skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a desingineer - ux, visual design, solid on front-end and okay on backend. Just wanted to point out its not all a bed of roses.

For the last month I've been interviewing at some really amazing startups. What I've found is that I have no problem getting interviews at some of the best startups (>50% response rate) because well everyone wants someone who can code and design . The problem is that I have to fight an uphill battle to prove that I'm not just a designer that writes HTML/CSS. There is ALWAYS the question of "so...how good are your frontend skills?" with an intonation of doubt. No one actually bothers to ask or determine about the level of your design skills. Another question is "which one do you prefer?". I really hate that question because it shows you don't understand what a product focused engineer is.

Positive response really depends on the stage of a startup. I'm finding that teams between 5-20 are looking more for specialists in design and engineering. Any smaller or bigger and a desingineer becomes a very valuable role to fill. So feeling I'm missing out on opportunities at some great startups cause of this phenomenon. Would e interested to know if anyone else has experienced this?

It's definitely causing me to think about my career path. Do I focus on one or the other? I know I am not great at both and that is because I have to spread myself thin in both areas and dont know the best tools and practices as well as I should.

Being a desingineer makes it really easy to start your own thing be it a startup or side project - I've done it a few times myself. However, sometimes you need financial stability, or are waiting for a significant idea, or just want to work with other really smart people on an idea with traction to gain more experience.

So we aren't unicorns and it's definitely not a double-rainbow life.
Portfolio or it didn't happen.
The Node.js Ecosystem - Frameworks, Libraries and Best Practices(2010)
Britney Spears to marry again: ex husbands reaction.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
I definitely have #1 and #2 in mind. #3 is hard to do in session, but dropping the client's name into the preamble can work. I think it would drive home the point that the session's customized for every individual, although it does mean I can never be too far away from my (makeshift) studio, at least until I get through the 1000 (?) most common first names.
Yay, i'm a designineer. :D But.. i've been in the closet. I don't talk about it much. In fact i've actually hidden the fact from others, masking my role by making up imaginary coworkers to beef up the credibility of my one man shop.

No, I'm serious. That is not a joke. And it works.
I prefer white backgrounds when reading. Everything is consistent with a white background and black text, and I can scan the text quickly.

With coding, my preference is exactly the opposite (I prefer a black background). The difference is that the structure of a program is much more complicated than the structure of prose and that structure is more apparent with white/colors on a black background. Further, the colors of syntax highlighting seem to be much more apparent when displayed on a black screen rather than on white.
Best way to learn is to try to replicate an existing website's design/UX.
Hong Kongers planning to take any of the Jan 2012 Stanford online courses?
Are there any other Hong-Kong-based folks here planning to take one or more of the upcoming Stanford online courses -- specifically the ML, NLP, or PGM classes?

I just finished the AI class, working solo, and got a lot out of it. While I'm not looking to collaborate on homeworks for the Jan 2012 classes, it would be great to meet up with other people taking the same courses.

* http://jan2012.ml-class.org/
* http://www.nlp-class.org/
* http://www.pgm-class.org/
The DET construct (and this might apply to the JOIN as well, I don't remember) is most useful with symmetric key encryption since then you can use in inside one of their "onions". You couldn't peel off the DET layer to get more functionality if it was stored as a digest, since those are only one-way.
The 20 Best Videogames of 2011 | Game|Life | Wired.com
Do More Tweets Equal More Sales?
First Round Capital Wins The Internet With Its Holiday Video
My impression is that several U.S. states have registration or licensing requirements - how does your business plan to ensure compliance with them?
You may want to lower your monitor's backlight level (if LCD) or brightness/contrast (if CRT).
I've been an enthusiast of language learning (and teaching) for almost a decade. Memrise has an absolutely beautiful interface, and I love its responsiveness and colorfulness.

That said, you're doing yourself a serious disservice if you're using it for learning Mandarin. Aside from the considerable disadvantage of any language learning effort that focuses on single word flash cards to the exclusion of sentences, it propagates some misunderstandings specific to Mandarin. The most serious problem is that it treats single characters as "words", despite the fact that the vast majority of modern Chinese is disyllabic. The word for child is 孩子, not 子, which is found in hundreds of words that have nothing to do with children. Similarly used in isolation, 土 is as likely to mean provincial as it is to mean "earth" as taught in the series.

If you really want to learn, you'd be much better served by one of the services that gives you access to lots of audio, as well as flashcards done well. Try popupchinese or chinesepod. I really recommend the China Breeze series of graded readers, too.
I'm not looking to move things to the jvm anymore, I can't trust oracle with the future of stuff I may need to update and maintain.
Indeed! He has been super helpful and friendly.
Actually, your first statement is not true. They also present a multi-user mode, where the keys are generated by a user's password when they login. The keys only remain active while the user is logged in, so if somebody gets a hold of your proxy only those users data is vulnerable. Although, I will admit, the paper seems to assume an attacker only gets a small attack window (I believe) and hasn't just installed something that monitors the proxy indefinitely.
Why Pay More for Gondor Rather Than Just Get a VPS?
I'd love to read your thoughts on this as a blog post - do you have one?
I’m curious. Do you have links to those studies?

