skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite honestly, how many people under 40 (or 30) keep learning and stay hungry? Many kick back, raise a family, party, ... There's a lot to life, and only so many hours in the day. If you're lucky enough to do what you like, and to have time to enjoy yourself (at work, or elsewhere), you're doing just fine.

If it happens to make a difference, so much the better. But you gotta keep up.
That's a fair point, when it applies. But I perceive this joke as coming more often from a sense of superiority and an emotionally ill-conceived attempt to improve others by insulting them.
"It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
it's the format of the piece. he goes to lunch with interesting people at interesting places and includes what they ate.
Wow, thanks for the full review! Since we do offer the 14-day free trial on all plans, I could probably delay choosing a plan until you want to upgrade. Then it would just be a one-step sign-up.

We do only track new data; unfortunately there's no easy way to go back and links to your site from Twitter historically so we decided to be consistent with Facebook data. As a result you'll only see social interactions from the time you sign up going forward. Twitter data is real-time, and Facebook is polled on the hour. I will see if I can make that more clear.

We're definitely working hard to find what our biggest value prop will be. I think the features are there and we can iterate on them, but I definitely agree that we might not have nailed it yet.

I'll take a look at the Chrome calendar issue; on the other hand I'm glad that the sign-up was painless and that you like the design (blue on black aside).

Thanks again for the very thorough review!
"Facts not in evidence." You're ascribing malice to the judicial system and making it sound like a conspiracy.

There's a fact - data was destroyed. An investigation may be able to determine what that data was. Either the human who deleted the data or the firmware can tell you why.

No guilt.
Any opinions or experience with the 'Chance' magazine? It looks interesting, and Andrew Gelman is an editor.
Ustream?
Ask HN: Adsense, how long after launch should we wait before signing up?
I only ask because we tried to get an account setup right before launch and they rejected the application. Any ideas what they're looking for?
Ask HN: I'm an unemployed programmer in SF that will work for minimum wage
Live in San Francisco

B.S. Computer Science

Have used java, python, flex, html5 canvas, javascript, and css on various webapp projects

No 'real' job experience

Unemployed for 6 years trying to do a startup (yes 2005, when I just graduated and read my first PG essay)

Will work for minimum wage, or free if the work is interesting and may lead to a job

Will do any work, even if not programming related

Will accept any length term: internship, contract, contract to hire, full time, etc

Hey HN. After 6 years of trying to do a startup with no success, I'm close to giving up. I've been rejected from ycombinator (twice), various startup conferences (launch, etc), and even angellist. I have no connections to investors and have had no success trying to get introductions.

I've recently tried to apply for programming jobs in SF, but had trouble because of my complete lack of work experience. All my software engineer friends in SF are making $100k+ and telling me how hot the market is. I can't even get a minimum wage job flipping burgers at In N Out or bagging groceries at safeway because they have dozens of applications for each opening and my long period of unemployment looks bad.

Is there any possibility for me to make a fresh start? Will anyone take a chance on hiring me? Do you have any advice for me?

Your comments are appreciated!

edit: added email contact in HN profile

edit2: for all those asking for code samples, I implemented the reddit is hiring backend challenge in python (http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/fjgit/reddit_is_doubling_the_size_of_its_programming/). they said not to release the code publicly until after march, but if you send me an email I can show you privately.
Ah, the kids these days...
My first programming job was with a team that was mostly in their late 30s and early 40s. They were all extremely experienced and still pushing their own personal knowledge limits. Best environment I could possibly have hoped for.
Ask HN: What do you want in a website metrics tool for bootstrappers?
I have taken a look at present apps and i must say they do not appeal to the one-man startup or side projects. Website metrics such as event and funnel tracking is really important when running a business. I have decided to build one and want to know what you would like to see in a metrics tool.
Big deal. It's an embedded device just like a gaming console, that some people now use to do things that previously was only possible in the PC domain.
We're definitely hopeful that will be a big part of it. We look to be a value-add to services like Sysomos or Radian6 who offer much more comprehensive brand management solutions at $500+/month. We're also targeting bloggers who want to aggregate their social metrics, learn a little bit more about their audience, and check out the same data for their competitors. While I don't have an exact visitor or social metric cutoff, we are actively targeting what I would call professional bloggers or would-be professionals.
So I (or anyone else, including Steve Jobs) somehow owe society something just for being born, or just for living? If that's what you mean, I absolutely do not agree.
Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: Dozens of new high quality multilingual speech voices
RIM's chief marketing officer resigns
There would be a lot of eye movement

