skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes exactly! There have been times in history (pre-printing-press) where most people couldn't even read. I'm sure there where many scribes who would look down their noses and say that the common man would never take the time to read for himself.

Our society has grown to be incredibly complex. Imagine taking your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and dropping him in modern times today and asking him to fill out the forms to get a drivers license, prepare his own taxes, set the clock on your dvd player, or send an email on an iPhone.

I guess my point is that the "common" man is pretty capable of feats that would be considered extremely technical from a historic vantage point.
How sinister! I have an alternate hypothesis: they want to filter out people who can't solve simple problems, and the people coming up with the problems sometimes forget that a problem is only simple if you remember (say) Newton's method and the fact that square root finding is equivalent to solving x^2 - num = 0.

This seems more plausible to me. Recruiting is hard.
I know where you're coming from but I think that if more people have a basic understanding of programming then more people will be able to recognize the value of good programmers. Assuming you've got the talent and experience I'm thinking your market rate may actually go up significantly. People have a hard time appreciating (and paying for) work they don't understand.
Great idea. Who made the video? Animation genius
Competent direct sales people choose that career because they are good at handling that risk and like the boost in compensation they get from it.

The guy who's content with the base salary is almost the definition of a sales account manager who isn't working out.
"Fog Creek have taken on the sales risk entirely from the sales staff. It's not a one-way trade."

I suppose. But without sales, they would be out of business. They take this risk on regardless of what they are paying their sales staff (Business is all about taking risk).

I wonder what percentage they were actually giving their sales staff..10%..20%? I doubt it was over 50%, so they aren't really increasing their risk by that much.
thank you! will check it out :)
63% of Americans aged 18 to 24 couldn't find Iraq on a map after we'd been at war there for three years. So let's discount those people right away. The rest -- the other 37% -- have jobs and at least some kind of education. Most of them aren't interested in solving puzzles; they're interested in making money. That's what comes naturally to them.

I'm a mid-level coder. I bill $100-$150/hr. freelance. I specialize in cleaning up the messes left by the Indians and Romanians they hired the first time. I turn their disaster into a functional app, or website, on time and on budget (a budget about six times what they thought they'd be paying, but still not enough for the aggravation). It's a hellishly difficult job that makes me want to pull my hair out by the roots; but I'm good at what I do.

I DIDN'T go to college, and I never took a class in programming. And yet there are only one or two other guys in the world I'd trust to work on my code. So all of this, really, is bullshit. It's nice, but it's a lie. Either you're born with the kind of screwed up brain I have, that lets you see through the code, or you're not. They can commodify everything and turn everyone into a product, but they can't make more of us.
1st time founder hustle 101: how to find super user
But what I want is not on a monthly basis. It looks like that site is 8.99 per month while what I want is a complete snapshot without getting enrolled in a monthly payment plan for monitoring. Basically just pay once for my current credit report and nothing else.
"Despite my differences with much of the Republican party platform, one thing that they are damn good at and I respect them for is an ability to communicate with their target base."

Yes- they are so good at this, its a great lesson in conveying with power.. George Lakoff beautifully explains how they do this in his book- "Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate".. You also mention they get the other political parties to use "their" terminology as well, George Lakoff goes through this in the book as well. I found a ton of communication lessons in the book, and I dont think the tone will alienate anyone, even though its clear the author doesn't lean too far to the right. A great book to read if anyone is at all interested in how the Right owns the game...
I don't mean it as condescending. Sales takes a lot of creativity and skill - but still, if you're hired by, say, Fogcreek software, to sell the Fogbugz product to enterprises, the product is known, the customer base is more or less clear, and the process to get them sold has probably been practiced hundreds of times before you're hired. There will always be unique quirks to every client, but compared to the levels of uncertainty of entrepreneurial sales, you could say that every sale is pretty much the same.

Making a sale still takes a lot of skill and effort - and, even more, it takes tenacity, and drive, and a very strong desire to actually close rather than spend months and months waiting for the client to make up their mind. Sure, you might lose some clients by pushing for the close (though with experience, you know which ones will respond to it), but at least it then frees up your time to pursue other prospects who can be sold more easily.

I don't think that makes salespeople inferior to programmers. These are two different kinds of jobs with two different sets of parameters. Programming is project-based work, where you aim somewhere and you go there and then you're done. Sales is process-based work, where you have an infinite pile of leads to go through (and if the leads run out, you go and generate more), and selling more today doesn't mean you sell have less to do tomorrow. I find the latter much more difficult to do.

To put a final nail in the idea that I look down on sales - both my girlfriend and my ex-girlfriend are salespeople. Not that that's why I dated them, or anything, but it'd be hard to be with them if I looked down on their profession ;-)
If prozac increases brain plasticity, I wonder if it could be used to enhance retraining of adults. For example, if you go back to college to learn a completely new field of work (say medicine or law), you could take prozac to make the process easier.

