skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although I don't in fact like the progressive income tax scheme, I don't see why it isn't possible to critique this aspect of it while supporting the concept at large.
This issue with testers in my experience is that anyone who is a really, really good tester has the skills and determination to very quickly move up and out of testing.
How do employers find out the ban? I thought it's a private matter. Does Facebook have a list of all banned developers?
Background checks these days pretty typically include your name being googled, especially if it's in tech.
It doesn't look like they provided any explanation, just gave a "fair" warning, "In order to avoid further escalation of this matter."
This is good news for Microsoft, and I really do hope they do well, but there's still a mountain to climb: tech reviewers are not the same as normal consumers and impressing them for the limited period of time it takes to write a review does not necessarily translate onto having a successful product. Here are a few challenges Microsoft still face:

1. Getting the mobile networks to take handsets running Windows Phone.

2. Training handset retailers on this new platform and promoting it enough to ensure that these handsets are actively sold to consumers.

3. Their advertising and PR must not be lame, like Microsoft advertising sometimes is.

4. The UX must be consistently slick enough over a long period of time that word of mouth among non-technical people really takes hold and the phone moves beyond the early adopter segment of the market. Phones must run for several days without a reboot. Calls must not be dropped because of crashes. UI Lockups or moments where the slick facade falls away to reveal clunky technical menus are a big no no. And the inevitable bugs must be fixed and rolled out in a timely and seamless mannor. Otherwise, when Bob from accounts notices you have a Windows Phone and asks "what's it like?" he'll sense the hesitation in your voice and choose the iPhone.

5. If things start to work out, the team will need top level executive cover to prevent in-fighting or politics from ripping the team appart or forcing an unwanted technical strategy tax (think "Windows Phone - Bing/Azure/Office Edition") from destroying the product.

6. Microsoft need to make money from these things, otherwise the project will be shelved and resourced diverted to MS Office 2020.
The Timeless Genius of Kodak’s George Eastman
My uncle is in his early 50's and is a Cobol programmer. Been doing it for a long time now. For him, programming isn't fun any more. Its just a way to make a decent living doing something he knows well. But he really doesn't like it.

I've talked to him about learning some new languages and expanding his opportunities, but he's more interested in moving into some other kind of work like teaching.

I think it depends on the person, whether they do it for life or because its what they know.
Yes, rollover is an interesting problem. With the app and scale that we're operating at that will not happen within the next few thousand centuries though.
I'm actually describing how I might go about doing it, and what I /think/ Oracle RAC does.

I'm not actually certain as to the implementation.
Yes it does. But programming is one of those nice fields where you can usually pick up the pieces and relearn things pretty quickly if doors happen to close on you.
Ask HN: what is your ROI of publishing your web app on Google Apps Marketplace?
I am considering publishing one of my web apps on the Google Apps Marketplace but I am wondering if it is worth it ($100 + dev time to integrate).

What is your experience with it? Did you get good results?
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

That certainty is a sign of ignorance and therefore I am ignorant because I am certain is false because that argument is circularly invalid. This statement: "If you are certain about something, it's time to re-examine your assumptions." Seems pretty certain to me.

Ha, I love the meta-cognitive logic judo! It's a fair point, but I hope the subtext of my entire meta-point is that I regard my opinions with little certainty. Even my defense of affirmative action as a policy is measured, because I think it's a very complex issue that I'm not an expert on. Maybe a better way to put it would've been: "When I'm certain about something, I find that it's generally time to re-examine my assumptions."

But again, what I take issue with is that your argument starts with the premise that college admissions should be about past performance.

However, I do fully grapple with the opposing arguments that are in favor of Affirmative Action. I just reject them. I understand their side, I've just been lead to believe it is suboptimal.

If you did, I missed it. AA is about equal opportunity. It's about providing opportunities to people who are circumstantially impoverished of them.

I don't know and I don't care because to me it is racist to favor or disfavor one group based on race.

From behind Rawls's veil of ignorance and with the premise that education leads to higher wages, one's race should have no bearing on whether they can get into college. If one race is systematically denied that opportunity, then it's racist to not address that systematic oppression.

Now there are plenty of premises there to argue with, but I didn't see you argue with any of them. You instead talked about certain consequences that you perceive from affirmative action that you find suboptimal. But suboptimal increase in tensions between sub-cultures is not something affirmative action was meant to address. Also:

If they are wrong, then their competitors are able to get black graduates cheaper, and, at the margin, grow faster.

It sounds like you're saying that companies that don't subscribe to us vs. them will then outperform companies that do, so it'll sort itself out.

So, what's the problem, then?