I've tried a similar setup in the past and found it too be just too much work. It turned into lots of head movement. If it was about 4-8x the res then maybe it might work as you could segregate it into 4 or 9 workareas and just focus on one at a time. But it's simply too low resolution to work for that right now -- you'll end up moving so far away from it that you may as well just get a big monitor and a desk.
If this had been titled ...(1980), it would have mad a point. Back then there was a practice that managers had to make more than their subordinates. There was real salary compression among engineers. If an engineer go to 40 he had to become a manager in order to put his kids through college. Companies started to create separate career paths for developers so they could get paid more. Then came the restructuring of the 80's to a flatter management hierarchy and suddenly it was middle managers who were out on the streets.
Yep, it's very hard to prevent spam, But I think eventually there are ways to control it (We're actually learning a lot from Quora)
Or perhaps it comes out of pent up frustration at having to use them myself in work environments ;)
All of you thinking about this is such a long article with no meat, why he describes food so much, hold off a bit. This is THE format of the column, he does this every week with interesting people (mostly in showbiz), its just relevant to HN due to Sean Parker.
thanks for that feed back, its a lot to consider but its helpful.
F!%# bro, that sucks. If I had a job to offer, I'd try to help, but I'm in the middle of the bootstrapped, funded-by-my-dayjob model myself, so I have no money to employ anybody. All I can offer is my best wishes and encouragement. The HN community is really awesome, so I'd bet there's a good chance somebody here can help you out. Keep your head up, things will get better!

Oh, and if you've worked on anything open-source, or you have any code you can open, make sure you put it up on GitHub so you can show it off. Code talks and bullshit walks, as they say.
Post some examples of your work. If you don't have anything then create a project to showcase your skills. That's where I'd start if I were in your shoes and it will generate interest if you have solid skills.
I liked the bit where I didn't understand anything.
An SQL in Shell, written by Bruce Momjian of PostgreSQL core.
"The fact is, teaching is an incredibly easy job."

I'd just like to point out that this statement isn't actually related to the others you made. In Western Australia it's been popular for a while due to the mining boom to go and get a fly in/fly out job in one of the mining towns. The pay is fantastic and the time off is good. This does not correlate to being "an easy job".

I could say that it is "easy to do a bad job", but when is that not the case?

Anyhow, just wanted to point that out. Not after an argument :)
That is an excellent choice for them. Dr. Hipp (author of SQLite) is the author of Fossil and a big Tcl fan. Tcl is maintained by a small core team of developers. Just an overall good fit for them.
I think the perceived lack of older programmers has many causes:

1. industry fairly young. yes there were some professional programmers back in the 70's but the number needed and working know probably dwarfs that by a couple orders of magnitude. websites, mobile devices, appliances, vehicles, CAD/CAM modeling, simulations, CNC, toys, Wall Street -- tons more places running software now than used to

2. the pay's pretty darn good. much easier to retire younger from a salary-type career, plus if you're a software/entrepreneur type it's fairly easy to start your own company focusing on that and score FU money -- not guaranteed, of course, and not impossible in other fields, but other fields are capital intensive whereas this one pretty much just requires a single PC and a chair to get started, and this field has seen a lot of growth and innovation in the last few decades, it's not an old/mature/commodity industry like many others are (cutting hair, selling oranges, etc.)

3. tech mastery freshness. while the fundamentals you learned a few decades ago will still serve you well, there's a lot of superficial/application-facing/fashionable technology that's changed pretty rapidly -- again, not all of it has changed, but the rate of change has been higher than a lot of other working fields. Humans get better over time at anything they do long enough. There's a natural tendency to slowly get very good at doing things the old way, even if it's no longer the best way. I looooooved writing C apps for several years but I'm glad I made the jump to languages and tools which are better suited for that role. Eventually a good chance somebody fails to make the jump to new tech/paradigm -- increasingly due to distraction from family, friends, hobbies, health issues, travel. Speaking in generalizations, of course.

4. it's demanding work, intellectually. folks burn out. eye strain. wrist strain. brain strain. the 1st 100 times you're asked to solve some evil bug caused by dipshit coworkers may be interesting or satisfying to solve, but eventually it gets old. (I think this is a big reason why Java is so popular inside large corps: it reduces chance that newbs/dipshits hurt themselves, plus, when shit does hit fan, Java has great tools and hooks for digging in quickly and finding out what's wrong and fixing it, in runtime/production scenarios, not just static code reviews)

5. management track black hole, certainly. partly the demand to push programmers into it, partly because you get bored, partly because you lose your edge, partly because it's a more sure-fire way to increase your pay in a corporate/salary type job working for The Man, and you don't want to become a contractor or start your own business, for whatever reason
Most people won't have to do this. Most people will just join an existing site. Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking (http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...) and that it lets you export your data. It remains to be seen if they make the system of "aspects" simple enough.

That said, it's a little annoying that a supposedly open product can't be installed in one command.
I used to have the same problem.

