skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps it's more an issue of naming.

If you have a man and a woman in a room together, it's going to be more or less a toss-up which of them happens to be more suited for a particular task, since what the body of research mostly shows is that, in general, men and women are pretty much the same.

Considering that, it strikes me as disingenuous to say something like "men are better at [x] than women" — which is vague by the most generous reading, outright false by the most literal — when what you really mean is "the mean for [x] among all men is 5% higher than the mean among all women."

I think the reason people don't say that instead is because it's obviously a very weak statement.
http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/News/Red-Hat-the-Top-...

"The vast majority (70 percent) of contributors work on the project on their spare time, while an additional 20 percent of contributors do so on both a paid and voluntary basis."

Adding the percentages of the top 5 corporate contributors adds up to just over a third of contributions from ostensibly full-time developers.

So it appears to be just a fact that people are developing this in their spare time. That doesn't mean they're less competent than paid developers; of course not. It simply means that compared to a big company, like MS or Apple, they just don't have the same level of cash money resources to hire the right kinds of people--UI design experts--and buy the right kinds of feedback--real-life user testing, focus groups--that big companies do. And that very much shows in these screenshots.

Alpha or not, criticism is essential for furthering the project. If everyone just sat around and said "whew, lots of hard work, good job guys!" to whatever crap any OSS dev produced, OSS would never progress. I want Gnome 3 to be better because I use Gnome every day!
Agreed. Good developers are good developers. The same traits that make someone successful on one platform are identical to what will make them successful on another.

If you pay more for certain training backgrounds, you're paying only for the few weeks/months required for a good dev to come up to speed on the new technology. The company in the article probably spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they needed to for virtually no gain, unless those few weeks/months made a critical time-to-market difference.
Well, I am actually a bit more curious about the difference between coding drunk and checking sober vs. coding sober, checking sober... But I suppose checking drunk would be amusing too.
The developer hasn't kept his skills current

This comment and similar comments I've seen on this post seem to be implying that every developer needs to continuously be learning the latest technology/platform -- in this case mobile.

I really don't think that makes sense. Technology is way too diverse to expect everyone to know everything. Do you think every web developer needs to be able to develop iPhone apps (and vice versa) ?

It seems to me that the post has more to do with the employer discovering an inconsistency in the way they were evaluating the value of their employees. Is the mobile developer really generating more value for the company than the backend/customer logic guy with 10 years experience. I doubt it, and judging by the outcome the manager seems to agree.
"... How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask? ..."

Probably by making a product that people want and maybe a good bit of timing. If you read through the first post by Alex ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 you'll see a mention of Yahoo refuting a claim they are closing delicious, but instead making it know the wish to sell.

When launching a new service with a big existing competitor, uncertainty can be used to boost user interest in alternatives.
>Iphones are nearing the mid point of the yearly cycle, and I'd expect them to be relatively flatish until summertime.

I wouldn't expect that, at least not this year in the US. The iPhone goes non-exclusive here in a week or so as it hits Verizon stores. Most people are expecting a big jump in sales from Verizon customers who wanted iPhones but didn't want to switch to AT&T.
Up The Asset: Modern Accounting on the Open Web
It was $6.80 for each: http://www.l4d.com/sacrifice/index.html#sale_content
I suspect that ATM skimmers will see some nice features in the current generation of 3D printers.
Prevent Zune From Relocking Windows Phone 7 Devices Unlocked With ChevronWP 7
The major downtime sucked, and the minor hiccups still continue to suck. But I think we also need to realise it's free. It doesn't excuse the lack of communication, but lofty expectations of uptime for a service that's offered freely seem asinine.
Here are 36 human-competitive results:

http://www.genetic-programming.com/humancompetitive.html

That list is kind of dated, though, and in no way representative or exhaustive.
Here's some research suggesting that the Long Tail isn't just for weirdos like us, but that pretty much everyone dips into the long tail occasionally: http://messymatters.com/longtail

In other words, businesses like Blockbuster figured that since only a small fraction of demand is in the long tail that it's not worth the large cost of supplying it. But just because there's only a small fraction of demand in the long tail doesn't mean that there's only a small fraction of customers who care about it.

That's because it's not, as previous conventional wisdom had it, that most people stick to the popular stuff and there are a fringe of eccentrics who prefer the long tail. Rather, most people most of the time like the popular stuff and, occasionally, like long-tail stuff.

Conclusion: Total demand for the long tail is low; total customers who care about it is high. So ignoring the long tail means alienating most customers.
Playing audio at full volume for every user that hits your site is a bad idea.
but was it a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Given the hype around departures, I almost didn't submit this. But one is pretty newsworthy given the Kinection.
The U.S. was only in WWII from 41-45. It was only in WWI from 1917-1918.

