skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The top ten percent probably don't reinvent the wheel when they don't have to.

True, but they can invent the wheel because there isn't one, and they can do so in a way that others will find it useful as well. It is a different point than edw519 is making, but what he said made me think about where I disagreed and why.
The purpose of code libraries, is to make everyone more efficient, by solving a problem so others don't have to. If that means a programmer can produce twice as much functionality within a given time frame, or is able to produce any functionality at all where he couldn't otherwise, there is still a net benefit for everyone. This should not be scoffed at; it is the reason why we are able to produce software as featureful and useful as we do. Imagine each of the XFCE, KDE, and GNOME teams having to rewrite X.org all over again, and how much less each of those desktops would have to offer right now if they did. I'm willing to trade useful functionality sooner for less machismo.

But libraries don't always achieve this, and the degree to which it doesn't determines which people will be motivated to create a replacement. If a framework solves a common problem, but does so in a painful, unwieldy, or hard to understand way, some hacker out there will probably think it a better, more efficient choice to just write and use a new solution. It might be a fork of or series of patches to the original framework, or it may be an entirely new codebase -- which of these routes to follow is a judgement call. Nevertheless, it requires what I think is an important distinction, which is the ability to not just understand what problem the framework solves, but how it solves that problem. And not understanding it just in following what each line of code does, but why what steps it takes work. At that point, you end up leveraging a framework far more that relying on it. If something tomorrow were to happen that required you leave it behind, it would be a pain in the ass, but not a brick wall.

There is also the question, more important that the above in my mind, of understanding if you actually have the problem the framework solves, or if you are attempting to shoe-horn. But I worry that might be a bit off-topic of this particular thread, and would probably warrant another 3-4 paragraphs of musing.
Yeah it's basically the same thing. Hypnosis, as far as I can tell, is a grab bag of techniques (much like NLP) and anchoring/triggers is/are definitely used. For instance, some trance inductions involve interrupting a trigger/pattern before it can complete (i.e., the handshake interrupt). Anchoring a command or suggestion to a physical trigger can help cement it, too.
"Warning: Studies have shown that playing video games is really fun, so you watch out now"
Perhaps the threat is overblown, but Perverted Justice has achieved over 400 convictions since 2003:

http://www.perverted-justice.com
That's a bad example to bring up, considering how Apache httpd is such a massive pile of shit.
Read My Tweets redesigned.  (Tweet exchange with reading comprehension check.)
Hopefully it is easier to understand and looks a bit more professional now:

http://www.readmytweets.com
Google University Inaugural Lecture: Expanding the Frontiers of Computer S...
Challenge to plant methane link
Wow, memories. Reminds me of going to the 2600 meetings in the Pru's food court and hanging out with guys from the other sides of Boston who I'd have known no other way. Guys with whom I'd later go to college and/or start companies. Reminds me of learning how computers actually worked by reading and finally understanding "Assembley for Cracking" by the shepherd, playing with Macsbug, ResEdit's code editor, and referring to a Morotola m68k manual which Motorola sent me for free after I called and asked for one. Reminds me of cracking software for fun. Neither distributing the cracks nor really even using the cracked software but knowing that I could do it. Reminds me of trying to find every way possible to locate the base-address of the VRAM and then blitting pixels directly into it "by hand for speed." That MOV16 instruction on the 68040 was really something. Back then my little brain focused so much energy on this stuff and it's something I don't even remember unless someone posts something like this to news.yc. So strange.

Oh and if anyone has "Assembley for Cracking" I'd love to read it again! :)
>A reserve requirement suggests an amount of reserve capital that is safe for operation of a bank.

In one case we have members of the public who have passed a driving test. In the other, we have the foremost experts in the field, using the latest theories of risk, working with millions of dollars of modelling and statistical equipment, with their jobs on the line. For what good reason would a single one of them look at the reserve rate and say "Although the government doesn't claim that this is a safe rate for banks to operate at, but instead sets it completely arbitrarily, and admits to the fact that it's totally arbitrary, and has not changed this rate in several decades because it is an obsolete tool of monetary policy, I am nevertheless going to take it to 'suggest' a safe level of reserves, totally ignore all of my models and education, and just pick that number on a completely irrational basis."
Photoshop Stickers on Billboards
IPhone to own 40% smartphone market
I posted this as I was reminded of it when I read through the comments here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432299

Thought it was an excellent blog post and still relevant today and so I posted it after a quick search revealed that it hadn't been posted yet here.
It would be much much much easier. Possible, in fact. Markup is the most rigid part of the system. For it to change in a useful manner means that every tool from my browser to my xhmtml parsing tools must change to adapt before I can work with it in a way that doesn't degrade my development environment. Javascript, on the other hand, is the most flexible part of the stack. It is a dynamic programming language whose behavior can be altered by inserting additional code into my particular copy of the running page.