I discovered if I unofficially turned it into a loosely directed review session taught by me, they suddenly became very helpful. 'teaching' my peers the material forces me to think about everything much more critically, and justify and explain everything. The process of doing these things myself crystallizes my understanding, assembling together everything I've learned.

(I believe this phenomenon is very similar to the way you can be stuck trying to find a bug for hours, and then instantly realize the solution as soon as you try to explain the problem to a peer)
Here's the world's fastest talker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM6zPikfOEs

Somewhere in the video the neuroscientist talks about her cerebral cortex working differently than it does for most people, and indeed, she's able to understand fast speakers better.
I agree that the less productive programmers ought to be willing to learn and can improve.

But at least in some of the cases I know, the difference in productivity is based on a couple of extra decades of intensive experience (fanatic code-all-day experience) and does not get narrowed down significantly by studying new techniques.

I agree these are the outliers, though.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff at one time; when I was sorta-kinda playing with the idea of trying to do something that had some potential as a "facebook killer." But that was never my real aim anyway, and I wound up refocusing a lot of my energy in other directions now. But I still find the idea of thinking about "what will replace Facebook" interesting. If you ever want to bat some ideas around, feel free to shoot me an email.
I don't know that I've got any legal scholarship to back me up, but that never stopped me from having an opinion.

It seems to me that our rights acknowledged by the 4th and 5th Amendments boil to a right to "Freedom from Scrutiny" (and I think this is also implied by the 1st Amendment). That is, the government should pay us no mind at all, unless it's come to their attention that there's something illegal going on.

I think that viewing things through this lens clears up a lot of ambiguity. It holds together as a coherent philosophy and resolves a lot of potential uncertainty, when the law is confronted with new technologies, etc.
I meant "git reset --hard" as a prefix for useful <refspecs>.

Can hg set the current branch to point anywhere in time?

Does histedit do exactly what "rebase" does? Does it also work with "--onto" and other rebase features?
IMHO People's minds, in the conceptual realm, work on a black-and-white basis. I find it can often be very difficult to discuss the grey region with folks.

Which is somewhat amusing, considering the underlying hardware works on a billion shades of grey.
Somebody ought to make an SSD that promises to wipe data ASAP and use that as a selling point.
NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life
The fact that you are upvoted more than me shows me that too many people spend too much theorizing and not enough time actually trying it out. Go spend some time on a treadmill and some time running outside. It very well could be that if you had a perfect tailwind (which doesn't happen) then it would be similar, but I wouldn't bet on it (the surfaces are different for starters). My point was that running on a treadmill is not the same, and that's irrefutable.
Apple's server hardware isn't the issue: Apple is asking for a 30% cut when Readability is processing and distributing content. (Maybe; I'm not sure how the Readability app specifically works. But Readability is theoretically in the same boat as Amazon, where Amazon is hosting all of the content, and Apple expects a cut because you're using an iOS device, and Apple maintains that their curator position licenses them to revenue sharing from all apps, regardless of who hosts the content.)
Autodesk SketchBook is as well. The user interface in this application is so well done.
I tried these instructions and got bupkis.
Perhaps a better conclusion would be that: startups should no longer consider SEO a viable __short-term__ marketing strategy.

Sure, the industry has spawned aggressive black-hat SEOs that make "profitable" keywords very competitive. But I feel that a startup that's carving out a niche that's not as cutthroat as "hotels", and more focused than content farms, can still make search engines a significant part of their traffic.
Marketplaces often flop when the people who build them don't fully understand the market they're facilitating.

I think the exercise in the brokering of selling newsletter ads, even on a small scale of one or two customers, will be truly valuable in achieving understanding of the needs of the platform before you dump precious time and resources into building it.

I wouldn't write off that idea too quickly... As an added bonus you can make $$ doing this from day 1, before you even have a product.
Moderation takes care of it (everyone is a moderator in a way similar to Reddit). Enough irrelevant clicks and it's gone.

The relevancy algorithm also solves it partly when you upvote and downvote enough things and the system build can build up some profile vectors for you to improve ranking for yourself.

We did some really through analysis and built a bunch of statistical models and tests. We think we can handle the problem makers and still try to maintain highly personal relevant and realtime posts wherever you are at.

As a test, we scrapped 4chan and dumped posts of that scum at random intervals. Beta users killed it really fast and quality didn't suffer. Turned it into a game a little bit and it reveled our early evangelists.

The trick is doing all this relevancy matching without crippling scaling issues when we turn up the dial on users. Really fun engineering problem.
This sounds awesome!

Any alumni up for a weekend in Vegas? Me and my co-founder will show you around town. :)
Hey Terry. Congrats on the launch. Some feedback:

1) The demo link needs to stand out a bit. I found myself looking for some kind of a demo and almost missed the link.

