skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think users wanted that...?

Foursquare tried to make them want it, and retrospectively it looks like people did. The decreasing number of checkins on that and Places would suggest that it didn't work, because presumably people didn't actually want it and they weren't convinced enough to use it.

Edit: in fact, it's kind of a perfect example of 'why now' making it seem like it makes sense, and bandwagoning, and the appearance of 'solving a problem' and 'changing the world', all to little effect because it's a shakey idea to begin with.
Realizing the True Power of Marketing
re: square -- consider the source.

it makes sense that the square coo would be "anti nfc." the notion of "nfc payments" as the way of the future detracts from the vision he's pitching -- that is "square payments" are the way of the future.

whether nfc ends up being integrated into square or not, and whether or not nfc is useful in the payments vertical is irrelevant to him. square likely wants you to think about square and only square when you think about mobile payments going forward...
It surely is easy but it doesn't matter - unlike someone stealing your EC card and PIN.
yeah, I much agree with lurker. I wish I had more data about this, but I suspect the percentage of PhD graduates (let alone people who enter PhD programs) that actually end up in the situation you've described is pretty low.

Also, I just can't agree with a good ROI "regardless of salary". Salary can be lower - quite a bit lower, but there is a limit to the size of the gap. Graeenspun and the RAND study I referenced mentions this - that the financial sacrifice has gotten too great, even for the "winners".
A lot of great comments. No action. When it comes to issues of a vote (like this), im sorry to report - we've lost our say in the matter.

Some would say "that's why we elect people, to do this for us" don't you get it? Politicians aren't out to help you. They have their own agenda. Unless your padding their campaign coiffer, your falling on def ears.
wont be able to make.. but i really want to go.. need to get back into the scene.. ready to partner with some people and make some companies happen... from the brookfield area please keep me updated or if there is a meetup link let me know.. thanks
Carl
Well, looks like they learned from the pros... paypal asked me for my name, address, credit card and bank account verification and on top of that a scanned passport AND a utilities bill - I find this absolutely outrageous.
Just bought it and it's very, very cool. The one thing I'd change (or make an option for) is making the notes continuous rather than discrete -- if I slide my finger over, it would be great to have it cleanly transition between the notes. Great work so far!
"But your Honor, my iPhone told me I was sober enough to drive!"
Can you explain how the existence of a first cause can be contingent?
Foursquare wants to be your city guide.
Being disruptive doesn't matter at all if you cannot remain solvent so looking at those numbers, they have got to be whXXXng themselves out to their investors.
@porfirio: Thanks a lot for trying it out. We're currently pulling in data from various sources like Foursquare, Google Places, etc. -- but we do add unique stops as well. Currently we've filled out unique stops for the PNW (since we're based here), but CA is definitely one we'd like to tackle soon.
They probably can measure the adoption of IPv6 from the usage data Windows desktops volunteer back to MS. That said, I would guess they predicted (at least in March) a scarcity of addresses for their cloud offering before IPv6 becomes widespread.
Why would Microsoft even bother?
What It Takes To Be At The Top
My coworkers are wondering why you're encouraging potential users to shoot your mascot/namesake, but my coworkers are nitpickers. That was fun!

If you do: $('div.ducks').mousedown();
in the developer console it's pretty hilarious.
Accessory Review: The Adonit Jot Stylus
Why use an Amiga in 2011?
While I agree with a lot of the arguments you're saying, I disagree with the end statement. Building a massive company and building a world changing company are not mutually exclusive. It's probably more common but should not be implied.
Could you talk more about the difference with MBAs? The side I've always heard said that MBAs don't have that much of an easy time unless they're top 3 program graduates and even then they still have to work their way up corporate ladders for years.

If you're into politics, I don't think there's much stopping you from climbing the ranks of a corporate giant, MBA or not?
I find this low too but the job title is "Astronaut Candidate". This probably does not guarantee that you'll actually go to space. If you manage to go through all the training and get on a real space mission, the salary will probably be higher.
Yes:

http://infinitybladegame.com/

http://firemint.com/real-racing-2-hd-home/
Are your finances fit?
The best perk, as far as I'm concerned, is that when they do need you to go to another city they apparently give you one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_T-38_Talon

and tell you to make your own way there.

