skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote a framework.

Instead of thinking, "How do I want this program to work?" I had to think, "How do I want every program to work?"

Instead of organizing this data, I had to organize any data.

Instead of worrying about what my customer needed, I had to worry about what to put in my toolbox before I called on that customer.

Instead of handling the current outlying case, I had to learn to anticipate possible outlying cases.

Instead of worrying about instances of what we do, I had to worry about classes of instances of what we do.

Instead of benchmarking and optimizing performance, I had to understand the kinds of things that affected performance.

Instead of scaling, I had to design an architecture that would scale.

Instead of conducting analysis and design, I had to build an application to handle and apply system parameters.

Instead of covering bugs, glitches, and inefficiencies, I had to eliminate them before they compounded exponentially before my eyes.

Instead of having fun, I had to build a world within which I could always have fun.
For designers, okay. But what's wrong with a simple LaTeX CV? Its clean, gets the point across, and frankly, it stands out from the other badly-formatted Word documents.
dude, I'm a product person, don't have marketing bone in my body...
Schools that have switched to the How to Design Programs (http://www.htdp.org/) curriculum for their intro classes would beg to differ! Of course, whether that specification+testing approach to development is carried through to the rest of the curriculum is another story :-)
Presumably in the context of web development, this means familiarity with browsers as deployment platforms (quirks etc).
Thanks for you offer, jpadvo. Much appreciated!
I would think they didn’t explain how it makes JS better because they were on the defensive from people who said leaving semicolons out will break code. They are saying “stop forbidding me from coding in the style I want, my style works just fine”. They are just trying to defend their style, not convert people to it.

However, that’s not to say there is no reason to omit semicolons. I personally leave out semicolons as an extension of the DRY principle – if you are putting a line break after a statement anyway, then you might as well leave off the semicolon. It’s one less character to delete if you combine two adjacent lines into one. Also, if you already think of line breaks and statement ends going together, then semicolons are just noise that you have to make an effort to ignore – the effort required may be small, but there’s little reason not to avoid that effort.

The only problem with omitting semicolons in JavaScript is this case mentioned in “Semicolons in JavaScript are optional”:

a = b + c
(d + e).print()

The author recommends avoiding the error in that by changing the last line to

;(d + e).print()

. If the extra effort of adding a semicolon before all line-starting parentheses costs more effort than you would save by getting the two advantages I described above, then maybe adding semicolons everywhere is right for you. You might have to experiment with coding in both styles to be able to accurately quantify how much those two advantages and one disadvantage would affect you.
wow. This would have been 1000X awesome if this was a video captured by one of our space telescopes looking at another galaxy!
Sylvia's dad here,

Great to see the hacker news crowd has found the show entertaining and useful! We glossed over a lot of the programming aspect because the physical aspect of making something is far more immediately comprehensible for kids (which is why we emphasize getting out and making -something- above all else).

We made sure to get the source code as commented and as easy to handle as possible, but introducing it in the video not only requires a substantial programming background overhead, but may scare a number of newbies off a lot quicker than if they just copied and pasted something into an simple IDE.

Getting something working, that kids can feel some kind of accomplishment with, no matter how simple, can psychologically push them over the initial barrier of fear that an come with new, seemingly difficult things.

The Arduino itself as a dev board platform does a great job of erasing a lot of that fear with a friendly usb connection, holes you can plug things directly into and an open IDE with only a few simple buttons and configurations. The remaining hurdles exist beyond, in attainable projects that lets you poke and prod at the internals and get a good feel for how and why something works, or how to break it. Hopefully our little starter project are simple enough to get kids (or anyone for that matter) out there and -trying something-, no matter how silly or simple. If all you do is do something once and never again, you are still the better for doing it.
It's my understanding that there is no vaccine against chicken pox, and the greater severity of it in adulthood (and consequent wisdom of deliberately exposing children) is understood by many in the, ah, "pro-vax" community. So it's not really an anti-vaccine argument that people do this.
"It goes like this: the 4th, the 5th, the minor fall, the major lift..."
a) Not a problem. Same here, or why else would I embark on a journey to slay a >50k karma dragon. ;)

b) I don't disagree with most of the formal concerns that you listed in the top comment. I'm just saying that I think you're judging her too hard.

The goal of a resume is to score an interview. I do think that this one is well enough executed to score above average.

Case in point, so far it's been good enough to score a "Best resume I've ever seen" blog-post and a >60pt Hacker News thread.
One of the reasons I like gmail is they do not display annoying image ads like hotmail / yahoo.

