skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would go with an online niche/specialist version of what she knows best: travel.

I have a friend who has made a living arranging & supplying tours for cyclists: arranging the route, supplying the bicycles, booking the hotels, printing maps etc.

What other specialist knowledge is there to call upon in family and friends?: her hobbies, your hobbies etc. Is there any two things you could combine?

Obviously you would know your local area better than a foreigner and the web is wonderfully accessible to travellers.

There are many interesting possibilities for automated web services, online mapping software, GPS etc, but it is more important to present a human touch. I would sooner get a hand-drawn map that imparted real expert human knowledge than a Google map.

I think that Square opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities for small businesses and sole traders, too.
LaTeX on Blogger
"Come on. Implementing something you invented should be easy."

Sounds like someone who has never implemented something more complicated than a hello world.
I feel your pain - precisely why I started writing the book :(
Yeah, bugs never happen on a Mac.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=379084
I used to do that too. But now I use Quassel IRC, IMO it's pretty cool because it consists of two parts:

- a daemon process that does the actual connection to the IRC servers. You can run this on a VPS server.

- a GUI client that you can run from everywhere. It connects to the daemon and gets your chat history for every channel. Disconnecting the client doesn't disconnect you from IRC.

Just like with the ssh/screen solution, you can use the same IRC connection from your desktop, laptop, work, home, etc. You never need to reconnect and you can browse what was said while you were away.

The big difference is that you have a (QT based) GUI instead of a console-based client. If you have a lot of channels and servers open, this is especially useful :)
I think Microsoft's view of software quality has contaminated the industry. If you can't build your own spec correctly, maybe that's because you got overambitious with it.

I find it ludicrous that Microsoft could write the spec, find the resources to corrupt the process at ISO, discredit a valuable institution, cripple it by inflating membership with members that don't participate on any other issues in order to promote a standard that aims to be impossible to implement by third parties and be unable to command the resources required to implement it correctly in the first place.

Didn't they have a reference implementation for the standard in the first place?!
"I suck" is not a productive line of thought and potential employers will never give you feedback what you suck at. If you're sending out a large number of job applications and resumes, it might be a good idea to incorporate some basic testing methods. Try out different combinations of CVs, different tones, different vocabularies. Maybe there is a simple reason for all the rejections that can be fixed with some minor adjustments. For example, you might be giving too much or too little information on your CV. Perhaps you're applying at the wrong companies or for the wrong position. The point being, if you received so many fuck-off letters, there is probably something systemically wrong here, and chances are you can use a combination of quality assurance and data analysis to find out what it is.
Only if its auto-update mechanism mysteriously crashes.
WordPress 3.2 release: "Microsoft" just announced
From XSS to Reverse PHP Shell
Cubelets: modular, affordable robotics for kids and students
Russ Cox talks about the Google Go programming language
Hopefully this means they'll finally release a 64-bit version of QuickTime too!
They did publish documentation for the original formats (iirc around the same time they published the new XML formats), btw.
Is it OK to Hire People from Your Friend’s Company?
I've had plenty of feedback from interviews from UK companies without receiving one piece of actionable advice.

To be fair, it was quite clear that I didn't want to work at some of those companies and if I'd have been asked to give them feedback I'd have phrased my disinterest in similarly brief and diplomatic terms which wouldn't have told them much they didn't already know or weren't inclined to disagree strongly with.

Even if the tribunals are inclined to side with the companies, companies' fears are still well placed. A perfectly reasonable "unfortunately we didn't think you had the appropriate experience for the job" can become possible evidence that they were concealing discrimination should the company subesquently hire someone similarly lacking in experience but in every other way perfectly suited to the role. Companies seldom announce their decisions to reject a candidate are based on racism, sexism, homophobia etc even when they are.
In July this year the Django (as in framework) mark, assuming it's the one below, becomes incontestable, which strengthens it's case a lot if they sue Wordpress.

It's also generally a strong mark as it is what TM attorneys call "arbitrary" - like Apple computer.

