skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought we brought democracy to Iraq (or I hope that's what we got out of that), and Egypt is holding their first election in forever in November. The area's getting better overall in terms of democracy it would seem, with or without our protection of them.
And if you can't trust the claims of LulzSec, whom can you trust?
They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things

This is the case with everyone. Multitasking negatively affects overall performance. There are many studies that confirm that. If some developers avoid it, maybe it means they are better at evaluating their own productivity?
Vloggo launches! Feedback?
Hey Guys,

I just launched my startup, Vloggo, last week. Vloggo is your life through video. It allows you to share and interact through 60-second videos called vlogs. A vlog can be posted via the iPhone app, webcam recording, or by traditional uploading. All vlogs are organized into one simple timeline so it's quick and easy to experience what's happening in your friends' daily lives.

I'm looking for any feedback or advice you can give me. I've implemented the video player on the timeline in a really unique way, so it's a creative and fresh way to watch video. Let me know what you think! Many thanks!

URL: http://vloggo.com

iPhone app: bit.ly/vloggoapp

My profile: http://vloggo.com/members/kurt
An RSS feed would be great.

And a way to link to the question.
Creating a new web app: the first steps you should take
Yes I would, because part way through he changes the definition to talk about Hipmunk, then attempts to draw conclusions based on the pun.
I think that Groupon is likely to adjust their vig if they start to see their momentum decline. Instead of 50%, they take 40% or 30% …. at which point they can circle-back and offer their services to all of the business that may have declined their services due to the steep percentage of the offer they demanded. Sure, this means less revenue coming out of each deal, but it seems to give them a quick way adapt.
The Irish were fighting against one of our closest allies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Relationship
So it's a space-filling curve with self-similarity across scales, but which one? Either showing the curve or defining the recurrence relation (or both) would be nice.
Inconsistent tenses. "We will store" but then "we are doing." Last sentence should read, "and we will do it for free." This isn't just to be pedantic. Consistency in grammatical form creates symmetry which improves the impact of your writing.

I would also consider striking "we believe" from the text. As I'm sure you've heard, if you didn't believe it, you wouldn't have written it.
Ask HN: My character sheet makes no sense
tl;dr I'm smart and capable, but have no marketable skills, so am basically unemployable.

I started college right after high school in CS, but, bored out of my mind and depressed, dropped out after a year and enlisted in the Marines soon after that.

During my four-year enlistment, I fought in Iraq twice, saw the West Pacific (Japan, Thailand, Guam), and got pretty good at killing people.

After I got out, I went back to school on the GI Bill and got my B.A. in Comparative Literature, because I wanted to study something that would keep me engaged and interested, and I assumed I would be able to learn any technical skills (programming, which I was still interested in) on my own. Having gotten a bit older and gained a lot more discipline, I did much better in school the second time around, and raised my cumulative GPA from about 1.7 to 3.3, by maintaining almost perfect grades for those three years.

I graduated in 2009, which I understand was historically the worst time to do so. I was unemployed for six months, then finally got a low level adminstrative job in the federal government through veteran's preference. I also got married and bought a house. My job is a little bit soul-killing and doesn't pay very well. But it's tolerable (I've been through a lot worse) and secure.

I'm currently teaching myself to program for Android. It's fun but slow going, since my free time is limited. So slow, that I'm realizing that it probably isn't going to be more than a hobby unless I change something.

So:
Infantry Marine: Level 4|
Comparer of Literatures: Level 4|
Bureaucracy Admin: Level 2|
Rock-climber: Level 6|
Programmer: Level 0

My options look to me like:
1. Stay in the fed. gov. Boring, but safe.
2. Go back to school. I like academia and I'd be interested in studying CS, HCI, or IA, but I'm afraid of student loans and 'higher-education bubble' talk. And I've got a mortgage to pay.
3. Find employment in a field I enjoy. I write essays on my blog about tech and tech products. A friend of mine at a software megacorp is convinced that I'd be a good Project Manager in the sense of Joel Spolsky's User Advocate. But neither of us see a path to there from here.

So my current plan is to put in my 40 hours, program Android by night, and regularly spam job listings, hoping that I'll slip through a filter somehow and be able to convince somebody I'm worth taking a chance on.

Advice?
"AT&T (really, SBC with a new name)"

Hah. And SBC and BellSouth were just AT&T with new names. Le plus ce change.
When I set to write that post I was trying to base it on some real data, not personal experience.
Thanks for those very thoughtful suggestions. I am now going to write our assumptions down, and then set out to test them. I also think you are dead-on about the experience being the primary differentiator. The blog aspect is a completely untested assumption.

