skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should apply to intern here:
http://ict.usc.edu/internships/

I did it in '99 and '01. Then I was hired fulltime out of school and worked there for three years. Most definately an awesome place for a creative person with Computer Science and Psychology background.
Austin is pretty bikeable, and there is (limited) car sharing for the few times you actually need a car. The buses seem like they'd work well enough and were fine the couple of times I used them, but biking is faster and more fun.

I think Dallas and Houston have Austin beat in terms of public transit. Dallas has plenty of rail, Houston has some rail with a lot in the works, and Austin has a commuter rail line that's about to open but doesn't actually get you anywhere without transferring to a bus that will be stuck in traffic. There's more to a good transit system than rail, but it's the best indicator I have since I've only used Austin's system in Texas.
"it always looks like it's peaking if your growth is hyperbolic."

Sure, but the fact we're even discussing $250m valuation for a company whos only real worth seems to be its users and possible future profit, should be a good pointer that this is a peak. Much like Facebook peaked.
Great post, I was feeling lonely in the small-clean-code-works-just-fine-without-tests camp
Bankers' excessive salaries as predictors of Depression
andreyf's comment got the gist of it. I think personal computing should exclude things most people may only do for work like programming, writing reports or filling out forms even if those kinds of things were often the "killer apps" for personal computers when they first appeared 25+ years ago.

These days personal computing is more about the seamless integration of processing with personal and social activities which is why companies like Apple, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc are doing well.
That's very funny but as someone with an unusual name it's less funny.

More seriously your should use a middle name to provide uniqueness. People are basically unable to recognise words they haven't heard before. Complexity in the part of the name used normally is a hassle.
Make Something People Will Buy (Corollary to YC's Make Something People Want)
munin and pingdom.com
Product manager!
I think we're already at the start of the revolution in education he's asking for. With Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, if you want to know something, you can get that knowledge more effortlessly with each passing day. I think what's missing now is a rating system, a process guide to step you through it, and video conferencing to handle study groups, before we fully have a sort of Wiki-University.
Make something people want... more than their money.
Tara Wheeler Miss Virginia 2009
The "5 whys" don't need to be exactly 5; it's just the name for the process of getting to the root cause of a problem.
Evan Williams already sold Blogger to Google pre-IPO, so I don't blame him for seeing how big he can make Twitter now that he has breathing room.

You normally don't create another startup after becoming wealthy just to become more wealthy.
I would suggest a more advanced language, such as Scala, because Java, C# and Python are all essentially subsets of Scala.

Python ⊄ Scala IMHO
The Hangman Cheat (Computer hangman game that uses statistical guesses)
I play dota so i totally get it ... ;-)
You'd be surprised, because thats exactly what serial entrepreneurs do.
HTML!

<html>
<head>
<!-- will to kill all humans goes here -->
</head>
<body>
<!-- insert weapon systems and super strength here -->
</body>
</html>
sometimes direct translations from Chinese are just weird, makes me think of how my Chinese friends use 'forced labor', which sounds scary, but they just mean 'manual labor'
Everybody guesses and whoever guesses too high by the largest error, gets his bid accepted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner's_curse
There've been a few of articles on here about it so I'm sure you've caught it already, but I'll just say: praise what the child does, not who they are. Praise a child for doing a good job or trying again after failure, not for being smart or gifted.
While I can't prove it, my intuition tells me that when I do TDD, my designs are much more flexible and my code is much more reliable. Stuff that I would have buried in one class is often split into smaller classes. This gives some overhead, yes, but the tests are well worth the effort.

>"If you must do testing..."