If Django doesn't sue, they weaken their trademark. You have to enforce your rights to your trademark if someone infringes or a later infringer can use your lack of enforcement as an argument against you.

The reality is that Django probably won't sue and it doesn't matter because few people Google for Wordpress releases by release name.

From the USPTO:

Word Mark	DJANGO
Goods and Services	IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: DOWNLOADABLE OPEN SOURCE COMPUTER SOFTWARE FOR USE IN CONNECTION WITH INTERNET PUBLISHING AND WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT. FIRST USE: 20050719. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20050719
Standard Characters Claimed
Mark Drawing Code	(4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK
Serial Number	78680396
Filing Date	July 28, 2005
Current Filing Basis	1A
Original Filing Basis	1A
Published for Opposition	April 25, 2006
Registration Number	3117015
Registration Date	July 18, 2006
Owner	(REGISTRANT) THE WORLD COMPANY CORPORATION KANSAS 609 NEW HAMPSHIRE, P.O. BOX 888 LAWRENCE KANSAS 66044
Attorney of Record	Michael B.Hurd, Warren N. Williams, Stephen D. Timmons, John M. Collins, Thomas H. Van Hoozer, Thomas B. Luebbering, Andrew G. Colombo, Scott R. Brown, Tracy L. Bornman, Tracey S. Truitt, Michael Elbein, Joan Optican Herman, David V. Ayres, Kameron D. Kelly, Gregory J. Skoch, Jennifer C. Bailey, Cheryl L. Burbach, Matthew P. Harlow, and Sam M. Korte
Type of Mark	TRADEMARK
Register	PRINCIPAL
Live/Dead Indicator	LIVE
I'm printing this out and putting it up on my wall.

"Our best estimates put the number of developers in the world at around 5 million."

It would be nice to see how they got that estimate but for arguments sake, I still like where the breakdown is going.
Page seems cut off on the bottom "Generally? Well pleased..."

If that is really the end, it could use some padding.
"I find the complexity budget of Clojure much lower than Java, and maybe VB, too (haven't programmed VB in a long time)."

I am not disputing that you find Clojure easier than Java but if you include complete mastery of macros and laziness and functional programming idioms into the "complexity budget" it is very arguable that some Joe Blow developer would find Java easier to learn and read and consider Clojure "too complex". I am just pointing out that they are bogus reasons to reject a language. The OP is claiming that the deep type theory constructs of Scala are too difficult for him. Of course they are, just as deep macro fu would be hard for a Clojure beginner.

Please don't mistake me. I prefer Clojure to Java any day. I am reacting to the idea that "too many parantheses" or "but macros are too complex" or "laziness is too hard to wrap my head around" or "Scala has a more powerful type system than I am used to" or "Erlang has too weird a syntax" etc are sufficient reasons to reject them.

Back to Clojure. My (original) point is that you don't need to understand macros (say) in all their glory before you build something in Clojure. Use a macro-less or macro-lite subset and grow into macros as you gain experience. Yes you will write less than the best Clojure for a while. (Imho) that is fine (and unavoidable). Rejecting Clojure because you couldn't completely understand macros (or read "complex" code with lots of macros) is (imo) not an optimal strategy.
How about an Avon rep?

As a travel agent I'm guessing she liked interacting with people and she probably can contact those same people she serviced as a travel agent for her home-based Avon business.

My wife has been with Avon for years. It does take some time to build up a clientèle and team but you can make okay money at it. It depends how extensive of a network you have and how much time and effort you're willing to put into it.

Cheers
Exceptional language skills or specific domain knowledge. For many languages, it is incredibly difficult to find skilled translators with sufficient knowledge to make sense of technical, legal and medical documents.
Usually it goes "it's not you, it's me...".

Yes but in life as in dating, I'd like to know why I'm not a match.

Knowing the posting was inaccurate for what you're looking for is better than wondering why one got turned down for what seemed a perfect fit.

Instead of asking "what went wrong", maybe you might want to ask "is there anyone you can recommend or do you think that something / someone else might be a better fit"?

