skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
most body shops don't add value

Yet companies still insist on using them. I don't understand why. At one company, I was a contractor. I was leaving for another job, and they needed someone with my skillset. Well, I had a guy who was suitable working for me at the time, and I offered to rent out my employee at a below market rate. They refused. Well, I moved to my new gig and my side business slowed down, so when the recruiter who got me this contract gig called me asking for recommendations, I referred the guy who was working for me (I wasn't exactly paying him a fair wage, and even at the poor wages I was giving him I didn't have many hours of work for him) Anyhow, the company hired my guy through the headhunter (and liked him for more than a year) - but they paid twice as much to go through the body shop they liked rather than going through my corporation. It wasn't like the body shop was big... it was some guy running the operation out of his front room, just like my corp.
Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, Location Platform
We're using YUI pretty extensively at my startup HubSpot.

Beyond the functionality, one thing we really like is that Yahoo! is continuing to invest in the product, posting regular updates, and building a community around it.
Python Never bites
body shops offer a degree of protection from contractors who later decide to sue for employee status, but I don't think that makes them worth it. I mean, your liability there is usually less than 50% of what you paid for the guy (if the government thinks you were paying an employee as a contractor, you have to pay the employer portion of SSI and unemployment insurance and other benifits, for the entire time the guy worked for you.) It's bad, but that's about what most body shops charge, and it's fairly rare for a contractor to come back and sue for employee status- but even if you had to pay those fees for every employee, I think you are still coming out ahead doing it yourself over paying the body shop.

I've not met one headhunter who was capable of distinguishing between someone who is technically good and someone who is not. Granted, it's a hard problem- but it also requires a whole lot of domain specific knowledge. Knowledge that headhunters usually don't have.
i hope you are not really equaling marriage and a job. The average person stays about 2 years in a job, and they go thru about 10.5 jobs before age of 40.

Most people get married once or twice in their lifes, and expect their marriage to last forever. Nobody expects that from a job.

You might want to equal getting a job with dating and sleeping with a new girl, but not getting married ;)
That's a real breakthrough. Now we are real close to see someone building an artificial human.

But I got this thought(may sound silly). Now since artificial humans should be able to think a lot. That would imply a lot of processing, which means the electronic components would generate a lot of heat. This artificial skin is said to be able to handle heat. So to get rid of excess of heat(more than the amnt the skin can handle), there needs to be a method to handle the excess. The two ways i can imagine... By having a fan or heatsink like in a computer or by storing the heat and using it to power further processes. For the second method it would be better to accommodate the storage area in the skin itself. That would reduce the size of the artificial human(and make it look more like a human, since having a bump else where in the body would look odd).

[ disclaimer: just my thoughts over tea ]
Check out the search.wikia.org project. They make their crawler (and crawl data) available. Maybe you can get away with using theirs. That would really be cheap!
You have one extremely nice webapp. The grading function is really impressive - nice work.
Yes, I read it first. It wasn't an awesome article: mostly just a depressing story about a few men who murdered someone and wanted to get away with it. Happens everyday. Its not surreal. Its definitely not hacker news.
Yeah, we wouldn't want a sense of humor creeping into this site. Might ruin it.

Note that 3 of your last 5 comments are you being the HN police. Maybe consider relaxing and enjoying life a little more, rather than attempting to impose your vision of what the site should be upon everyone else.
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Border-image in Firefox
The issues with virtual currencies are not technical, rather it is a social issue of trust. You trust that a $100 note will be accepted and exchanged for goods or services according to the note's face value in the general economy. This is backed up by laws and businesses must accept this as payment, hence "legal tender". So, our economies can function by exchanging these notes instead of each of us carrying around three pigs, a sack of wheat and some chickens to pay for goods and services.

I would never take my universally accepted "legal tender" and convert it into a less liquid form of currency that is not universally accepted in the economy, that is backed only by a company and not by law.

Even if it could get universal acceptance and was backed/supported by law, it would then be the same as our current system of currency, so why bother?

I have had hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer points disappear due to an airline collapse. This would be my biggest fear of adopting any virtual currency.
Yeah. Sorry about that. I generally revise my comments if they're too confrontational, negative, or inane. That one was set up perfectly, though. I fully expected to come back to my computer to find my first net-negative comment.

FWIW, this was my second highest comment and second most replied-to comment since I joined. In both dimensions this comment lost to my first comment which 1) was a reply to PG, 2) invoked the "hi i just registered here" sympathy upmod and 3) invoked "boo reddit/digg" sentiment in this parenthetical comment:

(I'm a recent reddit lurker, and as reddit continues to become digg my clicks seem to be heading elsewhere)

So, I agree with you fundamentally, but it looks like that's not how things are going to play out, if my first lets-be-a-jackass comment scored so well.

