skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Article date: Mar 26, 2011
No, they're portrayed as undesirables. If he had said the neighborhood was diverse, that would be a positive light. Instead he's lumping them together with homeless and hipsters (a derogatory term).
Is there anything new or original here at all, except for some bad "text as images" and other MSN/Live/Microsoft account styling cues? Good god, this is just, embarrassing.

Well.. my feed stream is full of random people posting barely clothed people..
My facebook random people are all fully clothed.
I think it's about expectations. I would never sign up for the project you linked to, but that's because I'm a 40-something serial entrepreneur. OTOH if I were a college CS major I would seriously consider it.

My biggest regret career-wise is that as a young coder I never got a chance to work on cool projects and find mentors. I had to create those projects on my own without much guidance.

The company running that ad should realize they will likely attract developers who are pretty green. If so, no harm no foul. If they expect an experienced rock star to show up, they are delusional.

An inexperienced rock star might show up, but they should treat that as a happy accident.
So GPS makers can not only have patents on how a route is created, but on the actual routes?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Heq16nJvTKA

the next version codea supports hooper selection
An entitled attitude is never justified, despite how much the attitude holder believes it so.
I've been developing Heroku and GitHub integration for months, at the expense of a better editor. But what people want is a better editor: themes, vim keybinding, extra keyboard, etc :) I'll try to do it after I finish with the server side code execution.
I'm surprised this article is on the front page of HN. If developers are not X but are Y, then surely all of these schemes to employ and get developers with X tactics will soon disappear for lack of efficacy.
Startups and SpecOps
Agree with Ryan. And besides, what good can possibly come from say 48 hours of caffeine-fueled chasing of shiny dangling objects. That's not how you make software
Yeah, it's purely a different-strokes sort of thing.

I hated the monolithic campus library. It was less lively than a mausoleum. Low ceilings and the agony of a thousand procrastinators. The quiet was unnerving and I had trouble focusing in there.

I instead opted to study at a noisy on-campus coffee shop environment. Most of my friends seemed to need dead silence though, so asserting that either one is the "best work environment" is rather self-centered.
Look, I've lived in Spain for a long time and obviously I see what's happening here. But I'm from California and I read/see/hear what the US press says about Spain. DO NOT BELIEVE IT! Most reports, and unfortunately this report as well in Slate, are more gut-check types of articles, with little background, facts, or true reporting.

For the curious, here's one BIG fact that all the press write about spain, but is totally false:

Reports state that Spain has 24%+ unemployment. FALSE! Unemployment figures in the US are pretty reliable (minus structural unemployment) - but in Spain the official figures are totally bogus. MANY PEOPLE work the system here - basically declaring themselves as unemployed (in order to collect the State's very generous unemployment insurance benefits), while continuing to work "illegally" - ie in the undeclared/un-oficial black labor market. Obviously, the government loses revenues in the form of unpaid social security payments, but 24% unemployment here is a total myth. I'm not sure why the press doesn't point that out.
Ideas are not patentable, but a machine that implements the idea is what's patentable. Someone demonstrated that software implementations are equivalent to a custom-built machine. And poof mathematical algorithms (like RSA for example) and business methods (still really just ideas) became patentable.

So it's not that you can apply an idea to a machine, it's that you can implement the idea as a machine using a general purpose computer and some software. Now, you can certainly fight against this ... but can you afford to do so?

I don't think it's right. I think the systems needs overhaulin'
Who was this person who rented the car? He was driving in the wrong lane. What kind of screening did RelayRides do?
The other joshkerr's are out of luck (recycling usernames)
Reality intrudes. If you have a day job, or even if you're a student, it's hard to allocate 3-4 days to something that is not either paying the bills or contributing to your studies.
Here's a place that teaches you about joining, giving nice experience for when you start your own: http://openhatch.org/
Have you ever lived in a hacker house? I haven't, and if you haven't, then I don't think either of us are in the position to say the whole point of living in a hacker house is to work non-stop. You simply don't know that.

Of course lots of work is going to get done at such a place, but who said that the experience and fun wouldn't also be incredibly beneficial to a young developer?
I just looked at rents after posting this article and it looks like things are going up about $100/mo at least in the areas I had saved on PadMapper.

My advice would be to wait and find a place you'll like and just realize once you get a full lease (ie- 1 year or more) you'll be there a while because in a year, rent will definitely be way higher.
Beyond checking that he has a valid drivers license (not suspended, etc), what else do you expect them to do?
Not to get into the with or without www. argument, but this domain would benefit without the prefix. www.so.cl looks odd, especially when they are trying to brand it as "social". Only reason why I'm bringing it up is that they are forcing the www.
Looks like protovis, unless they are using different tools for each graphic.
http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/ex/pack.html
The Unit Record - "Not Likely to Upstage Those Dazzling New Computers"
That ad is for an internship, not a hackathon. It offers room, board and $3333/month. That's a better offer than most summer jobs for college students and more money than most students would make freelancing. Unpaid internships are still disturbingly common. The ad makes it clear that real work is expected. I really don't see a problem here.
I feel that Ryan's conflating hackathons - 1-2 day coding events - with 2+ week residence situations where you would probably be trying to actually build a business.

