skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the link. That actually raises several good points I'd not thought about.

For example, if I start paying them, would not only their expectations change, but would mine? Would I start feeling they owe me their time, and would they feel obligated to give me their time? I don't want to impose this upon kids that are going to high school or college, at least not without prior experience of imposing this on paid professionals.

I've always made it clear that their school and real life priorities remain above those on ACC. But I'm not sure this mutual understanding would remain if we cross the borders from social norms to market norms.
Julian Assange to host own TV show in mid-March
Clicking on the outer ring before starting the game still registers and gives you a score.
Learn how to do these things in your head. External lists mainly exist to help your supervisor track what you are doing (so they "know what's going on"), and to help you fight your own forgetfulness.

If you have a setpoint in your mind of where you are trying to go, then simply stay focused and don't stop moving until you get there. When the load becomes too much for your short-term memory, then make a few notes to remind yourself of what you are trying to do.

Set a vague target, then leave your mind and shear willpower to do the rest.
>>> kemvi.entity("japan")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/kemvi/__init__.py", line 232, in entity
ret.append(Entity(item))
TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'popularity'
I think because he's got the name off slightly, it's Insert Knob A In Hole B. As for finding a copy of it, well you should be able to do that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insert_Knob_A_In_Hole_B
That's true. I still do think there was some good historical info that I at least wasn't aware of.
Three points of contention, and then a pointer to more valuable advice from a fellow HNer:

1) Union Square Ventures is a leading name in this space - everyone knows Fred Wilson's blog. On top of that, they only have three "staff" listed on their site. USV can ask would-be employees to fly up to NYC to deliver resumes in person and they'll still get plenty of applicants.

2) The job openings in the article that focus on surveys and personality tests - supposedly instead of resumes - are clearly unskilled labor (e.g. social media intern). This is exactly as it was when I applied to work as a waiter at Olive Garden in 2000.

3) IGN's coding challenges are similarly suspect as a representatitve example because game dev is a glamor industry with a surfeit of naifs lining up for these underpaid jobs. Prized developers aren't going to participate in many coding-contest-as-hiring-lottery situations unless they're just really interested in the problem. Ask a YC company who's ever posted a hiring puzzle: what percentage of your correct submissions were from people who didn't even want the job?

The tactics cited above wrongheadedly invert the recruiting plan tptacek uses at Matasano: Start from the assumption that you want the best people possible and that those people will have plenty of great alternatives to working for you. Do your best to get your company's name in front of those people and to convince them that they'd have a rewarding time if they joined your team.

I trust Thomas's experience in identifying and recruiting talent far more than I do a career WSJ reporter's [1] trend spotting.

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rachel-emma-silverman/31/331/507
To an extent, yes. But my app also sends over details like where the person is going to, which AFAIK Latitude doesn't do.

The app also lets you search for destinations, gives you a time and fare estimate, split the total between friends, review your cab ride... while the tracking stuff is a central feature, it isn't the only one.
The formula for finding the difference in color is CIEDE2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_difference#CIEDE2000, the actual number is quite meaningless, but in case you're interested:

score = "perfect" if distance <= 2
score = "very good" if distance > 2 and distance <= 6
score = "good" if distance > 6 and distance <= 12
score = "average" if distance > 12 and distance <= 18
score = "poor" if distance > 18

The score is more strict on the first exercise (Hue only)
http://www.freelancify.com/projects/1-craigslist-search-scra...

"Come Join the Exciting World of SPAMMING!" Not the founder's fault by any means, but it looks like this new site is not immune. That'd be a selling point: "invite to list"/vet the listings.
The civil service is corrupt along with staffers and legislators themselves.

The problem is the revolving door between industry and government... the promise of being able to sacrifice yourself politically translating directly into a cushy job in industry that's gained billions by the malfeasance... high profile examples are legion: Dick Cheney, Dick Gephardt, Pat Toomey, and (more timely) Chris Dodd.

I don't know the best solution but an airgap of related employment (say, 2 years) would probably slow this process down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity
Government turns to entrepreneurs for help
So I was listening to my local public radio this morning and heard a story about local employment agencies working with entrepreneurs to create jobs. They specifically mentioned an entrepreneur who runs some sort of a balloon distribution business. So once I got to the office, I ran a search and found the following article: http://ginewswire.com/entrepreneurs-balloon-idea-gets-noticed-by-govt.htm

Personally, I think this is great exposure for entrepreneurs and the money you get from the gov't probably isn't bad either.
Well, presumably you could print the next generation of printers using the previous generation.

