skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You sound exactly like me. What I've found useful is getting in front of as many people as possible. I know that if I sit down and talk with someone I will be hired to do something.

What I would do is find people to talk to, listen to their problems, and then relate how your experiences can help them solve their problems.

I've had getting to know you meetings where people have said, "We have a job for you. Come back in two weeks and we'll know more"
Facepalm worthy iPhone app review
For double bonus points, make sure you have enough entropy in your code that it "trivially" decodes to your restaurant review in one half, and the other half is just plausible-looking noise.
So for those of use who know nothing about websites: what is the correct way to protect against SQL injection?
MoPub Client SDK moved to GitHub
Looks beautiful on my Desire. Any word on a bold font?
Whatever happened to whom? You never hear or read it anymore.

It's gone the way of will and shall, nobody seems to know or care about the difference.

"Do not ask for who the bell tolls..." -- sounds like crap, but that's the way they'd write it today.
It is a ridiculous analogy anyway. Fukushima failed, yes, but only after a magnitude 9 earthquake, followed by a devastating tsunami, overwhelmed its myriad safety systems. I don't know how any right-minded person could ever form the impression it was only "held together by luck".
The problem is that when the "low fat" fad started, a lot of the the fat in processed food was replaced by sugar. Read ingredient labels... there's sugar or corn syrup in almost ALL low-fat/fat-free foods. So not only were you not getting the fat that would have worked to satiate your appetite, you were getting sugar on top of the carbs.
Here is evidence that exercise on it's own works for weight loss.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car...

You can find lots more in sports medicine textbooks. Plenty of studies have varied exercise and diet in order to fine tune muscle gain vs fat loss for various purposes (mostly related to weight class).

I would not trust Gary Taubes in general. I've only had one exposure to him, but I found him to be dishonest in that instance.

http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...
Thanks for posting. We do our best to keep a high standard on our selection and try to make people think for a second.
Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong
Maybe all the ways one can use your product are not obvious to all of your customers and potential customers only a few hours after product launch?
Ah, looks like I need to catch up on my reading!
Terrafugia flying car to hit the streets (and skies) in 2011
> That depends. Do agricultural subsidies count as control?

Even the most extreme interpretation of govt food control doesn't approach the amount of govt control in primary public education. (I find that folks who talk about various subsidies tend to overstate them if they're opposed and understate them if they support. Note how that lets each side claim that the other is lying. Curious that they never notice that they're both correct about that.)

Or, are you suggesting that all amounts of control are the same?
We know that he's had this "language" since he was a child so I'm going to go out on a limb here (and introduce no small measure of my own bias) and guess its not a cerebral cipher that will easily be unraveled by simple frequency of note correlation.

I've likely got a touch of Asperger's myself and I know I have a bigger touch of synesthesia. I remember vividly during my childhood certain words being an explosion of color and texture and even having under-tones of other unrelated sounds. Even today I've got my own little "esperanto" in my mind for words and concepts that don't feel right in normal language. I use them on occasion on my unfortunate family, although its tough to say "oranger than orange with a texture like crumpled sandpaper and snow" succinctly.

Is there a way to just output the letters as a stream of phonyms? I tried "say" at the command prompt but this ends up reading the names of the letters and not their sounds. I'm going to guess this "code" is a stream-of-consciousness type thing and would be very interested in hearing it slurred out fast as basic sound.
I knew I must have been misunderstanding you. No, I am not aware of any.
x264 in Google Summer of Code 2011
Google's Failure in Local Search
And Learn You The Ruby is still in the dust. I feel so ashamed :(
Actually I think it really is a case of "scienceyness" vs. science.
To the Whingers Go the Spoils in the Google Books Decision
There are very few "sit down and read" type books about chemical engineering. That being said, there are two books that I reference every day: the first physically, the second philosophically.

