skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reproduction is an interesting analogy for software development, but like all metaphors it eventually fails.

For instance there is the change of feature set as pointed out by m0nastic. Large projects tend to be very flexible in features over their development life, which is odd because usually its not the end user requirements that are changing.

Another thing is varying programmer qualities. Some programmers can bang out a baby in 9 days. Some require 90 months to make the baby (hint: don't whinge about your hiring praxctices, man up and get rid of these ones). Some are completely infertile (fire these ones with extreme prejudice). Some project a field of radiation that will not only prevent themselves from making the baby, but will kill all babies in a 5 mile radius (do the world a favour: take these ones out back and shoot them, and then burn the body - do not promote them to management!).

Continuing the reproduction metaphor, Yak Shaving can be considered similar to Onanism. While some people might not be able to make babies, they might be master craftsmen when it comes to building cribs. Some people might be bad programmers but really good at changing nappies... without these people you will be buried in a mountain of... 'cruft'. :D
This one was posted not too long ago they are looking for a IOS developer and a Javascript developer http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2389805 I have no association to them just figured for those looking it may be valuable.
This is like staring into the abyss. i couldn't help myself from constantly clicking the swap button.
ING Direct has something similar for entering your PIN.
Loads of Gatto audio at http://tinyurl.com/2d9rqr
Makes sense. I'm sure this greatly improves the user experience, but you can kinda see why it would make publishers unhappy, right?

I guess it's a fine line, though. Presumably, one isn't committing copyright infringement by using AdBlock or a Readability browser plugin. So why treat you guys differently? (I guess because they can.)
Spent fuel rods even continue to generate a nontrivial amount of heat months after they've been removed from the reactor - one of the problems at Fukushima is the spent fuel pools (which are located near the top of the reactor buildings, outside the secondary containment).
He probably meant "rich" in the global sense.
Perhaps a better comparison would be Buzz. That was a big change, rolled out to everyone at once, and an attempt at grabbing a chunk of the social web in one swoop.

Meanwhile, their repeated, incremental, segmented, non-intrusive changes to add social aspects to their searching have essentially all gone off without a hitch.

The first time I saw Buzz, I thought "Really? Good luck with that.". Prior to the privacy hubbub (I actually read the dialog), which nigh-totally tanked it. The first time I saw a tweet from a friend come up in a relevant search result, I thought "Really? Awesome." and I clicked on the link. I think this'll end up working better than their much-ignored stars on results.
It's funny but people always reference Facebook whenever PHP is called to discussion. Former CTO and now cofounder of Quora, Adam D'Angelo, has said so himself the main reason for Facebook staying on PHP was mostly for legacy reasons. There was simply no good reason to continue using PHP but it had already become a core part of Facebook so they optimize as best as they can. In building Quora, he decided in hindsight to use Python and had Facebook not been so entrench in it, they probably would have switched. That isn't to say Facebook doesn't already use other languages as part of their infrastructure. And it was in part why hiphop was developed.

That said, I have nothing personal against PHP and have been a PHP developer for years. It does get the job done and is forgiving as you have said but make no mistake, there are better alternatives. There are things that, for example, Python and Ruby is able to do that PHP can't since PHP is purely a web base language and Python and Ruby are not. At the end of the day, it's really what the developer is most comfortable with.
I'm not a NetBSD person (though I did work for a NetBSD-dependent company for a while)...

This seems like a smart, pragmatic decision: create a system where modern hardware can be prioritized more, while creating a system where extremely legacy hardware is not hampering kernel and ports decisions. Not to mention the development and testing effort involved in supporting them all.

That said, anyone who values the support of those systems can put some effort in:
"In no way does this mean that NetBSD is abandoning support for old
hardware. Support for ports such as vax, mac68k and pmax is still
more than welcome. However, users of such ports are asked to take
a more active role in development, maintenance and feedback for
the platforms they know and love."
Plastic from Fruit Stronger than Petroleum
I hate the comma in variable declarations personally I use a new 'var' keyword on every line.
For a shop whose pre-requisite to hiring a developer is that they have code publicly available, you can bet cultural fit is the other thing at the top of their checklist.