As you point out, the terminology is an unnecessary hurdle, -especially considering the space we are in. I am going to look at ways to simplify that as well.

This has given me some very good food for thought. I think that I was putting more thought into UI when UX is just as relevant, if not more so. Thanks a lot. It's much appreciated.

p.s. I see you are on Forrst. I might follow up with you there in some time if you don;t mind.
The title s/b "Stackoverflow developers get better with age. And scarcer."

Stackoverflow is not representative of the overall developer population. As an example of an alternate view compare the relative number of items tagged on SO with C#, Java, and PHP. Then compare that to the number of listings of those tags on Dice.
One thing that a lot of analyses fail to account for are the number of Groupons that go unused. I would love to see some figures on how many Groupons are never redeemed (for whatever reason).

I had some friends visiting SF, and they had bought Groupons from various outfits for the trip. But they ended up not using a few of them, and gave them to me. Chances are I'll end up using them, but I wonder: how many such Groupons expire unused?
Except for the upfront payment, which is obviously a sunk cost, book publishers have no other liability.

Unlike Groupon, which might have to reimburse its customers if a client business goes under.

Furthermore, AFAIK author deals are screened/filtered, a bad book will not get published (not that this is a 100% accurate process, see for example 4 Hour Work Week).

Judging from the article, Groupon does little screening, so their risk is much greater.
HN: just out of curiosity is there any examples of companies that have tanked based on speculation of failure regardless of track records?

Ie: Speculation leads to lower investor confidence leading to pulling out of investments and so on so forth
Heart with no beat offers hope of new lease on life
6 Million Americans Left Facebook Last Month
The older libraries may still be around, but they're not the recommended choice anymore and they don't support everything you can do with the newer libraries. It'll be the same with HTML5 and Windows 8: you'll need to switch to develop apps for the new UI, but old apps will still work.
No need to map it out, as the LEAF provides the current or last navigation destination lat/lon in the request as well! Most LEAF drivers will probably have something programmed in, as the car provides range information and traffic re-routing functions based on destination.
> Does anyone believe that the promotion that Apple offers on average is worth two cents?

I do. I made a couple small and quick apps. They have made several hundred dollars. I attribute that almost entirely to Apple's promotion of them, mostly by having them show up in iTunes search results which Apple promotes. Also having them show up as recent releases.

My promotion consisted of linking them on my websites. If that was all it was -- my website links and nothing else -- I think sales would be near zero.

For better apps, Apple's promotion is even more valuable. Definitely no where near 2 cents.
I think it's real scarcity. I'm 41 and am always one of the oldest in any group of devs (except for that Usenix event I attended :-).

Most people get into their career in their twenties. For computers it's often even younger. But it seems relatively rare for someone to pick up programming in their 30s or older.

If you're 40+ today, your twenties were ending around the time that the "tech boom" was beginning. But there just wasn't as much information and inspiration around for getting into software development. Even through the mid-90s a college degree and programming skills was no sure ticket to cushy employment.
I think that this is showing a correlation between those programmers that enjoy programming and want to share their knowledge with others, and those programmers that stick with it for more than a decade.

I bet that if you could separate out the younger developers who will still be developing in 10-20 years, that their rep on SO is similar to that of older developers. Those developers that'll wash out in the next 5 years are dragging down the participation numbers of their peers.

So it isn't the age that's important, it's the personality type which is correlated to those people that'll stick with development.
- http://global.epson.com/newsroom/2011/news_20110517.html

- Solar

- Books are heavier, already.

- Personal preference, but the UI will improve over time -- it probably won't be flipping a page however.

See you next year! :-)
Teaching, from grade school through college professors.
Please get the security of (your) web admin applications correct the first time!
Anecdote: When I buy music, I either buy it from Amazon MP3 or direct from the artist via Bandcamp.
How long were horses used for transportation? There were no alternatives to paper books at all until personal computers and PDFs. E-book readers aren't perfect yet but they're the first real alternative to books.
For all itunes accounts who have a beta ios install associated with them, they cannot post reviews until a certain expiry date. Developers would not really mind the trade off and it provides a small disincentive for non developers to not install pre release versions.
one has to wonder what would happen if people with a complex knowledge of how these things work (market fluctuations and what not) decided to mess with Bitcoin.

What I mean is, investors can be twitchy, and susceptible to manipulation. It's sane to assume that people who invest in Bitcoin would be the same. Right now Bitcoin is new, so I doubt there's any sort of "Round Trip Trading" style activities going on, but should those types of speculators move in, could Bitcoin survive it? Especially since there's no laws protecting it.
I'm killing it with lisp for web at the moment. A personal fork of weblocks that allows for some fast and slick application development. Widgets all the way down. Launching real soon now.
I am not saying to trust LulzSec, but to address this information? Also the price is roughly 24 hours old. I don't think this article deserves to find its way on the front of Hacker News, by the time it did, the information contained in would be 36 hours old and the numbers cited off by a factor of 4.