Some developers do enjoy drinking redbull and sleeping under a desk because evidently they do it voluntarily. I don't see the problem with that.

What's missing from the arguments in the article? I'm generally a supporter of hackathons, but if I was to play devil's advocate and advise caution among developers, I'd say:

* Although the entry price is usually free/nominal, there's still the opportunity cost of your time. And hackathons can leave you pretty drained for the next day, so a weekend hackathon needs to be justifiably worth it in terms of the learning, fun, and/or social connections you'll make from it.

* Most hackathons nowadays are sponsored by companies wanting to promote their platforms among developers. If the focus or requirement is to use those platforms, you need to think hard about whether they're worth your effort.

* You will be subjected to pitches of varying lengths. I've witnessed "one day hackathons" which were half a day of preamble. So your hacking efforts may be minimal.

* Wifi access is critical and if the organisers haven't got their act together, you would have been more productive at home.

* You can learn a technology at a hackathon or you can build something cool. You will be disappointed if you expect to do both at the same event.

* If you're trying to start a business at a weekend, coding is probably not the way to do it. So if you're going to a pure coding hackathon with the aim of starting a business, you will probably be disappointed. (Startup Weekend etc make more sense for that.)
Wait... Who in their right mind would work for free on someone else's project? And sign away the ownership of the code (non open source) for them to profit from?

Every programmer I know have more ideas than they will ever have time to finish. Why would they do something like that?
IME your description of twenty-somethings as cannon fodder is more common on Wall Street and at IT consulting firms than Silicon Valley. For example, everything I've read is that Facebook does not overwork their employees in the course of normal business.

http://www.quora.com/Facebook-Inc-company/What-are-the-avera...

In the very early days of a startup (< 50 employees), people often work crazy hours. But everything I've seen suggests that once you start to scale, crazy hours are less common except when deadlines loom.
Solitude is great for creativity. Labs/offices/hacker spaces are great for making that creativity a reality. You don't hire in more people in a startup because you want to stifle creativity... you need to get shit done sometimes.

The "why not both" meme comes to mind. Go sit in a hammock for a month or two, come back to the lab and try to get somewhere practical, then go back to the hammock. You need creativity, but you also need critique from peers out on the same ledge you're on.

Which reminds me of the hammock driven development talk[1]. The talk really resonated with me.

[1]: https://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586
"It's clearly written by someone who thinks they can throw material things at a Developer and then get them to work 20-hour days for three months straight."

Clearly? Given it's almost certainly not a 9 to 5 job. But I fail to see anything that indicates the job is consists of "20-hour days for three months straight".

As an aside part of being young (or not knowing about something when you are old) is learning from experience. Even though I don't necessarily agree that this involves 20 hour days, it seems like a reasonable paid opportunity and a good environment. If I wanted to break into TV, I would totally think it was reasonable to spend time as a 24 hour a day personal assistant to an important person doing whatever needed to be done to make connections.

FWIW I spent some time recently doing free work for a VC in something I know about. And, viola, they are now sending me paid customers. Just like that. I gave them hours and hours of my time (with no expectation of any return) and it has paid off.

I really think you have the wrong attitude toward this situation.
Thoughts on being sexism neutral: "I Don't Know: Is There Anything You Can Do?"
I've ridden public transport all over the world as well, including in San Francisco and Oakland, and the only place I've ever felt even moderately uncomfortable was in Chicago. Muni does suck, but I've only got anecdotal reports that it's unsafe.
My understanding is that reporting that the debt should be considered "paid in full" will be reflected positively in a person's credit score. It's not going to completely undo all the damage from earlier reports of missed payments, etc., but it will take care of that particular debt and be counted as a debt paid.
Physicians use Latin for a reason. I believe they do not like to use it either. But they can not leave it back. It would mean throwing away hundreds of years study away.

In Turkey there is a hot topic about it. In 1928 with the order of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk we transitioned to use Latin alphabet instead of Arabic alphabet. It lead us to easier to reading and writing. And we got combined with European sciences and literature. But this caused a hole in our literature, science and in some more majors. We can't read any Arabic alphabet work nowadays. And this means hundreds and thousands of years of literature, physics and many more kinds of works are forgotten.
They don’t want to drink Red Bull all night and sleep under their desks.