The worst part is that you have to live in Houston.
Simple Genius: Artefact's 999 Water Bottle Tracks Your Eco Karma
Very nice project! And this is the kind of thing I always want to do: stop at weird little fun places on the way. I wish I had it when I did a cross-country trip. Looks like I had missed a few scenic drives and what not!
He has http://onevoiceapp.com/ redirecting to his homepage. I agree that it would probably be a good idea to use the domain instead.
I had top score until someone got a score of 100001158 (mine being 3385. You may need to take extra measures to ensure the scores are valid and from the game.
Online clairvoyant toy to predict... anything
CNBC news I hope you know I run this show ok!
It sounds like you're describing local politics in general. Something similar happened in a city in which I used to live. The mayor and part of the city council wanted to change the city's liquor laws (not a bad thing in itself), but they used misleading information in the voter information brief to do so. Their information brief suggested that there was no previous limit on e.g. distance between bars and elementary schools, when in fact their ordinance reduced an existing minimum distance.
Stanford develops super-fast computer device
In Germany you could easily end up paying that much for a single cash withdraw from your own German bank account if you end up using the "wrong" ATM... completely ridiculous and nothing but frakking with customers over bank account turf.
I think this might be the one you're talking about: http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/11/if-youre-busy-youre-do...

HN discussion from a few days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3222725
This is great action on the part of SendWrite.

One suggestion: since you ask for the sender's home address anyway, why not use that to scrape the contactcongress website to automatically fill in their representatives?
I'd still do it just to pick up chicks.

I guess NASA frowns upon getting "I'm an astronaut, bitch" printed on your business cards, though.
Lol, if you're able to hack the score, please send your resume to hiring@ravn.com
you should obfuscate that js ;)
Not just the independence aspect, but the hubris with which he complains about the most brilliant minds choosing to not work on, well, a social network site.

It's 2011; we are traversing inflection points of development in solar energy, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and seeing the early, dramatic fruits of stem cell research, and Parker is bitching that the best of the best aren't keen on improving software that shares drunk photos and your latest opinion of Kim Kardashian's divorce?

Wow. Just, wow.
Let's just start with lynching paypal first before we move on to those two that are actually offering a usable solution.
I think it doesn't happen because of the way medical insurance is set up in the States. No doctor has to "vote with their wallet" so to speak.

"Oh, hey, a model bone is going to cost us $1200? Whatever, the insurance company is paying for it". No pressing need to save money and optimize their processes...
A woman I knew in college got in and flew on the Shuttle. She was a geology major and then a high school teacher. So there must be something beyond the science and pilot aspects in the evaluation.
I think it will be a slow process but they will certainly succeed as a business. The rent payment use case alone should be enough to keep the company afloat indefinitely. Rental companies can very easily say we only accept cheques every month or if you want automatic payments then dwolla, no credit cards.

The real reason I wouldn't use dwolla for a consumer web transaction over my credit card is not the credit aspect but the risk aspect. With a credit card I'm protected against fraud fairly well whereas with debit or dwolla the protection isn't nearly as good.
You are absolutely correct. There are differences between the two industries. The two key ones would seem to be that (a) the investment required in time and money to create the software and its likely lifetime value are low compared with a drug, and (b) the ease of difficulty with which the software may be copied can vary a great deal. Compiled source code is harder to reengineer than a drug. Server side code that is held as a trade secret, such as google's search algorithms, is hard to recreate. So in these cases it is quite true that there has been innotation (ignoring the fact google did have some IP protection). But there are cases I can think of where it would be downright foolish for a software company, particularly a small one, to invest substantially without protection. The key characteristic is that the code cannot be held secret and can be readily read and thereby copied. The key point is that it really isn't very helpful to generalize to broadly about the software industry.
Would love to do that. We wanted to get this out the door quickly. If it is popular we'll see about improving the UI. Thanks!
> they don't want the "nfc = payments" meme to spread,
> not quite sure why

Maybe because it takes away from the idea that Square will be able to dominate? Maybe they see the spread of NFC as a way that the current credit card companies can jump on the tech bandwagon and edge Square out? Dunno.
I find Cain's lack of depth on many issues frightening, but that's pretty awesome.
I don't see giving direct bank account access to any third party plus from my own customer point of view, both VISA and Mastercard have worked well for me in pretty much all situations in a lot of different countries all over the world.

If it can bring down the credit card transactions costs then great but other than that, I see no reason to move to bitcoins or dwolla because I see not a single benefit for me. Maybe it is great for you USA hackers but here in Europe... shrug.
Looks like the beta has been pulled...
haha good call - but i know that wouldn't stop you either! (sorry, i adjusted your score down...)
The history of Silicon Valley
Cool to see other developers who were/are in Boise. I wish we had a way to find each other besides linkedin (and not get sucked into pitching/getting pitched a job)
> Don't know who is your local representative?

I believe that should read "Don't know who your local representative is?", no?
Mozilla hatches plan to tackle memory leaks in Firefox add-ons
One question they apparently do ask of every candidate is, "What can you do better than anyone else in the world."