Looking superficially, I could only find articles claiming the exact opposite – like http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on... – but they all seem to quote the same and old (1980) research.
Foursquare Used to Document the History of Rappers
While I prefer a dark background, I'm in an office with sunlight coming from behind my screen. I've noticed about six months ago that I was getting headaches when using a dark editor. Since I've changed from dark to light background the headaches have gone away.
It's kind of cool to see all the founders and startups...

but yes, it's really pretty awful.
HTML/CSS/Java <-- the lumping together of these three is either wrong (you meant Javascript) or bizarre, too.
Ok, first of all--if you're a designer and your primary area of design is for the web--you damn well better be able to hand-code HTML and CSS. If not, you push pixels in Photoshop--and that's not design.

Designing for the web requires that you understand the limitations of HTML and CSS and not push our crap from Photoshop that would be a nightmare to implement.

When we're talking about "desingeers" are we talking about designers that can write markup and style or designers that can code out a great Rails backend?
Yes, if you don't have a proper gamma curve, a lot of the medium-contrast darker themes look poor.
Here is a (long) story about an American who lived in SK who got a chance to go to NK. It's an incredible read and well worth the time. His interactions with NK citizens and his gov't minder are really eye opening.

http://www.1stopkorea.com/index.htm?nk-trip1.htm~mainframe

I don't know about you guys, but reading his story is really sad. It's like a whole country, with limitless human potential, is developmentally frozen.
I can't read prose on a dark background, but I find scanning code to be fine.
There are two modes presented in the paper: single-user and multi-user. In single user, the proxy has a master key in which it derives all other necessary encryption keys from. In multi-user mode, keys are generated from a user's password and the database schema is annotated to identify who's keys can decrypt which data.

So for your proposed example, you would likely run in single user mode and it would work just fine.
just for kicks I decoded the QR code in the middle of the video, hoping for an easter(or rather xmas) egg, but alas only the rather boring http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/
My words were meant completely literally :). I wrote this after waking up in the middle of the night wondering where'd the base premise for my startup was baseless.
It'd be cool if HP would smack apple up a bit with the Palm patents.
Show HN: My weekend project: Play Zork on Twitter
In an homage to Andy Baio (http://waxy.org/2004/03/infocombot_for/), I've created a twitter bot wrapper for dumb frotz. To begin or restart a game of Zork, tweet "@playzork play zork".

The code powering it all is open sourced at:

https://github.com/dgouldin/twinfocom

Since twitter will not allow duplicate tweets, you can prefix your commands with any number of periods or delete your previous duplicate command tweet.
Coffee comment seconded.
I would really like to have some people post that are looking for someone like you or I, and how someone can actually make themselves the best candidate, or even find such positions. I know how to find standard programming gigs. That isn't a problem.

I keep hearing about the demand, but I keep not seeing it. Unicorns looking for unicorns?
Smalltalk Koans
Another great way to "improve your credit" is to save.

If you show up to buy a house with a 50% down payment, which you saved in your interest-bearing money market fund, I bet that payment will more than make up for a lack of credit history.
I'll try to spread the word to get a few more people on board. Once we have an idea of how big the meetup will be, we can think about date/time/location.
Understanding Lower Levels of Computers
Probably one of this best parts of this story was when he visited a shrine to the Great Leader:

"The next room contained more gifts from the South, including a Hyundai Grandeur donated by the former chairman of Hyundai (whose family is originally from the North). Mr. Huk asked me if I had ever seen one of these cars during my time in the South. When I said, "sure, my neighbor has one just like it," he gave me another one of his 'you have to be lying' looks. How could such a great gift, a gift implying so much respect, belong to some normal person like my neighbor?"
I gave the implementation a go in R. lets say it didn't go so well. http://bit.ly/uv2MoQ
but that it is hard to play both roles on the same project unless you have a lot of discipline.

For me it's less of a discipline issue and more of a time issue.

Both the backend and the frontend take a lot of quality time to do them right. It's simply not effective to have a single person context-switch between them, even when said person is very good at both. I.e. this is one of the situations where two people can indeed produce a given result nearly twice as fast.

However, I also agree that on top of that discipline plays a role, too.

While wearing the engineer-hat you have to constantly force yourself to stick with the brain-damaged abstractions that comprise todays "state-of-the-art" and not give in to the urge of fixing them bottom-up.