2) The demo page is stuck on loading in IE.

3) The boxes that appear on the right throughout the site needs some design tweak, though I can't put my finger on exactly what.

Best of luck with your startup!
I can't find the contact email on the site - where should we submit suggestions, feedback, etc?
Being fit and feeling good about myself is a better feeling than anything I have derived from food. I love me some delicious food, but not at the expense of my health.
Holy freaking cow, Microsoft has an open source hosting site?
I take issue with your statement about stagnation. You're implying that apart from pay, the only other variable in the mix is the teacher. Now admittedly I'm in the Australian system not the American, but I know that if you asked teachers here what some of the main detrimental factors are to their teaching, then department policy and political pressure would be pretty high up there.

It's very convenient that politicians forget about forcing schools to accept the latest testing fad, drastically changing course requirements on a regular basis, increasing the numbers of children with learning disabilities in regular classes (much of the time without adequate learning support), etc. Especially when they want to find an excuse for underperformance.
In practice it's meant to run like email--most people don't register a domain, provision a server and install a mail server / webmail app / spam blocker. They just use an existing server, be it their ISP, Gmail, Yahoo, an employer, or whoever. It's nice that I can set up my own, but it's also not the path that 99.999% of people take.
I updated my iphone from 3 to 4 and all the apps bought through itunes on my phone (not my pc) were wiped out.
That's great and all, but what I really wanted to know is how he used his napkin? Was it folded in a triangle in his lap or a rectangle...gasp, did he use one at all?!

Superfluous information is superfluous information.

That said, I still skimmed it for the bits and pieces I found interesting.
> unfortunately there's no easy way to go back and links to your site from Twitter historically

Maybe you can. I am no dev but once you have the url of my blog post. There must be a way to query this sort of thing via API? http://twitter.com/#search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.64notes.com%2F... THis is search result for single blog post URL that tweet button displays as # of RTs.

I guess you can get all the tweets via API, which will have date of tweet and things like that?

Not sure if we are on the same lines but maybe it can be done.

Keep moving forward :)
Forget free. It's illegal, even fro interns, where you produce value for the company. I would consider it unethical for me to hire you for minimum wage, cheap is OK. You are in an oddball situation, so HR types wont pass your resume on. Forget BofA. Startups probably cant take the chance. However, there are usually a few companies on that advertise entry level. Non-profits are also a possibility, because they cant pay so well.

Your post is a good bet, so I upvoted it.

EDIT: I checked your profile. You dont have contact info. A job cant find you.
I'm distrustful of people who make lots of diagrams; it indicates to me that they may not actually know how to create the thing they're drawing, and thus lack the capacity to make truly sound decisions about it.

I've found UML-y diagrams to be useful it a few cases:

1. When sketching out an object model in a statically typed language, it helps to see the whole thing at once. The class diagram tool in later versions of visual studio is a nice compromise between functionality and usability for this case; it's easy enough to generates the code, but it's easy to ignore the diagram and do real work when you're ready.

2. When talking about system interactions with people via email, sequence diagrams can be useful. http://www.websequencediagrams.com/ is by far the fastest and easiest way I know to make them; trying to use a GUI tool is an exercise in frustration.

3. If my system has some internal structure I want to draw for people, I output graphViz data and let it draw the picture for me. Pictures generated in this way are always up to date.

I don't know that I've EVER kept a diagram around as a piece of documentation; they're invariably wrong after a short amount of time. In fact one of my favorite things about the visual studio diagrams is that they break if you change the code out from under them.
> Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking

I had to go through the slides to understand this: basically, it said in the case of a woman they did research on, she commented and liked photos of her friends at the gay bar, but her ten-year-old students could see those comments too. The thesis was that a bunch of her social groups that shouldn't interact were forced to interact on Facebook.

Now that that's overwith (if you were as confused as I was), how does Diaspora solve this? I'm honestly asking. Do you not see updates on another service, or something?
Do you have a site where you showcase your skills?
As part of the format, the magazine pays except in one of the articles where the interviewee insisted on paying.
Yes and no. I believe it all depends on the network/company. For an example, they asked my co-worker to cover up the Nike logo on his t-shirt. They had no problem with my hoodie though, which had a visible Hollister logo.

If it does turn out to be a problem, I can just send the participating founders a release form to sign.
All of facebooks users are willing to try something different. Just like all of geocities users, all of yahoo searches users, all of myspaces, friendsters and orkuts users were. Simply put internet companies don't have a durable competitive advantage.

They have an advantage for a little while, then someone bests them. But no one has figured out how to build a rolls-royce, goyard or even coca-cola internet service yet.
That seems like an awful lot of work for something that would only be viewable for a radius of a few miles
Thanks. Silly mistake. :)
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't have the right to decide what links get shown on our own websites?