If they switched from FBML to JS for providing that stuff, I would go from not being able to view my app at all until it is deployed to being able to stub out all of their calls to return test data (and even do interactive UI actions) so that I and my designer could see it pretty much exactly as it will look once live.

It's a huge difference.
Watch out, you're blowing your cover as lazy :)
Yeah, but you can depreciate cubicle systems, which is something you can't do with drywall.

Curiously, cubes count as office furniture (and hence business machines), which means that you can depreciate it much more efficiently than you can if it was a capital improvement cost, which makes it cheaper on paper. Even better, if you've got some crafty people, you can have someone else own the things and lease the cubes - which is even better from a tax point of view.

While this probably doesn't apply in a startup context, it has a significant impact if you're moving into a larger space and will be paying for the improvements yourself.
The problem isn't the USPTO, it's the patent applicants themselves who do not disclose the prior art in their own applications. The USPTO is supposed to conduct its own prior art search, but the volume of applications, coupled with funding which decreases every year, results in a very minimal search for direct prior art.

Patents can and often are invalidated for the patentee's failure to include prior art; in fact, it is the leading cause of patent invalidation.

The problem is that the USPTO doesn't have the number of employees it needs to examine each patent, as fully as would be necessary to stop "obvious" patents from getting through, within a time frame for allowing meaningful inventions to hit the market in a timely fashion.
If you're willing to pay, you could try approaching they owners to see if they're willing to sell/license.
What I’ve Learned from My First Big Trade Show
Expense. What if the invention is very expensive to make but the inventor is a high school dropout living above his parent's garage?
This one requirement now completely invalidates his rights to the invention he created; this means less incentive for people to invent. It also applies against companies as well, b/c now they have to invest resources in researching an invention and in developing the production line to crank it out if it works.

Timeline. You require them to build the product before it can be patented, which means a massive incentive before they even know if they'll get any protection.

REDUNDANT. Patent law already has a "reduction to practice" requirement. This requirement usually requires the inventor to build a working copy (and this is the most common way that the RTP requirement is met) or to provide detailed enough instructions that any person in the same art could build a working copy of the invention.
The Real Pictures in Gaza
I think we'd be better off if the qualifier were mandated, regardless of holding a degree and at what GPA.

The metaphor of a degree being a pointer to a body of knowledge fits well here -- I think it was pg who I originally got that metaphor from. I can imagine extending the metaphor to where the degree points to a graph of knowledge, and the GPA is a walk length. No knowledge of which nodes are touched, just how many. Hopefully this metaphor isn't too much of a stretch. :-)

The problem is that the GPA to walk relationship isn't well defined at all, and it still doesn't say what they know, or more importantly how well they think and learn.

The only thing I can really glean from a degree-holder and their GPA is that they were able to learn some body of material at the pace of a college-level course, and were able to retain and work with that information well enough to get the GPA they have. Maybe, depending on how grading is done, and what their grade was based on. It is a very weak indicator even then, but better than using it for determining stored knowledge.

I think it might be better to include as part of the qualifier (in fact, maybe even most of it) a problem they need to learn and apply new things to solve.
Slicehost iPhone app now available
Having met graduates of these "esteemed" graduate schools, I think that their degrees are exactly worth the tuition they paid. Which is to say, that I would trust the average community college graduate more than some from Ecoles.

America may suck balls at the pre-12 level, but college and up, even our community colleges kick the world's ass.
I think this project should try to compare itself to pastebin. It's cool by itself, but does not have the simplicity of pastebins.
Catfight at Yahoo - Decker Out
To encourage more people to visit the 'New' page and upvote stories, give users one point per day for visiting it.
Indeed. Book knowledge at universities is wonderful, but the value of the social experience cannot be understated. In some sense, one's classmates at a university form a giant fraternity. Stephen Leacock put this quite eloquently in "Oxford as I See It":

"If I were founding a university--and I say it with all the seriousness of which I am capable--I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then after that, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books."
I think it has a lot to do with corporate climate, more than the studies are capturing. I have worked in small offices, cubeland, and open office plans. I have been in open office plans where communication was non-existent, and in small offices where we communicated well.

My current place is a very open floorplan, but it just works. We all know that one of the problems we have is that we spread around disease more than we would like. But the thing is we are all extremely happy with the format, and with the benefits we get out of it. There have been offers made in the past to change it, and the team decided to turn it down.

I think breaking it down to floorplan alone doesn't address the issue fully.
I think you're better off NOT taking micropayments, primarily because the cost of authorizing the transaction dominates the actual value of the transaction.