Perhaps there's some middle ground?

Everyone has their limit, but I'm not offended by a little risque humour (obviously), and it doesn't seem inappropriate for the site so long as it's not explicit or vulgar. My primary beef with reddit is that as an "all things to all people" site the front page is filled O LOOK A LOL CAT ITS A CAT WITH FUNNY WORDS [pic], and the comment threads are filled with semi-predictable reply chain puns.

I'd love to read consensus (esp PG comments) for style guidelines for this site. I'm a geek and a trendy comp-sci field dabbler, but I'm not building a startup, despite my desire to be an entrepreneur, and I'm definitely not in Y Combinator, so I have a pretty good idea where my opinion lays in the grand scheme of things here.

All articles being about tech/hacker interest seems 100%+ sensible. If the style guidelines are "No empty humor comments, period. Startups are Serious Business." Then perhaps I haven't found the right community fit for myself (hey look a startup idea!).
Where is Bob: Bob’s Other Job
Tough to find a career in it?
It doesn't. But since drag'n'drop doesn't work with Vista and UAC the Visual Studio experience is really a lot worse.
Ruby on Erlang
Eh, don't sweat it, he just likes to play neighborhood watchman here apparently. Some people aren't content to just vote, they have to impose their will on others.

There's nothing wrong with mixing in a little humor. It's been awhile since I read PG's guidelines, but I don't remember a ban on it. I don't think your joke broke the bounds of civility. It's a little blue for sure, but not NSFW.

A joke here and there (even an off-color one) is FAR from turning this site into Reddit or Digg. I started surfing those for the first time a week or two ago just to see why everyone here complains about them, and wow is this site worlds apart (in a good way). I was actually shocked at how Reddit links are often so editorialized that I can't even guess what will be there when I click through.
Libraries like mechanize and hpricot are shrinking the curve for scraping tasks. That's not to say it is easy, but it should not take a bunch of people working on it. One good developer with proper experience would be ample in my opinion.
Plz Send Me The Code
The field is too competitive, and the perks are so great that they keep the wages down. At the end of the day it's all just going to be outsourced to India.
Is google opensocial so open afterall?
link is dead/site is down. just says "not site admin" or some such.
I don't get it, is there some sort of news about YUI, or are you just professing your love for it?
How did he put forth a good argument? His argument was that it's wrong for YC to hire people and work them for extraordinary amounts of hours. YC doesn't hire anyone, and doesn't (can't) require anyone to work any certain amount.

He's arguing against something that doesn't exist. I don't know about other articles, but this one was attacked as nonsensical babble because it was.
If infant mortality remained constant, you'd still have periods with seniors being overrepresented 65 years after a boom.
why not use water for cooling ? if the skin is porus (not clear from the article) it can possibly be made to appear as sweat, and then it gets replenished in the usual fashion !

please take all of this with a huge mountain of salt :o)
This is good background but not entirely accurate. Make sure to talk to a lawyer.
No, but then I don't think that that was Steve's point. If you work really hard, and really listen to your customers, you'll probably be able to build a reasonable product.

But if you truly want to build a great product, one that does the things that your clients didn't even know they needed until you wrote it, well, there's only one way to find out about those sorts of requirements - do the job yourself. Your software will never fulfill these unrecognised needs, and will hence never be truly great.

It's back to the whole Mac circa 1982 thing again. No-one would tell you that they needed a graphical interface to their computer if you had asked in 1982.
YUI is bloated.
Another Sound Sculpture by Robert Hodgin for Advanced Beauty
Blogging Is Not A Crime
I'm gonna quote Bruce Lee and apply it to everything here.

"Take what's essential, discard the unnecessary, and make it your own."

That's the point I got from Steve's post.

And that's how I dealt with his rambling.

Meta-great post.
Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...

The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Werkzeug, a Python WSGI Toolkit
Werkzeug started as a simple collection of various utilities for WSGI applications and has become one of the most advanced WSGI utility modules. It includes a powerful debugger, full featured request and response objects, HTTP utilities to handle entity tags, cache control headers, HTTP dates, cookie handling, file uploads, a powerful URL routing system and a bunch of community contributed addon modules.
Governments probably aren't going to get their act together for a while, and when they do they are at least reasonably accountable to the populous.

Perhaps if the geoengineering is part of a miltiary, farming or energy offering, but otherwise I doubt they will get long-term subsidy...