Are you suggesting that tests are bad in general?
This begs the question: why is SAP work so grossly overpaid (at least over here in Germany)? Doesn't look particularly exciting or challenging to me. Most of the implementations I've seen are of the 'meh' type: buggy, boring, bloated. I'm a bit biased though since a colleague of mine ran away screaming from a highly-paid SAP job. 'Never again', he said.
SOB :(
Big market, big projects, small amount of qualified people, people who don't yet realize how dumb is it to run your business on something you need to pay a single vendor to maintain (ie, most people).
Nah, that's pretty much the tale of a lot of software that I've written.
Actually this is mostly about the authors continuing quest to find the perfect man bag for his Kindle.

I use the Sony Reader which is a lot slimmer with better build quality than the Kindle. I heard good things about the iLiad which would be better if you want a bigger device, keyboard etc.

The real mark against the Kindle is the DRM. It's basically the iTunes choice all over again except worse as the device can't play anything not bought from there. If your not technically literate you might want to trade control for ease of use but if your on Hackers News your really should be buying the device you can hack.
I don't understand how the cellphone is involved in this. My working credit card right now is a piece of plastic with a number on it. Why couldn't I pull the RFID device out of the cellphone and put it on my keychain or in a block of cheese?
If outside the US would be an option, Berlin (Germany)
Public transportation is great (24/7), a lot of cultural activities, quite a view of web startups there and in contrast to other big cities in Europe and the US, it very cheap.
Your duck example is interesting. Obviously the evolution doesn't use any top-down design.
lol.. 108 727 181
add me
In the broader subject of illustrating any thought I rather liked the suggestions of http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/. The main categories from it:

who/what - portrait
how much - chart
where - map
when - timeline
how - flowchart
why - multiple variable plot
This should be almost trivial to contain, since Facebook is a closed system. Beyond users flagging spam manually, it would be easy to implement some heuristic filter to detect these scammers: new accounts with very few friends and lots of sent messages.

I actually got a 419 scam message on GitHub last week, but that was the only one so far.
Or I guess you could just downmod me.

I was curious, that's all. I'm not a image-manipulation person (the largest amount of image-manipulation I've done involved porting an algorithm to do some stuff from C++ to python), only have cursory experience with both Photoshop and the GIMP, but have heard both "It's no replacement!" and "It's a perfectly good replacement" from people I know who do have a lot of experience with image-manipulation.

I know, for instance, that the interface is wildly different than photoshop's, and was curious as to how much time you had invested into examining it.
Ask HN: Afraid I've dug myself into a hole

12 points by fbacon 80 years ago | 20 comments | flag

Hello guys. This is my first time writing to HN - I've held off mainly because the internet hasn't been invented yet. I'm an interior designer, and I have been doing that for the last 4 years...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_(painter)
World to George: System.out.println(GreetingsFactory.newInstance().createGreeting("Hello, George!"));

George to World:
(prn "Hello, World!")
I have a unique name Tarrant, after my ancestors from England. Sure there are times when I get annoyed that people can't say my name. I'm at the point where when asked for my name for an order at a restaurant I'll give something like Dobbs, Bob or Joe to make life slightly easier. I will say that I greatly prefer having a unique name over having a common name. I've always loved my name and wouldn't trade it, even with the hassles it can bring.
I had been considering getting a kindle when I got some spare cash, but hadn't taken the time to really research them yet (waiting until I could afford one - plus there will probably be better options by that time).

I'm afraid that the lack of a monospace font on the kindle means that I will absolutely not be buying one, as a lot of the books I would want to carry on it would be technical reference type of stuff.
One of the problem using monads in dynamically typed languages is, as this article suggests, the need to overload 'return' operation by the type of results, not by the type of arguments. I once tried to address this issue.

http://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/wiliki.cgi?Scheme%3aExpli...
I prefer jQuery. Mainly because for what I do with javascript, it feels a lot more "declarative" (best word I can think of at the moment) than Prototype.
I like it how you list

Delivered tech support to many families in a local neighborhood,
spreading the word of Free and Open Source Software in the process.[…]

This is real work and should be listed there. Will add sth similar to my CV, too.