You'd still need to pay for the energy/raw materials to run them though. Maybe if LFTR works out, energy will be next-to-free also.
Sniffing Your Way to Extroversion?
So now introversion is a disease?
President Obama cannot stop people from talking to members of Congress.
Personally, I love this trend - I last updated my resume 3 years ago and haven't sent it anywhere since. I just direct people to my portfolio (link in profile) which has all the stuff I built. Much easier that way.

But in my previous life, I was an enterprise Java developer in the financial industry. None of the projects I built are online - they're all proprietary B2B applications. It's some of the best work I've ever did, yet no one will ever find out about it online. The only way for me to tell this story is through the resume.

How do people like that supposed to present themselves, in this new hot social media environment?
An important measure to change the skewed dynamics of political financing in the US would be the additional funding of political parties with money from the government. An example of this is Germany, where parties receive money from the state according to the number of votes they collect, in addition to other funding sources. This relieves the pressure to raise money from corporations, and makes politicians less dependent on "money interests".

EDIT: Wikipedia article going into more detail, see under 'Political Revenue': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_finance_in_Germany
There is no doubt in my mind that this step must be taken, but I'm fairly certain that as the number of parts and types of material increase any cost benefit from 3d printing will be wiped out.

Sneakers for example would be really tough to just print out and assemble due to all the different types of parts.

Scale in assembly continues to beat out lack of scale. It could change, but I think 3d printing is better for custom applications rather than mass market goods.
I love the idea of SPDY, but I would really like to see an open source (transparent) proxy, then I could proxy all my internet traffic through the cloud.
One of the first signs I noticed of this was startups we funded not caring much what their domain name was. IIRC that trend began about a year to 18 months ago.
While it would be exciting to see something as progressive as SPDY become codified as a standard, keep in mind the deliberately conservative nature of standards development, as seen in the responses to that message:

On 24/01/2012, at 3:50 PM, James Snell wrote:
> +1... would love to see that work move forward within this group. I do
> have concerns about keeping the scope focused, however. Even tho the
> door would be opened to the possibility of new features being
> introduced, there is obvious danger in opening those doors too wide. I
> strongly feel that things such as the introduction of new request
> methods and new header fields, unless there is clear and irrefutable
> evidence of their general utility within the core of the spec, should
> continue to be pursued as they are today -- within separate I-D's as
> extensions to the core protocol. The charter should make it absolutely
> clear that the goal is an incremental evolution of HTTP/1.1 rather
> than an opportunity for radical changes.

Thanks, James.
Pretty much everyone I've spoken to about this has raised the same concern.
I agree it's going to be a tightrope walk, but I think there's a healthy
amount of concern about this in the community, which will help guide development.
Cheers,
Mark Nottingham
My dating site startup.  Designed and coded all by my lonesome.
How To Get People To Act The Way You Want With BJ Fogg of Stanford University
To be honest, I haven't been able to run any kind of reliable test, I was just working on "common knowledge".

Testing battery drain is, by it's nature, a kind of time-consuming exercise. Given that it's a relatively small piece of functionality I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
If the commands correspond to some set of objects (reserved words, defined functions, builtins, on-disk executables), then discoverability is indeed high.

Conventions also matter. Most Linux and GNU utilities offer:

- manpages (or, deprecated, info pages)
- a brief help with some variant of "-h|-?|--help"
- package information under /usr/share/doc/, generally with a pointer to upstream.

They'll often include readline command editing, command completion, and other features, all very useful.

Systems such as Debian's 'dwww' (built in web-enabled documentation integration) allow accessing all of this and more through your browser, if you prefer.

Not all utilities offer this. I've seen more than my share of proprietary CLI tools with very, very poor documentation and discoverability, so this isn't something that's inherent to CLIs. But it's certainly doable.

I see some 3200+ commands available on my search path, plus shell builtins and functions. My shell history includes fewer than 200 ($HISTSIZE=3000).

The situation for GUIs is very nearly always worse. Except for minimal interfaces, it's difficult to present more than a dozen or so options at a time. Some level of predictive completion may help, but in doing so you're starting to bridge the divide between a pure menu and a CLI.

I've found myself preferring CLIs increasingly, even in nominally GUI tools. The vimperator plugin for firefox claws back crucially useful vertical real-estate while offering a very powerful interface to my browser.
What Industries Contributed to Google's $37.9 Billion in Revenues? [Infographic]
4 Reasons Why Discontinuing Microsoft Points Is A Good Idea
The Missing/Stolen/Returned iPad Saga
Does anyone still use alkaline or zine-chloride batteries? I've switched everything to "pre-charged" NiMH batteries, since they don't self-discharge and are easily recharged. They're great for things like the rear taillight on my bike (which may sit unused for a long time, but then draw a lot of current), but also work pretty well for clocks and remote controls. And they're not very expensive if you buy the Amazon brand. (But watch out, four batteries come with enough packaging to ship a 747. I bought three four packs and couldn't live in my apartment until I called someone to come remove the waste! Almost.)
I suspect those of us who use and swear by Gnome-Do/Synapse/Quicksilver and the like will love this. For those who don't, think of this is as 'Google Instant' applied to the desktop interface. It feels like a whole layer has been removed from between you and what you want to do.