I really like this idea, I guess I never considered this as a possibility before. Nothing to lose by asking, though.
Combine travel with another one of her interests and make a DVD (a la "4 Hour Work Week"). For instance, if your mom is into wine, make a DVD of all the wineries in a certain region. It could include reference statistics that she could research. People that are going to travel there could use the DVD as a guide or load it into their cell phones as an app.
Going to make a wild guess and say push a focus on vacation rental homes. It's a huge market and the big player is a big slow dinosaur if there ever was one.
Hey guys -- for the past 7 years we've named every release after a jazz musician, as you can see here:

http://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/

Usually no one notices, and the codename isn't even in the tweets or announcement email, just a sentence that clearly links to the jazz musician's Wikipedia page. (It's not like Ubuntu codenames that are widely used.) We also put a fun plug for djangoproject.org to the end of the "future" section, which hopefully will also introduce some new people to their project. I haven't seen anyone tweeting the codename except to complain, so I don't think this is going to confuse anybody think we're rewriting in Python. (However much they may want that.)

That said, apologies for the unintended controversy. In hindsight, we probably should have used "Reinhardt" to have the same effect of honoring one of our favorite musicians without anyone getting confused with a fellow Open Source project.

Now to work on 3.2 Sinatra! (Kidding, Ruby folks.)
That is a really great, easy-to-read layout. You have at least one new regular reader. :-)
It's the implementation of the standard in Office 2007 and 2010
So you mean Microsoft is to blame for Netscape 4.x sucking and crashing on every OS?

Office has code dating back to the 80s. Read more for a backstory http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
This is about defending crony capitalism. The patrons of the radical right make lots of money cooperating with authoritarian regimes in oil-rich countries, so lapdogs like Beck do what they can to move popular opinion in their favor.
Current versions of FCP are still stuck using OS X 10.4 ways of doing things.

There have been huge changes in OS X since then, with a remake of Quicktime in Cocoa and all the new HPC tools like GCD and OpenCL...

Apple has plenty of opportunities to make progress.
Show HN: I built an app to help you make friends (and you can try it for free)
As of 10.6, QuicktimeX is Cocoa/64-bit
Uh, the last four digits. If it was the whole thing, I'd say this is somewhat valid, but the required information seems to be kind of just... checking that they're real people.
How about someone sends a polite but firm email before calling a lawyer?
If they were in a completely different area, for example if they were selling baskets, Django would have been perfectly acceptable.

But calling a blogging platform Django is just stupid. It might also be unethical as some pointed out Django is a registered trademark.

I can see this happening:

- "So how do I get started with WordPress?"

- "You have to download the latest Django release"

- "Oh, ok"

(downloads latest from djangoproject.com ...)
Someone needs to lookup Hanlon's razor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_Razor

Also, daring fireball doesn't add anything. Link to the original source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google-been...
Memphis Closer to Electric Vehicle Technology
At first I was like "Heh.."

But then I looked at my calendar and realized it wasn't April.
He's so frustrating to me as a libertarian. He sometimes says things I agree with so I want to believe he's not a complete lunatic but then he wears those glasses and starts writing on a chalkboard...

He did a show on one of my favorite books (The Road to Serfdom) and got people buying it which I think is a good thing.

I've only seen his show from clips on the Daily Show though. I have no interest in wasting my life watching his show.
So a more appropriate title could be 'Microsoft's Office embarassment' ? Or not?
Here is Google's press release from the Huffington Post article:

This year we started accepting doodles from kids even if their school hadn't registered for the contest. To help us keep entries distinct and remove duplicate entries from any particular student, we asked parents for limited information, including the last 4 digits of a student's social security number. We later updated our forms when we recognized that we could sufficiently separate legitimate contest entries while requesting less information. To be clear, these last 4 digits were not entered into our records and will be safely discarded.

As for the city of birth: The city of birth helps us identify whether contestants are eligible for the contest, as winners must be either U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents of the U.S. The information isn't used for any other purpose."