Some of us do from time to time. It's fun. I've got a family, etc, but I like geeky extra curricular activities in the same way other people like gardening, hiking, or whatever.

All that said, I've seen the sort of hackathons Ryan's describing and they're a kind of stereotype in the same way "brogrammers" are a programmer stereotype. They're not the majority, they're just the cases people seem to be gossiping about. (Scoble has been to and written about quite a few good ones over the years, I think, and here in the UK, they're certainly more down to earth generally.)

So I think Ryan has a point for the opportunists' hackathons but not hackathons generally, and it's easy to misinterpret it that way.
"It will not. We orbit a self-sustaining fusion reaction which by definition will last our habitable life. The Earth, at least, is pretty much set."

We are set if we are allowed to find new ways to generate the energy. I don't see that happening right now or in the near future, in fact what I see is primarily an attempt to replace current usage.

Perhaps you have different sources that shows we have no problem and I would be happy to have a look at them. Otherwise we have to agree to disagree.

"Many environmentalists argue for nuclear and thorium reactors. What decade do you think it is?"

Perhaps our definition of environmentalists differ and perhaps it's because I am from Europe. But again if you have sources showing that the waste majority of envorimentalists are pro nuclear and pro thorium I would be happy to be proven wrong.

In fact this was the only thing that showed up.

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

In which even they argue that environmentalists anti-nuclear views are a misunderstanding.

So as it stands right now I have a hard time believing your claim to be true.
I just registered to say that the "remember me on this computer" checkbox on teh front page does not use a <label>. Whenever I see stuff like this (on a brand new website nonetheless!) I lose more hope we will see consistent and semantic website markup.
> Everyone else will be part of a "sports, arts, and leisure" society

It can't work. Leisured aristocracies become decadent, dysfunctional, hedonists. People on reservations with free food become violent drug addicts. The human animal can't cope with a struggle-less existence.

If automation leads to a society as you've described then automation will be stopped.
I don't think your conclusion at the end is true. Most undesirable work is in fact not valuable, in the sense of being paid well or easy to get, because, at least if it's also unskilled, there is a large supply of labor relative to demand. Stuff like janitorial work does not pay well and has no shortage. Similarly with McDonald's: they typically get many more applications than open positions, and not because they're paying $20/hr.
Because I suspect that presenting the data this way masks the reality of why there are sheer number of people who can't find work. But even without major (which I was simply curious about), the data set is suspiciously aggregated.

For example, what if we were to drill down into the data and discover that in the metric "Some college or degree" that 99% of the individuals who could not find work were in the "some college" category and only 1% were in the "degree" category. That would paint an entirely different picture: having a college degree is incredibly useful, but attending college without completing the degree is not very useful in terms of being employable.
My understanding is that this is different than a COD. From the perspective of the credit reporting agencies it will be considered the same thing as paying the debt in full. From the perspective of the government it will just look like someone paid their debt, not that they got extra money. But I'm not a tax expert or lawyer, this is just my best understanding after talking to a lot of people about it.
When you compare Roman & Greek letters to Arabic, it's clear that the former were designed for carving, and the latter for writing. It's interesting that the carving letters wound up being more suitable for a printing press.
How Android Developers Can Thrive With Google Play
Order - an interactive film by Selfcontrolfreak
The year followup will be more interesting.
Car accidents are foreseeable and inherent, but this guy was driving in the wrong lane, what if he intentionally did it as a suicide (not saying he did, but hypothetically).

What if someone rented a car and intentionally drove it into a crowd of people?
He's a fairly well-known blogger, podcaster, speaker, and .NET programmer who's entries get submitted here pretty frequently. But you could've learned this by visiting the link you're complaining about.
Student debt is different. Because it is backed by the federal government there is no incentive for private lenders to sell defaulted debt. In fact they end up making even more money off of defaults. There are some student loans that are made outside of the federal government's system, and these can be bought and sold. These are usually made under highly predatory circumstances like for profit scam schools.

We are looking at other ways to forgive student debt. I don't know much about it yet so I shouldn't say anything. It might not pan out, but I'm looking into it.
Another related issue are the startup accelerators claiming to be based on the Y Combinator model. Full of MBAs and no hackers in sight. They only offer office space, marketing advice, template spreadsheets, and a very tiny bit of money (none of it for paying workers).
The HTC One X Has Cleared US Customs
Disclaimer/confession: I happen to be the author. That may not be obvious but it is also no secret. I posted it as my contribution to the general ongoing HN discussion of issues like women in tech and related stuff that shows up here.

Enjoy. Or not.

Thanks.
Ironically I think he's actually already following the advice from the link by not visiting it.
But wouldn't this be great? I think it would be fantastic if we could some how organize so that people could buy their own debts for pennies on the dollar. It seems difficult for several reasons.

