skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The book Soccernomics touches on a similar point: how socioeconomic factors influence the pool of candidates for spending inordinate amounts of time training. In the case of the English national football club, the fact that the pool of national team players was historically concentrated among players coming from working class backgrounds shrunk the sampling of genetic talent (since kids from upperclass backgrounds had more opportunities both athletically, academically and economically) which led them out of the pool.

In the US, the position of golf within society constrains the genetic pool from which top players will emerge, which may in turn lead to tour pros being much more likely to come from classes and situations with easier or cheaper access to golf courses than due to innate ability. The range may still skew towards those with physical gifts doing better, but not as much as you would think. Given these constraints he may have a much better shot at achieving success in golf than in other sports that draw from larger genetic pools. (E.g., compare the number of kids playing competitive high school and college football to the number playing competitive golf.)

That said, there are around 22,000 people in the US who could be considered "club pros" or instructors of golf, and around 150 slots on the PGA tour. His 1 in 100 shot would just about correspond to these numbers if you figure that most of those club pros have put in close to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (allowing them to get paid to hang around the golf course) and it is certainly reasonable to believe that he will achieve that level with his current plan.
Has the Finder been rewritten yet?

That brought up a weird thought: I wonder how much SoundJam MP code is still in today's iTunes.
I like that idea. Penalize submissions (hype,linkbait,fud) that go against HN's mission with 20pts and bad comments with 10, 20 or even 50pts for spam.

Or something like that, if you get to negative score, you can't vote anymore until you go back to positive with nice comments and good submissions.
How big is their team?
Apple To Launch Video-Focused Cloud Service, Jefferies Contends
As an ICPC competitor, I don't even find these tales all that cautionary. It's a well known fact that those who do best in standardized tests do not excel the most in the workforce. Programming contests are no different.

And to be fair, I'm not really sure that I even agree that going off to go work at Microsoft or IBM is all that bad. You're still solving problems, they're just different problems. The claim, I guess, is that they aren't algorithmic problems. But the majority of algorithm-based ICPC problems are combinations or heuristics of already defined algorithms. Ad-hoc problems are where true problem solvers flourish.
I wouldn't complain if they didn't mention desoldering at all. But they do mention it and they only give one method for it, as if that's the only way to do it!

I've actually done more desoldering than soldering and I would have gone crazy if I had tried to do it that way. I find braid to be the easiest method by far, but that's just personal preference. I'm sure there are people other than me who can get the suction devices to work well and who don't have to buy braid all the time.
imo.im
Intriguing. You'd need some way of providing feedback to them if they 'picked right'. Combining our ideas, this would mean 'picked like long-time users did'.

Re: xenophobia, it's not precisely that, as I'm not suggesting a date-joined-cutoff, just that it takes a long time for HN to be convinced you should contribute, rather than just learn.
I didn't really find anything on it. Nothing that could cause the company any damage. I don't really remember because one of the first things I did was to throw Ubuntu on it.
Your quote is exactly the part that confused me. I'm not an android developer, so my perhaps naive reading of that segment meant to me that there are two possibilities:

1. regardless of whether you install a custom boot rom, the lowest-level software running on the phone might be impossible to overwrite, so the carriers still have some basic low-level access to your phone to tell android to lock you out.

2. any such feature is part of the code that is itself replaced when you install a custom rom, so would be defeated and you'd be safe (at least as long as the model you buy does not turn out to have become locked down during the manufacturing batch you end up buying).

It sounds like 1 is just not the case, thankfully.
Deciphering 16th century Steganographia
tl;dr
Dropbox use their own encryption keys to encrypt your data rather than encrypting each user's data using a user provided key. This helps them dedup files and save space/money. This implies that a court could ask to analyse your data. Dropbox will update their privacy policy to say this clearly.
You shoulda flipped it when you could.
I bought the mac version from Gametreemac -- when I have periods of dropped connections, my game doesn't give me a warning, it completely dies. This has forced me to save nearly every minute or so. Terrible UX :(

Almost makes me wish I torrented a copy.
It'll be interesting to see if/when Python/Django support emerges for CloudFoundry. In the meantime, the DjangoZoom PaaS provides automated deployments of your Django app in as little as 30 seconds. Sign up for the private beta and mention that you saw this Hacker News thread to get priority in the queue. http://djangozoom.com
I've had good success hiring Pythonistas from http://python.org/jobs
Ask HN: how to kill it in university?
I know there's got to be a ton of high achievers browsing around here. So I was wondering if you guys could share your wisdom in time management and effective work/study practices to really get the most out of university grades. Maybe even some tricks to "hack the system" so to speak.

