skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Still waiting on that invite I signed up for what seems like a year ago.

Can't leave Fifth Third soon enough.
Profitable Sales Part 2: Market Sizing
Ugly Babies and Customer Development
That sounds really cool. I don't have any projects in the pipeline that could benefit from it, but I'm looking forward to hearing the price of it.
A lot of tools for (almost) the same job, it seems.

I also like Zed Shaw's TNetstrings alternative: http://tnetstrings.org/

I like how it, indeed, is trivial to parse.
TI calculators were toys for children. Real Engineers use HP!

Lots of good memories with my HP-48G, until it got stolen just before I graduated.
Microsoft Superphone Idea Borrows PC Processing Power
Well, that's science for you. No shame if they don't end up finding the Higgs boson. You just regroup, devise alternate theories and move on. Surely with all of the data there's something we can learn about this.

There as something interesting in the article about Congress cancelling the Superconducting Super Collider. There is something to be said about how society values finding particles that could change humanity against more mundane needs like economic stimulation and ensuring it's people are fed.
PumpTire: Self Inflating Bicycle Tire
I almost never downvote, and didn't in this case, but I don't think this is sending the right message. Android is not a copy and adds more than enough of its own twists and innovations to justify its existence. If anything losing on trivial patents like this this is going to send the message to Asian companies that the Western markets are stacked against them no matter what they do.
BlackBerrys to Get Android Apps
CPUsage is AirBnB for CPU
Acer reports first-ever quarterly loss
People should be paid according to the value they provide, not their need. (Correcting for basic necessities.)
How does this differ from Codepad, which has been around a while? http://codepad.org/

Edit: The ability to use the tab key is pretty awesome.
Yeah, it is a dick move. At the same time if it moves the whole industry forward then it's good for us as well. Mixed feelings.

Do you remember how we unlocked phones before the iPhone? On Nokia phones it was Menu, * which was great but my mom never remembered to use it and was always pocket-calling me. I promise you that problem has not occurred since she got an iPhone. The first time I saw slide to unlock I was amazed, yes over such a small thing. And it's a great example of why I like Apple's products. They take the time to find good solutions to common, everyday problems.

Now everyone uses slide to unlock. I like competition as much as the next guy but it's hard to see how most of Apple's competition is not riding on their coattails with Android. We all know what Android was going to be prior to the iPhone's release, a BlackBerry wannabe.

Microsoft is notably not just copying Apple. HP/Palm also. Mostly just the Android OEMs who seem to wish Android were iOS.
The whole of the UK bailed RBS out (not to mention HBOS).
Lifecycle of a Startup
Who is Suing Whom In the Mobile Patent Wars?
I agree with most of what you are saying. However, SV still generates a smaller fraction of millionaires than most people in the tech world might think. Around 200,000 Americans made over a million dollars last year and most of them took fewer risks than the classic raman profitable startup does. A tiny fraction of startups generate billionaires but when you start looking at expected payout and risk it's harder to justify as anything other than the best option based on your current skills.
Does it make sense to force customers to contact you using only email?
Well, what people value more depends on each individual. Some people have more time than money, so DoubleRecall is perfect for them, while others have money and no time.

What DoubleRecall does, is give a chance to everyone to view the article. If you take a look at a DoubleRecall client Finance, where people can still choose to pay monthly fees to get the content without DoubleRecall. Other people, like myself, can now still view the premium content without having to pay anything. I may still later decide to but a subscription and have uninterrupted access, but I probably wont, when someone else might.
In all fairness, someone has to be an early adopter, otherwise issues like this would go unnoticed.

I've no idea how complex a problem it is to fix, but it is worrying that it seems to be taking a while for Apple to fix it.
I was surprised to read that the ebook is only marketed in your blog. It seems like a great product for an affiliate program like clickbank.
how would finding this "change humanity"? i know that it's been sold as "the god particle" etc etc, but what changes do you expect if it is found?
When I read any well written Lisp code I feel my awareness of the subject gets cleaner, sharper and lighter. I never experienced a similar thing with other languages. I am not belittling them, or criticising. It is just a deep personal feeling, that has been lasting since university times, back in the 90s.

I liked the code that I have seen at newlisp.org, newlisper.wordpress.com (for example) and I am eager to see what I can do with it.

After reading so many pages (including this one), on so many sites, I have decided that I will learn newlisp too.
It is understood that the judge involved in the German case made his ruling based on a physical examination of the two tablets, rather than relying Apple's paper submission alone. -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14542200
I don't understand why, other than being among other hackers. I recently visited there and was really disgusted with the place.
> "Sure, but it works well enough for many organizations."