1) Perry's Handbook for Chemical Engineers (Perry)

2) Conceptual Design of Chemical Processes (Douglas)

Perry's is the end all be all for technical reference.

Conceptual Design is incredibly useful for learning how to quickly and accurately design an entire process. If anything, it'll teach you the best methods to go about "back of the hand" calculations for sanity checks.
BP Springs Another Leak: Loses Laptop With Data of 13k Spill Victims
Zed Shaw wrote "Learn Python The Hard Way", and then E. Martin started to write "Learn Ruby The Hard Way", without asking permission to copy the text.

There's a second book, started before LPTHW and LRTHW, called Learn You The Ruby, by me. But I haven't finished it :(
Ask HN: what can I do about a newspaper that plagiarized my blog?
Yesterday, an NYC-area newspaper lifted some original research off my website, and when I contacted them requesting attribution (i.e. a link) they responded in a pretty unprofessional way... publicly... on their newspaper...

So, the truth is, it's a silly matter of Petite Lap Giraffes. If you've been following the DirecTV viral advertisements, maybe you've seen the Russian guy with the tiny giraffe. I blogged about this last week, and it's been a ton of fun. ...but I had a really negative interaction with LongIslandPress.com today, and I wrote about that too:

http://iandennismiller.com/blog/2011/03/total-bummer-longislandpress-com-plagiarism-and-coverup/

It's so silly I hardly want to waste any time on it. At the same time, their actions were so blatant and contemptuous that I almost feel like an injustice has been committed... So my question is: what can be done about a newspaper that factually lies about something, steals your work, and is kindof mean about refusing to provide attribution?
Hopefully, this will lead apps that have a gratis/lite/ad-financed version and a donation/premium/ad-free version to have unified versions where one can upgrade to the latter option inside the app.
Clickable link:

http://iandennismiller.com/blog/2011/03/total-bummer-longisl...
A full list of the people who voted against the measure is presented here:

http://stopthecap.com/2011/03/29/house-republicans-sell-out-...

If there is a concerted effort to fight this legislation to which people (including those of us outside the state) can donate, I haven't found it; if anyone does, please post!
The word app doesn't only refer to something in an app store. The article mentions "I'm talking small, stupid applications that serve no purpose other than to take up space in some app store or some .com". threewords.me is such an app that takes up a domain.

"But last time I checked, companies started with one application, sold it, then made a few more" ... like 37signals and their apps.
No.

They employ a lot of people that can write code on boards, and can certainly churn it out at high velocity. But when you start looking at the actual code... it's bad. When I first looked at the chrome code, the layer they dumped on top of webkit to make it out-of-process, the only thing I could think of was "this looks like something a kid fresh out of college would cobble up together". Same thing with most of their projects - lack of clear design, hacks, hard to maintain, lack of standards, no portability. The projects that get visibility end up getting better (more competent programmers assigned to them), the rest lingers in crappiness mode.

They're not all like that, obviously. They have very smart and very competent people there. But the general low quality of their code, the lack of polish in their products, it clearly shows the consequences of hiring people based on how fast they can dump code on a whiteboard.
It's hard to respect an article that doesn't even mention that Thorium isn't fissile.

Myself, I expect serious development of thorium reactors to come after spikes in the price of oil and uranium, not before. Uranium and fossil fuels are just too cheap right now to justify the additional effort associated with the Thorium fuel cycle.
That's exactly what happened. Also, it's not so much that she requires supporting, more that it's something I want to do as thanks for allowing me the freedom to explore and then pursue a more rewarding career path.
With all due respect, that perfectly fits the theories that Taubes is advocating. "High intensity" exercise over six months manages to drop only 3.5 kilograms on average (and add 1.4 kg in muscle). That is not terribly significant by any definition, let alone the one I gave, and based on my (other) reading it seems likely that actually happened fairly early in the study and everyone has plateaued by the end. I dropped that in my first two weeks of dropping carbs and have kept it off for a few years now in addition to a couple dozen other pounds and drop that amount pretty much at will when I accidentally gain it back from slipping on the carbs too much. (Which I am slowly but surely getting better at avoiding.) And I guarantee you that I did not exercise during that first period. (I do now, because it's much easier now.)