Although I must admit, the Financial Times covering bitcoin is news in itself.
but it's not quite the same experience as seeing the size of an african elephant for the first time, or looking a gorllia in the eye.

In fairness, most parents have probably taken their kids to the zoo dozens of times before they even get to school age. I know I will, when I have kids, because... hey, zoos are awesome!
Your layout is nearly illegible in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 11.04. The "sky and clouds" background image + light blue text... why? Am I doing wrong? Did I miss something?
Cable Show Schedule: Convergent Solutions Top of Agenda
> namely, that of book publishers

It's entirely different, actually. The risk to publishers is much lower because the book publisher, not the author, control the means of printing the books. In Groupon's case, Groupon would be like a publisher paying in advance to a printing company. There's nothing wrong with such an arrangement, but those that invest in the publisher should acknowledge the risk that the printer will go out of business before delivering. It's doubly risky if the payment terms ensure that the printer will lose money on each book printed.
The quicker ketchup picker-upper
Why does not it make sense?
Can someone help a poor liberal arts major? I see "costs $1.3 billion to run" and I think "Apple loses $1.3b a year on the iTunes store." But reading the article and the constant Apple talk about breaking even makes me think that what they're trying to get at is "the infrastructure for the store and payments to artists and app creators costs $1.3b a year, but Apple's 30 percent cut of everything produces about $1.3b a year in revenue, so it all works out," which is a very different proposition, yes?
There will always be giants ahead of you. And they will always try to eat your lunch. But with vision, determination and perseverance, the giants can be outfoxed and outwitted. One of my favorite ideas in business is that if you think you have 'no competition' than you don't know your market well enough. There is always competition. Forward competition, backwards competition, and neighboring competition. The key is to be able to think and visualize the best solution, and if that solution is better than anything else that's offered out there, and you can execute on it, then you are safe. Once that vision is lost, then the companies/products become walking dead, just waiting for the next competitor to catch up and pass them.

Even the mighty fall regularly.

http://www.walletpop.com/photos/top-25-biggest-product-flops...

http://consumerist.com/2008/09/the-10-biggest-chapter-11-ban...
Oddly, market conditions seem to have conspired to give bitcoin what is essentially "backing" for the time being: that being goods and services which are available only by bitcoin and not by other routes. Among these include ways to buy products not ordinarily available in a country (such as the recent newegg-via-bitcoin site that showed up) and illegal products (such as Left 4 Dead 2 in Australia, or the more obvious example of psychoactive drugs). So I doubt you'll see it crash all the way, though it will probably remain unstable for the forseeable future.
Largest data breaches of all time
What Amazon Should Do With Its Kindle iPad App
Even if that's true, it should raise flags that one party selling into a market can do this... shows the bid is thin and liquidity generally poor.
So for non-trivial validations, how does it do? I mean, "requires y != 0:" is really simple.

I'm guessing that for more complex things ('name' field of record does not already exist in the database) that you'll have to program them the old-fashioned way anyhow. Which leaves you code a mix of the 2 ways.

And really, wouldn't this be just as good and concise?

throw "Y can't be zero" if y == 0
When you say "regardless of track record," what is being discussed Ad Nauseum is whether Groupon has a track record of success or not. This is different than a company that has a consensus track record of success but is battling some unrelated speculation.

It's almost the other way around: Groupon spends $1.43 to buy $1.00 of revenue, but boosters are speculating that they can pivot their model or harvest more revenue from their merchants and email list to make $1.44 revenue from every $1.43 they spend.
So how old are you? Do you have any coworkers below 25? How well do they do with multitasking? Better than you?

Twitter, text messages and facebook have trained our minds to work differently. Have you been keeping up?
"I don't think the 30% has ever been an issue."

Seriously? The 30% on apps, the 30% on in-app purchases, 30% on subscriptions, etc., each caused an uproar when they were announced.
The point of a requires clause (as I understand it) is to have it be verified at runtime (edit: I mean compile time). You lose that if you do it as an exception. "just as good" is debatable, but it's definitely not equivalent.
Tell HN:

On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.
If you don't like the terms, don't sign up for it. As I said, Groupon isn't magic. Making a bad deal with them will not magically turn into a good deal. You have to use Groupon as a tool, not a genie.
Very easy, but the proof of that will be in the proverbial pudding :)
The Quicker Ketchup Picker-Upper
Startups & Rockbands (video)
I ain't touching this unless it has haptic features that simulate the sensation of page-flipping, full ability in annotations and scribblings on the e-pages (I want to be able to use a ruler with my markings, I want digital pens, I want to be able to use digital crayons for all I care), and it is medically confirmed that reading e-ink produces no more eyestrain than reading paper.