I'm ok with text ads but not image ads, please.
Is writing this type of resume really the best means of filtering out an applicant's undesired companies? It would seem to me that the best way to avoid companies you don't want to be involved with is to simply research the company before you apply. With that approach, there's no risk due to the personality or opinions of the recruiter regarding the format of the resume, but you can still end up at the type of company you want to work for.
This is the first one I've ever seen that supports D&D from Mac/Safari. Very nice.
For what it's worth, I reread my comments, reconciled them with the fact that I'm just here to kill time today, and zapped most of them. Thanks for calling me out for them.
I've implemented this too. You take a branch of the mainline, work on your feature, integrate mainline if it has moved on in the meantime. When your ready to submit you tell one of the reviewers. They checkout your branch, do a diff and if it's good they submit. If they have questions you talk about it and if something is not right or missing, they get told to add it.

It stops lazy check ins and it means at least 2 people know what code has gone in recently.
It came out in, like, 1995 didn't it? I remember that because all my IRC friends immediately got to work on crazy crypto tools with algorithms and ideas cadged from that book. It definitely didn't teach them that crypto was hard.
Great stuff, Sylvia's Dad.

Sounds like you've really helped her learn how to push forward into productivity - and in domains where she gets a thrill from the process and from being able to share it out in the world. Sounds like a great way to let her experience the entrepreneurial as well as engineering worlds!
There's nothing wrong with S-Corps! They're superior in a lot of ways to LLC's. The only things I get ranty about are: (1) not incorporating at all, and (2) using S-Corps to dodge FICA taxes.
Turning The Tables On The Google Toolbar & Disclosure Claims
Be born to parents who got me a computer when I was 5. Computers have always felt 'natural' to me as a consequence, even if, clearly, there's lots to learn about what actually makes them tick.
I am curious to know what the HN community thinks about this start up in Ghana? "Leti Games"
It is funny for a moment but that is all.
Single most effective thing I do to improve my programming skills?

Refactor.

It might be enough to get a hack done to get some functionality working but if you never revisit it you wont learn what you did wrong or what you could have done better. Refactoring your solutions trying to improve efficiency, or usability (of the code), the process of examining your previous work and discovering how it could be made better will greatly benefit your learning process. Some times you may realize right away after finishing a piece of code how you could have done it better. Other times, its not until months or years later when you've learned and experienced more that upon revisiting the code you realize how you could improve it.

It's one thing to learn about programming techniques and designs, but it's refactoring your old attempts with those new techniques and designs that leads to understanding and empowerment.
If you're only focusing on the 'writing really good code' aspect, sure. But in the wider world, writing a book can be a spectacularly bad way to invest your time.

I've made way more money from my "Slicehost vs Linode" article than I have from my portion of "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, 2nd edition", even though the latter required a ton of hard work.
See my reply to someone else, describing the advantages and disadvantages of omitting semicolons: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184289

As for whether you should omit the semicolons, only you can decide how much those pros and cons affect you. Depending on how much you care about others who read your code, you might also want to consider how you think those other people would choose, if they evaluated those pros and cons for themselves.
No such link, it says "This website requires Flash player 8. Click here to upgrade." if I enable Javascript.
Thanks. Like I said, I bet on Ze.

Btw I am Joshua, not Josh.
How To Stop Domain Names Being Seized By The US Government
better than some resumes I've seen...hell I've seen some where the person had their email address wrong
the best resume is no resume. They give hiring managers too many things to find wrong
Buy ethically: Buy sweatshop
If this is true, I wonder if the Feminism 101 manifesto will get revised.

EDIT: Feminism 101 asserts "that time of the month" has no alterations in behavior or thought other than threshold of feedback. That patience is lessened, so a woman doesn't think differently, she is more likely to speak her actual mind on something she would have otherwise just put up with.

Citation: http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/01/feminism-101....
Ask HN: Good airy audio trademark? Feedback wanted
Sound can be found here:

http://soundcloud.com/lordjawsh/audio-trademark

Constructive criticism wanted so I can revise and improve.
Thanks
Mayonnaise not just for ham and cheese sandwiches
Thanks, all great points.

The progress bar is next in line, as is a preview. I also agree on the instant download - it was just a quick way to make it work.

Appreciate it!
But isn't "maker of beautiful things" what designer/developers are really aspiring to? And in light of that, isn't recognizing the division just as silly as drawing a venn diagram with yourself in the middle?

I'd suspect anyone who calls themselves a designer/developer is probably good at other things to, like writing, designing meaningful infographics, and playing the resume game with subtlety.
Ask HN: Camping resources?
I've never really been camping. I am considering it for the future. I am interested in some of the following:

Cooking/food while camping.

Website with maps for where good campgrounds and the like are -- or any other websites that you deem to be a good camping/planning resource and why.

