skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Studies have shown a correlation between the ability to delay gratification as a young child and future success in life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment).

Social media and video games are one of the most ingenius/insidious dopamine releasers ever invented. It's not surprising kids prefer the dopamine hit _now_ to hard work. (Don't we all?)

Well off children surely have problems with this too, but they have more of a cushion to fall back on if they fail, and their parents are probably more aware of the problem since they are more familiar with computers.
@ksat - I think it's easy to get the wrong idea of what your site is for from the heading - "...having them develop a real web application". Of course building an entire web app just to apply for a job is overkill. But it looks like that's not what you meant? I read further down the page and the examples given are more like short coding challenges. That's acceptable, and I think you need to focus your site more on filling that need. Position it as some sort of "Automated Fizzbuzz Test".
> I ask job applicant to cut up and code a PSD

You judge job applicants by their willingness to jump through boring scut work hoops in the hope of getting a job? I don't know what you're optimising for there, but it certainly isn't programming talent.

I've known a few C-class bumblers who would probably do that for a job interview. The number of grade-A talented engineers, the people I would want to hire, who would put themselves through some pointless, arbitrary slog just to impress you with their "eagerness"? Precisely zero.
What about Tsung (http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/)?
The article talks about the measurement of skill. The number of accidents that a driver has caused in the past year is not a good measurement of skill. Essentially the difference you bring up is whether something can be expected to fit a normal distribution (where the average is by definition in the middle). It's a reasonable assumption that skill will fit a normal distribution, but the number of accidents caused in the past year is much more likely to fit a Poisson distribution.
Self SEO - SEO, Internet & webmaster tools
Got it. Thanks. I'll see how I can word it better.
I guess the system is driven by dreams, or abstract long term goals. Most things I do help float me vaguely closer to them. Occasional detours turn out to be serendipitous more often than not, so I just go with them.
Stream Radio Script with jQuery ,CSS3 and PHP
I don't really agree. A lot open source exists because a developer wanted to work on a project and found it rewarding, though they are paid to work on something else.

The idea is that you contribute effort in one area and get a return value in lots of areas. Some people only take and never give, but overall I'd say most developers gain a huge benefit from OS code.
Maybe hire me? I have applied at a few places without getting a response, let alone a phone interview. If I'm spending a couple of hours writing code for them, they might as well take out a couple of minutes to reply back to me.
Hi,

You might read this first:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4057912

you can reply to that as well here if you want.

I think we're in very general agreement. Although you yourself did not say "it is likely to fail" or "you should expect that it will fail", this is exactly the sentiment I was replying to was.

Regarding your "all hardware possibly failing" and the example of a starter motor to imply that I am trying to disappear a technical problem with a semantic argument, I think I am (especially in that cousin reply) being quite a bit more specific.

Basically, when it comes to safety mechanisms that exist as a layer on top of a process and aren't necessary at all, I simply shouldn't have to even think about reinventing another safety mechanism on top of the safety mechanism. Get one that isn't defective.

A hard-drive isn't defective just because it fails: it's expected to. A RAID controller is also expected to fail...JUST NOT SILENTLY.

In the seatbelt example: should you even think about having to tie your seatbelt to the buckle with sturdy rope, for real safety in case the seatbelt just doesn't buckle when it seems to, or comes undone like a ripped shirt button at the slightest firm tug?

No. You should get an actual seatbelt.

Basically, the standard you hold a control layer to is different from the standard you hold an underlying process to.

It would be like the difference between your brake failing and your (for added safety) handbreak failing, which you only engage on top of the motor's brake anyway. If the motor brake fails you would start rolling (if you're on a bit of an incline). But you shouldn't even have to think about a hand-brake 'just failing' in the same condition.

Sure it can fail if you are being towed without being lifted, or whatever, in an extreme situation. But in a normal situation?

Basically, it is a difference of both category/kind AND of degree.

I am certainly not saying that a parking brake can never fail. I am not saying a raid controller can never fail.

I am saying that both of these, when they are layers on top of a normal process, should be out of sight, below your threshold of having to control for it. If they're not, you need to get a different one.

You don't get six insurance policies against the same earthquake possibility, hoping that they won't ALL decide to out-lawyer you or go bankrupt. You get real insurance that's properly reinsured. Check up on them. Find a real one.

Raid failure is fine. Silent raid failure is not fine.

(checksum failure with an exception is fine; checksum failure with no exception, warning, or error, just a random checksum produced - or a check randomly passing when the checksum doesn't match the one you provided, is not okay. fix your checksum, get a real one - don't build another layer on top, for the cases that your checksum is a randomized print statement or your insurance policy a monthly donation from you to a non-charitable organization that puts aside a portion to out-lawyer you with if you try to make a claim, with the rest spent on advertising or being their profit. That's not an insurance policy, that's a scam.)
Password Rules
I wouldn't code for free if you paid me to
It's not just a question of porting it to cocoa. To really do its job, it needs to take control of every other window. So you need to hack Apple's existing window manager.