I swear I've seen a similar drug in a science fiction novel.
http://20suggestions.com - Recommendations based on your tweets.

I created it to learn Ruby, Sinatra, JQuery, and web development in general. It was a fun little project.
The Problem with Patents [infographic]
The problem I have with the shoplifting analogy as presented is that someone unfamiliar with SOPA might conclude that the website at risk must also be the victim of the crime. How about analogies to other crimes like stealing from another customer, assaulting another customer, etc. What's ironic is that the bar/nightclub industry is effectively governed by such a law. It seems that, when patrons decide to do bad things in a bar, the government can revoke the establishment's liquor license. Even the number of police visits to an establishment due to customers' bad behavior has been used against the establishment. While I might have sympathy for the government if the bartenders were encouraging drunkenness, few other establishments must worry about their own culpability when a customer does something bad on premises.
I was going to complain about the tagline

> The missing Markdown editor for web developers

given that there are many, many markdown editors on OSX. But after seeing the vertical Chinese layout, I'm really impressed! That's cool.
Contraband Preview 2012
Contraband Preview 2012
competitive below ground big intercontinental smuggling blank made up of determined scammers as well as corrupt authorities
Well, I used to work at IBM alongside Scott Ambler. He is one of the international though-leaders in regards to Agile. He's a good guy and has amassed a great collection of scrum/agile related materials online on his personal site @ http://www.ambysoft.com/onlineWritings.html

Hope this helps.
I was talking to a (print) design friend the other day who's trying to learn to code. It's interesting to explain to a non-programmer what kind of person will/can become a programmer. If you don't love solving problems by digging and automating, then you will never be a programmer. As you say, not because of intelligence but rather desire and enjoyment.
Thanks for the post but I just worry our app won't be as easy to upgrade. We've got a Rails 2.3 app that I'd really love to upgrade ...

Did you not encounter any gems/plugins that broke after the upgrade? (we've got a hacked version of attachment_fu for images)
While I haven't used it, a good friend of mine has used it successfully twice, once to help send a play [i.e. the actors, and musicians] she wrote to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, and again to send another play to New York from LA.
Couldn't a system with N supervisor-actor relationships be rewritten as a single process with N try/catch statements, where the catch block simply logs the exception and jumps back to the start of the try block?

I haven't used Erlang, so the two patterns seem roughly equivalent. I've even heard exception handling referred to as "happy path programming" by way of contrast to return value handling.
Fanboy Theory
Personally, I'd have to say adding clickable ads to an app that's designed for kids to click on things is a bad idea. You're likely to get a lot of complaints from parents for the app constantly launching ad links.
I've tried so many of these apps and keep coming back to paper and pen, can't shake it.
I find the Santorum "Google Problem" disquieting, to say the least.

I think his politics are repugnant, but less than 1% of Google search queries for his name are looking for Dan Savage's prank. Google knows this. Google obsessively tweaks all manner of other links in the index. But Google's overall politics happen to be the same as my politics, so Santorum gets unequal access to the 2012 Internet.

Savage's prank actually discredits the Internet. Surely nobody's mind is going to be changed by that disgusting link. Instead, it just serves to associate Internet content with the culture wars. I don't think I'll upset too many HN'ers when I assert that the people most likely to be offended by that link are the people we'd most like finding better ways of informing themselves than talk radio.

Finally, and most obviously, we all happen to share the same sense of humor and political stance as today's Internet gatekeeper. But we are by no means assured of compatibility with the next one.

That "Santorum" link is perhaps the most notorious attempt ever to game Google's search rankings. Google should penalize the shit out of it.
That Hideous Strength is a fantastic bizarre ending to the space trilogy, completely different genre (satire?) from the others (sci fi?).
The only place I have seen where people are able to set a fee on "email" that is sent to them is in EVE Online, where I believe it was introduced to stop spam. I'd never thought of it in the real world before, but now that you mention it, I wonder how well it could work. Unfortunately, it may be a little bit too late to introduce it now.
I made http://www.newsfeedy.com to provide context for trending topics at a glance. Born of my desire to know what breaking news/trends were, while being too lazy to google the Twitter trending topics.

Started writing (semi) regularly on my blog, http://tgriff3.tumblr.com - a big step after many stops and starts.
One problem with this approach is that it would be relatively easy to train classifiers that are looking for people who are attempting to avoid detection.
Agreed. There's so many issues with the article, it's kind of weird.