Saying "no one wants to go home and write a big fucking pile of code" probably means that regardless of technical aptitude, you wouldn't fit in well with the kind of folks who love and encourage doing just that in their spare time. Most of the developers on our team have and love "endless side projects."

Not bullshit, just different.
Show HN: I couldn't help it...I made a meme news aggregator site
According to Hofstadter (no, not the guy from Big Bang Theory, the one that wrote Godel Escher Bach, the eternal golden braid), it is because there are strong links between music and maths, and there are also strong links between programming and maths.

Which suggests a solution to the problem of interviews and hiring good programmers. Take them to a Karaoke bar and get them plastered instead :D
Definitely, but unfortunately a lot of one-off code meant for school assignments isn't valuable for anything else. And I wouldn't want GitHub to be littered with random things that aren't — and don't need to be — FLOSS projects, but instead serve as résumé pieces.
How to Name your Web App
What is this AIM thing you mention?

// The rest of the world never really used AIM. Certainly here in Australia it was ICQ and then MSN (and now facebook) for chat.

Skype has always been the VOIP / Video Chat service of choice..
The article does mention that "there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through." The author makes the point that it is this competition that creates the best of athletes in our society, and fosters the necessary talent to be come a good athlete.

I do think that the author misses the point when he compares producing a major league player every 10-15 years to be the same as producing a "Shakespeare" every 10-15 years. Producing a "Shakespeare" every 10-15 years is like producing the best of the best every 10-15 years. To play in the Major Leagues, you have to be one of the best, but amongst that elite group, only a select few can achieve "Shakespearean" status.

To produce a Shakespeare, Einstein, or a Michael Jordan requires some luck, and they are characters in history that will be remembered for a while. But it should be possible to cultivate a culture that can foster more talent in the academic fields.
How is consistency sacrificed with HRD? Do you mean that, with HRD, you could potentially see the effects of some write W to entity group A, write some value dependent on that write to entity group B, then immediately look at entity group A and see a pre-W value?
The "Filter-Branch" tip was the most helpful tip for me, since I've been there and deleted my whole repo as quickly as possible not knowing other solutions existed.

http://help.github.com/removing-sensitive-data/
Employment contracts don't dictate what you can write in the privacy of your own home on a non-employer-owned machine and what you subsequently do with it. (Of course non-compete clauses can kick in if you're working on Oracle DB and contribute to Postgres, but there are always other OSS projects where that little restriction doesn't apply.)
The problem is that I can't believe a word you said. I can't see examples of this awesome super top-secret code because it's all closed-source, as you say, for good reasons.

I also can't trust your references, because you'll only give me ones that will say good things about you, and any digging at your work history will only uncover "yes he worked here" responses.

I want to see open-source contributions because I like being around people who are passionate about solving problems with code, and it is my experience that people who contribute to open-source projects, or start their own, are of that mindset.

I don't think that they are the only people who are passionate, but I want to make a choice so I can get back to solving problems.

If you're making the hiring people work harder, you're going to miss out. Being able to show examples of your work is the best way to do it.

How do you feel about tests? or "write this program that does [x]" spec projects instead?
As PageRank is a trust metric, and their entire system is based around that, I'd imagine they would perform similar calculations for +1 results. Especially as +1s contain no implicit content, as they are merely flags, I find it unlikely to suffer from SEO like search does - trust metrics are practically designed to handle farming.
besides a vague allusion to security concerns

Not to mention that should it be licensed under a free model, those security concerns don't just magically vanish. I agree with you summation their stance can be radical and preachy at times much like the Vegan community.
Crying out for categorisation, but I like that you must contribute to participate and the simplicity works for it too.
Grand Challenges Canada projects
And science... How about developing 5000 Isaac Newtons? There are lots of problems in the world that could be solved by producing more great scientists and engineers.
I've been thinking a bit about how the tablet game plays out over the next few months. Just for fun, here's some speculation:

1) Apple sells a crap ton of iPads. Their biggest problem will be that they can't make them fast enough. Don't whine to me about "openness" or the notifications system. They'll sell lots of them and we all know it.