Also saying "The war on terror" is kind of misleading since troop levels have varied greatly. To give one example the initial Afghan offensive only involved about 1,300 ground troops. As of 2003 that number was still only at 10,000 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/01/ap/government/main...)

That's around the same number we had in Somalia (5,300), the '89 Panama invasion (30,000) and several other conflicts. So the fact that the chart starts to level off as of 2001 while these other conflicts don't seem to have made an impact undermines the implied point
A previous boss once said to me "I don't want to pay to train current engineers, I'm going to hire someone who knows X already".

Experienced engineers who were more than capable of learning something soon realized that their growth at company was limited b/c boss didn't see them as being different than their current state. So, if you are code Java now, boss thinks you are a "java engineer". People started to leave quickly.

Experience shows what not to do more than it shows what to do. Imagine someone who "knows python" trying to build django, twisted or tornado w/out having general real world experience, domain experience or really understanding why those need to be built. That is a recipe for disaster.

Smart, capable engineers are constantly reinventing themselves. If they feel they are not going to be given a chance to work on something interesting b/c they don't have X on their resume they will move on. The business will suffer as they take domain knowledge and experience with them.

That boss is still at that company. Engineering staff has over 150% turnover in past 18 months (when above boss started). Most engineers have moved onto things that are much more glamorous and interesting but still say they would have preferred to stay there and work on that system. The company itself has slowly started to lose market share and customers are not renewing their contracts. A former clear #1 in the space has become a #3 or #4 at best. Those months watching this boss destroy this company are some of the best lessons I could ever learn...on what not to do and how not to do it.
If this turns out to be true Samsung just lost a customer for life. This is just plain stupid, short sighted thinking.
There's not a whole lot to gain by making the desktop increasingly iOS-ish. Most of the iOS advantages don't 'fit' quite right, the existing base would scream, and the market they'd theoretically be chasing with said changes will have been happily working on their iPads for years.

As far as convergence goes, what I'm starting to wonder, is if it wouldn't make more sense to add a docking solution to iOS instead. After all, Moore's law is bringing desktop-class power to the iPad far faster and more convincingly than any case for iOS style interaction on the desktop is being made.

So the question then arises, whether it would make more sense to support a docked iOS 'mode' -- allowing use of desktop-style app UI and interaction (keyboard/mouse) in native iOS apps -- or just run OS X virtualized when docked (with some shared file bucket between the OSes)?
It's like Tumblr are trying to prove some kind of point with the insane downtime.
Introducing Winston, the multitransport asynchronous logging library for node.js
On a site like Hacker News, we judge Tumblr both from a consumer point of view, but also from a start-up point of view. And from the latter, this instability is a really big problem.
Per-item, it's probably less. But overall, they're drastically increasing the size of their potential market.

Real life example: say I have a friend who says "dude, you should totally check out Dexter. Great show!"

In the old content model, I go to Best Buy, see the DVD set for the first season on sale for 39.99, and unless my friend is godlike in his predictions, my response is "hell no."

In the new content model, I log on to my Netflix account and watch the first episode. Not bad. I watch another. Pretty good, and now I'm invested in the story. Whoever produces Dexter is now making free money off of me that they definitely would not have otherwise.

And that's only the first-order effects... by allowing the market to be more responsive to the actual viewing habits of consumers (rather than being mediated by network decisions on what shows to air), consumers will eventually get more of what they want, particularly niche audiences who aren't a fan of standard TV fare. This increases the entire market size, and allows producers of individual shows to expand the market on a per-show basis, something that was previously impossible. Experimental indie shows were simply not on the table, before. Now, they at least have a chance of finding a market.
Just because you're giving away a service for free doesn't mean you should take QoS lightly. Nobody would say that complaints about google search going down were asinine. Same for local broadcast tv service. Or twitter. Or youtube.

If your business is providing hosting for content or providing a service that is expected to be ubiquitously available then QoS is a significant part of your business whether your service is nominally free or not.

Edit: Whether your revenue comes from users or from advertisers the reliability and quality of your service matters. If your userbase decides to abandon you then you are screwed regardless of whether they are your customers or your product.
Awesome post: http://www.contrast.ie/blog/evolution-of-a-dashboard-design
Never say never. From the last exercise in ch 4: "This problem is open-ended. A good answer is probably worth a Ph.D."

I admit that I indeed skipped over that one.
One interesting thing about the Gnome Shell design process is that it has been very open and responsive. Although there was a heavy focus on creating design principles up front, the actual design has evolved a lot over the few years that the project has been active. The overview of the current design at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design has many relevant links that you can explore if you're interested.

I know there are plans for usability testing, but I don't know how they have progressed since this blog post http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/gnome-shell-usability...
Phenomenal. I'm not sure I can put together a comment that's much more than that.
Korea.