FWIW, you can easily compile and run it on OSX, under X. But of course it can't reach out and control any of the native applications.
There's a working market for electronics.
Disclaimer: I'm a founder of Site44.

Like some of the commenters here, I looked around for simple static website hosting when I was trying to find a new home for my blog. I considered Heroku, GitHub Pages, and S3. Heroku didn't seem particularly optimized for static hosting (e.g., dyno spin-up time), and GitHub Pages lacked some flexibility (like custom mime types for my extension-less URLs). S3 doesn't handle things like sending gzipped content to only browsers that support it. Ultimately, my cofounder and I decided to build our own solution based on Dropbox: http://www.site44.com.

Site44 is in a private beta now, but we're hoping to move to a public beta very soon. I'd love to get some feedback from HN. The basic idea is that when you create a site (<foo>.site44.com or a custom domain), we create a folder for you in Dropbox, and then you publish by just modifying the contents of that folder.
A prerequisite for making any of this work is having a statistically significant number of visits to your site on a daily basis, right?

I think many people first have to figure out how to cross that bridge before they start to worry about optimizing what's on the other side.
Singly10k People's Choice Award
The Singly $10,000 App Challenge wraps up this afternoon, and included in the prizes (because who trusts impartial judges?) is a People's Choice award!

Each comment below is one of the applications being worked on. Vote up your favorite and feel free to discuss each, but please restrict top-level comments to just those describing apps.

Read more about Singly and the App Challenge at https://singly.com/appchallenge, or on Twitter from @singlyinc and #singly10k.
"I am not sure if Dr. Seuss realized that this particular book would hold deep significance to anyone, or that generations of young people would be given this book as a graduation present."

I'm sure no one could have predicted just how successful it would become, but he did put an enormous amount of thought into the messages he was sending. This NPR interview with the author of a new book about Dr. Seuss is very interesting:

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/05/141085044/gustav-tadd-and-todd...

He made a lot of war propaganda early on in his career, and it seems that this is one of the things that had a profound impact on him and the later books were partly an attempt to make up for that.
XO Friends

A Hollywood Squares-style game featuring questions drawn from your friends' social data.

Signup to be the first to get the iOS app at: http://HowWellDoYouKnowYourFriends.com
We're on twitter at https://twitter.com/?category=people#!/SinglyAthonGame - Let us know what would the funniest question we could ask about your friends?
slight OT but I wonder if a pinboard-type site for Facebook photos would make it or break it.

You sign up with your FB, you either allow all photos to be pinned/published, or you choose which photos are OK to go public. then those that you agree on goes into a public pool of photos for you and others to pin in different ways: by places you been to (seen all ppl at the same location), by different activities you been doing, etc.
Calm

Filters the noise out of your stream and gets smarter every time you use it, showing you just the posts you want to see.

@getcalm
Isn't Heroku a mediocre option for a static site unless you're paying? If the site isn't accessed for a while they spin down your EC2 instance, and it takes a few seconds to get it back online.
But see, these aren't even reasonable measures. In the case of legs, there is a hard upper bound which changes the useful definition of average away from the mean. This is a fairly intuitive thing.

Similarly with driving, a terrible measure is number of accidents per year/number of drivers that year. It just makes no sense, because it doesn't take into account the person's entire driving record. An intuitive measure might be how many accidents that person has been in total compared to the average number of accidents a driver has been in (of course, this makes people who have been hit by someone blowing a stop sign bad drivers, even though they had no major input to the accident... again intuitive, having this conversation with someone not well versed in stats will have this exception outed pretty quickly).

Basically both of these measures being considered reasonable suggests people who think this don't really have the wherewithal (knowledge or expertise) of legs or accidents to properly assess what makes sense.
I don't think "what were you thinking when you created this" is EVER that interesting a question. Too short a time interval, and too vague and undirected. "What were you thinking when you typed this semicolon?"

However, two types of questions are interesting (at least for me -- of engineers and entrepreneurs; not really that interested in athletes or musicians, but I think it's general).

1) How did you solve this specific problem or decide to make these specific tradeoffs (micro)

2) How did you get to this point (macro) (this has to be asked in a more specific way, unless the person is a really skilled or experienced interviewee
What did I miss?

Come back from work to find the grocery store's a burnt-out wreck? Figure out what you missed.

@whatdidimissapp
https://www.facebook.com/whatdidimissapp
> For every woman who contributed in some way to the founding of the internet, there were hundreds of men. That's just reality, and to use that fact to argue any point about the state of the technology industry today is retarded.