2) HP gets the TouchPad into stores. There are no queues to buy one on day one, but it does OK in the first few weeks. Sells maybe a million units in the first three months.

3) Consumers shopping for a tablet are now faced with a choice: I can buy an iPad and wait four to five weeks for it to arrive (those are the times Apple's website is currently quoting), or I can buy a HP TouchPad and take it home today. For some, that'll be enough to bring them over to HP.

4) HP's TouchPad gets some traction. Enough to justify a version two. Nowhere near enough to knock Apple off it's perch.

5) HP does something badly wrong. One of the MBAs gets in the way, makes a decision he has no place making, and hands one of HP's competitors a major competitive advantage. Maybe they decide the TouchPad should be US only for the first year. Maybe they piss off developers in some creative way, so no-one writes apps for the platform. I don't know what they'll do, but I can't shake the feeling that they'll fuck it up somehow.

6) Android tablets come out too. Nerds like me buy them, while our grandmothers buy iPads and TouchPads. There are many more grandmothers in the world than nerds. Android tablets do badly. Attempting to explain this, reviewers looking at 2011 retrospectively will cite a confusing UI, a flash implementation that was promised but never materialised (or materialised in a broken state), and many of the same compatibility issues that we see now with Android phones.

7) Microsoft announces Windows 8 with a completely redesigned UI based on Metro. This UI will try to work just as well with the keyboard and mouse as it does on touch devices. Ballmer will use the phrase "bridging the gap" a lot.
Thanks. I didn't understand the relationship between entity groups/partitions and consistency in the HRD.
semi-off-topic; does anyone here have experiences with GSoC they'd like to share?
my idea is the one about the dynamic music, if anyone happens to see it.
From developer.palm.com:

HP Veer planned availability this spring. HP TouchPad and HP Pre 3 planned availability this summer.
Not required. We'd much rather see an active Github account or experience working on open-source projects.
Are you a tech startup enthusiast? We'd like your help.
We're a small blog run by a few guys who love reading and writing about tech startups. Right now we're focusing on the SoCal tech scene, but we want to expand our reach to other, non-silicon valley, tech scenes. If you live in NYC, Chicago, Miami, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Boulder or any number of other tech startup communities and are passionate about covering this subject, sign up!

You can do so here: http://thestartupcafe.com/write-for-the-startup-cafe/

Thanks! We can't wait to work with you.
The Idea Swap = INteractSPIRATION?
Yeah I think I'll do that soon.
You own the domain http://co.ke?
and you're wondering what to do with it?

Sell it and roll around in the cash...
I don't really recall seeing this spelled out clearly in the documentation before.
Let me quite honest and say that if someone Agnes an employment contract, as a developer, that prevents them from writing unrelated code in their spare time or lays claim to any code written outside of the office, that person is an idiot. I'm not a developer and on every company I've been with in the past 10 or so years I've gotten something in writing or marked up my contract/employee agreement stating that in no way does the company have rights to anything I develop on my personal time.
I'm fully willing to accept restrictions in specific technologies if it directly competes with the core business of the employer but only under very specific circumstances.
1. pictures of scarface from movie

2. ???

3. profit
From 2004, but I think the basics don't change very much.
Putting aside GitHub/Bitbucket, the tools for Git (and even Mercurial) suck when it comes to Windows. This is the case with both the Visual Studio and the Explorer plug-ins. It's a real shame too, because Git and Mercurial are massive improvements over the existing SCM tools for Windows-based developers (CVS/SVN/TFS, etc.)
Some companies have a culture built around open source software (e.x. Github), and some don't. The latter will value open source contributions less (or none). If you have no desire to be involved in open source then perhaps you'd fit better in those companies.