I.e. when both front- and backend are in your hands then the temptation to make the frontend truly model-driven can quickly become overwhelming (auto-generate those stupid forms and validations! why mirror when we could just rpc!). Sadly more often than not this results in a huge time-sink, as you embark in an uphill battle against a tool-chain that's strongly optimized for the exact opposite.
I have absolutely no idea what Groupon's load actually looks like, but as for actual datacenter cost, $1,000/sqft would be a starting minimum, and that's for a decent sized datacenter where some economies of scale kick in. Google supposedly spends as much as $3000.

One of the smaller datacenters I've ever been in was around 20-30,000 square feet. Replicating it probably would have cost closer to $3000/sqft than $1000, so you're probably talking about $40 million minimum.
Those are questions a manager should be asking, ie, outside the scope of the interview I'm conducting. They're also the easiest to fake. Everybody knows the answer is to say they write test cases for every change before they check it in. That's way easier to memorize than any coding puzzle solution.

I've had some frustrating experiences where the obviously talented candidate was nearly passed over because they didn't use the right software engineering buzzwords while at the same time the manager came close to overruling the technical veto because they felt some other idiot sounded like a good fit.

Teaching someone to write unit tests is, imo, far more likely to succeed than teaching someone to understand recursion.
I never thought of my self in this fashion but I guess I fit into the designineer category only because I took some graphic design classes in college while I was studying CS. I thought it would help me create video games but I landed in web development which I enjoy a lot of think of myself as lucky.

At my last company they jokingly called me the "Utility Man" taken from the football term. We had a lead designer but I worked with him a lot on stuff. We had developers that I helped. I worked with our Architect to design systems. I lead several projects so I did the PM thing. I even spent 2 years in security and information security audits (yuck!). Even the audit crap I excelled at.

I think some people can just pick up stuff fast. I don't think I'm a genius as this post suggests these types are but I do think I can pick up stuff really fast. I would imagine that most "designineers" could probably pick up in another area fast as well.
Good points and fitting as right now a large portion of my personal income is consultant based.
> Is it poetic justice that it's revived on the JVM?

It's certainly a good use for the JVM ;-)
I would guess this has become a trend based on the following...

1) Entrance of lower quality, inexperienced founders who want an end product and only know about the buzzwords that supposedly go into building that product. They don't have an expert grasp on the development process so they naively think the process is to collect a group of people with all skills.

2) The advances in work process efficiencies make it easier to do different jobs in tech. Consequently, this makes it much more possible for 1 person to wear many hats somewhat more effectively. 10 to 20 years ago, these sort of job descriptions would be 100% insane because it took so much more out of the different disciplines to put software together. It would be like a hospital posting a job opening for a doctor who can also drive the ambulance.

On the 2nd point it makes me wonder if eventually at some point in the future the startup team along with the need for venture capital will be obsolete. If we follow the current trajectory, I could see building tech startups being more and more the domain of one to a couple people with slim to none capital requirements.
My Career Advice: Make Yourself Redundant
A few states do, although most states don't regulate hypnotherapy. My understanding is that the licensing applies to one-on-one hypnotherapy services and wouldn't apply to hypnosis recordings created by a semi-automated process. Among my competitors who offer hypnosis recordings online (either pre-made or custom recorded), I don't see any of them restricting their sales to states without licensing requirements. Having said that, I appreciate your comment, and I think it's a good idea to double-check with my lawyer that everything I'm doing is kosher.
Perhaps as importantly, R has significant buy-in in the statistics community, so a paper on a new technique will often be accompanied by an R package implementing it; in fact several journals explicitly prefer R packages for accompanying code, because the reviewers are likely to be familiar with how to use it. That's partly due to its semi-continuity with Bell Labs S (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)), I believe, which was a language designed by-statisticians-for-statisticians. It's fairly hard to replicate that; would require considerable effort to migrate the whole community to a new consensus environment.
Show HN: I Created the Inverse of Angry Birds
It's interesting what business model will allow them to cover costs of providing 2GB for free? (without mentioning signup-free 250Mb)
Show HN: Splunk Developer Platform (what I've been working on)
Hey HN,

I wanted to share with you what I've been working on for the past few months – the Splunk Developer Platform[1]. We released our Python SDK[2] back in August, but just last week we released our Java[3] and JavaScript[4] ones, and the JS SDK was the one I've been working on.

It was a great learning experience for me – first real foray into JavaScript and Node (the SDK works in both the browser and Node), and was a lot of fun to try different things out releasing it. I ended up building on a couple of open source libraries (and contributing back).

We are building out Splunk's developer platform and do a lot of work with social data like Twitter, Foursquare and GitHub, as well as try and come up with new ideas about how to use Splunk. If anyone has any questions or wants to try Splunk out, just let me know (contact info is in my profile).