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google-been...
Do you believe the radical left is on your side?
Hmmm, I smell a general case...

Our best estimates put the number of x in the world at around y.

Applying the 80/20 rule you can estimate:

Of those, 20% (y(.2)) want to z

Of those, 20% (y(.2)(.2)) have enough motivation to start educating themselves about the process

Of those, 20% (y(.2)(.2)(.2)) will actually start building something

Of those, 20% (y(.2)(.2)(.2)(.2)) will actually finish building something

Of those, 20% (y(.2)(.2)(.2)(.2)(.2)) have prepared themselves enough to achieve some measure of success
Sounds like you don't know me.

In the past 25+ years I got my share of bugs. But having a correct implementation of a spec is kind of the only proof you can have the spec is complete and implementable.

Not having one is just sloppy.
One long, intimate month with the Facebook API
Stubia - information in 160 or less characters
Is Windows a form of dessert now?
well, i've made it to the 40,000 group
I didn't do it for my mom, but helped my ex-wife launch a small business on Etsy. I would recommend looking into some hobbies she has and stuff she is familiar with.

My ex-wife orders cute buttons for clothes from japan/korea, repackages them individually, and sells them on Etsy. It works pretty well and makes her some nice extra money...

If your mom does it, make sure she pushes through to the christmas holiday... sales are practically guaranteed then, and even though its gross rev, the sales can be very motivating!

Good luck!
Interesting to be downvoted even when HN requires 500 karma to get downvote rights. Sorry for stepping on the toes of Apple fan club members.
irssi on *nix, Colloquy on iPhone.
That only applies to companies that are paying Beck. This is a company that is not paying Beck allowing it's worker to harm the interests of companies who do. Intellectual consistency is not a big priority here.
Wow. I'm going to start using this approach with my own app...

ParkGrades 1.0 codename "Hotpot"

ParkGrades 1.3 codename "Yelp"

ParkGrades 1.5 codename "Reddit"

ParkGrades 2.0 codename "Apple"
Solid State Drives — The Future of Data Storage
While many people who are quite comfortable using a computer may have heard the term “Solid State Drive,” (SSD) few of them realize what they really are.
That really is an interesting Hypernumbers bug/feature which I will fix...
Your wikipedia link is dead. Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_Razor
Is the Verizon iPhone a flop?
(spoof fixed on the site)
I keep track of my time on different projects using a half-assed version of the Pomodoro Method. However, that time-tracking paperwork is for my benefit alone. If I felt that the entire corporate hierarchy was looking down my shoulder as I checked off my time, the method would lose its value to me.
A Google chrome extension for filling forms repeatedely
Please let me know your feedback.
[meta]This is precisely why hn needs a special (limited to maybe twice a year?) +5 upvote button.[/meta]

Mcluhan forgive me if I misconstrue - but what we are seeing across the world right now is the "message" of the "medium" of the internet finally being heard. The fact that beck attempts to paint this as anything else is disgusting. How can any "freedom loving" human essentially decry liberation and the will to democracy?
Loading Unloading Delhi,Office Shifting Delhi
what the hell is he talking about at 5:40

Germany and Russia (soviet union at the time) attacked Poland in September 1939

he loses all credibility about history when he makes such egregious mistake during the first 5 minutes of the talk.
Lesson #0: It's Elisp or Emacs Lisp, not some intercapped 90s abomination.
This site is awesome. I love the email updates too. Just enough that they're not annoying
Ask HN: Best way to share photos with my 75 year old mom?
I need some serious advice to help me to share photos with my mom. She is 75 years old, never used a PC before, nor a cellphone, and we are thousands miles away. I have two kids, they are growing everyday, and my idea is to send her some of our daily pictures to her every week or so. She has TV, phone, and a DVD player. Thanks in advance.
My experience is that a lot of people don't have any problem with it.

It is more friendly to say: "the hired candidate has a lot more experience" than "you lack experience".