It might be significant if we could just assume that's a linear progression and you'll keep losing that every six months, but that's not a conclusion you can make. The bar for proving exercise works as a weight loss method in the literature is low, because it can't get over any higher bar than maybe ten pounds with a fairly large exercise load.

("But you're just citing your own anecdotal evidence!" In this case, only as a tidbit to show how unimpressed by that study I am, not because I consider it proof. Proof I'm leaving to others who have done it better.)
[AyoCariRumah.Com] Tukar Link Gratis, Site Link Exchange,Web Banner Exchange
Interesting to find this on HN. The author's point of view is one of the main reasons I like Java and am kinda unimpressed that you can do quicksort in one line in uber-functional-language-of-the-day-X. HN seems to me to be a hotbed for people who think that the main purpose of a programming language is to enhance your geek-cred.
A few things about your otherwise great idea:

1) Grooveshark exists, it approximates the holy grail in my opinion, not all the way there but pretty damn close.

2) We do not know if Amazon could or would crack down on suspect pirated music. As stated in another comment, they have some rights concerning your files.

3) Will Apple allow a native cloud player for iOS? Perhaps an HTML5 version could work.
If you'll excuse the question, is coding really a good idea for part-time money? It was a given that someone on HN would suggest learning to code.

Are websites and mobile apps high-probability enough to pursue with limited time?
If by "healthy" you mean the certified organic stuff, free range animals, yes that can be expensive. But you can do a LOT better than the typical junk food diet for the same money at any "big box" supermarket.
after reading it online, I preordered it right away (last December). Had to get some money in Miran's account. Glad it's done and ready to go.
it's not down, works for me.
> If your car suddenly gets 60mpg instead of 20, it's only going to ENCOURAGE you to drive all the way across the state to get that special jar of peanut butter you like, instead of walking down the block to the corner store.

For the benefit of interested parties, this is known as "the Jevons Paradox".
Poll: Would you switch telecom providers for privacy?
By now it's established fact that your cell-service provider keeps a log of where you are and what you say, 24 hours a day, and this information will probably be retained by the NSA for a long time.

Some think we're getting dangerously close to 1984. If, say, Sprint were to start a campaign with slogans like "We don't spy on you", would that entice you to switch to such a provider?

Relevant links:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/what-location-tracking-looks

https://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying
Flagged due to misleading, flamebait title. The bill in question does not ban community fiber, it just sets some constraints on it, to ensure that a taxpayer subsidized service doesn't compete with - and undercut - a private business. This is a Good Thing.

Also note that there is a specific exclusion to even these constraints, when it comes to serving a currently unserved geographical area.

http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Sessions/2011/Bills/House/HTML/H...
If your production environment is Linux but you're developing on another platform, what do you expect?

You'd have the same issues if you developed on Debian and deployed on RedHat Enterprise.
It's really not cheap to eat at McDonald's. You can buy a dozen eggs at the supermarket for the cost of one Egg McMuffin.
I've been doing this, and it's gotten me a handful of gigs, some one-offs, and some odd jobs. At the moment, that's my best angle on finding work, and I'm going to keep at it unless I find something steady and high-paying.
Seconded. #haskell and #lisp on freenode are both great.
> It sounds interesting, but before sending my resume to a company, I'd like to know more about them.

What exactly is lost by sending a resume to a company that you are interested in?
Doubt it.