But to be fair, Korea was dwarfed by WWII and Vietnam in cost and public awareness. For example, did you know that we're currently technically still at war with North Korea? There's only a cease-fire, no treaty. We still even have troops over there...
Anne -

My apologies, I was not aware this list had an owner. I updated the post to credit you. Thanks very much for maintaining the list.
Pandora Expected to IPO in Early 2011
and beyond that, if you set the expectation that you're giving a pro service, regardless of the price, then you should probably do what you taught people to expect...especially with millions on funding.
historious has been running for more than six months now and it hasn't been mentioned in the NYT... Not only that, trunkly does basically exactly what historious does.
Apple COO Tim Cook on Android, Verizon, and more
'Holometer' to Determine Once and For All Whether Reality Is Just an Illusion
In 1993, twelve years after the introduction of the IBM PC, there were 152 million personal computers [1]. That figure includes Macs, and many of the IBM PC compatibles were probably running only DOS or OS/2, not Windows.

I'm guesstimating that the Windows platform reached an installed base of 160m around 1996. That means it took iOS 1/5 of the time to get to 160m.

[1] http://www.itu.int/wsis/tunis/newsroom/background/missinglin...
I don't think not having Facebook is antisocial in that it hinders others, but I think not having one hinders yourself socially (at least at my age - 21).

If people are having a non-formal invite (i.e. not a wedding or a 21st which will usually get a paper invite), the event invites are all done through Facebook. If its a close friend of yours, you'll get a text message anyway, but if it's an acquaintance, you might find yourself without an invite, whereas all your mates do. If you want to go, you have to get them to ask if you can come, sometimes an uncomfortable conversation.

I also find (though I only have a few examples), that those without Facebook like to complain that they're never invited to events yet like to maintain moral superiority over those who do.
>I'm more interested in why we got the Great Depression in a period of relative peace.

Speculation. There were very few regulations on the stock market, which led to massive growth across the board. As a result, average people invested their savings in the stock market, because they were all but guaranteed double-digit ROIs. Problem is, stock prices were based on the inflationary pressure of increased investment, not the actual revenues of the companies themselves. When the bubble burst, it hurt everyone. People were worried that their savings would be lost, so they rushed to the banks to withdraw all their money, but the banks didn't have enough to cover their balances, so they shut down. Now, savings weren't insured back then, so when the banks closed their clients lost everything.

As a result of the Great Depression, the government instituted sane financial regulations. Of course, in protecting against busts, they capped growth, so big money types hated them. Thus, neoliberals in the Reagan, Bush (I), Clinton, and Bush (II) administrations systematically removed the regulations that had been put in place to stop serious recessions from happening. There was tremendous growth, then...

This latest recession was entirely foreseeable, and in fact, my friend's grandfather called it. He said in about 2005 that the last time he had seen growth like that, and people generally acting so irresponsibly with their money was right before the Great Depression. In fact, he even called the housing market as the bubble that would pop. I promptly ignored him of course, because he was just some senile old man. Just goes to show, people will only be responsible so long as the pain of their previous irresponsibility is fresh in their minds. When it starts to fade, they get greedy and stupid again.
Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?
Is this a new experiment or is it a new permanent thing to reduce load, I don't think many people are going to be looking at the lower end of the spectrum (clicking more) which may detract from interesting comments and conversations.

Examples: look on the front page with comment threads >~30
Hum, they sold mor Macs then ever before, and they make a pretty good margin on them. I would say the needle is going upwards quite nicely.
I have a friend in SF that loves your service. The only problem is that every time she goes to redeem a groupon, she gets berated by the staff and feels like she's a different class of customer.

This rainbows and unicorns thing isn't the reality from what I'm getting.
They were shorter and cheaper. They didn't involve the kind of spending that leads to trillion-dollar deficits.
It's simple and obvious, but few people actually do it: read the CSS spec. Learn the rules for specificity, for vertical margin collapsing, for positioning and stacking, for forward-compatibility.

I know way too many front-end devs/designers who only learned from shitty second hand tutorials, and it always shows.
This is probably a good list but I really hope no one is intimidated and decides not to read SICP at all. I have to add another voice saying that it's really not that hard. I'm into chapter 5 and I found it not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be, challenging but not insurmountable. The writing is extremely clear and it really builds up the material at a good (not too fast, or too slow) pace. It's a terrific book and well worth the effort.

I don't know about the other lectures listed but the 1986 lectures are worth a watch, they are quite motivating since both authors exhibit an infectious enthusiasm.
You'd then overlay the whole panel, a sheet of polished aluminum with your hardware behind it placed over top of the original sheet of polished aluminum.
ReadWriteWeb had a piece on that topic today: http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/how-3-companies-are...