What do I mean? Well, suppose you had asked me to pay a nickel to read this comment thread. I value my own time at about a hundred dollars an hour. I've already spent more than a nickel of time reading this thread, so clearly I should have been willing to pay a nickel to read it. But the mental decision point on whether to cross the penny gap or not, plus the amount of friction it would take for me to authorize this transaction (fish out credit card, type in digits, sign in, click "Are you sure you want to pay $.05 to this merchant?", yadda yadda), is worth far more than a nickel of frustration to me. That increases the cost of the content to me but it is revenue that you don't capture.

Rather than selling things for micropayments, do what essentially everybody does in this space: sell a microcurrency in macro-units ($10, $20, etc), and then make authorizations to spend the microcurrency as friction free as possible. For getting over that penny gap on the first transaction, you probably want to give people a significant incentive to buy their first hit of microcurrency -- 100 dragon eggs for $5 instead of $10 like usual, whatever.

Clarifying edit: for non-Americans reading this comment, it might be useful to know that a nickel is .05 USD and a penny is .01 USD. They're the common names for two of our low-value coins.
Agreed. Dead worries me and I'm very happy I turned showdead on - not because spam shouldn't be deaded, but because I've seen plenty of legitimate comments "deaded" on threads..
I Agree, you made a fair point and while it may not be data studded it wasn't trolling either.

I do disagree though. I don't know the woman, but i listened to a lecture she gave via the STVP Podcast series. She seemed really bright and if I remember correctly didn't have a computer graphic background before joining AutoDesk.

It is easy to lambast "pointy haired bosses" but it seems like Yahoo is a classic case of a company needing strategic realignment. They have amazing traffic spread over dozens of business units. Her task is to rationalize those, set a course and turn around a massive company. Her success at AutoDesk would suggest she will be able to hire the right technical leaders to join her team.
How would it invalidate his right if he's made it? That wasn't really what I meant, though-- the requirement would be more that you need to actively be pursuing the thing you're patenting, instead of simply reserving the idea. I don't think requiring it do be made _before_ a patent to be issued would be a good idea, but just the _idea_ isn't worth much, unless it's _really_ nonobvious.
They're right, but I doubt this post will have much effect. It's a profitable game and of the thousands of people who click through to that hosting review site, very few are already Dreamhost customers, have read Dreamhost's blog, or, heck, probably even know what a "blog" is.

All those horrendous price comparison sites, catalog sites, and other junk sites are still out there and still thriving just because consumers are pretty ignorant when it comes to online research. These sites won't be going away any time soon, alas.
The Marketing Content Factory
which star wars movie would be added to my queue?
My experience has been with the inverse of this, though. I've been seeing Microsoft and friends reserving literally thousands of patents on things that aren't even tangentially related to anything they're working on, in language so broad it rules out huge areas of development.
Good for you, standing up for yourself.

I think if you hang out with "programmers" long enough, you'll learn that the worst ones spend the majority of their time complaining about the shortcomings of others' "programming" techniques or methodologies. In reality, there is no de facto standard modus operandi for the nirvana of any code, and if you want to learn, it's best to just keep an open mind.
That is a good idea. Billing monthly maybe possible too, depending on the product/service.
Well, tracking can work both ways. Perhaps you could use this script to help you avoid Domino's pizza.
I read books while many of my teachers lectured. They knew there was only so much they could do for me without seeming to neglect the rest of the class. I was left alone to read or do what I wanted as long as I did the work that was assigned.
wow, i couldn't have paid you to illustrate my point any better.

Where there is fear, there are opportunities.
A new Google Sitemap Generator for your website
Salaries for professors are not the main expense in a university. In fact, salaries have increased at a much slower pace then tuition. The whole infrastructure of the university is what is expensive: labs, administration, fitness centers, counseling, etc. Real education is just a small part of the package when a student goes to a university.

Also, tuition is not going to research. Most research is payed by the Government and a few non-profit institutions.
The education bubble is, in large part, a credit bubble. If you have a resource which has perceived value approaching infinite, competition for the resource, and a government policy subsidizing consumption of the resource (especially via loans), you're naturally going to see the price balloon.

It would be like what happened if you subsidized the speculative investment in assets that people irrationally thought would never decline in price, like, I don't know, homes.
Why Carol Bartz Is Right for Yahoo
How to: Boost Your Geek Cred
Should or shouldn't?
Dude, seriously.

What is the point of this submission? Can you imagine if everyone who tossed up a "rate my webapp" post here then came back and posted again everytime they updated it?