How is it retarded to remind readers that women made critical or at least significant (if not necessarily numerous) contributions to the evolution of the technology we have today? The work of these women has been overlooked, overshadowed, ignored and discouraged throughout history so much that there is a whole month relegated to reminding US school children of that fact. You may have heard of it.

I agree that one blundering sentence does not an endorsement or thesis make, in the case of the New York Times piece. Perhaps the intent was to satirize the "lore" that it's all about men, men, men in tech, which is why women (in this case, Pao) get so much shit for even trying. Xeni took it literally. I can see where you might see that as an overreaction, but frankly the way that opening line is written doesn't instill much hope in me that the average NYT reader will catch the knowing wink, if it is in fact buried in there somewhere.

Finally, no one's saying men shouldn't receive credit for their work because they had the misfortune of being born into a gender fraught with examples of the underqualified being showered with recognition. What is being said is that women should receive credit for their work because they had the misfortune of being born into a gender fraught with examples of the perfectly qualified being mocked, ostracized and all but forgotten. If that frustrates you, I would be curious to know why.

Edit: original comment deleted. I'm a little disappointed because it indicated the writer felt a very potent irritation with the dialog on feminism/sexism in reaction to Xeni's response and I do wish we could engage each other when those difficult feelings rear up.
Pipe

Pipe tells you the one person you need to connect with today, and makes it simple by allowing you to reach out to that person within the app itself.

http://pipeapp.co/
http://blog.pipeapp.co/
PlatePorn.com

Foodspotting across your social media streams

@plateporn
MementoMap

MementoMap is a travel journal that brings together all your digital ephemera in one place.

@mementomap
https://www.facebook.com/MementoMap
Together

Find people to hang out with
Where good Ideas come from?
Acievement and effort don't have a linear relationship. Doing 20 hours instead of 40 does not mean that the project is 50% complete or 50% viable. Early in the project there is a process of discovering unknowns and ranking tasks by importance. Usually this information is not communicated within the team or other team members won't believe them, so with 5 part timers you get five people who only rediscover the same constraints and no one is able to actually finish the project.

Usually a full timer has to use judgement and time management to keep the project within a full week or they work overtime. Part timers will feel less obligation to deliver the project and more obligation to meet their part-time limit of 20 hours. If they don't finish then that is perceived as ok because they not fully invested in the project timewise.
It is great! It works on my keyboard, and I think I can learn how to use it when I have time.
NYT: The tech industry is male-dominated and sexist.

BB: The NYT is male-dominated and sexist for pointing it out.

Flagged as bullshit.
I don't know about other data providers, but with the ADO.NET adapter, there is a huge performance penalty for non-parameterized, non-transactional queries. So if you string together a query you get clued in pretty quick that there's a problem.
Untitled App #3

Emotions and Locations.
Healthygram

Prevent and reverse diabetes.

@healthygram
Building a Rails Gmail Client Outside-In
Yard Rush

The optimal way to sell anything.

@yardrush
Pixley

An embeddable photo gallery.
I like how PHP will interpret a SQLite database as code. (Yes, I know why this happens, no need to explain.)
Really? Maybe BB did say that, but that's not of the point of the article at all. Most of it is just criticizing the NYT views that men's contributions to computers and the Internet were more important than women's contributions.
Reverse Engineering the Birthday Paradox
This might be off-topic, but - wow, what a great-looking, well-designed blog this is. Congratulations.
I don't think most statisticians need to be taught the latter. This particular narrow slice of statistical methodology is dominant in certain areas of advertising, web design, and UX, but it's not as if it completely dominates the field of statistics, or the toolbox of most statisticians.
If there's so much DC energy available can we store it?
Women may have been invisible, but the work we did laid the groundwork for more visible advancements now credited to more famous men.

But what aspects of that work specifically led to the invention of the Internet? If "laying the groundwork" is the criteria then Newton, Tesla and Turing had a hand in inventing the Internet as well (an assertion I think few would make...). The fact that Lovelace and Hopper were women and programmers doesn't mean that "women" deserve credit for every invention that came after them.
Vanity Parking

Reserved parking for people with vanity license plates.

http://vanityparking.us
from the article:

"that researchers stopped the clinical trial early to give all patients a chance to receive the life-extending medication"
Maybe you are right and it's an old discussion. But repeating things and repeating discussions is in no way a bad thing. In fact, most of the ideas presented here on Hacker News are repeated ideas, maybe with a twist.

