of where the science is.

Having said that, I have problems with the use of proxy climate data, such as this author does with ice cores. While useful to start an inquiry, many times these things are overrated. Add to that the fact that everybody is able to grow their own "adjustment" functions to try to extrapolate the measurement to the climate at large, and having a discussion using data like this seems problematic, at least to me.
Apple Is ‘Becoming Microsoft’ With App Store, Says Pirate Bay Founder
It's even worse even worse. 2007 you probably could still get a higher-quality LCD than TN, though it was becoming a significant challenge. Now it's flat-out impossible, as near as I can tell.

I'm pleased to note that it's NOT flat-out impossible: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4049/hp-elitebook-8740w-ips-on... . It's just really expensive. I think the version of the IPS HP laptop Anandtech tested is something like $5K, and the defaults are something like $3.5K. But if you've gotta have it...
This wonderful Socratic dialogue has articulated my professional hell over the past six months.
I think it's an anachronism. I've interviewed well over a hundred candidates for various engineering positions, and it's extremely rare to get a follow-up. The few that I have received came across as kind of stalkerly. But maybe that's just me.

The only situation I can imagine sending one is if a couple of weeks go by and you still haven't had any response after the interview (which usually isn't a good sign anyway.)
Shows one data set. Does not detail any methodological assumptions used to interpret that data set. Does not elaborate or respond to contrary views. Not science.
> Why can't you? Cat got your mouse pointer?

Lack of karma, I guess...

PS. I'm Estonian ;)
Agreed, those are better, but the idea stands - tell users what they're doing when they click that button with the button text
I never did anything using SOAP, and thought that this technology died many years ago.
Learning to Code (with an eye on RoR)
I'm 20 years old (well, 21 on the 17th) and in school for Communication/Business. I've loved starting entrepreneurial projects since I was 7 or 8 years old.

For the past four years or so I've been completely taken with the Web, and launched a few (very) small projects...the thing is, I don't know how to code. At all.

My most ambitious project to date is in the latter stages of development and I'm working with a great freelancer on an equity deal. I'm really into the product and the interface and how people use social products, but as far as doing the actual creating, I'm useless. I love the business side of the Web, but the product is so much fun.

I want to get to the point where I can hack together demos/prototypes with RoR - I started a tutorial (http://railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book) on Monday and have slowly progressed (about an hour each day... I'm on the Heroku part) but I'm wondering if I should learn some basic HTML first or something.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
Screw simplicity. - Sahil Lavingia
Looking forward to meeting everyone! See you there.
> each design relies on a ball-shaped lens

I probably just need to be thwacked with a clue stick, but what do they mean by a "ball-shaped lens" ?

Might be ironic, but are there any pictures of the prototypes?
They are describing an UTF8 feature - nothing invalid or broken about it.
A few thigns which immediately jump out:

1) "1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century." While true for the USA, it was more than offset by cooler weather elsewhere. [http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warm...]

2) There is significant evidence that the "Medieval Warm Period" was regional. http://www.google.com/search?q=medieval+warm+period+regional

3) All of the data in this blog post was from a single ice core sample in Greenland. So at a minimum the title is very misleading, and should be "In Greenland only 9100 ...". This fits with the previous errors of picking regional temperature sets which back his claims and presenting them as representative of global temperatures.

4) Temperature proxies, like ice core data, are apparently only valid when they agree with him.

I expect we'll shortly see a rebuttal where someone includes graphs of some of the many other 10,000 year temperature proxies. See, for example, the wide variability of different proxies as graphed together here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_...
One of the things that strikes me about what I've heard about hiring practices is that they all seem primarily focussed on keeping the wrong people out rather than on finding the right people.

Does anyone consider the possibility that there might be really capable people who don't fit the model that N developers have of what a good candidate should be ?
your doing the same thing as the other, magically disappearing a whole class of people. Please come meet me in Los Angeles and I'll show you the poor. They don't have a house, a car, or any consumer goods.

As I said before, a very large percentage of the people I'm talking about are war veterans. They are people that were capable of functioning in society before we used them up and spit them out. Disappearing them from our minds doesn't make them go away in real life.
I had my appendix out a couple years ago, and it cost me around $2000, and this was with some really fantastic insurance. If uninsured, I would have gotten a bill for around $25,000. Had I been in a different point in my life, I would have been ruined financially.
And let's not forget where else where the text may end up later.

I'm sure this message was fine in their mail reader:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/manet/current/msg11520.... (chosen only b/c I was reading through the list this morning)

But now I must horizontally scroll :(
Keeping track of your secrets is as essential a part of a crypto implementation as the algorithm used. As I understand it, they could have used something like this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Socialist_mil...