Also, contributing to open source projects doesn't necessarily need to happen in your "spare time". Companies contribute to open source too.
Yes there's junk on Github. But I can see that and I can say "no, this person is not a good fit" before I hire them. :)
So the value proposition I see is that I input a valid business idea that I was researching 2 years ago and got inputs from 4th graders. Totally will use it again.
I agree that the relationship is there, but I'm curious if there's any basis for your claim that folks who write software will also tend to write music instead of enjoying it in other ways.
20 years, for Magic Johnson.
i think you sign up at freshbooks, let freshbooks know that mixergy referred you and you will get a cake.. maybe by dropping a note after signup or some coupon code field or something like that..
I have a lot of respect for the idealism underpinning your motivation. That's partially why I got into finance in the first place.

You can also

1) charge for the advise. Something relatively small but accessible to most people. THAT would be a game changer :)

2) pitch the idea to fidelity or some other consumer facing brokerage. If you have good material, brokerage companies love it.

3) fake the trades. For example, Lehman Europe [LBIE] used to allow for infinite leverage by simulating each position (withdrawing money from the account when clients bought, and replenishing when they sold again). So you could do the following:

- hold the positions that you advocate
- when people want to "buy" the signal (buy when you say buy, sell when you say sell), then basically sell the exposure to their account
- when people want to "sell" the signal (opposing you), then just take a naked position. Ostensibly, if your signals are good, then you should make money :)

I would highly recommend learning about finance via a trading job or internship. There are a lot of subtleties involved. Not that you couldn't learn by reading a bunch of books, but finance is highly regulated and its important to understand all the ins and outs :)
Forgot to mention that you also need a patient spouse.
Big Tetrinet fan here, I used to play the modified version Tetrifast a lot(no new block delay) which is the same as this, you can lay blocks with speeds of 120+ ppm(pieces per min) depending on the keyboard repeat and initial delay settings(usually needs to be reduced). One flaw I see is there is only a key to turn the pieces one direction, and not he other, this should be implemented to increase speed of laying. Also, it would be cool to have customizable keys for those of us who don't use standard, I tend to use(may not be optimal):

down: drop, e/r : turn piece left/right, up: faster descent

Unfortunately very very few people play Tetrinet anymore, I wish you the best to revive what was a great game!
Ask HN: Home healthcare companies?
Fellow HN'ers....I would love to speak to someone within the Operations side of a Home Healthcare business. Anyone have any connections?

Why? I'm doing some market research into the space and just want to ask a few questions.

I'm happy to speak with you first so that you can validate I'm not crazy :)
The modern equivalent is probably something like Harry Potter - mass popular appeal but from a technical point of view not well written, or maybe Stephen King - extremely prolific within his particular niche.

I think you are grossly overestimating the social position of actors in the days of Shakespeare, from what I've read they were regarded as little better than prostitutes (and some were, they were not at all well paid for their stage work).

Additionally, your 'nitpick' about Shakespeare being compared to Virgil etc actually proves my point, that we tend to hold older writings in higher regard than modern writings. Whereas with athletes, this is not the case. Roger Bannister is famous for running the first (recorded) four minute mile, whereas today running a four minute mile isn't even considered noteworthy. Sporting records regularly tumble, and when they do the athlete that set the previous record diminishes a little in our eyes (I'm not arguing that this is good or right, just that it is), whereas Shakespeare and Tolkein are always going to be up on their pedestals.