I think being able to have an answer for that is a worthy goal.
The Empower Network
Empower Network is a new company that is offering a business opportunity where 100% of the commissions are paid directly to your bank account. No more waiting for your commissions and splitting the money.
My favorite thing about this is that he's extremely good at playing it. I also have an instrument app that allows for continuous pitch + autotuning (http://www.iansimon.org/fingrophone/), but his looks like it allows for way more expressivity.
It looks like a post request with an authenticity token that never changes during the session, so you can just post a new request with the same authenticity_token and invite_id, but with any value for new_score :)
Actually, the base level GS-11 pay grade, with a location adjustment for Houston, apparently translates to about $65K. I really hope that, like military pay, gets boosted with all sorts of crazy allowances, because $65K just seems... unbecoming.
Professional Painting Contractor
Thanks. Yes, originally I had also wanted it to be continuous. I settled on discrete pitches to make it a little easier to pick up. I will be adding sliders and stuff so you can change the tuning parameters as well as the other other parameters.
What sort of tasks would make such a drastic reduction possible? Genuinely curious, having never written c++.
It depends where you live. In the NASA launch area, it goes a long way.
haha good job stanton. obfuscate probably would have added 30 seconds to the time it would take to hack it. If we really wanted to make it more robust, we would have added a validation to the score, a validation ensuring that time had passed between duck clicks, (looks like you didnt click ducks at all in your case), a minimal time to beat the game, a validation that ensures you didn't exceed the maximum possible score, and whatever other means to make it more annoying to hack, but even then... and in the end, we're not a gaming company and this was just a fun lil exercise we threw together to test a concept. Good job though haha, we knew if we posted in tech, this would probably happen :)
Why would they pay more? It's not like you're going to quit after getting selected for flight just because you want a $10K raise.
Considering the amount of trolling you get when Perl is mentioned on e.g. HN, I'd say that some other language culture's love is boundless -- and a bit less than fully grown up...

Which also applies to that "great community" point. Shudder.
Nice effort. Do you find Python fast enough in solving the required task?
I liked to imagine astronauts as individuals who excelled so much in their given fields that they stood out and were actively recruited by NASA. Instead, I find out that NASA posts job postings and interviews people just like everyone else

Possibly if your job is "test pilot" then you might still get recruited by NASA. For scientist-astronauts, though, I'm guessing that being spectacularly brilliant in your particular field is neither sufficient nor necessary to be a good astronaut; better to hire good but not necessarily field-leading science-trained types who also excel in the various other qualities which you need in order to strap yourself to a giant bomb and perform brilliantly in adverse circumstances for several days without enough sleep.
I hadn't tried, but with your encouragement, I just gave someone a score of 9001.

Edit: and now myself. I had accidentally typed the wrong id.
Social network analyst job "for the identification and analysis of threats"
Most people take "Build something people want" to mean "Pick a problem to solve and solve it well."

Most people are wrong.

"Pick a problem to solve and solve it well" focuses on the "Build" part. The important part is "people want".
Sunlight Labs has an API that'll do it by zip code:
http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/

They've got libraries for Ruby, Python, and even PHP, and the interface is drop-dead simple. Definitely worth a look - I'm baking them into one of my projects right now.
How to multithread when "Threads are for people who cant program state machines"
you're right. honestly we didn't try at all to make it difficult to hack. figured that no matter what we did, anyone with decent skills should be able to hack it. after all you can see all the source code! (like jerry said in another comment, we're not a gaming company after all - it was just a fun little experiment) - excites me that it piqued people's interest enough to go poke around in the source code though! :)
The Only Numbers that Matter for a Website Owner
Menstrual Cup Reviews
As I already said, the notion of a first cause is absurd, it's an idea that has no basis in reality or evidence to support that such a thing is. Just because you can think a thought doesn't mean reality must reflect it.

If you insist the universe had to come from something, then you can't solve the problem by inventing a god that doesn't.

If you can accept that a god is eternal, then you must accept that the universe itself can be as well thus excluding any need to invent God.

If you insist that God can be eternal but the universe can't be, or that the universe requires a creator but God doesn't, well... then you're just not being rational and there is not point in having a rational discussion.
Steve Jobs wanted iPhone on its own network, carrier-free
Buy new Nokia N9 64GB for only $59.15 from EZY-BID auctions
Don't miss out!,,,Buy new Nokia N9 64GB for only $59.15 from http://www.ezy-bid.com EZY-BID auctions online for cheapest iPhone...Hooray!!!
Organic synthesis on paper was an interesting problem - I just didn't care for going through the motions, cleaning glassware and pretending I was conducting a meaningful experiment.

You don't learn enough in four years to do meaningful lab work in OChem, but you still have to learn the basic techniques somewhere.

Personally I really miss bench chemistry. If the professional culture weren't so conservative and hierarchical I'd probably still be doing it.
> It seems like even research universities are increasingly doing work that are more low-quality first-startup style grabs at attention, using machine learning (itself a balkanized field devoid of theory) as a semantic stopsign-marker of objective quality, and less of "classical" computer science results that were very mathematically informed.