EDIT: add "in my opinion" to all of the above :)
Interview With Dave From Socialbrowse
Programming in D for C Programmers
I have a friend who owns a home in Marlboro, the town in the article. He's had multiple issues with neighbors bringing up zoning laws. Apparently the bushes between homes on his block can only be 48 inches high (or something like that.) No motorcycles can be left overnight in the driveway. Etc.

In a town where people call the cops on their neighbors for not pruning their hedges, I can totally see the SWAT team raiding a guy's house for doing chemistry experiments in the basement.
backup your comment? In what sense is it bloated?
Keyczar - Toolkit for safe and simple cryptography
Does Good Tech Need PR?
Well, not quite. But who you get married to will determine a huge amount of how happy you are, possibly for the rest of your life if you're so lucky. =)

Similarly, for a startup (or engineering team), each hiring decision is so important that in aggregate it will pretty much determine how happy/productive you are... and possibly in the case of a startup, for the rest of your life as well.

The time scales may be different, but the impact is similar.
Thanks for the tip! I just switched our codec to x264 and we saw a quality improvement. I'm also playing around with higher bitrates, we definitely want the video on Posterous to look good.
Genetically modified flies?
Blue Screen of Death during opening Olympics
What is IMO?
Echoing my comment I left on RWW: so far, we haven't yet used any PR and have done all our marketing/outreach ourselves. Mainly due to costs more than anything else (although we do enjoy talking directly to bloggers/journalists).

One thing is clear though, as NewsCred grows up, we'll most certainly be tapping one of your recommended PR folks. There's a time and situation thats ripe for PR at every startup - I just think early stage ventures without funding should wait for that time and concentrate ruthlessly on the product until then.
Currently, coding directly from phones is not a big use of the language - it's just too painful on all but a few.
I'm still waiting to post blog posts over the phone. I would like voice to text so that i can make posts from anywhere.
I thought it was interesting, but completely unrelated to hacker news, as the really strained "6 degrees of hacker news" comments below demonstrate.
Congratulations... you've learned how to bias your samples! Out of my last 20 comments, 4 are me being "HN police". 20% vs your 60%.

And you're right, I don't come here for humor or jokes or any other bullshit. I come here because the name is "hacker news" and thus far, it has done a pretty good job of living up to both words in that name. The reason I come here is 80% for the comments, 20% for the actual links. I learn more from the comments than I do from most of the articles and I'd like to keep it that way. I go elsewhere for humor, and I don't want to spend my time sorting the two out here. Is that asking for too much?

I see now in the guidelines that my original comment is frowned upon. I only have a 56 karma currently so I apparently don't meet the threshold for downvoting/flagging (I'm more of a gatherer/reader than a karmawhore) so this is all I've got available as a tool to shape things. So, I retract my request and I'll go back to lurking and if/when the signal:noise ratio goes to shit I'll go looking for something else (tho, HN does seem to be the last resort for good S:N so my hopes aren't too high).
It feels like the SVN of the CVS that is Java/C#.
Developing a better CMS
Full unix compatibility without easy, comprehensive & working BINARY package management (like debian, or archlinux) is still a big pain in the ass. Setting up something like the mysqldb library, mod_python, apache, and django can be a 1 hour production vs. the 5 minute production that it is on linux.
Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda - A Sad California Health Insurance Story
Sometimes my clients like to elaborate about their own experiences with medical bills. This one I want to share. I was speaking with a man who said to me that he “Will never put his family threw what he went through as a child”. I expected the usual grew up poor and lived in the projects story, but this one was unique.
Study: The Pill Causes Women to Like Different Men
International Maths Olympiads
This capitalization of "Pill" is intriguing.
Poll: Would you install Java on a Linux PC for Noobs?
Preparing another Linux PC for a Noob. Flash Plugin is a must, unfortunately, but Java seems almost irrelevant? I see a 1 in 1000 chance for a Noob to hit a Java web site - would you bother to even set it up?
Hey, it's great that you are enjoying it, but is your personal happiness really "Hacker News"? If you'd found something interesting to say about it, that would be different.

I'm kind of curious why people upvote this story. Is it just because they agree with the premise? Like the "vote this up if you love chocolate ice cream" genre on Reddit?
There is original art everywhere. I liked the boat made from junk.

Sounds vaguely symbolic.
Information that isn't actually true. I have different trainers for road running and trail running and I didn't buy what is fashionable at Niketown but I went to a real running store, got my gait analyzed, and paid attention to the advice I was given. My knees are fine and I fully expect them to remain so.
Makes me think about the recent articles on decision making, which said that people who pondered less about their decisions in general were a lot happier with them. I wonder if the same thing applies for companies (the less they fuss about hiring, the happier they are with their hires)?