I apologize for resorting to ad hominem, I didn't mean to. The last thing I want is to start a flamewar. I should've phrased my response more carefully. The reason I brought up my meta-point is that I read a tone of certainty in your prose. I recognize both that that's subjective and that sometimes it's enlightening to stake a hard-line position and defend it vigorously.
No. People who use HN would be damaged by a blackout.

You need to hit ordinary people, not those who already know how damaging the passing of SOPA would be.
Now look who is trolling. First you respond with the now deleted statement, which I'll post back here:

"ww520: You were not trying to have a conversation. You were trying to have a bragging session. I don't find it constructive to continue the "conversation."

Then you come back and respond again? I'm so confused. Anyway, I'll consider this thread over, unless you actually want to have a real grown up conversation.
Ask HN: Early tech startup with all technical co-founders
My philosophy is that at really early stage of a tech startup, it's better to have only people who can contribute directly to the product that we're building, therefore, I prefer having coders (like myself) to business/sales people as a co-founder.

My main concern is that since it's early the only thing needs to be done is to get the main product built and out of the door, then there'll be no room for people who can't really code and work on the product.

Of course a startup needs non-technical resources such as sales, marketing, etc, but to me it;s still a long way to go.

Are there any statistics that show the success rate of startups founded by technical people vs non-technical people? what do people here think about my philosophy? Am I right/wrong? I just feel that I need to ask people who are more experienced than me. I have been thinking to start working on a project and get it up and running soon. Thanks.
it seems like he really lost his faith in government regulation and subsidy programs not capitalism.
The fact that

1. a developer could create a working product that is live and used by a lot of users.
2. a developer could create something that draws a significant attention from a huge company like facebook since it turns out that the product has significant impact that it's actually all over the news when facebook tries to limit it.

These to me would not be a strong reason for hurting a chance of employment. On the other hand, this is the kind of developer you want to work with.
I would suggest a rephrase of "A weekend project" - it makes it sound like something that will disappear soon.
"mbox" is a family of several mutually incompatible mailbox formats
Yeah, this wasn't a straight comparison, but an act of apologetics.
4TB Hard Drives Now Available
I generally don't agree with your premise, that it's unfair to advantage homeowners in the tax code. I think society as a whole benefits from increases in home ownership (homeowners are stakeholders in neighborhoods). I think the tax code can either be simple or effective.

You are free to disagree at length with both of those beliefs and I won't fault you for doing so, except that if the best argument you can muster is "no fair, I just want to rent" I may roll my eyes.

But the thing I really wanted to point out is, there are 104905480 things we can debate on HN where a change of perspective might be productive. This isn't one of them; the mortgage interest tax deduction is a psychological pillar of the middle class of the US and eliminating it would be painfully disruptive to huge numbers of voters.

Narcotics will be decriminalized nationwide before we lose deductible mortgage interest, is my prediction. People have strong feelings about drugs, too, but the decision to legalize them or not doesn't change whether they can still afford the cable bill.
Yeah. I feel so blessed. One kid, costs me $25k in day care a year and I get a massive $900 tax break. Awesome. Thanks buddy for covering for me!
Revisiting iChat Hacking
He wasn't "banned for life". He received a "cease and desist" letter from Facebook's lawyer that threatened (bluffed) to escalate their challenge against the game. It's classic scare tactic employed by lawyers for unethical clients.
He published the info on the internet. Will be easy to find using Google.
Any decent humanities program will fully fund its PhD students. In exchange, those students are tasked with teaching a majority of the courses in a given term (composition, first- and second-year languages, etc.). Or, if they aren't teaching their own courses, they're doing the grunt work for the larger lectures.
I'm a little uncomfortable talking in specifics here, but I'm not close to 50% effective tax. IL's state income tax is 2 points lower than VA's (or was until recently) but that's 2 points.

20% sounds low to me too (makes me wonder whether he missed FICA), but add all them together and you're still not giving half your money away.
He's right, there's something about the machines that makes me laugh--the 5 watering cans in particular made me giggle. Though I have to say I cringed when the macbook fell off the table. I hope it has an SSD (or a pillow under it)…
Why do you believe a black applicant has higher future potential than an equally or more qualified white applicant?

One of the premises of AA is that college admissions shouldn't be about qualifications, at least not entirely. The reasoning goes like this: If different races are not genetically different enough to account for large demographic differences, then college admissions should represent the races proportionally. Qualifications-based admissions do not, and this is because of systematic socio-economic/race/culture problems. To account for these systematic disadvantages, we should factor in racial information to normalize the different groups.

Why couldn't (for example) cultural factors cause blacks to be less likely to perform well in school?

That's part of the premise, too. That it's not genetics but many other reasons. But people should be given opportunities to realize their future potential regardless of their culture or the systematic oppression they might live under.
Two minutes?