I disagree with this. Much of the product of computer science departments these days is mathematical gibberish. Pages of proofs written by extremely poor writers with nary a point in sight.

The heyday of computer science, in contrast, involved academics working on interesting problems and publishing readable work that was accessible to practitioners. For example, the papers that came out Rice's Scaler Compiler Group in the early 1990s are a model of clarity and good taste in academic writing.
Some mailbox companies do that for you. People (esp old folks) living in RV traveling don't have physical address, so they set up one permanent address with a mailbox company to receive all incoming mails. The mailbox company would forward them to their current location. Whenever they stop at one place extensively, they contact the mailbox company to update the mail forward to the new location.
I'm getting an error when going from Seattle to Yakima, it says:
"Your geographic boundary is too big. Please search a smaller area."
This could have saved us a lot of time. Thanks!
That was nice. Everything seemed to come together to make a nice clean message queue class. Which I think is due, in part, by the new C++11 features. Hello closures!

The guy's typing speed was killing me though...
I'm actually getting that error 100% of the time. I tested Seattle to Redmond, and then I tested a specific address to another specific address, both in Belltown.
As a lover of road trips, I really dig what you're doing.

If I may offer two observations:

1) I would appreciate some sort of filter to hide multi-location stops like Sub-way, Exxon, etc. If you are going to have such data at all, I would appreciate the ability to hide it. I can find a gas station by reading the highway signs, but it's not as easy to find the super unique and interesting stops.

2) Scaling the page to see more of the map makes the text very difficult to read.

Anyways, pretty darn good for a week. Thanks for sharing!
I think we may differ about the value of a commerce or business degree vs an engineering degree. My experience is that engineering grads from top schools have a very easy time getting hired into lucrative financial or other non-engineering firms, and that business/commerce is not nearly as widely respected a major (a few notable programs aside (wharton, berkeley), most top universities don't have a business or commerce major).

As for the law degree... law (at least in the US) is almost always a graduate degree, so we'd be comparing a JD with either a MS (a little shorter) or a PhD (much longer), not a BA or BS. A chem engineering grad can go to law school and will have more options than most other majors (I read somewhere that IP firms have the highest per-partner profits, and getting a job is easier as there are very few law grads with this background).

Of course, the presence of lucrative professions that can be entered without these difficult undergrad degrees certainly should play into the calculation. If you can do well with a law degree regardless of major, well then why bother with something hard? Ok, so your options are slightly reduced, but as long as they're really good (and they tend to be for top law grads regardless of undergrad major), people may decide that the ROI on engineering vs economics or even art history just isn't worth it. Sounds like your buddy made this calculation and acted on it.

Still, I think the picture is discouraging for PhDs in STEM fields (though better than the utter misery of PhDs in the humanities), whereas I'd still say that majoring at the undergrad level in engineering or hard science puts you in the position where you have the most options leaving college, though it is also a very difficult course of study.
If people don't want to waste paper, you can also check out popvox.com or votizen.com. Both allow for electronic communication with Congress.
the people that just missed the cutoff for those spots are probably top of their class at whatever regional university they ended up going to.

also i'm sure there is some of that percentage that are capable but fucking off and not doing homework because they are 18 and just moved out of their parents house.
I'm not really sure that i trust anything with access to my entire dropbox... any plans to allow for sandboxed access?
On the other hand, one shouldn't underestimate the power of not knowing something is impossible.

If you talk to a lot of others who have worked in the space you may well end up with a long list of reasons why your idea is doomed. It may stop you from wasting time on an idea that can't succeed. Or, possibly more likely, it will muddy your thoughts and prevent you from observing the space with the fresh eyes that are needed to see what those before you have missed.

But all too often companies just start building without understanding why the previous attempts have failed.

Sometimes you need to just start building to begin to understand exactly why previous attempts have failed.
Exactly. My checking account earns interest, but right now it's paltry because rates are so low. I have automatic transactions in place to move part of each paycheck into various savings and investment vehicles. I have calibrated it so that the only money left in my checking account is money that is budgeted to be spent that month. In my mind, that is what a checking account is for. In order to maximize the amount of money that's working for me instead of just sitting there, I have shaved it pretty close on the amount of money I leave in my checking account.

All of my regular bills (utilities, insurance, internet, cell phone, etc.) go on my credit card, and they are mostly clustered in the first part of the month. By using my credit card, I don't have to take that money out of my bank account until the end of the month, leaving me free to put money into savings and investment earlier in the month. If I were paying those bills directly out of my checking account, I would have to postpone my savings and investment transfers until later in the month to avoid going negative in my checking account.
It's probably easier to start a photo-sharing social media network, sell it to Facebook, and use the proceeds to buy a Virgin Galactic ticket, than to get this job.