I think mathematicians are simply better at internalizing "this symbol stands for that concept" than other people, and this ability makes them good at both imperative and functional programming.
I'm a chemical engineer myself, and often wondered if there were any others interested in programming as much as I am. I'd be interested to see what sorts of marriages you have made between the two fields. Do you have any links you could post or send me?
Simple. Sue.
Why not "charge" $90 per hour and then offer to "come down" to $75?
> If a town of 1,000 bought a 1-megawatt thorium reactor for $250,000, using 20 kilograms of thorium a year with almost no oversight, every family could pay as little as $0.40 a year for all their electricity...

Are they really arguing that thorium power would be too cheap to meter?

Uranium is a pretty small part of the cost of generating nuclear power. (<10%) What makes nuclear power expensive is the tremendous upfront cost of building a safe reactor.

Thorium reactors aren't magic; they're still nuclear reactors. They produce plenty of radioactive waste. A thorium reactor might not be as susceptible to certain types of failure as a uranium reactor, but they're still dangerous enough that it will be necessary to build them to a similarly high standard.

In some ways, thorium could be more expensive. Thorium reactors need a kick-start from a uranium reactor, so they're inherently more complicated. Thorium waste decays faster, but more intensely. Some tasks that can be done by hand in uranium reactors would require robotics in a thorium plant.

Thorium may or may not be a good idea. But to assume that it will be cheaper than uranium is a bit foolish after witnessing what a graveyard uranium reactors made of such dreams over the past sixty years.
Its certainly true that statistics work best when you make them up.

The first version of firefox was in 2002, and was already better than IE:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/phoenix/releases/0.1/
Recreating logos with poor substitute fonts = ew.
Evolution, Optimization and Art Using Large Grids of Genes
Work on streaming SC2, LoL, BlackOps at Justin.tv
As someone who studied maths before programming, I think the only real predictor is whether you are comfortable with discrete mathematics.

I don't find most mathematics I learned (undergrad + stats/EE at graduate level and above) very useful for programming. There are commonalities of course, in the sense that people who do mathematics understand the notion of abstraction, etc... But what most "real" programming is about boils down to things where mathematics can actually be harmful at first: everything related to the difference between science and engineering. For example, I still have to fight my will to understand most aspects of a problem before solving it. Not that programming should be done without thinking, but you need a much more iterative approach in programming to be successful. The whole notion of prototyping does not really match anything in mathematics, I think.

What makes functional programming interesting nowadays is more linked to those engineering issues. Unless you do very theoretical stuff, functional programming has little to do with maths, and more to do with the typical practial matters of programming.
It's goofy if you look at it in the context of how Nokia's going to get their act together on smartphones.

If you look at it from the perspective of 'hey, we designed this new font which we think is cool' then I wouldn't call it goofy.
Forget thorium. Work on getting hydrogen fusion technology far enough past the break-even point to be practical and profitable instead.
Starting to get off topic but I really don't think evolution is happening in humans anymore, at least in the first world. Sanitation, medicine, and surgery has advanced so far we've almost completely eliminated natural selection. In fact I'd be surprised if some "de-evolving" isn't happening.
It depends (explain below)
Great idea www.openhatch.org
The best substitute for commercial experience is experience on an open source project. Actually maybe open source experience is better than commercial experience........anyhoo - this is a much needed way to connect developers with projects.
Creating a Thesis Statement
The creation of a thesis statement will take much time and effort. There is much brainstorming, gathering of information and analysis which goes into the creation of the perfect thesis statement. The thesis statement should be the central theme of the thesis paper.
Gmail to Fine Tune Ads Using Priority Inbox Technology
...but honestly? I mean, I'm not earning advertising money from the blog, so it's going to be hard to show any kind of damages.

Really, the only thing being broken is some sort of journalistic ethic here, and I figure there must be some kind of body that hears these kinds of complaints outside of a courtroom.