It's so much more efficient and flow-of-thought oriented, and opens up new opportunities for innovation on the desktop (better fuzzy search algorithms, speech control, etc). Glad to see Canonical pushing the tech here.
Rescuing People from Aliens
Stupid, wrong, and garbage are the correct words for this. People are taking leave of their senses over this bust.
I really used to value the internet as a "third space" like a bar, or a club. I don't really want it to become an extension of my work persona. I will adapt I suppose, I have started to make a conscious effort to build a presence under my real name. But honestly, how much management of my online presence must should I really be expected to do?
The author notes that most electronic devices have a threshold below which the battery is effectively useless, if not dead. I think a more useful comparison would be to measure the area under the curve until the voltage drops below the necessary level. Granted that devices may vary, but even drawing an arbitrary line at, say 1.0V would be more informative.

As others have noted, I'd like to see a comparison to the much-more-expensive "lithium" batteries. Despite the expense, I've adopted these in preference to alkaline, NiMH, or Eneloop batteries for my cameras. The lifespan is so much longer, meaning less need to carry spares or risk of running out, that they're worth that extra price. But I'm curious just what tradeoff I'm making really making.
Virtual Joysticks and Other Comfortably Poor Solutions
BMW Self-Driving Car Hits the Autobahn
After Hardship and Homelessness, National Science Fair Honors
Thanks, it's fixed -- that shouldn't have slipped through testing.
Yes, true. Pretty much any passive device can pick up sound. Two wires running next to each other is enough. A "microphone" is just a particularly well-engineered sound collection device.
Ooh, thanks for that.

Edit: That wasn't sarcasm. I appreciated the link. No need for downvoting.
Oh, I'm all for everyone tinkering, that's practically a sacrament. But

> If we allow the future of the web, software, hardware, video games, etc. to be conceptualized, created and maintained by just one sector of the population, it’s impossible to expect that it will serve the needs of the entire group.

and

> We recognize the power of diversity and want to seek ways to attract more women and girls in to the tech industry – for their own personal benefit and the overall potential of the industry.

suggest the goal is to substantially change the face of the industry. And the existing filter is entirely inadequate for a large number of candidates only moderately interested.
I'm the author and I submitted it last night, not sure how it went through the repost filter. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503758 but glad to see it again.

In addition to d3.js and Raphael, it uses an implementation of Lab for D3 by Jeffrey Heer https://github.com/mbostock/d3/pull/183, and the colorblind implementation uses superformulas for D3 by Christophe Viau http://bl.ocks.org/1020902
Mark Dalrymple, co-founder of CocoaHeads, Developer Interview (Part 2 of 2)
New RIM CEO Heins: "We sometimes think the unthinkable, and that is fantastic”
Hacking Health: Join us Feb. 24-25 in Montréal
Discover cool stuff for guys.Daily.
So now introversion is a disease requiring a daily fix?

The author need a hit of something, that's for sure.
So is your new product going to do the same thing as old Basecamp? Are you targeting the same audience? Don't you think that's cannibalizing your own user base and helping your competitors?

Unless you're building the whole new product that serves a different purpose, and is only influenced by Basecamp - in that case, it makes sense.
Open Freely Is The Swiss Army Knife For Opening Files
People still need to figure out what to say, or what gesture to make. Without a traditional menu or toolbar to advertise what functionalities are available, how would they do this? A video tutorial?
Money in politics is the root of all current evil.
I found out about Warby Parker after I decided to get a new pair of glasses and thought "by now, there must be a good way to do this online". Sure enough, I found them.

Very cool company. They let you pick out 6 pairs of frames and ship them to you free of charge, along with a free UPS return sticker. It's an relatively easy way to browse an online selection of frames and see what works best for you. This process is a lot better than the standard "upload a photo and we'll superimpose a picture of the glasses on top of it" model that most sites use. The downside is it may take a couple weeks to find a frame you like, and I think they only sell plastic frames.
I just discovered this last night. Fooling around with Trello on my alt monitor, I resized the page to a little under the iPad screen resolution and I saw a new layout. Going down to the smallest size, it was now an iPhone-friendly page.