When I used to read lots of Fantasy I would pick up books in shops and read the blurbs on the back, and almost everyone was going to be 'the next Tolkein' or 'bigger and better than Tolkein' or some such hyperbole. Now I can easily imagine someone being better than Tolkein (he spends an entire page describing a forest just talking about trees for goodness sake. They're big green and leafy, move on for goodness sake!), but you're not the next Tolkein until everyone compares their books to you instead of him. If you see what I mean.
I'm curious a to why this vaccine has been worked in at Los Alamos which is a national security orientated government laboratory. (US government, of course)

On the one hand it makes sense - AIDS/HIV is a national security issue in many ways - I just wonder what that means for everyone outside of the US. If the US government owns the vaccine, are they going to share it openly and without prejudice to any other countries that want it? Even Iran?

But it also makes you wonder, then, whether there is merit in donating to AIDS/HIV research charities if any significant break-throughs are going to be snapped up by the government as matters for national security.
They have a $14.99 1 year subscription until Mar 31. Loved the magazine as a kid. The iPad could add an interesting dimension to a science magazine.
Ultimately, I agree with you, except that reading these kinds of articles for long enough will get you into the right mindset. Then you can maybe read these kind of articles as refreshers or get some new ideas. Or never read one again.

At least, it's how it works for me.
co.ke isn't a domain name it's a country code like in bbc.co.uk.
No. It's just this guy.
.06mg/kg is a pretty small lethal dose. That's probably entirely due to the radioactivity. Tetraethyl lead has a lethal dose of something like 1.2mg/kg http://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/chemical/organlea.htm which is 20 times higher. But that's organic lead, which is rapidly absorbed; lead oxide is something like 600 mg/kg, ten thousand times higher than the dose you calculated for plutonium. But, in that case we're comparing the ingested dose to the dose absorbed; you'd have to ingest about 150mg/kg of PuO₂ to absorb 0.06mg/kg of it.

Also, though, the fatal dose of another heavy metal like lead might be lower than the LD₅₀ reported, because LD₅₀ tests normally don't give the experimental animals several years to die.

So, in conclusion, it seems like accurately comparing plutonium poisoning to poisoning by other heavy metals requires more knowledge than I have. Good thing the NRC's on the job.
The "guess the number" game for arbitrary rational numbers?
Oh, thanks! I'd forgotten that C feature of Python. Unfortunately it doesn't work in JS.
Three Mile Island was 32 years ago.

Which killed how many people?
I'm saddened that HN is degrading into Digg.
File upload processing web service
You're correct that I am given a choice about whether I want to release my source. But I mentioned a specific example (Chromium developers paid by Google) who are being paid to produce open source work.

I do exhibit some of my smaller projects on github; my larger projects are not online because of competitive reasons.
I stand corrected. And thanks for the links.
We have been toying with ideas like Python support, but so far have not thought about it seriously.

What kind of diagrams do you need? What situations are you in?
You are absolutely right, but just because he has changed and the world has forgiven him doesn't mean we should forget his past self. There are still lessons to be learned. And, his philanthropy doesn't justify his past bad behavior.
Nice site!

All of this attention means you're going to get a nice C&D letter from the lawyers of Henk Roger's Tetris Co. LLC real soon, though.
>Maybe they piss off developers in some creative way, so no-one writes apps for the platform.

Already nobody writes apps for the platform; they need to do something right in a creative way to get people to even port iOS or android apps.
> And yes you can steal an idea, people get thrown out of higher education everyday for stealing someone's idea.

No, they get thrown out for doing something against the rules of the school. The fact that they get thrown out does not prove that an idea was meaningfully stolen (as opposed to the simpler explanation, in which the student experienced a lapse of integrity in following citation requirements).

A thought experiment: If I believe that we have a duty to repay society for all that it has done for us, then in order not to be a thief, am I required to raise Immanuel Kant from the dead and ask him for permission every time I want to bring it up in conversation? Obviously, no. I'm allowed to believe the same thing as Immanuel Kant and it is not theft. If I got my ideas from Kant but tried to deny it, that would be dishonest, and he would still be the originator, but ideas aren't really property.

This isn't defending what the Long Island Press did, but you're going too far in the other direction.
Google's +1'd up way of utterly +1'ing with things
We'd need a word like "bromance", but for nerds.