EDIT: I understand now, having read more carefully, about how this particular MITM attack works. Nasty. The only solution would seem to be to give up some convenience.
This is one reason I ditched my HTC Magic on Rogers. I hear all this great stuff about new Android releases, but it's going to take months before any updates get to my phone, and by then Rogers will have boned things up somehow. With my iPhone I always have current (non-telco-modified) software.
I would like to see a visualization like this, but corrected for population density. What cities tweet disproportionately?
Apple PR: "1 Million Downloads on Mac App Store!"

Twitter PR: "900,000 Downloads of Twitter for Mac in 24 Hours!"

https://twitter.com/shawnblanc/status/23391070813425666

It's a joke, but I bet there is a heavy skew towards free software and new software. You're probably not going to pay for iWork a second time. It isn't all Twitter though; the guys at Evernote saw new sign ups from Mac increase by 1,800% (https://twitter.com/evernote/status/23116726547775488).
If you are in Los Angeles, there are several affordable machine shops here. I'll be taking the Venice Machine Shop class starting next Monday (http://venicemachine.com/). For only $55, you get 6 hours of machine shop access for 3 months! El Camino College has a more modern machine shop with all sorts of cool prototyping machines but the classes are on weekday mornings (http://southbaymachine.com/). Machine shops in other parts of our fair & sprawling region are listed here: http://venicemachine.com/expandedinfo/machineshopclasses.htm

There are also Fab Labs around the world: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/labs/
"better off even than the kings of yore due to technological progress"

This is absurd. It's based on the false premise that consumerism equals happiness, dignity, well being, and a fulfilling life.

And there is still the problem that you guys are disappearing a whole class of people, a large percentage of whom are war veterans, to make yourselves feel better.
Thanks for the pointer, but no this is not what I am thinking. This project is supposed to be a intermediate level electronics project. This is most probably going to have a black and white screen and an avr controller of some sort. I chose IF to implement on this because I love solving little text adventures.
I miss my old electric typewriter with it's one line of text. I am glad it's slowly coming back.
Two checkpoints I've used in the past:

1. If an idea sounds promising, I try to forget about it for a while (say a month) and if it's still a good idea after the wait, then I go for it.

Usually this means that I really have that problem and it needs fixing. So I build it.

If not, I've only lost a few brain cells. No harm done.

2. I launch, and if it works and gets people excited, then I'm really onto something.

If not, shut it down.

Note that these checkpoints allow you to back track or drop the idea. No need to keep flogging a dead horse.
I'm guessing one of the big reasons we still have poor people is simply human preferences, as well as the fact that poverty is defined in relative rather than absolute terms.

Some people prefer to consume goods and services. These people trade work for money, and have many goods and services.

Other people prefer to consume leisure and avoid work. They have a standard of living lower than the workers (from who they receive large subsidies), but still much larger than the historical average. If we properly accounted for leisure, we would realize how well off even the "poor" are.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf (This report shows that most of the poor consume leisure.)
try going to pretty much any other industrial country. The poor of america are shit on in comparison.
Articles I found mentioning HIG wherein Gruber praises Apple's design consistency: zero. Why don't you try finding some for yourself?

Like I said, this has been a pet peeve of his for years.
Food for thought: If the scientific consensus came to be that the current global warming trend IS NOT anthropogenic, what would that matter?

That is, say the recent global warming is a natural trend - do we still try to mitigate it? If not, why not? The implications could still be dire for poorer countries in non-temperate climates.

Of course the flip side of this question is: if it's concluded that global warming is anthropogenic, why do we assume that the best course of action is to reverse it? Isn't it reasonable to suggest that perhaps many more lives could saved by using that money to "adjust" to global warming rather than try to turn back time?
I'm being asked to create webservices so other developers don't do direct database access and their stuff wont break when things change. How do you manage that?
There are two ways not to be poor: either you're productive yourself or you are supported by someone who is productive.

If you are not productive, it's because you don't want to be or because you can't. You may not want to be productive if it's easier or more pleasant not to be (eg, if you're receiving large unemployment check from the government.) You can't be productive if factors outside of your control prevent you (eg, you suffer from a severe handicap, you're in prison, or no one will hire you.)

If you're not supported by someone, it's because you either don't want help or you don't have anyone in your life whose willing and able to support you.

In the modern, these two cases (being productive and having someone willing and able to support you) are often merged. For example, there are many people who are essentially professional beggars. They are not productive in the way a farmer is. A farmer works at farming and lives directly off of the wealth produced by the farm which he trades. In contrast, a fundraiser for a charity works at convincing people to give for something that is only indirectly beneficial to themselves.

Sometimes the same person may play both of these roles. A politician may ask a working person to vote for him because he will provide students with financial aid. The politician in this case is acting as a kind of professional beggar on behalf of students. The worker who votes for the politician does not expect to receive a direct benefit. The worker's vote is an act of charity. The same politician may ask a student for her vote because he will increase her government-provided student aid. The student's vote is a kind of business decision. (Although of questionable morality since her vote is not a vote for charity so much as a vote for coercing others to give.)