Collection agencies often have a wide range of flexibility and can almost always get rid of the ridiculous fees that are added for missing payments. Most of the time they're just trying to figure out how much they can realistically bleed out of someone and go for that. A well informed person should be able to cut a deal with a collector, but if you're in that situation you've already had your credit ruined.
There was tremendous wealth concentration, ultimately leading to the New Deal and Federal Reserve.
It always seemed to me that the simplest way to protect content is to just upload a bunch of garbage with the same file name making it impossible to locate the actual movie, app, etc. It doesn't seem like it would require a lot of sophistication either. It could probably be done effectively, even showing a 90-minute repeating trailer for the movie or something similar. I think a lot of people pirate simply because it's the easiest way to get a movie. If paying $9.99 becomes the easiest way, then a lot of casual pirates will just buy it.

Virus writers seem to like this technique, uploading garbage to usenet. (50Kb files pretending to be a feature film, etc). I've always wondered why movie studios didn't do more of that.
The article he's talking about[1] is linked from this post, literally within the first sentence.

More generally, Scott Hanselman is known, to me anyway, mostly as a blogger and host of the This Developer's Life podcast[2] with Rob Conery. He works for Microsoft.

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIgn...

[2] http://www.thisdeveloperslife.com/
It's inspiring for me that Mark went through such an incredible ordeal in the founding of Facebook but he was still able to make it work between him and Priscilla. It shows that you can have a relationship while also trying to change the world (and, hell, your partner may be what gets you through).
Probably easier with photoshop
4 Steps To Relieve Back Pain
No. What makes you think that?
Depends on the type of learner (trial and error, or firstly building a conceptual foundation). I've come to the point that the pressure of problem solving is not enjoyable for most people.
I could be wrong, but I suspect if you offer to pre-pay for an entire year you should be in the clear.
Barely read the title, saw the link to a video, pictured an image in my head of someone yawning and others copying ... had to yawn myself.
Are searches public?! I'm seeing the same!!
You insure a vehicle. If the vehicle is insured, then that insurer is the primary, so in the event of a claim, that is the insurance company on the hook.

Now it is true that when you sign an insurance policy, part of the contract makes the insurance company liable for the driver if he is in an accident in another vehicle and for whatever reason there isn't a primary or the primary uses subrogation to recoup damages from that insurer.

But that is not the most common case, and certainly shouldn't be used as the standard for what to expect would happen in this case.

Have you ever heard that women's insurance rates are typically more expensive than men's because they lend their cars more often to others? Now why would that be if the drivers were responsible as opposed to the vehicle insurer? Again, civil law is not black and white. Insurance companies have teams of lawyers in every major city in the country to fight their way out of claims when possible and certainly there are times that they succeed in recouping some damages from other insurers. My point was that this is not the norm. The primary insurance company is the first in line when a claim is to be made.
Hi, the short-term option sounds very interesting to me. Will definitely check out landmark. Meanwhile, do you have any particular motels in mind?
Thank you for pointing that out, I've just changed some code :)
That's a good idea. I'm going to add that to the road map.
Well, in that case, maybe it warrants a second look.
I can't wait until some of the programmable-matter type approaches really take off. The closest we have is 3d printing.

What I am hoping to become popular and inexpensive something like 3d printing but with the ability to either assembly parts into machines automatically or the ability to print functional machines all in one go.

When you have inexpensive machines that can do that type of thing, then you really will be able to program reality in your garage, and print out fully assembled machines from open source components you downloaded from the internet.

On a slightly different topic, I was thinking, in response to this article, in a way, no one who is trying to innovate in technology (especially things like software) is really working alone. Instead we are building off of existing platforms and modules that others have created. For example, I am probably one of the most introverted programmers around, but the platform that I am building, ostensibly working on it completely alone, integrates many, many different pieces of open (and closed) source software/APIs, created relatively recently by hundreds or thousands of different people.

I'm working on a product based on jQuery, jQuery UI, WebKit (V8), CodeMirror, NodeJS, jQuery context menu, noty, NowJS (socket.io), CoffeeScript, FckEditor, jQuery editable, jquery ipweditor, Google Web Fonts (more than a dozen contributed fonts by many different authors), Google API hosting, AjaxUpload, NodeJs (NPM, shellJS, formidable, rimraf, async, request, cssmin, vows, zlib, mongolian, etc.) Rackspace API, PayPal/Stripe API, Ubuntu (Debian), Xen. Just look at the huge number of people that have contributed to Debian/Ubuntu, V8 or WebKit or Node.js recently or the rest of it over the years -- there is no way I could even consider doing this project without that stuff. So in a way everyone is in the lab already which is open source/APIs/github or whatever.
How To Turn An Unproductive Day Into A Day Well Spent