That pointed over to this longer piece about how Yammer, Proxlet and Bocoup are using Node.js:
http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/15/who-is-using-node-js-an...
Yeah, I expect the analysists are very low on their CDMA iPhone sales estimates.
The short answer, I submitted a press release to GigaOm, they wrote an article based on that and the NYT syndicate their content.

The long answer, I'm not a PR professional, but what's been working for us is to find some headline hook.

I'm not trying to write the article for the journalist but to pull out what's interesting. If it's an Australian blog, I'd make a big deal of the fact we are Melbourne based 'Aussie battler hits Top 20K sites globally in first month'. If it's someone like GigaOm, I'm trying to find some other 'cut through' that will grab the journalists attention.

I think in this case, the headline I went with was 'New startup Trunk.ly bookmarks 5 million links for users in its first month'.

The press release itself was basically the same regardless - a story about how we launched, what we do in the first paragraph, then facts figures and quotes. Overall I try to tell a story, but I make sure there is plenty of quotable things too.

In practice this seems to of been working OK - what's interesting is that the quotes facts and figures rarely, if ever, get used, but I think what's going on here is that we are capturing the blogger /journalists interest enough to want to research more and write about us.

I never tried to pitch the NYT, I think pitching a tech blog is a lot easier.

The question I'd love to know the answer to is do the NYT curate inbound syndication - did some sub-editor somewhere make a decision to run the article, or was it purely automatic?
Computer History Museum Goes High-Tech
Not being snarky here, but how about gmail? If you want pop3 or IMAP, you can do that in gmail. You can also tag/color e-mails based on which address they're coming from, set up reply-to, have a huge amount of space for archiving, Google searching for your e-mails...
I feel like T.S. Eliot knew all about this before the second world war...
"Doing bong rips of salvia with Miley Cyrus"

There's no excuse for downtime, but if there were, this would certainly be one.
Meh. The whole thing is based on an anecdote which may or may not even be true.

Anybody who pays a premium for new college grads is an idiot. Comp Sci programs don't teach you what you need to know to produce production code. It takes a good three or four years of professional experience for people to pick that up. Some never do.

There's a reason new grads are having a hard time getting hired in this crappy economy. It's not because employers don't know better - it's because employers do know better. Yeah, it sucks to be in that chicken-and-egg position, but everybody was there in the beginning.
Samsung Denies That They’re Charging Carriers for Android Updates
Evidence Stuxnet May Be an American-Israeli Collaboration
This.

Plus, in the case of Apple, they have a distinct first mover advantage. As we learned from watching the original round of Mac vs. Wintel, in the platform market, first mover advantage accrues to the company that puts together a viable OS + application ecosystem. That's why they're printing money, and it's why Android will have a very difficult time unseating iOS. Android is somewhat behind in the maturity of their OS. They're incredibly behind in the size of their app ecosystem. While I don't see Android ever shrinking to Apple's late 90s market share, I'll be surprised if they ever exceed Apple's installed base. I think most of Android's advantage so far has been in distribution. And now that Apple is free of it's exclusive contract with AT&T, I don't think that Android's advantage will last.
It's a Blockbuster ad, and that's why I pay for blockbuster online.
Iraq is definitely a sink hole. But the War in Afghanistan has cost $370 billion which is $200 billion less than Korea (in inflation adjusted dollars).

http://costofwar.com/en/
http://historical.whatitcosts.com/facts-korean-war.htm
Ask HN: How to apply for a small business loan successfully
Hello community,

My quick story: For the past 5 years I have been working at a small newspaper (Web Design/IT Assistant). I'm hitting the point where I feel I cant do this anymore. I've always wanted to work somewhere that has something to do with football(soccer).

I have a been toying with a business idea in my head for a while, I've done some research, estimated my start-up costs, looked for empty buildings. I have no competition in my area and know that there is a market for my idea. My business idea involves soccer leagues.

I'm reaching out to the HN Community for advice.

Has anyone applied for a small business loan with success? If so, what steps did you take to help you get your loan? What did you do to make your application stand out from the pile on someones desk?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all in advance.
Those are interesting points. I wonder if graphics are now at the point where the PS3's Cell architecture, which seemed needlessly complicated before, is now starting to look like a point in its favor. It's no secret that the PS3 is a far more capable device than the 360. Perhaps the PC market has come far enough that the ps3 is the only console capable of matching the PC in terms of graphics.
I agree, I think this basically disincentivizes commenting when you know you're going to end up "below the fold".

I went into the feature request thread to see if anyone had requested the ability to turn this off, but gave up on looking after rapid-fire clicking "More" 25+ times. Content more than a page or two back might as well not exist.