Any tips, personal experiences, etc.
Dang it I paid money to do just that!
>Its easy to see if she has Ruby skills, for instance - but its hard to see the overall picture of what skills she has without spending a lot of time on it.

One can take her resume idea even further and create a CV in an interactive form, so it could meet everyones needs.

The issue of thinking in pictures versus words has always interested me. Wiki says[1] 30% of us are explicitly picture thinkers, 25% think in words and the rest combine both methods. Most entrepreneurs (not sure about the ones dealing with start-ups) tend to drift towards the right, because it's usually easier to generalize your idea by visualizing it, rather than coming to a logical conclusion by using words only. Which, I think, would be slower in this case. So, how come are most (if not all?) of the current cv-websites featuring only long walls of text?

[1] = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_thinking
Just a fun little experiment we built in a couple days.
> I would definitely spend some more time to look into the applicant.

So would I.

> Yes, I would never hire her for algorithm optimization, but if she was building a website that doesn't innovate technologically but rather creates social, cultural, aesthetic or other value (which the majority of startups do) - I would take a second look.

She'd also probably be good at doing design / front-end parts of a website while communicating with back-end developers (who might be doing algorithm optimisation).

I expect she'd be good at talking to designers from a coders point of view too.
If you are just doing a thought experiment, might as well not limit ourselves to ethical approaches. There are two unethical approaches that come to mind, one of which we know someone has already tried, and one that I suspect has been used.

The one that we're sure has been used is simply scrape profiles from somewhere else. Someone just did that, scraping from Facebook, and it made quite a stir. At first you'd think that could not even have a remote chance of working, as the scraped people would certainly notice when you started matching them for dates!

If you were a bit smarter, though (and unethical people can be smart), you'd just use those scraped profiles to make your site look busy. You'd never match anyone to them. You'd only make matches among people who actually come to the site and register.
You know, you're right - the upload really could be a download or "convert" button.

It's made in php, I might throw the code up on Github once I get a final version I'm happy with.
I couldn't take it seriously because of how popular(cliché) infographics are. The first thing that came to mind was that satire on infographics which included the text:

2: The number of cats I own.
The best idea I've heard is to go with someone who knows what they're doing. I think you would be unlikely to do something dangerous if you went it alone, but you could certainly get yourself into an uncomfortable situation without someone who's done it before. Camping seems to be a highly experiential body of knowledge, so I suspect trying to study will be of limited usefulness.

My long-term plan was to have a son and get him involved in the Scouts so I could learn all the stuff I missed as a kid. Unfortunately, the Y chromosome bit didn't get flipped with this pregnancy, so I'm SOL for the time being...
Chinese Cyber Spies Target Government Systems
Just a heads up in the e-mail that I received from them:

"Our database was compromised and all of our data was maliciously deleted. (We are still working with our CouchDB provider to restore this data and help with forensics to hand over to the FBI.)"

Not a good start.
If it doesn't hurt, you aren't trying hard enough...
IE9 Tops in HTML5 JS Sprite Performance over Chrome
I'd be looking for another hacker to help teach/mentor some of the people who are interested. If you want to help, let me know here or you can shoot me an email. My gmail account has the same username as my HN account. :)
Try this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870484330457612...
New relationships with digital books
This was on the front page 2 weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130501

Unfortunately that news item linked to a blog post and not to the project itself.
If the vaccine definitively will prevent/end the disease, it may be worth it; but you seem to be ignoring the fact that most of these situations are far from binary.
We see a lot of posts on HN about the various technologies and startups in the digital book and web longform reading space.

I wrote this because I think there hasn't been enough discussion of why digital books can make a difference, and why consumers should pay for what is just plain text, when they perhaps already own print copies.

In the long term, digital books are going to be way different from glossy iPad apps or Kindle books. They're going to lead to a whole new/old way of reading.
Why the assumption that she's not a good developer? Was it the choice of emphasized technologies (e.g., terminal, text-editor) or the focus on web development tools (e.g., jquery, rails)?

I suspect she can program better than you give her credit for (better than straight copy/paste/tweak from tutorials), but probably won't be straying far from straightforward use of rails. Perhaps that level of programming coupled with design ability is a sort of "sweet spot" for many projects?

I'm certainly far more on the programming side of this continuum (and so would never attempt a CV like this), but I can believe this resume might persuasively communicate her combination of skills to her intended audience.
The second unethical way to do it would be to create fake blogs slamming the existing sites, and recommending your new site in those blogs.