The social welfare state has also given rise to what are essentially unemployed beggars: People who in the past might have lived off of the charity of others but now don't even ask for support. They simply declare their need to the government which supports them.
I think the author is missing the point: Wealth relative to a previous century is cold consolation when you're facing eviction, when you've lost your job, when your car, hardly a luxury in auto-obsessed America, is repossessed, and you lack health insurance.

In fact, the ability to purchase an iPad is comparing a consumer trifle to the kind of precarity the poor live with.
Maybe find a partner who can vet your ideas.
I can't say it would really make a big difference to get a "thank you" and I've never sent more than cursory thanks.

One thing I have done, though, when interviewing for a job, is to not ask all my ?'s when the interview enters the "what do you have to ask about us?" phase. I try to keep one in reserve and send that to someone in my interview loop after the fact. I feel that it shows continued interest in the position and I have never gotten a negative reaction from anyone for asking a follow-up ?.
Exactly, I've had this issue a few times and actually consider "submit"/"finish"/etc to be far more user friendly for this reason.

Presumably I already clicked something to the effect of "create user" to get to the form, and now I have to click "create user" again? What?
Review my iPad app for Comics - Comimix
Developed over the last few months - Just a fun way to browse 180+ comic strips on the iPad. There are a many loose ends as this is v1 - but we already took too much time to develop this and wanted real feedback before working on new features.

How do you like it HN? We'd love to hear your feedback!
Indeed. "RESTful" is basically a name for using HTTP well, and such APIs are usable for anything from bash script to Big Vendor Library™.
If you're going to be pendantic, do it right: Moore's Law is about the price of transistors on a single IC. For instance, the actual Moore's Law hasn't quite stalled yet, we're still getting transistors for cheaper even if clockspeeds themselves have stalled. It's also independent of the wafer size so you can still get a generation of Moore's Law just by growing the wafer size without raising the price.

I daresay monitors actually have benefited from that, but instead of raising resolution we've been dropping prices. Though I would imagine LCD-related fab processes not technically under Moore's Law are responsible for more of that.
Ask HN: Founders of popular Internet startups that are not programmers.
An interesting question that came up during a recent panel.
Piracy concerns over new Mac App Store
Thanks for reading it, and best of luck on your project!
Particularly since the pilot would still have to look up the local conversion, since it varies from place to place.
With all due respect, you're one data point. While not minimizing the hardships you went through as a poor child, you were fortunate compared to some.

As one report on Los Angeles' health concludes: "On the other hand, if we were to completely eliminate all deaths due to homicide, which is the leading cause of premature death among black males, this would likely have the greatest impact on reducing the disparity in life expectancy between black males and males of other racial/ethnic groups, and would result in a gain of 14 times more life-years at birth for black males relative to white males." [1]

"don't mistake those living on the street for the poor"

Are they rich? They certainly qualify as poor, even if they also fall into other categories. And you can't simply say "they're poor because of their mental state." You cannot trivially isolate a single variable like mental health or economic status from others. Poor white people in the US generally have a markedly improved experience over poor minorities. For example, a 2010 article examining Toxics Release Inventory Facility (TRIF) locations found a high correlation between placement and ethnic minorities. They found that, "...every race or ethnicity variable is negative and statistically signiﬁcant, indicating that Census units with greater minority populations are closer to new TRIFs than are those tracts with greater proportions of non-Hispanic Whites." [2]

So while I and others certainly appreciate your perspective and your experience, you ought probably be careful not to draw conclusions about others' experience as a result.

[1] "Life Expectancy in Los Angeles County", from the Office of Health Assessment and Epidemiology, July 2010

[2] "Justice for All? A Cross-Time Analysis of Toxics Release Inventory Facility Location" from the Review of Policy Research, January 2010. This study is particularly informative on the issue of environmental justice because it handles carefully the question of "market rationality" for environmental justice. As many had pointed out, "Individuals making conscious trade-offs to accept more environmental risk in exchange for some desired attribute, such as lower housing prices, does not have the same implications as does the situation in which environmental harms are imposed on existing residents." This study is an attempt to answer the "chicken-or-egg" question of whether environmental harms are imposed on ethnic minorities or if instead poor ethnic minorities make an economic tradeoff decision.
filter_term == "earthquake" || "tsunami" || "tornado"
lol thats the first thing i said after reading about 1mil downloads... "bet its 90% the twitter client because nobody wants to spend 50 bucks on all the other apps..."
My first thought was that DHH was being reasonable and rational in his skepticism. Then my thoughts about fees, etc., were mirrored and confirmed http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-now-it-all-makes-sen... .

It smells like a money grab for GS, and even at $2B in revenue for 2010, still seems at least a little over-valued.