skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who are these "back street 'computer repair' guys", and "dodgy chancers", and where are you seeing them?

If there were some sort of magic certification regime that would guarantee, a programmer knew what he was doing, you can be certain such a certificate would already exist.

You also seem to have just ignored all the problems that exist with mandatory doctors and lawyers guilds. For example the AMA hasn't allowed any new Medical schools to open in the US since the early 80s.

There is a reason doctors and lawyers are so expensive, it's because their guilds have an incentive to keep them artificially scarce.

Right now IT is one of the few professional fields where you can essential apprentice your way to a job. I can guarantee that were we to establish a mandatory governing body, a degree would be required.

Hell, in Florida they require Interior Decorators to have an approved degree (very narrow definition of approved degree too, I might add).

In Georgia (where I live), the board who overseas General Contractors, ruled they have $1,000,000 in assets in addition to the insurance they were already required to have to cover damages. The only reason it was passed was to protect the jobs of established contractors, who were being forced to compete with lower wage Mexican labor.

That kind of thing will happen to the IT industry if you regulate it similarly.
If I were to give you real advice, it'd be to keep working on it, if you're enjoying it, or you think you can get it done soonish.

They're not going to want to go with a whole new team unless you're very very behind, since they'd have to train them up.

But don't expect a payout from these guys. They're likely not to go anywhere, and you're playing "agressively" by taking so long.

So.. Do it if you enjoy it.
Thanks. It works in Ubuntu (Chrome or Firefox).

Playing with: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php it seems that Internet Explorer won't display the strikeout characters because the font on HN is set to Verdana, which doesn't have the combining character. If I create a page without specifying the font, it works fine.

I have Verdana on my system, but the browsers and font libraries I have installed mean that the glyph is taken from another font when one is missing. I'm surprised Windows 7 browsers don't do the same. Or maybe you don't have the glyph in any font, which would also be disappointing.

Of course, a real webpage would use <strike> or CSS, and strikeouts are usually poor typography anyway, except as part of lame jokes. But other unicode combining-characters can be of real use.
seriously you need path for all that stuff ? i've got a better solution for every one of your pain points:

- call so and so, go have a beer, take control of your life and have an actual social conversation with someone instead of waiting for technology to let or not let you have this conversation

- if you're really in fear of accidentally disappearing (which is really unlikely unless you live a very dangerous lifestyle) just geolocate your tweets or facebook status updates, they probably are more frequent than path updates

- you don't wanna be woken up: put your phone in silent mode or turn it off, that's way less clicks or swipes than using path!

it amazes me how some people try to find problems where they are proven easy solutions.
You need to make the canned responses use actual client data, have some variability and track what canned responses were used before for the client. We also allowed the human operator to customize the message and check if what the machine thinks is appropriate really is. We had more than 80% accuracy and we continuously measured that against the keywords found in the previous messages.
From the article:

The new programs, called Context-Free Grep and Hierarchical Diff, will provide the ability to parse blocks of data rather than single lines. For each new type of data structure, a vendor would provide a pattern library identifying the basic structure of the data, which the software would then use to "extract the constructs of interest from the document," Weaver said.

So how does the above fit into the Unix Philosophy's dictum that "Everything is just a stream of bytes (of text)?" Or does it?
Actually the normal vs alternate law thing might be a mode to build into the displays. I am usually a modeless fan and a VIM user, but this is an exception ;-)
TED 2012 Prize awarded to The City 2.0
To be honest, node.js isn't the kind of place for a complete beginner - it changes fast and there's a lot of outdated information available (which doesn't say which version it was meant to work with).

Even as an experienced programmer, I'm still reticent to use node in any real projects, (mostly because I'd spend half my time updating it to work with the latest release).

Of course, it can be fun to hack on a fast moving platform, but it can be annoying too, when you spend your evening trying to get an environment set-up on an obscure platform rather than writing any useful code.
I have a colleague who uses Netbeans for Javascript so I took a look. And yes it looks better than the default Eclipse editor for Javascript (the jQuery auto-completion is quite interesting). But still it's not working in many situations, unlike the Java support that works all the time.
I've just getting started with Rails and what I miss the most is good documentation like CodeIgniter.
But other than that that's an impressive piece of software!
intentionally just making shit up for the purposes of <employers agenda>

To me that describes actual journalism much more precisely than what most people, myself included, perceive that journalism should be.

Even the good journalists have to follow the editorial policy of their employers which is seldom unbiased.
.NET Developer
Pro-West & Associates, Inc is seeking an experienced .NET Developer.
Our development philosophy is to take advantage of the best features in the latest releases of operating systems, databases, web design and other tools and technologies. Our focus is on implementing custom and semi-custom spatial (GIS) technologies for government and private clients. We work collaboratively in small teams and independently on smaller projects. Most importantly we are committed to great customer service to our clients, and providing features that are of value to their businesses.