And I want it to be unhackable. And EMP shielded.
PR Tips: 5 ways to earn yourself some media
Yes, I'd forgotten that bit already... But I don't know how you can check that without running it for anything but the most trivial programs.
I find etiquette fascinating, so I've read some books on it. Particularly, in tipping etiquette, prescriptive books seem to agree about one thing:

In the US, if you're going to tip less than 15%, you should not tip at all. You should leave nothing and ask to speak with a manager to explain why you won't. If the failure in service doesn't rise to that level, then 15% is the minimum polite tip.

Of course, it's your wallet so do what you think is best. But this seems like a reasonable practice, so I follow it. I've actually never had to speak to a manager about service at a restaurant, though.
Which major corporation will be hacked next? (yesterday it was the IMF)
PathScale Open-Sources The EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite
It is without doubt a very good effort. More long term projects like this should be undertaken. A good example.
Tacky to reply to my own comment, but I wanted to add a quick point: as a developer you'll notice that my comment is basically about refactoring... How often do you see people kinda move bits of code, web pages, organizations, etc around and then wonder why nothing really changed...
The bitcoin market has always been unstable and anyone who tracks mtgox for more than two days (and often even those who track it for less) knows this. While a part of me wishes I had put more into it at $0.70, it is definitely not any kind of stable investment. If you're into btc to invest, you should be really, really careful to place only a small portion of your money into it; while you may get lucky and hit a 3000% increase, I wouldn't count on things to stay that way for any reasonable time period; as below, just one big btc holder selling off can drop the price of the market hugely, as supposedly happened this weekend. Take into account btc's prospects for government disruption/poisoning/etc and it is definitely a very unsafe place for any significant amount of money.
Well, it's not too tricky to buy foreign computer games in Australia; the authorities don't care that much. And the drug thing? Well, it remains to be seen how long it'll be before the authorities shut that one down.
There's some stuff in iTunes U.
Availability, elasticity and cloud databases
sell some dvds and ps2 games
Of course! I don't log in often on there, so only follow up there if it's not too urgent. @mikegreenberg on twitter is the easiest way to reach me.

Glad it helped! ;)
Let People Create Their Own Tutorials
Webapp, easy and user friendly interface. Create a step-by-step tutorial with images/Gmap/videos.
This is a talk I gave to 1,000 people in Dublin, on Friday 10th June. I draw comparisons between starting up a tech company and starting a rock band.

Interested to hear what the good folk of HN think :)

Best line I heard after the talk was "In a startup you do lines of code, in a band you do lines of coke"... which cracked me up (via @emigal)
Whenever I read stuff from him (especially his tweets), I feel like he's on a whole different level than the programmers I usually see.

Incredible.
I have Google Chrome 10 on OSX and everything is fine. I won't say great, but fine. And the background is snow. Text is grey.
What do you mean by the exclusivity? How do you mean it can destroy your business if caught on the wrong side?
Well for starters its open source instead of proprietary. I think that already deserves some respect on its own.

Then, this is based on doing websites in the web standards spirit of using plain-text files, where multiple components are linked together, and having the semantic content (XML) separated from the presentation (HSS).

I mean, we like the concept of HTML+CSS, but we would like to see many of its flaws and shortcomings corrected.
Blogging at Home? Fight Lethargy With a Solid Morning Routine
Using a median instead of a mean might help w/ this.
Mindblowing Experiment demonstrating Laminar Flow
You do realise that the "instead of trips to the zoo" is just a headline writer's sleight-of-something here, right? There's nothing in the article about zoo trips being cancelled.
This would actually be a nice way to hijack lpeg.
I think the more dangerous result will be that the scheme continues to "work" for another couple of years, a half dozen competitors come along and run the same basic scheme (with tweaks to make the new businesses "unique"; maybe they go for particular niches currently unserved or whatever), those companies also have explosive IPOs, and then the whole thing comes crashing down in a couple more years when the IPO money runs out.

One company with a 280 million dollar bankruptcy (or, more realistically, by the time of the IPO it will be a few billion dollars) isn't going to make a big dent in how the markets work. But, a half dozen such companies in the same boat when the bottom falls out of the market and the fallout for all of the companies that they suckered into taking these deals, could very well lead to something scary enough to get regulators and legislators involved.

It's plausible, if not entirely likely, that Groupon, and their ilk, could very well kill IPOs for the rest of us for yet another decade.
How to Choose the Best Web Hosting for Your Web Directory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Constraints