Either way, if you are tired of this discussions don't participate on one, but don't tell other people to not discuss. Maybe someone new here wants to express his/her ideas or maybe someone old really loves discussing this topic.
Vippit

Vippit helps you split bills and pay your friends.

http://getvippit.com
@vippit
iAmble

Find a place to grab food! We’ll analyze you and your friends’ likes and dislikes to suggest a spot we’re sure you’ll want to eat. Click a button and go.

www.iamble.com
@iambleapp
Meet&Greet

Who are the best people for you to talk to at the events you’re attending? Make new friends, find new mentors, break the ice easily.
yep yep :)
PandoList: 5 "First In, Last Out" Engineers
Where does she say that the NYT is male dominated? Where does she say that the NYT is sexist? As far as I can tell she is only pointing out that the person who wrote the article is ignorant of reality. That has nothing to do with being male-dominated or sexist.
Hasb-E-Haal 02 06 2012 Dunya News
Secure and high performance managed DNS service
The Millennium Triology
(Thou shall watch the 2009 version. The Hollywood one is crap).
3 movies. Involving hacking + The hacking parts are not total garbage as in other movies. But there's one scene where they say that she needs a faster computer to download things faster -.-
I dunno if the movies are available in English. But there should be at least swedish, norwegian and german ones.

Edit: I checked it. There's an English one too.
XML for dummies
We're talking about using OS X because the system has an nVidia graphics card. OS X is much more closed (and unconfigurable) than Linux + nVidia, so "nVidia's drivers are closed" doesn't seem like a good reason to not switch to Linux. Yes, they're closed, but at least you can use XMonad and apt-get.

Personally, I think nVidia's drivers are fine, modulo the ideology issues. They perform extremely well and work. Intel's drivers also work well, though the performance is not as good. (And video tends to tear due to some vblank syncing bug that's unfixable for some reason.)

I also agree that xrandr support is important for a laptop, because you are often plugging and unplugging an external monitor. xrandr --output VGA1 --left-of LVDS1 is much easier than dealing with some GUI. xrandr seems to work on my nVidia desktop, however.
Of course they don't deserve credit for every invention after them. I think the basic premise is that if you are going to say that only men's contributions to computers and the Internet are important, you are probably wrong as many women have advanced the field.

If we are talking about a particular invention we can talk about specific inventors. But the Internet is not one but many technologies put together invented and developed by different people, which include men and women (maybe not specifically Lovelace).

Apart from that, saying that women did not contribute enough to the Internet, is like saying black people did not contribute enough to the invention of cars; it's mostly true, but it could be argued that that's because they were an oppressed group.
As someone who works for a major e-commerce site, I am often the one who has the most influence when it comes time to decide which testing method to adopt. Multi-armed Bandit testing can be good, just as standard A/B testing can be good. But the factor which trumps all of these are the total costs of testing (and the return on investment to the business). One must consider the following before undertaking any of these testing methods:

1. Implementation Costs - How much time will it take to implement the testing code? Some tests are easier to implement than others.
2. Maintenance Costs - How much time will it cost to maintain the test for the duration of the testing period? We've ignored this in the past only to realize on occasion that implementation introduces bugs which incur cost and can be disruptive.
3. Opportunity Costs - What is the cost of doing the test versus not doing the test? Consider setup time, analysis, and final implementation.

After going through a few tests now, we have a pretty good sense for what the total cost to the business is. We don't really look at it as adopting one test method over the other, but instead rely upon the projected ROI to test this versus that, versus doing nothing.
Electrician Canberra
Dovelle offers solutions for Office and Shop fit-outs, kitchen, bathroom and home renovations, we provide professional advice for lighting solutions, energy efficiency through our Philips Master Lighting Contractor qualification to help you achieve the best lux and light output for the task/s at hand. Dovelle means multiple services as we offer electrical, information technology and now make up solutions to Canberra and surrounds. More information please visit:- http://www.dovelle.com/
I think any business has a series of key activities (the ones that are primarily resposible for generating ongoing value). What your key activities are depend largely depend on what type of business you are running. For instance, if you sell an undifferentiated commodity your key activities might be marketing (so people think of your widget first) and cutting costs (finding ways to be more efficient than your competition). Other times intellectual property may be more valuable. Many activities are important to most businesses, but some are more core to your business than others. I think the hard part is figuring out which activities are relevant to your value growth and focusing on doing those best.

Identifying and focusing on there is the best way to generate
This is like asking a chef if your propusion engine is built correctly. An absolutely terrible state of the court system. Instead of glorifying this judge, i want to know how the judicial system is ready to tackle other cases from the same realm because any technical person would have thrown this case out in seconds.
Thanks mehulkar, glad you enjoyed it
You're assuming logical spending habits.
No, because the cases are sealed with unobtanium screws. I'm sure the layout is very clever, but the fact of the matter is that they use the same hardware as everyone else. There's not much value they can add there.
The custom of worshipping the nation’s ancestors | Vietnam Travel News
OpenMetadata.org Scheduled to Launch on Wednesday
Major Challenge for Free Online Courses: Cheating
A revolution in education thanks to online courses could be in store, as Thomas L. Friedman and others have predicted. But significant challenges remain, not least among them preventing students from fraudulently claiming an education that they didn't get.