As you point out, they were hedging (and so did not see their bean prices go up), and even if they had, bean prices aren't even a major cost driver. But imagine, for a moment, that coffee beans were a major cost driver for Starbucks: The article suggests Starbucks' management should not be expected to manage these costs. That's ridiculous to the point of outright laughter.

In other news, Southwest execs say "damn, but there's just nothing we can be expected to do about fluctuating fuel prices" and analysts admit that Facebook "can't be expected to understand how to run large data centres; after all that's unrelated to their core business". </sarcasm>
Check out http://travellr.com/ too, it has been running for a while now.
I work with Pat and kicked around some title ideas with him yesterday. It's interesting to see a title that he created out of a sense of fun and excitement being perceived as linkbait. I can see why that perception would arise, but I hope people think of him as a good writer trying to have fun rather than some dude writing linkbait titles trying to get attention.

Some other title ideas:

* 23 characters ought to be enough for anybody

* 23: How Twitter could have solved their ruby scaling problem
You do however have legal recourse to ensure compliance (in the sense that you can demand they comply with their requirements under the license).

If you're out for blood, contact the copyright holder.
Should you always try to turn your passion into a business?
NuNeMe like TechCrunch but for Latin America. I need your opinion
I just started a project on my own my blog is http://www.nuneme.com. I'm really interested on startups from Latin America, what they are doing and where are they going. I'm writing it in Spanish for a couple of reasons:

-First i'm trying to reach mostly people that speaks spanish.
-There are a couple of sites out there about latam entrepreneurs, but i don't want to just make reviews about startups, i want to connect them so they can check if they can help/need each other(future plan)
-Latam needs right now are all about first steps in tech, first steps in entrepreneurship, etc, and i want to be part of that, i really want to help companies to grow and reach their goals
-Most people around the world have no idea what is going on with Latam Startups, not even Latam startups so i think i can help with that

I already have 3 companies for an interview and of course i need all the help i can get, i'm not doing this my full time job right away, but i've got a 6 month target to build this site and community and make a living out of it.

Btw I'm looking for a talented designer for my logo and general page design

Is the effort worth it? Am i going to be able to make it as a part time job?
Is that really true (in the sense of being analogous to what the bill does)? I thought it was more like, "If someone carries a shoplifted CD into Best Buy and leaves it on a shelf, it allows the government to shut down all Best Buys".
This, I can buy. More so even lossy codecs over crappy speakers.

I am wary of the argument that there exists this great gap between average listeners and trained musicians. There is a training gap, surely, but IMHO the raw auditory discrimination capacity just isn't all that different. I'm just a dumb brass player, but trumpets all sounds very, VERY distinct from one another to me, generally. I attribute that to practice, not acuity.
Supporting online material for the related article in Science:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6063/1731/suppl/DC1

Abstract of the article, including link to a related resource:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6063/1731.short

The research finding here was surprising to me, so I submitted it even though it will eventually need more replication.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

The research group involved in the research

http://www.helsinki.fi/neurosci/groups/castren_group.html

has an appropriate background for conducting this kind of research.

This preliminary finding about a serotonin reuptake inhibitor helping brain cells stay healthy is consistent with earlier findings I have read about in relation to lithium, another drug used to treat depression. Animal necropsy studies appear to show that lithium preserves nerve cells in the brains of animals treated with it as compared to controls. The references to this can be found in the standard medical textbook about mood disorders by Frederick Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison.

http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...

So perhaps the findings generalize to the idea that preserving youthfulness ("plasticity," that is adaptability) of the brain helps people suffering from depressed mood develop new thought patterns, perhaps with additional help from talk therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy.
I remember in 90s you were called a computer wizard if you how to type a document and print it. Expectations change.
I think there are certain skills that strongly overlap. I never studied programming, but I did study music. I've seen that pattern many times. So perhaps students at music schools should consider developing secondary skills in coding. I certainly wish I had done that.
I was going to ask the same thing about language learning; children are apt at learning languages and this seems like a way to reopen that window later in life.
No. Troll means "Says things in order to rile people up, often to attract attention or amuse the troll". Bad arguments are one popular method of trolling.
0) The utter destruction of due process and freedom of speech (most of the bill of rights) with respect to the internet, which is rapidly becoming the dominant means of political and private discourse and business in the 21st century.
Done, it ended like this :

switch (typeof value) {
case 'string':
return 'str' ;

case 'number':
return 'num';

case 'object':
return 'obj';

default: return "other";

}
return value;

}

Thanks a lot :)
You did great. And you looked sharp. Good job. For the next interview it would be great if you could paint a picture of post SOPA internet. Try to say, "if it passes we will HAVE to shut down reddit and most likely facebook, twitter and youtube will be gone as well".
The sdisk is not that clever - I got it for a clone that has an onboard disk II and no slot 7. For the more Apple-like I got the CFFA, which is very smart and can emulate an HDD controller and a disk II
Great job, and much thanks for representing the collective!