The death spiral candidate will try to discuss his rejection anyway.
How To Read Your Users’ Minds With Better Menu Options
This has influenced me to name my releases after Ninja Turtle characters. Hoping for a ROCKSTEADY RC opportunity.
Hi Matt --

I know this really isn't a big deal, and I really don't want to be a dick about it, but in this age of Google I would really appreciate it if you'd change the name. I think if we codenamed Django 1.3 "Wordpress" you'd feel similarly, right? I really don't want this to turn into A Thing, so how about you just see this as a small favor for a fellow open source hacker and I owe you beer/whiskey/whatever?

Please feel free to get in touch personally if you want to talk further - I'm jacob@jacobian.org.

(I'm Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the lead Django devs.)
Why would you lock anything in a sigle-threaded code in the first place?
A quick weekend project - how did we do?
Orrr... they could just deal with it, because it's just a version codename and it's not like people are going to start calling WordPress, "Django".

This shouldn't be a big deal, it's two OSS projects.
Fair point. I guess arbitrariness is like intuitiveness - it describes an individual's experience more than any objective characteristic of the software.
Why are you implying that Apple and Google being fallible makes it OK to ship buggy software? It's not OK. It happens, regrettably, and has to be corrected.

> Managing the tens or hundreds of millions of code dating back to the 80s is not easy.

It seems they should tackle an easier problem then. This one is, evidently, too hard for them.

> When it's MS, the comments and moderation are always about malice and incompetence

Incompetence, malice and... What would be the third explanation?

> I remember someone on Reddit calling HN an Apple fanboy club

It's been a long time since it's not.
A lot depends on the leadership style of an organisation, no so much its size or business. Diversity ultimately creates better organisations, but it's harder to manage every day (that's true for all diversity: gender, culture, language, orientation, religion, "mindset", etc.). So look for organisations where "people management" is recognised as a valuable skill set, not just something that people do after some tenure period at the company. A lot of tech organisations unfortunately fall into the latter category.

A good first-glance indicator is whether the management titles of the organisation are given based on tenure (older people and/or long term employees), domain expertise (e.g. the most experiences developers have management titles) or leadership skills. Try to find companies with the last type of promotion system and you are very likely going to have more gender diversity as well.
Competition proves the market. Why are you disappointed to learn that other people might have the same idea? It means it's worth pursuing if more than one person is doing it, right? Just add your own flavor, and have integrity and faith in the individual value of your product.

On the other hand, if your faith in your product hinges on how avant-garde the concept is, I don't think you're going to routinely be satisfied with your creations.
Asking for a list of conventions is like trying to learn slang by reading a book. If you want to learn the ebb and flow of HN, including all the conventions and hidden pages (of which there are many, and no, I won't list them), the best way is to spend time here. Conventions, like slang, are developed organically, and organically is the only way to learn to use them fluently.
He could be for more freedom and still be opposed to what they do with that freedom. I'm for freedom of speech but feel some of you all should just shut up. I'm not, however, saying there should be a law preventing you from speaking.

I have no opinion on whether google is behind the protests. I suspect they didn't have a big hand in it at all.
The only difference is ghat they usually say "you have to download the latest version of WordPress from their website."
And just updated the post to change the codename to "Reinhardt," just as a sign of good faith and before anyone else gets the wrong idea.
Android 3.2 - Apple

Okay, so maybe apples aren't your stereotypical dessert...
The only thing I would quibble with is: "This is great for Android". I think you mean "this is great for Google" or even "this makes it much easier for Google".

Assuming "great for Android" means "makes Android a better and more popular platform" -- I think that it will simply lead (indeed, has led) to horrendous fragmentation.
Print them and put them in the mail. Not every problem has a tech solution.
If you like it, it is not arbitrary ;)
It's not duck who's made the booboo but Jacques. It's trivially easy to find even without the link because he posted the exact title. Google the title, lots of direct links.

Probably easy to find the actual post on some archive too.
You got any pictures?
It would be great if some enterprising designer created a poster out of this concept with some cool graphic depicting a sequence of sieves. Going further I think that you could create an entire collection of Hacker News posters that would find a ready audience.