Which is to say: organizations derive such fantastic value from software, that even slow, buggy, late and over-budget projects, nor a parade of such projects, is enough to cause them to reconsider their approach.

Which is the answer to the original question.

Q: If software delivers so much value, why are programmers typically paid so little and treated so poorly?

A: Because even bad software delivers value far faster than most organizations can incorporate it and there's no shortage of bad programmers.
I don't know how to read an S1, which is why I go to places like CNBC and the sort in the first place. Granted, I'm not a financial services kind of guy, but it's useful to have that info generated in a digestible format. I don't think the podcast analog works quite right... it's more like taking a blog post from tech crunch, and automagically repurposing it for usa today by adding relevant context programmatically. There's definitely value in that, but I don't think it's "Bloomberg" money.
Did Samsung add voice control and speech-to-text functions, or is that part of the Android OS that Google provides Samsung for free?

While I don't have any need for HDMI output on my phone, I applaud Samsung's efforts to add differentiating features. That said, adding an HDMI port falls short of the type of innovation to which I referred in my original comment.

Look at the following photo and tell me that Samsung didn't completely rip off the iPhone's look and feel, right down to the icon layout:

http://www.gadgetfolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Samsu...

Samsung had an opportunity to innovate in a way that would make the Galaxy S2 look and feel nothing like an iPhone and instead look and feel like a new, innovative product. They clearly didn't do that.

Comments like "My G2 has a back button unlike the iPhone" or "But the icons have square corners instead of rounded corners!!", in my opinion, completely miss the point. I'm not claiming that Samsung copies Apple's products down to the last molecule/pixel, nor do I believe that Samsung is incapable of adding ports/buttons that Apple chooses to omit.

The point is that Samsung is clearly trying their hardest to make their products look very similar to Apple's products. I personally believe Samsung should try to imbue their products with their own brand design/identity.
Don't specify the class as public. Then you can name it whatever you want.
BankSimple == Duke Nukem Forever
Yes, I know. But wouldn't the British chap's prior art make those lawsuits invalid retrospectively?

I don't know enough about even my own countries' legal systems, and certainly not about America's. So my question is: Supposed you got sued back then, had to pay, and now try to get the money back, because the patents the suit was based on were invalidated by prior art. Would that work? (Sorry, not a crypto-question at all, more like a legal one.)
Following that logic, most doctors and lawyers are also interchangeable for the most part. The majority of work in those fields is applying what you've been taught and trying not to screw it up.

And of course there are exceptions, but from what I've seen it seems like there are more opportunities for programmers to bring personal creativity to their work than doctors and lawyers, just because the field is less established and there are more open questions.
It pays off to go through the material he mentions in his talk and look into them. I've listed some of them in the bullet points of the article. I'm currently reading inside the tornado, great recommendation.
I really love Portland, and I'm sure it's a great new home for BankSimple, but I am a little shocked that a company would move to a city where literally everyone in the company would have to be relocated. I've seen companies move to SF or NY before because of VC raised, but this is almost the opposite!
TI, CSR, Broadcom, etc have tiny chips which provide multiple rf technologies (wifi, gps, bluetooth, fm radio) in one. I don't know prices, but if the total for a prototype was pushed up to $75 it would still be much cheaper than other alternatives and still within range to replace my phone.
Studying mathematics also helps. Gives you a framework for studying, and contacts to people who are interested in the same field.
The blog is a straightforward, honest description of the work environment experienced by the robot operators cleaning up the damaged caused by the tsunami to Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. It includes both technical content and interesting information about organizational politics. The blog was created from April to July of 2011, but was recently taken down for unknown reasons. The IEEE article includes an overview of its content, human-translated and edited versions of nearly 50 blog posts, and a few videos, which were also taken down from YouTube.

This is the source for the BoingBoing article posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2921100
Standardized tests also help maintain a niche for Standardized calculators.
What disgusted you?
Makerbot raises $10 million from Jeff Bezos and others
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Insurance really drives this, too: HMOs, especially, are constantly pushing for GPs to receive less and less for a given procedure. Combined with the role insurance companies play in (effectively) deciding what a patient does or doesn't "need,* insurance post-1990 has been trying very hard to convince doctors to do a worse job.

My father, for example, had a practice for over 20 years in a small, working and lower-middle class town. He was notorious for taking patients in late and for long waiting times. And everyone wanted to see him. He was also notorious, as it were, for consistently finding and correctly diagnosing issues that other doctors failed to find. He talked to patients about the health in detail, with physicals often taking an hour or more. He would "forget" to charge folks who he knew were struggling to make ends meet.