That's about 9 seconds per line.

Unless you are typing a program that you memorized - you cannot get such speed.
Just want to point out that if 8.5% is getting you single-payer health insurance without deductibles, it's still a better deal than the prevailing rates for low- (not no-) deductible private market health insurance in the US.
These things can bite you when you least expect them. Say you hired him to write a web app and later on the users (or investors, or clients) want to have FB login. Now you need to fire the guy or separate him from the FB login implementation, testing, and use. The guy's got a huge target mark on his ass.
For me, the big missing use case is using it on Windows. It feels like git actively hates the Windows developer. Install mysygit on a windows box and the recommended option is to use a bash shell. A bash shell on a windows machine.

The message seems to be 'git's never going to really try to work your way; why not pretend you're using *nix?'
Facebook and Twitter (and Amazon MP3) are installed by HTC/Google on the carrier-independent Nexus One, at least.

Cyanogenmod solves that problem (but introduces others, like failure to sleep properly => battery drain)
I'm not trying to talk you off the project so much as I am encouraging you to consider reinventing this particular wheel in Clojure as well.
And this team-exploding is why all of Microsoft's good ideas die on the vine.
He quotes "I must cease and not access the Facebook site(s) and/or services for any reason whatsoever." There is not EOL date in his statement.
So you have a good trainer and a bad yoga teacher?
No good programmer wants to, but does so anyways because of Facebook's marketing potential.
Why? Seems like a fair-enough term.
I read "JavaScript iteration techniques" and think "that sounds interesting" - then I read "good technical interview material" and feel sad.

If someone doesn't find the subject interesting in its own right, why would they want a job where they do related tasks all day?

If the only reason you clicked that link is to prep for a job interview, please take some time and find your passion in life.
Key Features, MakerBot's text adventure
eh, Intel, right now, could own the microserver/power sensitive server market. The Pentium 350 is a step in that direction, If they'd sell me pentium 350 chips, I could sell very fast, very cheap servers with ecc ram. But Intel won't sell them to me.

Intel has a long history of nerfing their low-end products so that they compete less with their high end products.

The question is will intel make a good low end chip (and not castrate it) before arm makes a reasonable server board? I mean, it's clear that Intel /can/ the question is if it /will/.
Highly specialized in facebook API? If you are a half decent developer you can easily pick up any API in few days if not in few hours.
Note that we can use the @functools.lru_cache(None) to easily benefit from memoization.
Why would there be? Most if not all HNers already know about SOPA so there is no need to raise awareness.
I think implicit in your calculation here is that someone let in on AA grounds is inferior to someone who wasn't. But the premise of AA is the exact reverse, in fact. Saw two candidates A and B are born with equal amount of future potential: 100fp. Candidate B, for reasons of systematic circumstance, did not perform well before college. Without accounting for systematic circumstance, then, candidate C, who was born with only 90fp, will get admitted before B, even though his fp is higher.

It's not a matter of lowering standards, but normalizing them across racial lines.

A common data-based rebuttal to this is that minority/AA students tend to perform worse even in school than their non-AA counterparts. But that's a separate issue, and is pretty obviously going to be the case considering a lifetime of circumstance. The AA response to this is to promote programs that help AA students to overcome their past circumstances and perform to their full potential.

Your example of Caltech is great! That's a perfectly valid way to normalize demographics, I think, but it doesn't seem to exclude AA or even address the same issue. They seem perfectly complementary to me.
The internal representation aspect is important -- specifically, having to deal with the index as separate from both your working directory and your repository. that makes it harder to get started.
Hopefully a hiring manager at Google will ping him soon.
Has anyone a good recommendation for setting up a US company for someone based in the UK (or anywhere else)
For mobile apps, keep an eye out for Apptopia (http://apptopia.com/)
Another SEO non-accessibility advantage, you get to learn what your customers call your product/service.

e.g. I like going on motorbike holidays, like "Long Way Round" (but not as extreme) that's called "motorbike touring". Not motorbike holidays, or trips, or travelling, but touring. One step of SEO is to see what people are searching for, which will tell you what your customers call your service.
On top of that, the entire article is about how yoga (in the form it's most often done in the US) has the "potential to inflict blinding pain" and in teachers (in the US) the lack of "deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury."

The reason people do yoga (as it's most often done in the US) is because it appears to: "lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life."

Once you take out the "as most often practiced in the US" then the entire article is of course null and void. But since it's premised on differences between the US and India, like how Americans more often sit on chairs than on the floor, that's of course to be expected.

If you use another definition for "yoga", then you take away the bad parts, but then you also take away the attributed good parts. How do you know that the "pure" form of yoga is better at lowering blood pressure, etc. than the US form of the same? What's the cost benefit analysis?