Candidates should be self-motivated and have the ability to architect, design, code, test, and help deploy new products. Experience with SQL database management is a plus. The ideal candidate is one who produces results, takes initiative, has strong problem solving skills and can work effectively as a team member. We develop solutions using Visual Studio 2010, C# , Dojo, Flex, Silverlight/WPF, and the ESRI’s ArcGIS APIs.
Desired Skills & Experience
Minimum qualifications:
•	Expertise in at least one MVC web framework.
•	Expertise in at least one client-side and two server-side languages
•	Experience on the design and implementation of RESTful Web APIs
•	Experience with GIS technologies, specifically ESRI’s ArcGIS APIs
•	Experience with enterprise RDBMS
•	Working knowledge of UI design principles
•	2+ quality years of experience in .NET Development
•	Demonstrated experience with software architecture and design, testing, and deployment
•	General understanding of project management principles. (Agile, Iterative, Waterfall)
•	Strong work ethic, a drive for success and proactive attitude
•	Experience working in small teams
•	Strong communication skills
•	Demonstrated problem solving and analytical skills
•	Willingness to learn new skills

Desired qualifications:
•	C# .NET
•	ASP.NET
•	Javascript
•	ASP.NET MVC 3
•	Entity Framework 4+
•	Javascript Toolkits (Dojo, jQuery, Backbone, etc.)
•	Microsoft SQL Server
•	Use of or knowledge of version control (ie: Subversion
•	Agile methodologies
•	Nunit (desired)
•	Proven experience developing end-to-end products to 3rd party customers
•	Developing software for a connected/disconnected environment
•	Web Analytics, including A/B testing
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Pro-West & Associates, Inc is a GIS (geographic information systems) consulting firm located in Walker, MN. Travel is limited. We will discuss a remote work environment if relocation is an issue.

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Interviews will be held after 12/25/11. Questions can be directed to Annette Theroux, 218-547-3374, x108.
Start date: January 2nd, 2012 or as soon as possible
Startup idea: web-based news TV channel with experts reporting on stuff (with votes).
Not exactly related, but HomeSchool Baby! It's SO nice to just opt out of the whole discussion about what the school system should be doing for my kids. I've got friends who are selling houses, going to school board meetings, essentially begging the government to educate their kids well.
December 8th Trading Setup
I'd be happy with a native git client on Windows that is more integrated with the system. I use msysgit at work and it certainly works, but at best it feels like a kludge.
you nailed my second iteration right there. when i realized that the consumer market is just filled with services, i figured, the hell with it, i'll create an enterprise only product, full with virtual hosting environments and everything - never made enough progress to push it out yet, but it's at 80% done or so and does 100% what you said right there... appreciated!
Lindsay Lohan Appearance on Playboy Cover Leaked
Hum, I think the problem is that Dart may be technically open source, but it's not a standard. In addition to that you can publish the source but being truly open involves more than that: see the open governance index for an example:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/08/android-is-the-le...

It involves things like multi-vendor support, open project management & roadmapping, standards bodies where applicable, etc. These are all things Dart doesn't have.
Cars are status symbols in large part because they are advertised as such. If people buy fewer cars you will see a lot less car advertising which will directly reduce the status symbol effect.

See: Pocket watches > wrist watches > cell phones.
That's pretty huge. But how can they keep up the growth? I can't see the growth happening if they just target consumers. What can they do on the enterprise side?
>> I've long wondered if there shouldn't be a better way of handling updating / correcting news items.

Like I say here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3329327

I think this is by design.
You've forgotten your history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

And don't think it's not possible, a number of MSFT folks who employed this strategy are now in leadership roles at GOOG.
So a day later, someone will come looking for you? That is probably not helpful.

The "tell someone where you're going" rule is for trips longer than running. It's if you go on a two-day bike tour and aren't back by the third, or if you're going backpacking for a week and aren't back in 10 days. It doesn't do much for a quick jog in populated areas; a passerby will notice your corpse long before anyone you know thinks to figure out your running route and go look for you.
Actually point 9 is his most valid point. It is harder to figure out the more complicated things in Android because there are simply fewer developers actively sharing what they know. Which means you have to figure some stuff out by yourself and/or hunt for some code that is similar.

As an example, it is Google's fault but try dealing with an application that uses Fragments that also wants to utilize the non-Fragment Map View.

The best resource for real Android is CommonsWare.
The school board member claimed that he "managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly"

Perhaps if he wasn't utterly innumerate, he could have realized that 10 out of 60 is one and a half standard deviations worse the expected value of selecting answers by chance. His understanding of math is so bad, he performed worse than he likely would have had he just answered questions randomly.
I propose googles new motto - "Quasi open"
Want to take Instagram photos for a living? Win this GE competition and you can
Being nerds and geeks, we automatically focus on the numbers: is 96% utilization too high? Will there really be 20x fewer cars sold?