For over ten years, this worked fine. My family was, frankly, rich, with yearly salary approaching $200,000 dollars at times. Starting in the 1990s, my father ran into HMOs, head-on, if you will. Over the next ten years, his monthly salary consistently decreases until his overhead exceeded his revenue, and was forced out of private practice.

Now, my Dad might not have been the model of an efficient capitalist, but he was a damn fine doctor. I, at least, think it's a damn shame that we live in a world where that kind of care is systematically eradicated.

So, yes, I think it is that GPs deal with "less expensive" issues, but that's also because they deal with every issue. The goal of a medical system should be to avoid entirely expensive issues. The fact that specialists are employed frequently enough (i.e., demand is high enough) that their labor is worth so much is a systematic failing of the medical system.
I think the difference is that there is a successful one size fits all platform that it's competing with, which wasn't the case for PC's through the 90's. I don't think iPhone is better than Android -- they are just two ways of doing the mobile thing. Android and iPhone are still 10000x better than BB and Nokia.

I'm an iPhone guy -- I prefer it over Android for many of the reasons in the article. The bottom line is I don't need to think to get apps and functionality out of my iPhone. When people ask me what they should get, I usually reply with "I like iPhone because of X, Y and Z, but if you choose Android you're still going to have an awesome phone."
Show HN: Messagify - a private Disqus for web apps. Feedback?
Hey HN, I'm a longtime reader and this is my first Show HN (exciting!) It's a collaboration between me and two friends, and we're building this upon another app we made called EmailYak, an API to receive email. We're trying something new and releasing the documentation to an app while we're still building it.

We'd love feedback. Do you belong to any of these categories?

1) You've built an app with two distinct groups of users (say, people with cars and those looking for a ride) and they were able to communicate with each other. Did you expose personal email addresses? Did you send notification emails that people could reply to directly in their inbox? Or were they only able to read and reply to messages on your site?

2) You built an app where you wished users could message each other but didn't add that feature. What stopped you? Did you try to parse incoming email? What tools or APIs did you try out?

If you note which group(s) above you belong to in your comment that'd be great :)

Thanks so much for the help!
Ouch. That's good to know.

Through sheer luck till now I've mostly done network transfers using smb + rsync on my notebook.
IMHO, Software engineers and sales people have completely orthogonal skill sets. As a group we are poor negotiators, be it salaries or pushing "the right technology" to project owners.
What I would really like to see is more information on who the aggressors are in all the cases. While I can find who is suing whom, I can't find who started suits in the cases of counter-suits having been filed.

There is no doubt Apple is in the middle of things and they are being extremely aggressive, and this particular suit seems over the top. However, I can't judge all of Apple's lawsuits with the current information I have. They are too prominent in the press and too little real information is being presented there.

Put another way, if we assume all the patents were valid (which is the lawyerly assumption) and companies really are infringing, is Apple wrong? If we were talking about people stealing the core of Mr. Fusion and putting out Mrs. Fusors, would Mr. Fusion be in the wrong to sue?

I would love nothing more than for all software patents to get dumped, but until that day comes, they are part of the rules of business. Apple could choose not to fight, but I don't think that would be keeping with fiduciary responsibility.

(Re-reading this, I realized it kind of turned into a stream of consciousness thing. Hopefully there is something to follow here).
"win" being the operative word here.

cost-conscious consumers are flocking to fast-food eateries

The economy isn't doing well at all, and people are flocking to the cheapest alternatives. That's why Walmart, Dollar Stores, and McDonalds will always do well in desperate times.

It would be nicer to see people purchasing raw ingredients and cooking food at home. I can't imagine the amount of bad health effects that are going to hit the nation in 10 years if this behaviour continues.
RBS is a publicly listed company, like any other listed company you can just have a look at their annual accounts to see how much money they spent on staffing.
I've been running a customer development workshop in Toronto for the past four months where I run early stage startups through customer and problem discovery.

I've also worked with older startups who found out about customer development a bit late. These people tend to skip over a lot of problem validation.

That's why I wrote this article.
Well, I heard that my milkman's aunt heard from a friend that Alex Payne said he would quit unless everybody moved over to become his neighbour!
Ask HN: Review my startup idea
My startup idea is a questions and answers website for user interface design.

I'm aware there is a stack exchange for programming and ux, but there isn't one specifically for user interface design.