Perhaps so one day this would be seen as work even by relatives.
Apparently it also has scalability problems with very large networks - ask the Facebook Site Reliability team. They have 20,000 servers and tried to make Nagios work repeatedly before writing their own tools
For games, Hamburg (Germany) is great. Probably slightly more expensive than Berlin, but at least as great in terms of public transportation and culture.
Les Orchard (who used to work for delicious.com) has a good response to this article. Part of his argument is that Flickr is a really bad place to start a tag analysis, since people generally only tag their own stuff (the big win for tags comes when lots of people provide their personal tags for a single entity, meaning you can look at the data in aggregate). http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/01/18/tags-do-work-for-me-at-l...
Ask HN: Where's the best place to purchase a domain name?
Whilst GoDaddy has had a lot of brand name recognition through show like Diggnation, the extensive "pimping" of extras and the lack luster user experience leave me underwhelmed.

Does anyone know of any good, reputable and well designed Domain Name Provider? (worthy of HN!)
Talented, yes. But as the forensic psychologist cited in NY Times articles suggests, probably a psychopathic (aka sociopathic) personality: virtually without remorse; quietly reveling in his serial "murder of wallets."
There's definitely a lesson here for all business and professional relationships: about not mistaking a person's likability with trustworthiness.
...and not letting subjective impressions or word of mouth consensus overrule basic standards such as diversification of assets and "if it's too good to be true..." skepticism.

A super sad story of a super-sized Ponzi marketer and the pain he can cause :(
Yes for the public transport. No for the hacker 'connectivity': not all cities are created equal in Europe; there are huge differences in cost of living and 'cost of entrepreneurship' (taxes & regulations).
Can you elaborate on what leads you to that belief?
Brilliant! I listen to this on Radio 4 and was I looked down the list of Radio4 podcasts and didn't see it. Guess the list I was looking at wasn't complete.
tdd = test driven design
You didn't specify the country so: Tokyo.

Rent is expensive, though.
Although interesting, this is like saying that high CEO salaries are a predictor of company disaster.

Correlation does not imply causation ...
I've read SICP online. Also most things I learned about programming I have learned online. Books tend to lag behind the current technology trends.
Microsoft office 2007 تحميل + سريال + كراك + تعريب + اوفيس عربي + تنشيط - منتديات عوالم
The Terminator was programmed in 6502 assembly language.
I suspect that there is a long tail of root causes when it comes to accidents. So a little more analysis of a number of cases might have led to a better conclusion.
I've lived in Palo Alto most of my life and wouldn't want to live anywhere else. You can walk around the main parts of the city and it has somewhat of a community feeling while also being a major hub for tech and innovation.
yeah, from my experience Metro usually takes twice as long as driving. It is very cheap though ($1.25/ride).
The only thing missing from some development goes is a notable feature reversion based on manager deciding that it is now going against the strategic vision.

"Duck used to have webbing in his feet, but MGMT thought having another fluid-moving apparatus would diminish how much you value the wing. May be available as a paid add-on at a later date."
no. Testing has it's place, in important functionality, high level features, or if you are dealing with 3rd party, outsourcing companies, and integrating their code (make sure their stuff works as specified).

TDD by definition is build the test first, and then develop, which is implies, test everything.

Most of the code people write is not really test worthy.
Ask HN: How do you get someone to help with the CSS on an open source project?
I've tried to get some web design friends to help out but no one seems the least bit interested. The site itself is very simple and straightforward and shouldn't have any fancy design elements; Flying logos, mad drop down menus, scrolling backgrounds need not apply. I just need someone to spiff it up a bit. Maybe tweak the forms so they don't look like a$$. Or style the buttons so they look the good on all platforms. That kind of thing.

I was going to look for some CSS designers on-line but there are sooooo many that I don't even know where to start. Any hints would be appreciated.
"TDD by definition is build the test first, and then develop, which is implies, test everything."