EDIT: well - okay, but what does one sue for in a case like this?
Good writing is important, which includes finding typos.
Tech entrepreneurs stuck in Canadian immigration limbo
Thank you for the skepticism. I think articles such as this need it.
If it ends up working all the better but to be ignorant of the tribulations will only lead to dismay.
Something like this is going to have an intense affect on app rankings in the Market as free apps won't lose their install rates as people decide to upgrade to the paid versions.
Doing these things or not has nothing to do with being a good developer.
Instant Single Serving Site Maker
Not sure what you can do - but I just wrote a letter to the editor.
I agree, and I'll go a step further, risking HN pariah status in doing so:

Comic Sans is a Good Thing.

That capitalization isn't accidental. It, and every other easy to [mis]use cute, fun, and simple thing we've seen in the last couple decades have been incredibly beneficial to the tech industry and humanity as a whole.

When the Mac and Windows came around, a lot of "computer people" hated them. They were slow and inefficient, and hurt productivity. RMS still rarely uses a mouse. That's fine for people like us, but it isn't fine for people who use a computer to keep in touch with friends or make lost cat posters. And the simple fact is that there aren't that many people like us. Casual users are by far the largest demographic, and that expanded market has been a huge boon for us.

The proliferation of "toy" apps is no different. By sending the message that "you too can make an app", we expand the market hugely. That helps everyone. So what if most apps are garbage? Most websites were garbage in the 90s, but without them we would never have had the Internet that we have today. We needed that huge variety of sites for people to think the marketplace was worthwhile. Now, the Internet is mature, and we almost accept as an inevitability that it should be that way. It wasn't. Without geocities, porn, and even AOL it would just be a graphical Usenet with 2% of its current users.

We're in a Geocities phase right now. There's a proliferation of garbage filling up the mobile sphere. Without that garbage, however, the sphere would be much smaller. Eventually, professional companies will step in and improve overall quality, but we need size at the moment. It grows the market, and it's good for everyone.
clickable http://www.openhatch.org
I've taken the Meyers-Briggs and other personality assessments. I am INTP as well. I'm also into systems, struggle with decisiveness, and dislike too much consistency in my activities and schedule.

I've settled on psychology as the career of choice, and that's why I have to go back to school. Thanks for the thoughtful response.
The problem is that they do the exact same thing for people that they reach out to. Their recruiters go out to mailing lists and linkedin and harvest emails, then contact those people and offer them positions. If you say yes, they start you on the exact same anonymous interview process, the interviewers having no clue that you didn't apply yourself and treating you just like any other generic wannabe. That's why a lot of the best programmers won't take offers from Google, they know they're going to be treated like cattle throughout the whole process by people who have no clue who they are or what they've done and don't really care to know.

It's important to know that googlers are encouraged internally to do interviews (for extra cookie points? I don't know :P), they're assigned randomly to candidates for most of the process, so they're not a part of the whole process, just a piece of the machinery. No one oversees the interviews to make sure questions are not repeated and that there's a logical thread from one to the other (especially the onsite interviews), and you might not even be asked the questions that are actually relevant for the position they're considering you for, when you're in the latter stages of the process.

The stories I've heard from the hiring trenches are all pretty much the same. It's a great company, but their hiring processes are very weird.
> I know several stories about pupils who got in trouble with their school for less.

Which only goes to show that they shouldn't be in a position that involves judgement, let alone teaching it.

Whenever someone says "zero tolerance", they're saying that they don't trust the person who would otherwise make the decision. When public school folk say that they like the zero tolerance procedures that they enforce, they're saying that they can't be trusted to make a decision.

They're correct, they shouldn't be trusted, which means that they shouldn't be in that position.
Operation Yashima: TEPCO Real Time Power Consumption, with NERV interface
On this topic, would you switch telecom providers for privacy?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2385463
Sure, maybe they are mean for not giving you attribution. You are right and they are wrong. But it looks like you've got your pound of flesh now. Why not just move on?
I'd agree with you, but that's not universally true of graduate school.

In fact, I'm going to school to learn a trade -- counseling psychology. It's a prerequisite to being licensed.

The question now is how do I earn while in progress toward that goal.