The most influential single line in the entire interview -- "...we simply have been spend our money innovating instead of lobbying."
That is what my concern is. Is that good for things like doing a theater/play and for some legal issue does not work well for tech startups who envision it to be a high growth company and have C/S corp incorporated.

I know there are certain limitation on how many private investors a C-corp can have. Would these people putting in money via kickstarter be called as investors?
What were the reasons for upgrading to Rails 3.0 in the first place?
The Family Business – Part 3: Let’s Pivot
It's too bad that Ruby requires strings to be GC-ed, otherwise you could get away with an even faster stack string up to a certain size. Basically you would do the same thing as RString, but when you declare a string on the stack, there's no malloc unless you need >N chars.

https://github.com/dblock/baseclasses/tree/master/String for an implementation (a bit thick).
I don't think that those who are not skilled with SEO should get a free pass from Google because they can't get their shit together.

The santorum definition is a media campaign, just like any other. I don't see why it should be penalized because it attempts to spread what some might consider the distatefullness of Santorum's political views.
I would agree with you, except it's not one company or person gaming google. Thousands of different internet users have linked his name to the gag site. The reason it's at the top is that it legitimately IS the center of the web of links for the keyword "Santorum." The links driving the popularity of the site are not from content farms or SEO networks, but legitimate blogs, tweets and articles. It's not a result of SEO gaming, but a genuine internet-wide smear campaign (which of course is reflected on Google).

So the only motivation Google would have for penalizing the site is that it is the result of a smear campaign. And that sets a very dangerous precedent - for Google to identify and penalize sites based on intent or message would be censorship much worse than just allowing their algorithm to run its course.
I think there's a pyramid of automation. Something like

1. Set an alarm on a phone
...
4. Basic Excel formulae
5. Excel Wizard
...
7. JavaScript copy-paste coder
...
10. Professional programmer

The original post suggested that there are more and more incentives for people to push themselves up the ladder. I don't think it'll necessarily mean a whole segment of people people jump from 2 to 10; rather, I think peopel trying to get an edge in the job market could shift up a bit, taking the distribution higher. So Excel users will become Excel wizards, word processor users become HTML coders, etc
Interesting.

I am wondering how this is going to be better/different than a smart search engine, or a travel/review site that may be entrenched in its space for a long time and may have a lot of UGC around places.

E.g. A google or yahoo search on best coffee shops in San Francisco turns up a list, a map and links to sites like yelp with a lot of UGC. What would a user gain from using tripful? Just wondering.
From Wikipedia:

"Atlassian was founded in Sydney in 2002"

"Based in New York City, Fog Creek was founded in 2000"
That depends on the language support for the editor in question. Emacs can check C and related languages on the fly with flymake. Emacs can also check JavaScript on the fly with js2-mode. Editors such as BBEdit and TextMate cannot do that as far as I know. I'm not sure about the others that I mentioned.

The sky is the limit with programmable editors like Emacs and vim. Like general purpose hardware and OSs, neither can do anything that the other cannot do. Emacs does have an edge but in practice people have been able to make vim do just about anything.
I don't have a degree, and I've done reasonably well for myself in the tech industry without one. Thankfully I've been involved in a few places that needed the real world experience more than the sheepskin.

That said, I think telling him to do the same thing is bad advice. I've seen a distinct difference between someone who knows how to code because they've written a lot of it, and someone who knows how to code because they've learned the underlying concepts and practices.

To me it's sort of akin to the old adage of giving a man a fish vs. teaching him to fish.
File sharing is now an official religion in Sweden
Ask HN: Vague fuel gauge in cars
Why is it that we have this instrument cluster with so much detail, yet the key ingredient that makes everything work (and for which we pay by the litre/gallon) is measured with a vague needle or set of bars?

We fill a specific volume of litres/gallons, as represented by the fuel pump, but have nothing in the car to verify how much fuel actually went in. Is there a difficulty with including a sensor in the fuel tank to accurately display this information? Or do people not care out of habit?
I take it that 'Did you know the man?' is a rhetorical question. I 'know' that Orwell was antisemitic, because of some of the stuff he has written. I have read 'Down and out in Paris and London', and 'Burmese Days' (apart from 'Homage to Catalonia' and '1984'), and in both books I got the clear impression that Orwell was an anti-semite.

The essay to which you have linked surprised me; I can only conclude that Orwell must have been an anti-semite most of his life, and changed (or at least appeared to change) his views towards the very end of his life.
Here is an exercise... flip the table and think if our industry was going away and you needed to find a job in a completely new industry/job role.

Mathematician, without hesitation.