My background: I'm in a tough engineering program where I take ~6-7 courses/semester, and I have a tough time sitting down to work for long periods of time. Often I find that going to class 9am - 6pm leaves me no energy to any work/study. Next year I will be specializing in electrical and computer engineering, so I really want to get my act together here.

In terms of motivation, I'm pretty good at going all-out for projects, but studying something just for the sake of doing well on an exam (what I should be doing now...) is just so damn hard for some reason.
HN was seeded with a group who had personal connections to YC or were hoping to be selected, largely using their own public identities. With the expansion of the community, the fraction of HN that has a personal stake in appearing intelligent and polite is much smaller than it was.
I think it's important to realize that there is a difference between Dropbox, sugarsync etc and companies such as SpiderOak.

Dropbox and sugarsync both (as examples) are primarily SYNC and SHARE services that also offer backup. While SpiderOak for example is a secure backup service that also feature sync and sharing capabilities.
> Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it....

I may well the guy you're talking about who was berated and then downvoted -- even though two others besides you had posted that they liked my comment. And when I replied to the post that berated me, I was once again downvoted. At least one comment has been deleted but it's still a pretty interesting snapshot of what the mood is on HN these days http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437225
I wouldn't simply because I wouldn't trust the boss not to cheat me.

With this article and the one yesterday I am going to assume that in any salary negotiation the other guy is trying to cheat me, so I would just ignore that.
Thank you. I looked for it and couldn't find it, and actually did mean yours.
You can play with the numbers and goals all you want, but until you actually start something and generate revenue, it will all be meaningless. If your project goes like many of the others here, it will generate close to nothing for a while, and then slowly rise (or shoot up if you're lucky). Moreover, if you want to be successful you'll need to pick something you're knowledgeable about and have the skillset to create. Everybody here can pitch ideas, but do you really think we'd be better at coming up with an idea for a project than you would, especially given this limited amount of information?

There was an article recently that talked about the problem of people asking what programming projects they should work on, and how that was really the wrong question to ask in the first place. I wish I could find it again, as there are some parallels to these kids of questions.
ooops, yes, that's what I meant to link to. Thanks -- and thanks for mentioning it!
> Meanness is moral mediocrity.

Shiiit Paul, hacker news has been screwed up since the beginning. Remember this video?

http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/

That video would show up on the front page about once a year, and is by one of your most popular members and commenters. The video is full of slander and straight up factual errors and even gets almost all of cryptography and network protocols wrong. It's probably one of the worst videos on security out there, yet, what did HN do?

Eat. It. Up. Nobody flagged that video, told tptacek it was bullshit, or bothered saying one damn thing about it other than cheering it on and laughing. You definitely didn't boot him off the site, and in fact gave him a top spot in your system. This is not how you tell people you don't like 'meanness'.

Over the years here and before I started commenting people called me a cocksucker, cock, asshole, douchebag, and every mean ass thing you can imagine. They do it to other people too, and I sure as hell don't see anyone getting flagged or kicked off. If you pick someone unpopular to insult you're totally allowed to be a dick here.

Paul, HN is in decline because you don't actually enforce your own rules. If you don't want people to be "mean" or talk like idiots then don't let mean and idiotic crap on the front page. Half the time, when one of my many clever ruthless jokes shows up on the front page I giggle. My jokes demonstrate what you've been allowing for years but only seem to care about now that it's insulting your own ethos of the "uber hacker scientist ruling the world":

You guys love cruelty and insult, I'm proof.
DreamIt Ventures already closed its NYC applications. I saw that Dreamit takes applications from hackers and business entrepreneurs and team them up. I'm not confident enough in my programming yet but I feel like I'm qualified for the business end, are there other programs like this where they create teams?
Yes it has. They rewrote it for Snow Leopard (but they didn’t change anything about its functionality or looks).
I am actually surprised at how much the removal of karma from comments affected my feelings about hacker news.

I like to imagine myself as pretty laid-back and uncompetitive but once comments were removed, suddenly my motivation for posting and reading just seemed to vanish.

Maybe that's a good thing. Perhaps it will produce fewer comments but ones that people are more "honestly" motivated to make.

We shall see...
Do you know the importance of SEO for business?
Yep, it was rewritten in Cocoa for Snow Leopard:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a...
I can understand the need to be on the cutting edge of the latest software (I started using Win7 with the MSDN beta), but why would you want to install a milestone version that's already 6 months old?
Well, my tastes are not evolving or changing, I am still interested in using primes for the background, or the latest hack with css transformations, or going from 0 to 10k users in a week. They were my interests ten years ago as they are today.