I've started using Trello for personal projects and a little at work, and finding this kind of stuff is awesome. Knowing I won't have to fiddle with zooming in and out on my iPad/iPhone makes Trello a service I would love to pay for.
The only downside: you have to use Unity to get it :(
Most Popular legends Of Mahashivaratri Significance Festival 2012
An open source book on algorithmic graph theory
WhatFontis: Find font name in an image.
One option: Word of your skill travels at approximately the speed of beer. (i.e. Try traditional networking.)

You can also have a web presence about the work which does not actually include the work. Talk about an interesting sub-problem which is non-proprietary. Talk about architecture choices. Talk about the tech you used and the problems you overcame while using it. Write about how firms in the financial industry are missing opportunities to throw Java at problems and make heaps of money.
There's already a number of board games out there where you are essentially buying the rulebook and are asked to provide your own game pieces (pennies, figurines, whatever). Yes, they're very easy to pirate, but they usually have a low enough price point that piracy is not a huge issue.
What you want is a faster horse: http://www.slicedbreaddesign.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/a-fa...

There's nothing wrong with this, but maybe you would be happier with something like XFCE. (sudo apt-get install xfce)
Are the materials free? I think water is a really good analogy of how people treat resources when there is no economic nominal value attached.
Website Analysis, Estimated Value, Daily Visitors, Monthly Earnings
Dead simple and sane aws client for node.js
Unfortunately, you (and I) are no longer GNOME's audience; We aren't who they're interested in targeting anymore. This would irk me less if GNOME 3 was a new/separate project instead of the future of GNOME 2, but c'est la vie. I've been trying to use XFCE instead, but in reality it falls short of GNOME 2 in so many ways it could never be a replacement.

Fortunately, some people have forked GNOME 2 and plan on continuing its development under the name MATE, and they have Ubuntu/Debian repositories up.

https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment
>I'm not convinced that academics are better qualified to predict the needs of society regards knowledge and education any more than the free market is.

On the contrary, I'm pretty sure the free market is the last thing qualified for that. It will always be a race to the bottom, and that's not something education should be.
This completely violates one of the most important aspects of interface design:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

The article says: "One of the first things people do [when they get a new piece of software] is go through all the menus".

Of course we do! That's how we learn what the program can do, not just how to do it. That's affordance.
> I'm not arguing that we have to like this current situation, but it's hard for me to think of a better scenario that doesn't infringe on the rights of people to assemble as a group and voice their opininon via financial support

That's not a "right". That's a disease. Money in politics is the ultimate source of evil in western democracies. That is the beast that needs starving. That is the thing that needs systematic dismantling.
I've been using the new twitter bootstrap with backbonejs for some prototypes and have progressed much faster than I anticipated.

The learning curve on this one was not bad at all -- the examples are great!
I find this trend disturbing. This is essentially the opposite of what happened in the 90s during the mass migration from curated networking experiences like AOL and CompuServe towards the unfettered Internet. Now, people are willingly eschewing the open web in favor of, in the case of iOS, walled gardens. And unless this is reversed, it portends a dismal future for the Internet.
A fun side note about these: they're supported on the Wii's version of Opera. ;)

I wrote a very basic Node.js server to do this, which could in theory work well for 2-player games in the browser: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/wii-js/blob/master/server.js
Skallops: Build Big
This is fascinating:

Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it’s simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense.

I think this is why there are a lot of manufacturing jobs in China, Chinese workers are much cheaper then machines which could also do the same job... for now.

The "for now" is true for all kinds of jobs and kind of unsettling.
How about "single payer" campaign funding?

You want to contribute money to politics? Sure, feel free to pour some into this big barrel over here. The proceeds will be evenly divided between all candidates.
Nah, I'd say it has more to do with MS Office eliminating the need for typists in 1990 and companies replacing the personnel cost with a smaller licensing cost.

I have a secretary. She is an awesome resource that helps my whole team get more done. Typically, they are folks with humanities degrees who don't want to teach. Where I am, they tend to last about 3-4 years, than transition to project management type roles. They excel there, because after a couple of years tracking down stuff.
that's true, but sometimes it's a bit too smart for my taste... There is an internal company website that I often visit, say test.company.com. Chrome always autocompletes this with test.company.com/admin, even though I quite often also visit other parts of the domain, say /backend, /statistics, and so on... Now, the action is self-reinforcing, as I would type "t", press -> to autocomplete it, delete until there was just "test.company.com/", then select one of the options that only now show in the dropdown menu.
This. I think instead of spending your time online being a blowhard on twitter or your blog or wherever, you should be making things. Github, twitter, a blog, whatever should just be artifacts created as a by-product of making things.

The ideal employer who doesn't want resumes should be able to tell the difference between these two things.