As the essay rightly points out, yoga as it's taught in the US rarely includes the negatives. Apparently from various others in this thread, there are no negatives for yoga done right. Is this because every injury is attributed to not doing it right, or to the lack of good statistics on the matter? I presume both.
Honestly Id rather be a stay at home Dad than a corporate shill at some big corp like Visa. Maybe others enjoy playing politics and all the other management crap but when they eventually send you packing, you'll realize you spent X years of your life at a place where everyone will forget your name by the end of next week - hopefully you at least came away with a decent chunk of money I guess.
I find it super interesting that Microsoft (in 2010) bought an ARM architecture license. I think it will be interesting to see what they do with it (if anything).

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4204863/Microsoft-ta...
My impression (maybe wrong) is that Korea doesn't have the cash reporting rules we have in the US. So yeah. Cash.
While this is mostly true, it's worth noting that this is part of a push to make Core easier to build and use, which we hope will encourage more people to use it. (And enable others to contribute.) There's still a ton of work to be done in that regard, but this release, at least, includes a Linux build script, and the libraries which are necessary for building Core.

Also, this release includes Async (our concurrency library), which is a much more recent release (October 2011). If you'd like more information about Async, there's Ron's blog post announcing the release [1], and also a previous comment of mine with some very basic sample Async code [2].

[1] https://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/100

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3278532
I remember seeing this at the Maker Faire a couple of years ago, but then they called you instead of twittering. Pretty hilarious.
hmm...

I too have been working on a similar concept this weekend: http://i.imgur.com/7IoVJ.png

Couldn't think of a name as yet, so I called it weekend project :)
Fibonacci really doesn't need memoization since you can implement it efficiently by keeping just the last two values on the stack. Dynamic programming (like the knapsack problem) is a better example.
Adobe Kuler also has this feature.
That's how it's intended to be used on Reddit, sadly it's not really how it's actually used on the larger subreddits. Seeing as Reddit is a big recruiter for HN, it should come as no surprise that reddit user cause a lot of the "negative shit". Of course, they also contribute a lot of positive comments/articles.
Maybe I'm missing something, but generally when doing any type of Facebook/social integration type work, I'm not using my personal account, but rather one dedicated to that purpose (i.e. the client's). How in the world would Facebook know (big brother, tin foil hats, etc. etc.) if this guy is running API calls and send in their secret police? It seems incredibly unlikely to me that, by working through a client (or even a fake profile) and taking part in the thousands++ API calls that occur daily, that there would be any issue here.
I've run into this position before on many things of unrelated matters and it never really agrees with me. I think mostly because redefining something does not inherently change what that thing is. 80% of the U.S. population may define Yoga as a bunch of twists and contortions, but people who know what yoga really is do not agree that those 80% are actually practicing Yoga. Likewise, if posting an unfortunate status update on someone's FB, that you found left in the logged in state at the library, suddenly became defined as "hacking" by 76% of the FB community, would you be inclined to agree with them?
It's about the business aspect of a crime boss, not all of the killing and other things that go along with it. The same business and human nature rules apply to both crime bosses and multi-million dollar business owners.

IE: If you run an illegal drug-dealing business, you still need to worry about supply, demand, and marketing (although the marketing is a little different).
I own TheSunsetList.com domain and was planning on using it for this exact purpose. To catalog what has been tried, what mistakes have been made so that they're not made over and over.

If you guy(s) want to, we can team up and colaborate on this and make it happen. Yes crunchbase exists but it describes only the biggest failures and doesn't go into much detail as to why they fell and shut down.
Anyone here who is using a UK company while not based there?

Supposedly there are some additional requirements when you're controlling a UK company from abroad. I'm interested in establishing an additional company for some of my ideas but am based in a country which requires high start up capital (Germany, Italy, Belgium, ...).

Anyone familiar with this?
Should I use Facebook comments on my video site?
Im tossing up between using facebook comments for my video site or just using normal comments.

With facebook comments my site would get more exposure and make it easier for people to connect on facebook.

But I think that people might not want to comment on some of the videos with their real names. Also I dont think I can tie in facebook comments to the user on the site and associate the comments with their account. So I would lose this information and the only way people would be able to see if someone replied is through facebook.

What do you guys think?
In addition, the placebo effect is real. The more strongly the patient believes, the stronger the effect. This is only a problem when trying to determine the truth of a drug's physical action - if one's concern is helping people, the effect is beneficial.

Of course, over-prescription of antibiotics accelerates emergence of resistant bacterial strains. So, faux-antibiotics would be in order - provided no patients found out, PR outrage, malpractice suits, license revocation, bankruptcy, etc.