What I don't like is how larry page is already blundering, or facebook being sued, or how the ipad2 is the new paperweight2 and you should wait for ipad4 with cornea display.

I second heavy handed moderation without apology, and score penalties for every fault.
Indeed. Even when people bring it up :-)
Sure. And I chose not to install because of that. But why do they need them?

SoundHound claim location information is "saved with your searches in History to help you remember where you heard the song. This can be disabled under Options." http://www.appbrain.com/app/soundhound/com.melodis.midomiMus...

... which is a nice idea, but why does it need to transmit your coordinates over the network?
Unfortunately it's too easy for people just to hit the OK button at install time without thinking about it/realising what they are agreeing too. Whilst the user has to take some responsibility for this, maybe it would be more obvious if the system prompted the user the first time an application tries to use some permission. Then they would see the context in which, e.g., their location is accessed.
I think this could be a good service. But possibly Flash or something more polished and less spammy. Possibly the tradeoff would be 'Hey, what do you know about us? Pass the test and take 15% off your next order."
Soldering through hole components is really easy (SMDs are another story, altogether). Like everything else in life, the best way to learn it is to practice. Just get a cheap vero board and a bunch of DIP sockets and solder em all. Then, try to desolder them with a desoldering wick. Also, get a PCB vice. With a vice holding the PCB firmly in place, two hands are all you need.
3% is most of the profit margin? Really?
It's a market like any other. From my limited experience I find that the most qualified generally gets the job and rates aren't as important. In some cases I have found jobs in which people from low wage labor countries are charging more than I would have charged for the same thing because they are clearly trying to estimate something that they know nothing about and playing it safe in their quote. In these cases I'm basing off my hourly rate for something I know exactly what needs to be done but I actually jack up my rate based on these other quotes because I don't want to look like the cheap guy. ;)

So, there are good jobs on Elance and Odesk. There are also some real gems. Niche areas are good because there is less competition and the competition you do have may not be strong in that area. Developers posting jobs can typically see past the B.S. and are willing to pay. They know that hourly rates aren't necessarily important and support / flexibility / communication is worth more in project rates. Just because someone charges low, doesn't mean you will save time or money.
I did the program last summer and John was our team's mentor. He was really helpful in brainstorming idea and mentoring. We had a really good experience!
Could be worse. Last year when I tried ZumoDrive (a similar service), I noticed it marks the web-browser login cookies as safe for HTTP, and defaults to open session pages via HTTP. All it takes it checking your ZumoDrive once from an unsecured WiFi and your account may be compromised.

At least Dropbox gets the endpoint-to-server encryption right.
Ask HN: Changing jobs with excellent prior salary
I'm in a pretty good programming job that pays very well. Salary + bonus is around $200k.

However I wish to do something different technically. I'm started applying to the usual companies. My question is whether this kind of salary range is sustainable for a programmer.

I guess I'll know for sure when I get the offers but I thought I'd ask anyway to set my expectations accordingly.
Why that is the best simple explanation of continuations I have come across yet. Totally right, it's like thinking about how you are able to walk, if you do it trips you up. Dont think about the details just the concepts.
Personally, I think the only thing hurting HN is this constant talk about the decline of HN. It's all I see in comments and now on the front page. If anything is hurting this site, it's the constant complaining. Get over it people - if you don't like it, move on or learn to deal with it - in the end you aren't going to find a community as good as this one.
There's an office building right next to LSVP's offices, and they have an entire suite there that the teams use. It's actually a great space, although when we were there the AC was off during nights/weekends.
Well, I've been in the field, professionally, for about 3 years and have yet to see anything above $70k, so from my perspective you're doing just fine. :)
In other words, HN needs a few simple laws and some light moderation. e.g.

- no personal attacks

- no "x is an asshole because" inflammatory comments

- ostensibly duplicate content should be deduped

- no flame bait?

I agree that people making personal attacks should be punished. Perhaps a reset of karma and a limited time ban? Obviously there isn't going to be a silver bullet, but I agree with Zed here about enforcement.
I'm confused – Why wouldn't Apple pay you directly?

You shouldn't have to ask for anything, they should present you with an offer.

Meanwhile, you should do appropriate due diligence and interview with other companies that interest you and see what other offers you get. If Apple is interested in hiring you, no doubt other companies will be too.