No offense, but I think you should grow your userbase via other means.
I don't think requiring it do be made _before_ a patent to be issued would be a good idea

The courts that have ruled on these things apparently think it is a good idea.

http://robertplattbell.blogspot.com/2007/10/file-early-file-...

In Pfaff, Justice Stevens wrote:

"Second, the invention must be ready for patenting. That condition may be satisfied in at least two ways: by proof of reduction to practice before the critical date; or by proof that prior to the critical date the inventor had prepared drawings or other descriptions of the invention that were sufficiently specific to enable a person skilled in the art to practice the invention." (Id., at 12)

Perhaps you do not know that patents are enforceable back to their original filing dates (making their issuing dates largely irrelevant), and that it takes several years for patents to issue. What is your reasoning that led to your conclusion that patents should issue before they are qualified to issue?
Scale Economics (continued)
>sorry, but can't remember the source

You'll have to do better than that; it definitely isn't like the immune system stops adapting after the age of 20; otherwise vaccines wouldn't work.
Google Quick Search Box for Mac - Spotlight meets Quicksilver?
I was at his place for a fund raiser a while back. It is a truly awesome place, hundreds of tanks in huge metal buildings around a courtyard. My favorite was a scud missile launcher complete with scud from Yugoslavia (not Iraq). You would expect that a missile would be bright and shiny, like a new car, but no, this thing looked it had been beaten with sledge hammers. I am not sure whether it was the assembly process or whether it had just had a hard life.
What countries does this support? No mention in the FAQ.

I tried adding my mobile number with country code (Australia), but never received confirmation.

EDIT: Gah, I read your reply, "In terms of text messaging it's US only (right now), but if you're willing to use it from IM, email, or the mobile web site then you could definitely create shortcuts for sites anywhere in the world." You should add that to your FAQ.
And depending on the typeface/typesetter, sentences might also be set with more space after them than is normally between words, though it's quite unlikely to be twice as much. (TeX will do this, for example.)
Prompting users to create additional identities the first time they login would be helpful. I also missed how to do the SMS thing and just assumed it was because you were still in beta mode.
I worked on a highly unsuccessful multi-billion dollar health system that was intended to solve all of these problems on a national level. I can tell you now that a small guy working from the bottom up with individual institutions is much better placed to solve real problems than a top-down bureaucracy. The only hurdle is convincing them that they can trust your system with confidential and life-critical data.
Top 5 podcasts for App Developers
This post reminded me of an JoS post here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html

At the time I wanted to see where I could apply the 5 why's, but never got around to it.
This hopefully will become the "other means". If Read My Tweets (or a text ad variant) becomes popular, then you can use it to direct traffic to your site.

The problem with paid advertising is that it doesn't really reach the early adopter crowd -- they have learned to ignore advertising altogether.

It's time for an alternative.
What about qualifications that require specialised equipment or infrastructure? If you need to learn about say chip fabrication or radiology it's not enough to just read about it.

I suppose you could just pay for access to facilities and equipment on demand, but in the case of something like a chemistry lab or x-ray machine the institution granting access has to know your level of competance before they give you access and the easiest way of doing that without checking each time is a structured program.
Yeah, I was thinking that. You're also omitting an explicit return, I would guess by assuming the value of the last statement (as an expression) is to be returned (this won't work in general, because Javascript allows multiple returns, like C or Java). It's closer to a lisp syntax, by using nested lists instead of structs/maps. I submit that it's against the spirit of JSON to be able to name the values, and then not use that ability. I think you're Greenspunning it ;-). Sure is shorter though. :-)
The problem with videos such as this is that it's hard for the average guy to determine the validity. If they want me to take the video at its face value, possibly provide references so I know the photos were taken in Gaza and also recently.
Completely agree. Some of the more interesting research goes on in places like Watson Research and IBM Almaden. You need that kind of infrastructure and backing for all kinds of audacious projects.
If it involves more than one patent owned by different owners it is a classic tragedy of the commons problem: each patent holder has an incentive to maximize his demands because the downside (risk that the overall patent cost is too much for the purchaser) is shared by all the sellers (the patent owners).
Ok, now that's what you call a hobby!
Might be a little too clever. So many options in the UI it's a little confusing to figure it out without signing up - which I am reluctant to do until I have figured out how it works.

How will this site make money?
Pizza snob. You know you eat it at meetups.
This is one of the reasons I like PayPal and use it in preference to credit cards for online purchases. It has very low friction. To buy something online I normally need to get up, find my card (back when I used CC frequently, I had the numbers memorized, but no more), type in digits, go through the whole procedure.

Whereas, with PP, the site just takes me to PayPal's site where cookies know who I am, so I just enter my password, press OK, and I'm done.

It's gotten to the point where I often check if a vendor takes PayPal as soon as I even think of ordering.