How many of you can see yourself actually participating in a Q&A site about UI design? Would you ask and answer questions?
The HP graphing calculators are still alive and kicking.
the HP 50g is honestly a far more awesome tool than the TIs (and for those few who care, allows RPN entry too). (it also has a pretty outstanding distribution of reviews on amazon)

Yes portable ipod touches and the like are moving to partially supplant these tools, but there are a lot of use cases where a calculator with dedicated physical button and a far better battery life than any apple gadget, while still fitting in your pocket and being a general purpose CAS, is quite a nice baseline.
Hey HN, I'm a longtime reader and this is my first Show HN (exciting!) It's a collaboration between me and two friends, and we're building this upon another app we made called EmailYak, an API to receive email. We're trying something new and releasing the documentation to an app while we're still building it.

We'd love feedback. Do you belong to any of these categories?

1) You've built an app with two distinct groups of users (say, people with cars and those looking for a ride) and they were able to communicate with each other. Did you expose personal email addresses? Did you send notification emails that people could reply to directly in their inbox? Or were they only able to read and reply to messages on your site?

2) You built an app where you wished users could message each other but didn't add that feature. What stopped you? Did you try to parse incoming email? What tools or APIs did you try out?

If you note which group(s) above you belong to in your comment that'd be great :)

Thanks so much for the help!
It's really hard to get rich in the world by following an easy path. All things considered (prerequisite education, initial debt, work hours, desirability of everyday work), the average cog-like computer programmer is somewhere close to the top.

If you want to make money, stop whining and go make it. Negotiate a better salary with your company. Find someone with a problem and solve it. Realize an inefficiency in the world and fix it. The people who make money and love life don't do it by lobbying.

Here's a secret: you don't have to have any education to make good money. My stepmother started breeding German Shepherds when I was a child. She now sells them for $2000+ each, for family pets (http://minternsgermanshepherds.com if you're interested). She didn't even finish high school. She now pays a couple teenagers to help with the laborious task of caring for dozens of dogs.

My brother turned down a pharmacy scholarship to join the Marines. By the time he finished his five year tour-of-duty, he had established himself in the field of performance diesel trucks. He's helping people make 7,200-pound trucks do 10-second quarter miles (think Fast and the Furious). He runs his own garage (http://dieseladdiction.com if you're interested). He gets there at 6 AM and doesn't leave until 5 PM or later. He's booking people a month out because his schedule is so full, and he just keeps raising his rates. He now has two guys working for him and will be looking to hire another soon.

By and large, the people who make lots of money do it by working really hard. They develop their expertise to a point where there are perhaps one or two competitors even close to their level. The product they provide is something that people want and are willing to pay money for. They grow their business beyond themselves and enable others to make a living, too.

I don't want to work that hard. I'm happy to be able to use my expertise to improve my stepmom's or my brother's business operations. I can build them websites, automate some of their clerical tasks, and otherwise support what they do. But I don't lose sight of the fact that they are the ones creating the value in the first place. They put in the hard work to make the lives of thousands of people better in some small way, and I just grease the gears.

People want great pets. People want fast trucks. People don't want computer programs, they want better lives. When programmers actually align themselves with something people want, they do just fine.

If we want to be able to clock in at 10 or 11 and leave by 6 or 7, to enjoy what we do, to avoid taking full ownership of the product, to be generally stress-free, to not take some fucking initiative, then no, sorry to tell you, we're not going to do better than a well-above-average salary. You don't get rich by being lazy.
When are UNIX time or ISO-8601 insufficient?
Affordable Software Development – Myth Or Reality
Software program development is unquestionably the most high-priced company practice existing inside the industry these days. But, a brand new term known as cost-effective software program development is surfacing on the scene to cut down the overall cost of developing a software product.
BankSimple isn't a bank!

What I don't understand is the fact that all of BankSimple's customers (banks) are in...New York...
Google will pay $500 million for illegal pharmacy ads
>It's not very fashionable (especially in NY) to describe oneself as 'religious'

Or perhaps the people aren't very religious. I think the ambiguity your point raises is valid but that your thinking appears to be invalid. People aren't religious because they don't take part in religious activity (a religion or similar) and not because of their beliefs.

Researchers that don't define key words for participants is a little shocking for me.
Rock on, thanks :)
Rant - Skype Home Page : Give something to Microsoft and they will mess it up
Not sure why??? But everytime I start Skype, it pops-up a Skype Home window telling me that my contacts have not been active.
" It already has a small, five-person development office in Portland's Pearl District, led by Payne, who moved here last year. "
- http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2011/08/p...
Ask HN: Can we improve our SEO at all?
We've released a redesign of our website at http://www.scirra.com, I've done a fair bit of reading on SEO so think I have applied it well, although I am pretty new to it and would like some critique.

We get some visitors but we have always struggled a little with ideas to bring in more visitors, and have struggled to get much attention in the industry in general. Is SEO a valid strategy to attract more visitors or should we be spending our efforts elsewhere?

All comments are appreciated, thanks for your time!