Also: keep in mind that relocating will incur at least a few thousand dollars in expenses (which your future employer should cover as part of the comp package) and that living in the bay area is very expensive. 50k is do-able, but won't take you very far.
If you see a crowd outside a department store it is reasonable to assume that there is a sale. If you see a queue outside a bank there is a good chance that nervous depositors are trying to withdraw funds. In both cases the actions of other people send a signal that may be useful for others to follow.

But does the wisdom of crowds apply to investment?

The 'wisdom of the crowds' concept is not applicable here. In the example of the cow auction, the core idea is that a crowd of people all voting anonymously but without communicating with each other was better than any expert at the auction when averaged together.

Communication within the crowd hinders the wisdom of the crowd. If people are allowed to see the votes of other people before they vote, then herd mentality dominates. To work best, each person must make their decision based on their own out-of-band information network, gut feeling, voodoo magic or whatever. If they can see what other people are doing, then they will short circuit their normal decision process and react to that.

This is the problem with a lot of implementations of "crowd intelligence" gathering software and rating systems. This is why many polls don't show you the totals until after you vote, and why exit polling is bad.

(as an aside, this is also why I've been a huge proponent of removing vote tallies on HN comments. I'm excited to see pg is playing around with it and to see if it helps.)

Edited to add:

The article states:

The wisdom of crowds only really applies when forecasts are genuinely independent, as when farmers are guessing the weight of a bull at a country fair. Once you know what others are thinking, their views lead you into error.

It's more than just that. It needs to be a diverse set of people to get a full range of opinions. A group that all pulls information from the same source will estimate incorrectly. For example, if CNBC were to become the sole source of information for the average investor, it wouldn't work.

There are also several cognitive biases that come into play and it's a lot more complex than just keeping people in the dark.
DisplayCabinet: Augmenting Physical Objects with Projected Information
The salary you get will depend much, much less on what is "sustainable for a programmer" and more on how skilled you are at demonstrating value to prospective employers and then aggressively negotiating to capture a fraction of that value.

The first step: stop describing yourself as a programmer. You can buy programmers for cheap in India. Can you buy you for cheap in India? No. So don't sell yourself as if you are a close substitute for other code monkeys except you cost ten times as much.

Instead, you offer a virtually unique and impossible to hire for combination of skills which has previously and will continue to make firms lucky enough to employ you huge stacks of money. Exactly what skills you emphasize are up to you, but "I know technology X and Y" is a lot less important than "Knowing X will let me make you several million dollars; here's why. Knowing Y will... You will find it virtually impossible to find X and Y in the same guy because..."
Peter Florjancic: Slovenian inventor extraordinaire
Since you posted your thread asking the community for suggestions, I've been mulling over an idea that I'd now like to share.

I think jed is right; the navel-gazing is part of the problem and the more meta-discussion occurs the lower overall quality gets. This belief is informed by my experiences on a variety of fora, and is not HN-specific. Tackling the problem then, should occur in a way that doesn't draw attention to the fact that there is one, but fixes it silently in the background. This is partly why I like hidden karma scores; they (in theory) reduce groupthink and handwringing about karma.

My suggestion is this: pick a few dozen people who you think are good contributors, and write a quick script to dump their voting patterns. Take a look at how they're voting, and choose some number whose votes you think best represent what you'd like HN to be. Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly. Neither they nor the rest of HN should know they've been tapped.

I envision the superusers as being vote accelerators. Their votes would not only confer the typical +/- 1 karma, but would tag the comment they voted on. An up-tagged comment would gain, say, 2 karma for every upvote, and a down-tagged one would lose 3 for every downvote. Those values are provisional and arbitrary, and should be changed. Tags could stack or cancel each other out, but that's something else that should be experimented with.

If the superuser scheme seems to be having a positive effect, consider making it viral. That is, if some receives, say, 200 positively tagged comments, they too become superusers. Again, that constant should be chosen carefully. The idea behind making superuserdom viral is that it scales automatically (given a wisely chosen threshold), and offers insurance against decreased contribution from the original set of superusers.

Karma can be a very effective way of cultivating the kind of interactions the community desires, but can also lead to gaming and groupthink. By increasing the value of trusted users' votes, but keeping that mechanism hidden, I believe you should be able to maximize karma's benefits while minimizing its drawbacks.

Anyway, I apologize if this post is off-topic or should be addressed elsewhere. I figured a meta-thread was as good a place as any to introduce it.

I also wanted to say in postscript that although HN may be suffering the growth pangs of any forum, it still offers far better discussion than most sites I've found, so the doomsday-ery is perhaps premature.