That is errant. You can create high-level tests for new functionality, and then implement the myriad of implementation details to fulfill that test. Until all of our languages and libraries have 100% test coverage, you must decide to draw the line short somewhere.

Disclaimer: I am not a TDD aficionado, and we don't practice it at the dayjob.
Doh, right, k select is the same problem. Median of medians is a good linear time technique, though.
Fun historical factoid: LA used to have a world-class train system! Good luck with its public transport now, though... "I'd have to take 5 busses and it would take 3 hours? To get groceries?"
Tokyo. Rent is expensive, though.

...Per square foot. However, Tokyo has micro-apartments available, right? 60 sqft?
Keep your coat for next winter. You will likely be surprised at how cold 50 degrees can feel :)
I ran my wedding workflow through it.

Don't get me wrong, GIMP is not a bad program. I particularly appreciate it being scriptable in Python, which is my day-to-day bread-and-butter language. But for professional (i.e. stuff that people pay money for) photography targetting print output, it's nowhere near Photoshop - and it's very clear that the authors of GIMP don't understand why. At Adobe, they listen to photographers and designers and the programmers understand that they're not the domain experts. In the GIMP camp they suffer from the same problem as most open-source projects; people who can't code aren't really taken seriously.
Build your first NN in whatever language you want. Prepare to be underwhelmed :)
I dunno who downmodded you but it wasn't me. I suspect it was your use of quotes around evaluating.

If your friends are targetting web output, GIMP may be perfectly adequate.
yes, if this team means that they are planning on going out and getting their own advertisers.
LA used to have a world-class train system

It was just a movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric#The_.22General...

Other factors that may have contributed to the decline of electric traction in the United States include [...] low revenues.
Why is it anti-intellectual to question the value of higher education?
Most interesting slides and discussion.
Do you have a link to downloadable set of slides, or do we need to use the "link to email author for DL" on SlideShare.
[Always been a petpeeve of mine about slideshare that there seems not to be a mechanism to print (e.g., 4/sheet) slides for off-line study.]
Gracias!
The fact this got 4 upvotes suggests the article is right.
Please explain how better experiments can be run?
To be fair, their main concern isn't the "single vendor" (SAP) but the wide deployment of available (if pricey) consultants to maintain it. They're paying extra but they're buying peace of mind. Not saying it's the right move, but still important to understand (without necessarily agreeing) what makes a market such as this (or any other) tick.
I don't really see any cheating in this.
It just works the way you would expect, right?
Am I missing something?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186369

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377301

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150561

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=339823

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436364
> "you must cover 90% of your code with unit tests"

No, TDD doesn't mean that. TDD is where you write the tests _first_. This bestows numerous advantages that post-facto tests don't:

1) You think about the API as required by the person using the interface that you are coding up.

2) - and this is the killer - you are forced to create repeatable test data and fixtures (e.g. in memory sql databases a la sqlite). As the functionality and number of services builds up, you create, whether you like it or not, a large suite of easily instantiated, complex mock services that allow you to build truly automated and repeatable high level tests.

3) And you can then safely refactor much more reliably and confidently when features and ideas have changed.

I agree that writing tests after the fact is a waste of time. TDD saves time (and hair!).
I have read more than half of all programming books I read on my computer. I find that with a laptop and a good lcd screen, it's not much of a problem... (and I move too much to bother with hardcopies)
If you're willing to not confine yourself to the US, London is great for cheap public transport. On average, the cost of living is quite high: housing and nights out are expensive. However, if you're clever, you can actually subsist on a low amount of money: eat at home, live in a small flat outside central London etc.
That's pretty sweet. I'd love to do that in Sharm el-Sheik :-) Cheap flights to and from the UK and everyone speaks English and there must be plenty of hacker-divers...
I'd say the middle name is the place for common-ness. My first name is unusual (Lon), but my middle name is as common as dirt (David). The first name is a hassle sometimes, but I can always go by my middle name if I want. It also gives me the option to use the elitist "L. David" if I like.