I've noticed on Google searches for OKCupid and Plenty of Fish that among the suggested completions are "OKCupid scam" and "Plenty of Fish scam". Among the results on those pages are plentyoffishscam.com and okcupidscam.net. Those are blogs, both slamming the dating sites they are named after, and both recommending cougarlife.com, ashleymadison.com, and arrengementseekers.com.

It's pretty apparent that these blogs are written by the same person. (Oh, I just remembered, there is also eharmonyscam.com, also clearly by the same people and recommending the same three sites).

There are also many other blogs that quote these blogs, and it seems likely that many of these are fake, too. I think I've seen them quoted on legitimate-appearing forums, too, so there is a real possibility the cougarlife.com people are spamming forums.
Belgian man completes 365 marathons in 365 consecutive days
I think the value is in the writing itself, not the monetary feedback.
Wow. Google's Toolbar opt-in URL-tracking dialog has become more generic, indirect, and insistent over the years. It no longer includes the red 'yada yada' text Matt Cutts referred to last week.

On IE, it doesn't even offer a 'No' but rather an 'Ask Me Later', as if you'll have to agree eventually, so you might as well agree now. Kinda sneaky! (Do you think they A/B tested different wordings and went with the one yielding the most opt-ins?)
I have interns now, and I love having them. I don't think it was because of the 90s. Good interns (who have good mentors) have the heart and passion and remind me why I love doing what I do. Keep in mind that I started my internship in like 95 or 96 -- long before the dot-com craze really took off. :-)

And FWIW, I think internships are totally underrated. Whenever I saw my friends in high school spending their summer dicking around it always boggled my mind, even more so in college.

I never was an A+ student (though I did okay) but I did always have jobs and worked my ass off when it counted.
Is there any way to gain practice on negotiation? As an entrepreneur, are there any resources on the internet where you can "practice"?

The only thing I can think of is playing poker or something at the casino...
Thy to remember that "sweatshop" is not a binary function. The choice is not sweatshop or not-sweatshop, but instead a continuum of working conditions, often present in the same factory.

It may not be practical to demand western wages for these workers but we shouldn't support factories that beat the workers or subject them to environments that rapidly cause sickness and death either.
Pain and Waste
Oh, my plan is to go with people who are just as inexperienced (or more so) than I am. Not really wanting to camp per se. But thinking that may wind up being part of other plans which I am hesitant to spell out. So one of my interests is in gathering online informational resources to aid in my tentative adventure.

Thanks for the reply!
This was on here a couple of months back.
developer #2 probably doesn't care because it passes the unit tests and no one is the wiser. I've seen a lot of bugs during some consulting work that was simply the result of either intellectually laziness or un-disciplined coding.
I think its a terrible infographic, to be sure, but I also think its good enough to stand out from a pile of resumes on the HR or hiring manager's desk. Probably good enough to get an interview out of it.
Ask HN: How many pictures do you have and what size are they?
Hi HN,

I'm wondering about your picture collections! I have 2 simple questions and would really appreciate your feedback. This assumes the pictures are taken by you(or someone you know).

How many pictures do you have stored locally?

What is an average file size for these pictures?

Thanks!
>1. The word "between.

I largely agree with this article and even this point in particular, but I think you will often end up in a situation where stating a range can move things along quickly. If you qualify it properly, it can be a useful way to turn the tables. For example, if you are discussing rate you could say well, from the other people I've been talking to it looks like positions like this one pay between $45 and $65 an hour, depending on various factors, but of course more detail is required to pin the number down exactly and it varies for each individual, so what kind of budgetary, time and code quality constraints are on this project?

I think this is a nice way of turning the tables, it would be socially weird for them to just ignore the question and be like, "so what EXACTLY were you looking for?"

Of course, they may end up offering you at 45 to start, but you can just kind of scoff at that (if you want) and be like well this seems more complex/difficult because... there's nothing wrong with continually edging away from the question until they get frustrated.
I can't help but think of my long-standing opinion of infographics- they are often just a way to make a tiny little bit of largely inconsequential information take up a lot of space.
Cool! Here's some helpful feedback.

The text box that begins "We want to know..." is the most important text on the whole page and you need to fix the typography.

First and foremost, increase the contrast between the foreground and background so that the text is readable. The text weight is much lighter in Google Chrome than in Firefox. Here is how it looks for me: http://imgur.com/DP9d0

To increase the contrast, darken the background of the entire text box, not just the edges.

Also, courier is not one of the most readable fonts. Save the fonts with "personality" for your headers and opt for a more readable font for the core text. I would suggest Georgia, since it's a font that was specifically designed for the screen and it's a serif font which contrasts nicely with the sans serif header. It will also make the page look more professional.
EcoData Retriever: quick access to open ecology datasets