Those exact numbers are beyond the point. But a more realistic number for utilization may be close to 50%: half the time, the car would be on the way back to the next pick up point (or home or office or ....).

One of the main reasons planes have such high utilization is to recoup the high cost of the initial investment. You don't see _every_ plane being utilized 96%; heck, drive by any small airfield and you'll see lots of planes parked under a canvas, seemingly not going anywhere.
I wouldn't use it.
Would have been interesting if Dart wouldn't have been such an atrocious, bad joke of a language.
I've been using Evernote since 2007 or 2008, whenever it appeared (granted, with a non usage delay in between), and it is a great idea well executed.
What's interesting is that many people forget that Evernote is also a powerful cloud plattform with a solid API.
The ability to save all your notes in a standardized way in the Cloud and then install individual apps for filtering, processing, or managing them has huge potential.

I think we've only seen the beginning of where they'll go. In comparison to Dropbox mostly because Evernote as a whole is a bit more difficult to grasp.
You will be unable to prevent the industrious people of the world from being showered with wealth and success. Better to spend time turning drains on society into small contributer.
Buses have problems with aggregation, they don't go exactly where you want to go and you have to stop the bus whenever one of the passengers wants to get off or one. Also, you might have to share it with crazy people ranting at you.

Driverless cars cut down on most of the downsides of public transportation, but they do lose the fuel efficiency.
I also notice that Pocket Cast is "only" $1.99 on the iOS App store compared to $2.99 on the Android market. Plus on iOS at least, they have some good competition from Podcaster and iCatcher etc. On the Android side, there seems to be less polished podcasting apps. The people in my office that use Android (i only use a dev android phone) all use Pocket Casts.
Would it make you happier if I said 1/3? Is that a reasonable fraction of your potential userbase to leave with a bad impression of your business?

You make it sound like supporting Internet Explorer is difficult. If it's 2003, then yes, I'll agree with you. But today it's not.

Supporting IE in 2011 is a matter of building your site against Chrome while not going out of your way to use non-standard things like Object.keys, localStorage or Canvas when you can avoid them. Then you test on IE7, notice your corners aren't rounded, and decide you can live with that.

If, on the other hand, you go out of your way to cram in as much HTML5 nonsense as you can fit, or refuse to spend a few minutes getting IE to render, you need to realize that you're not taking a stand. You're just being lazy.

But then at the end of the day it's your business, so you're well within your rights to be lazy. You may or may not make less money as a result, but then again that's nobody's business but your own.

All the best.
Right. What I said. :)

But I will say that it's hard to imagine that a startup will be successful unless you are emotionally all in, and that quote failure is not an option unquote. Doing stuff on the side never really made sense to me, other than as a bootstrapping strategy. The anxiety and stress, if you are able to channel them productively, are amazing sources of energy and focus. Good luck!
You're right, but there should be plenty of companies willing to fund education of very bright youth.

Not many people care about those with a learning disability - see the death rates and poor health outcomes for simple illnesses.

Whether it's acceptable to have the IBMs and DuPonts providing funding for education is up for debate. Seeing the god-awful job that governments make of education for regular students I'm not sure many people would be too upset.

Finally: learning disabled covers a wide range; unfortunately it's sometimes used to include "people with mild dyslexia", and everything done for those people gets included in that budget. So people with severe need may not be seeing much result from that money because it's all being used for, for example, photocopying handouts onto different color paper.
Painting with a big of a broad brush I think.

A misquote getting corrected in less than a day and getting noticed by a news site which is frequented by the folks who would have seen the original misquote seems pretty good to me.

IMHO I love the current state of tech press (of which Hacker New's is a big part of for my consumption). I feel its much better than it was 10 years ago.
I used to be a paid user but then quit after their iPhone app crashed each time I wrote a note. They took forever to update to iOS5 and that seemed to cause their issues. In that period of time I found Orchestra and haven't seen a need for Evernote for me personally.
Dart may not be a standard yet, but both the Dart language and the Webkit source code are open.

Comparing this to Microsoft and ActiveX is an unfair comparison, imho.

2 things can happen: either Dart falls flat and this has no implications to anyone, or Dart becomes a major success and nothing is stopping IE, FF or Opera to writing their own implementation based on the open specification and code.

I fail to see the problem.
Not to mention you're not locked into taking your vacations during high season.
Yes you're right...Stall is not a free fall but a sudden reduction in lift which can occur for instance when the angle of attack increases beyond a certain value.
LXer: LiveUSB and LiveCD: devil OpenBSD twins
Solar system asteroid discoveries 1980-2011 visualised
I've been thinking about this myself. I concluded that if a Matrix-like option was offered (not forced), where your body would be used as a power source but your mind would be in some distant, impossible fantasy world which you are able to make up yourself, many people would take that option instead of continuing to live their normal life.