I really like having a unique name, and I don't think I'd be happier being a "John Smith". Ultimately, your name is what you make of it. If you're comfortable with it, then other people will be too. It can even be an advantage for getting remembered by people.

Just look at Barack Hussein Obama, who seems to be getting along just fine with his "funny name".
Why is your first response to seeing an unlikely achievement to assume that it's not true?
Brighton, UK works fantastically for us. You can walk between most parts, most tech businesses and coworking spaces are fairly central. There are regular trains and buses to get out to Sussex University where there are a bunch more. The community is very welcoming and there are events and user groups almost every day of the week (http://sussexdigital.com). When you need big customers and investors London is less than an hour away by train.
I could wish my name was easier to pronounce, but I would still want first+last to be unique. The thought of people meeting me, typing my name into Google, and getting back a soccer player, frankly does not fill me with joy. Middle name isn't good enough, most people won't type that.

Oh, well. I'm sure George Graham will want to change his name anyway at age 21 in order to outrun all the hideously embarrassing Internet posts he made at age 12, should the present world last so long.

Maybe you want to give your kid a highly anonymous first+last name, and a unique second+last name, so they can switch to using second+last once they grow up.

PS: I know a poor guy who happens to be named David Duke. (I suggested he go by Dave Duke.)
Enhancing and Experiencing Spacetime Resolution with Videos and Stills
Yeah, re-reading my comment, I'm not sure why I put quotes there in the first place.
London, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris all have good transport and good communities. Places like Enschede in Holland or Istanbul in Turkey have great hacker communities but not so good public transport.
Marc, what kind of work would you like to do this summer? Perhaps working with the guys at Bee Hive. They'd be a great match for your skills.
Yes. A Laptop is a boon in that case.
I have a nice PC ...
Another point for DC. Don't forget it's a great place to start a business if you want a way in to have the gov't or DoD be a customer.

SBIR programs are available, which are almost free $$ (you dev a product they need, they'll help pay for its development, and then buy lots of them from you). $70k instead of millions, but they don't take any part of your company in return.

There are apartments by metro stations, but you also have ZipCars http://zipcar.com which you rent by the hour ($9.25/hr weekday in DC, $11/hr weekday in NYC).

I grew up in DC, and now live in NY. If you prefer a suburban life, go DC. If you like the city, NY. One benefit of both places to The Valley is the gender ratio here -- slightly biased for more single educated women than men. I've heard the valley's a sausage party. Although I've heard really good things about LA in this dept.

Another point for Boulder Colorado, some friends enjoyed the tech startup culture there, too.
Congratulations! I hope he grows up and becomes a great hacker (like his dad ;-)).
Makes sense.

There's definitely a focus on feedback from coders in most open-source apps - and that makes sense as well, although I'm sure it can be frustrating.

As a coder, I've found that it can be very hard to communicate with non-coders about coding or design issues - and this seems to be mostly a case of one of us not understanding the domain-specific language of the other.

At Adobe, I'm willing to bet that a lot of the design and goals for abilities are found and decided by people who aren't programmers at all - or who are, but are also very involved with professional-style photo-editing, and that by the time it hits the people coding, the decisions that don't have to do with implementation have been made. (This is only one possibility, but I'm sure there's some sort of "translation" layer there)

I would be somewhat surprised (but not to a large degree) if the GIMP camp wouldn't be open to suggestions from professionals in the field, but communication might be difficult as the users don't understand the coders language, and the coders often don't understand the users language. People in both camps are rare - and in the case of the GIMP (and a lot of OSS), people in both camps are really comfortable using (for instance) interfaces that aren't really up to par, or having the ability to create the extra features they need instead of having those features by default.

There's also the problem with some groups of developers ending up being elitist cocks towards users that want there input heard (There are also elitist cock users, but whatever). There's not much that can be done about that, but it seems to be a decreasing trend as (high-level) programming becomes more mainstream.