Certainly I can not see somebody stellar enduring a 10 hour interview to get a job. No offense to the author of the blog article - he might still be potentially stellar, but not knowing it yet...

Considering the dating analogy: suppose you were on a date with Scarlett Johansson. If it would took you 10 hours to figure out if you really like her, she could be forgiven for thinking that there is something wrong with you.
Because of the reason for the change.
That wasn't even close to being funny. And why drag YC into it?
Interesting thought. One can argue that the ability to write better OO code is already present in modules, functions, processes, and asynchronous message passing. Threads are needed in Ruby and Java to handle the asynchronous piece. Consider also Erlang's pattern matching style of defining functions, which reminds me a bit of generics in CLOS. Lisp like atoms are also a very useful device in Erlang.

So it strikes me that this proposal is sort of re-inventing in Erlang something that already exists. Moreover when one throws in OTP and it's frameworks for structuring collections of processes, I'm not quite sold on the benefits of doing this beyond making Erlang accessible to the larger audience steeped in the OO way.

Corrado Santoro has done a little bit with this in his agent technology http://www.diit.unict.it/users/csanto/exat
I'm not sure his approach is a winner, but I do agree that Erlang feels much slower to use than Ruby, even after taking the time to rejig your brain for its style of doing things, and I think the idea of layering some more stuff on top to make it convenient isn't a bad idea at all. Perhaps that 'stuff' wouldn't end up actually being Ruby, but it's a good starting point.
The Apple Knowledge Navigator concept
This concept video shows Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video (made in 1987) by Allan Kay and team. This work builds on Kay’s original Dynabook concept developed at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s.
NYC is not the centre of the world's financial system. There are more American banks in London than there are in NYC, and London's FX volume outstrips NYC's by a significant margin.

The factors he applies to NYC don't in my experience appear to affect London (where I work) to the same extent, so that premise at least is flawed.
I am unable to think of an application for this technology other than spamming. Care to provide more details before we shoot ourselves in the face by helping you?
Why replace Erlang's message passing with a baroque RPC call/return thingy based on that same message passing?
Chuck Moore said: "Whatever progress you might perceive, I don't. New languages seem only to propose new syntax for tired semantics."
HN and reddit have swapped roles on this particular story: http://www.reddit.com/comments/6w1v0/pink_box_testing_are_yo...

BTW: I recently wanted to make an inane joke on a HN article, so I found the article on reddit using the below (I have it as a bookmark):

javascript:location.href='http://reddit.com/submit?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)

and made my joke there.
This article was all kinds of awesome. Very rare that I get to see hardcore gangster stories on hacker news. And how can you beat a story about a drug dealer named "Little Rock"? Upvote.
Small talk with a web designer [pic]
What's the difference between a web application and a blog?
You should checkout Spinvox @whatleydude on Twitter is their Chief Blogger, he can tell you everything about it.

Bastian
Online IELTS Training, CRNP Program, Nurses Immigration process, Nursing Jobs
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Nurses2Canada - CRNP Program, Nursing in Canada, Overseas Nurses and Placement Services
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Nurses2Canada - FAQ's
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I like the concept of email to blog, but I have no wish to move my blog to maxklein.posterous.com. Why can't I just use my existing blog and you integrate into that?
Slightly tangential question - why is the .net domain being used here, and not the .com?
Psychological effects of Hyperhidrosis
Though Hyperhidrosis is a physical problem, it has a lot of psychological implications on the person who is suffering from hyperhidrosis. There are no exceptions to this including myself. The physical problems are easy to manage but the psychological impact it had on me was really unmanageable and I tried even meeting psychotherapists so that I can handle myself in a little more effective way
Unfortunately doesn't just happen if you're a graphic|web|ix designer, mention anything about computers and someone with less technical ability will end up asking a question like that. Even if it has zero relevance to what you do.

Usual conversation for me goes "So what do you do?" "I'm a college student, but I do freelance programming work too." "Oh, what's your (maybe they ask which school, then it goes to...) major?" "Computer science..." "Oh awesome! Could you do something like x for me?" "Sure, but my current rate is averaging $200/hour..." ...end of discussion... O:)
Hmm, I signed up for rescuetime a long time ago, and I stopped using it, and they never send me any updates. Don't they love me anymore?

Rescuetime has improved since I last used it, but I never thought to check back. It would have been nice if they emailed me when they update the site.
Who is the real target of tech startup PR? Is it potential users or potential acquirers/investors?
Building your own memory manager for C/C++ projects
It should be no problem to set it up.
A new kind of Search Bar?
The point is that the reason that it's worth anything is one of the greyed out areas. All they really give you is the genre.