I know that if I were offered something like that, a world where I could live out fantasies with no conditions, other than that I give up my body, I may very well take it.

The end of humanity as we know it, perhaps, indeed.
On being a woman linux kernel developer
Linux developer Sarah Sharp shares her story about how she became a Linux kernel developer, as well as what it means to be a woman today in the open source software community.
Runtime types in OCaml
Indeed. I also took issue with the insinuation that working for other people always results in your job becoming "soul sucking". I can be creative, innovative and be constantly learning new things while working with incredible people at my current employer thank you very much.

It's always a brave decision to start a business, but this entire article reeks of the author trying convince/justify to themselves this risky decision.
For reference, the 2011 Transparency International "Corruption Perceptions Index" infographic again:
http://www.gizmag.com/transparency-international-corruption-...

India is squarely in the Red Zone.

Notice also how well the corruption index correlates with national prosperity. All the rich Western countries + Japan are yellow/orange... well, Italy and Greece are red, but everyone knows their economy is in the toilet, and I mean even more so than is usual these days...
cancer drives evolution? [[citation needed.]]

besides, nobody is asking to cure cancer in all population for all times. but in specific individual. who may or may not reproduce later in life.

EDIT: don't need to downvote me being curios. if i didn't ask, this guys who answered would have less chance to post this usefull stuff . so i'm somewhat beneficial to this.
I assume the title is an oblique reference to Neil Postman's seminal book Amusing Ourselves To Death, in which the author argued that TV had created a Huxleyan culture in which it became impossible to carry on the kind of informed, rational public discourse that a functioning democracy requires.
Mixpanel needs someone who can do it all: sales/marketing/support/engineering
Hi HN,

Mixpanel is a web analytics service for companies who want to do complex analysis of user behavior. The product is really powerful, and with power comes complexity. I'm looking for someone who can help keep our rapidly growing customer base happy.

As a Solutions Architect at Mixpanel, you will:

* Help customers figure out integration
* Answer support tickets
* Visit customers on-site
* Conduct webinars
* Make sales calls
* Debug customer coding problems
* Develop marketing strategies

This is a role where you truly wear many hats. It's a lot of fun. We have one guy doing this already, but we need more.

The ideal candidate for this role has worked as a developer before but wants to do something customer-facing. Our customers are highly technical and working with them is a treat.

If you think you'd be a good fit, please get in touch. You can email me directly - tim@mixpanel.com - or apply via http://mixpanel.com/jobs

Thanks for your attention.

Tim Trefren

---------

More about Mixpanel:

- We're still small, just 7 people. You can get in early without the risk of being employee #1.

- We mostly write Python, Javascript, and C.

- We have over 200 servers.

- We handle thousands of requests per second. This is up from 10-15 requests per second during YC.

- We wrote our own database in-house that can process 300M events in real-time. Ultimately, we found that nothing fit our needs and we're glad to have built this. We have just started to build products on top of it - things that push the fold of analytics.

- Our front-end team is top notch. We're building a framework to make building products much faster. It's not an easy problem to solve.

- We care a lot about design. Not every piece of enterprise software has to be ugly.

- The market leaders (Omniture, Unica, Webtrends, and Coremetrics) are stagnating under the people that bought them late last year. We are really taking their business.

- We're in San Francisco (2nd & Howard)

- We have a beautiful office: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4037/4426180253_21043a8ab9_b.jpg

- We pay for relocation

- We can transfer H1Bs

- We do benefits

- We pay market

- We offer meaningful equity

- We're not looking to get acquired. It's go big or go home.

- We're funded by Max Levchin, Sequoia Capital, Michael Birch, and Keith Rabois
It never was for beginners. All those problems have been around since the web has, and beginners have been making insecure crap ever since the first perl cgis.
How uncultured am I? :) Haven't read/heard of that, but will seek out, thanks!
I'm still learning Android Dev but points 2, 6 and 7 I agree with. Also to an extent 9, a lot of Android Dev blogs are abandoned and dated.
Thanks. Can you tell me more? Wouldn't use the part to give anonymous feedback? or wouldn't use the part to ask for feedback? or both?
> Where in a sane world, complaining that this sort of math is hopelessly impractical and not the sort of thing we should be testing would lead educated people to point at Mr. Roach and laugh (as I'm doing above), In this world, alas, it gets him the central role in sympathetic blog articles hosted by one of the nation's premier newspapers.

I have no interest in getting into a general debate about school reform, but I think it's important to note that this kind of work at the Washington Post is happening for one reason: because it supports the politically-motivated criticism of extensive standardized testing. Now, there's a lot to criticize when it come to high-stakes testing, but let's be clear that this sort of sloppy reasoning isn't caused by anti-intellectualism. It's caused by politics.
You might want to consider changing the lime green color background to something more neutral.