[1]: http://dev.splunk.com

[2]: https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-python

[3]: https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-java

[4]: https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-javascript
So, WebOS programs is suppose to work on Windows Phone Nintendo games are suppose to work on Sony Playstation? Using your own words, Android "got customers by their balls in a way that Microsoft only dreams of" because Android Market doesn't work on a Dell.
Re: performance of R language code, Renjin is a bit faster there than R2.X, and should get faster the more we get into byte code. (Though renjin is currently slower in other areas like giant matrix manipulation)

As for memory usage, I believe object.size() will double-count your input data when it is referenced by the resulting model objects. Better to check memory.profile()

At present, Renjin benefits from the JVM's state-of-the art garbage collection, so you may see some improvements even at present, but I expect the big difference will be once we roll out non-memory-backed stores for R Vectors. Then your input data could be stored in a database and only partially loaded into memory as needed.
There is an XSS on pen.io. I posted this a while ago, but feint didn't fix it.

http://xssdemo.pen.io

Suggestion: It is very hard to allow HTML but remove JavaScript. Write a method called something like isJSPresent() and then after you've done your filtering, check if JavaScript is on the page. If it is, return a HTML-encoded version of the page. Then, the security of your page will rely only on the correctness of that single method, and not on the correctness of your rewriter (which is much more complex).
Sorry, right now our efforts are in T.O. we are based here. Who knows what the future may bring. Join the group any ways, good way of keeping in touch.
Clickable links:

[1]: http://dev.splunk.com

[2]: https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-python

[3]: https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-java

[4]: https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-javascript
This feels like the old Coke vs. Pepsi blind-taste challenge.

Pepsi won a majority of the time on first taste because it is instantly sweeter.

But long term people prefer the flavor and full experience of Coke.

In my experience this translates: the dark-theme instantly feels more clear and crisp.

But over time I find that the dark creates too much contrast and slows me down.
I've noticed that using Passenger Standalone is faster than webrick / mongrel in dev mode using Asset Pipeline. Give it a shot.
there is the need for the implementation to actually make use of invokedynamic, otherwise there would be no gains. As for clojure:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2928285
When did a fashion house spend billions of dollars on R&D, a requirement for most significant tech products?

Please read "Are software patents evil?"
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2011/08/09/are-software-patent...
I'd be glad to feature y'all in the list of example sites on the Backbone homepage:

http://backbonejs.org/#examples

If you're interested, email me a brief paragraph of description, and a 550px-wide screenshot of Posterous Spaces.

Edit -- Adam followed up, and I've posted it up here:

http://backbonejs.org/#examples-posterous
How Good Is the UX of Mobile Newspaper Pages?
I like it. Maybe even beyond or in addition something like "Code Concierge" -- for a variety of reasons it might be nice to have an ongoing relationship with individual/team/org for problems, advice, etc, that is not a typical consulting agreement, but is more than ad hoc posts to HN or Stack Exchange.
This assertion is poorly sourced and sounds like bull. As many have noted, Groupon's processing and bandwidth requirements are relatively low. And are we really to believe "a source familiar with [Groupon's] business"?

ADD: OK, they do send out a lot of emails but even that seems manageable cost-wise with various options short of building your own data center.
Maybe, but requiring both skills to be "great" and "awesome" in order to be anything more than "passable" is a little unfair, no? Are there situations for which "passable" is indeed doing a good job?

And yes, it often takes longer to code features than it does to draw and place their UI elements.
It would be difficult but possible to organize a user's union that accepted/denied terms as a group. Something like a better business organization for software services. Hmmm -- the more I think about it the difficulties increase and the possibility decreases.
It's probably fairly comparable to a trifecta of software bugs causing a plane to suddenly plummet twice, causing injuries.
Android also charges 30% content tax:
http://support.google.com/androidmarket/developer/bin/answer...
We definitely have the science to describe this.

It just happens to be very complicated. You're right in that it's a mixture of E&M, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. Whether it becomes computationally prohibitive to model is something I am unsure of, but may be possible with some simplifying assumptions.

Edit: after a bit more research, I found a paper where, if I follow correctly, they are laying out a framework for creating such a model: http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.1611
I'm talking about a Netgear GS108Tv2, just because that what is sitting on my desk at the moment. It claims 16Gbps right there in the brochure. This is a notch above the lower end, it has a management interface, VLANs, QoS, port authentication, and a lot of other features from real switches.

Of course it also claims lifetime warranty but somehow that doesn't work after 90 days, so maybe the 16Gbps is not true either. In a testament to their opinion of their product, Netgear will sell you a warranty that does work for a couple years for only a bit more than the cost of the switch itself.
I'm in the same boat. Until five months ago I'd only worked for smaller web design/dev/marketing shops because the opportunity to "wear different hats" presented itself more regularly. My current position at a larger company is "Front End Engineer" and I only arrived at that after a significant rebranding of myself.