skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not everybody can learn to code

While I know that many programmers have this attitude, I have not seen any evidence for it. Nor have I heard of any attempts to verify it. Certainly many people don't care enough to learn to code. But that's a different point that one of aptitude, which implies that programmers are a special breed. That's an attitude that I reject.
I think what radley means is that Flash is an all-in-one solution, whereas to finish a non-Flash project you would have to master HTML, CSS, a back-end web framework, and perhaps some JavaScript as well.
The idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem.

I think the principle that (give or take passing a karma threshold) all contributors are equal and one vote is one vote has probably outlived its usefulness.

Perhaps up and/or down votes from established, positive contributors should simply carry more weight.

Another possibility might be to give a handful of extremely highly regarded contributors a third option to super-downvote a comment by a new or low karma contributor, such that just a couple of those (or even just one) would cause the offending comment to be killed immediately. I'm thinking that rapidly killing off things like Redditesque extended joke threads that obviously don't suit the culture on HN might help, by the "broken windows" theory.
Ask HN: Looking for a Django / Python guru?
Look no further, skype me "jparicka"
I really really need a gig.
Thanks!
This.

So back in 2007 I saw that Tata had licensed the technology for using the air-motor in its cars. As an infrastructure guy I thought "Hmmm, if this stuff works, I could use it in a data center." So I tried to do that.

Here was the plan, using a windmill you could compress air, it's a pretty simple mechanical linkage, run a pump off the rotating vanes, has been done for hundreds if not thousands of years. But instead of water, you pump air into tanks. This generates heat because you are compressing the air of course but its windy so you've got heat sink vanes in the air flow being cooled by convection. Now at some point your data center wants a bit more juice, so you dump air through these MDI engines, which are running electrical generators. But here is the thing, when you dump the air it gets colder, a lot colder and the pipes can freeze up, but this is a datacenter and you run the pipes through the data center and cool it epic win! Power and cooling for free, the more power you use the more cooling you get, how neat is that?!

Except there was no amount of money I could give MDI in exchange for engines. They don't make the engines, they don't have a plan to make the engines, they won't let someone build the engines and sell them at a profit because they won't license them to do so. I was a classic case of an inventor being so unrealistic about what the value of their invention is, they prohibit the creation of a market around it.

The trick is that markets have choices, and an air engine would be a good choice, but not if it is not cost competitive with high efficiency diesel, or cheap (and dirty) two stroke gas engines. After I gave up (by mid 2008) trying to get them to see the error of their ways I figured it would be 20 years until we saw a credible use of this technology because all the patents would finally expire, and people would start to make them, and probably curse the folks at MDI for their short sightedness.
freely allowed to say really anything

Well, that's allowed on the normal internet for the most part.
That's the proof that its working. As you say, when the child molesters are really and truly safe to speak their minds, everyone is.

These people would exist anyway. Sometimes humanity sucks. Interesting though, TOR allowed you to study them in a way you would never have been able to otherwise. It merely disgusted you, but it could be a valuable resource to someone who studies how people break and thinks about what might be possibly done to help or hinder them.
Most companies fail. It's a safe bet to predict failure. It's pretty lame to celebrate that failure from the sidelines.

Vision is not "how is this guaranteed to fail?" but how could it possibly succeed despite the odds?

Which voice do you want to bring to this community?
I'm not sure I understand how they are measuring quality in these sperm. The article mentions that they are now rejecting 80% of their candidates based on the simple fact that their sperm is not up to the same standards they set years ago.

What if their standards are flawed? Is there scientific proof that straight-moving and quick sperm is of higher 'quality' or 'healthier'? Is the sperm bank promising me a strong child that will grow tall or what is this quality metric in fact measuring?
I suspect the point is more that Flash enables one to tackle both code and design with a single toolset.
Although I agree with much in the article, I just want to point out that google app market has a return policy of 15 minutes after purchasing an app. So you can return it. I don't know if Starbucks offers refunds (I'm sure they would if you make a big deal of it), but apps are not a total gamble - you have the 15 minute window to get your money back.
Love the graphics! Excellent.
Oh, I just meant in terms of what iCloud charges it's about 1/2.

ATM 500GB is a pretty large in terms of options for consumer storage. Good thing is that the prices should continually go down. Bad thing is you'll continually be accruing more and more photos :).

It's a great question though. That 500GB of photos has some real value to you. I wonder what that is. And what the risk of losing it by backing up at home vs S3 vs home + S3.
... because it allows for an 80% charge in a very short amount of time... you're extending the infrastructure of places you can charge Teslas; and if you monetize it ($15-20 for full, fast charge) then you're making money.
An alternative idea to technical countermeasures is to do it the way the SA forums have doing it for 10+ years. $10 to get in. Appoint moderators who can ban or probate users at will if they post trash or break the rules. If you're banned you shell out another $10 if you want to join again.

(And no, this is not comparable to app.net. The money isn't sufficient, you need the moderators just as much. You need both.)
If using OpenVPN, there is one precaution one must take - make sure your firewall prevents traffic escaping when your VPN connection fails. Shorewall lets you set up such an arrangement fairly easily. Many US poker players have been burnt this way when using overseas VPN services to play poker as operators are able to catch their real location during brief moments of VPN failure.

With SSH tunnel, if your connection fails, no traffic will escape regardless.
A well-executed troll is, by definition difficult for humans to detect.I don't think there's much chance of reliably doing it with software. Fortunately, most political squabbling on reddit consists simply of people expressing scorn or outrage that someone would post something on the internet that disagrees with their deeply-held beliefs. That's a bit easier to detect.
Oh yeah. Ethics and moral values simply evaporate when we are unable to see/watch one another in society. We are suppressed animals. Go watch 'Blindness'[1]; it is the real life representation of the dark web.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/
You have a great point. Ditch the Karma, or make it invisible, and a lot of people will stop commenting just to get votes. And only when you reach so much Karma are you allowed to start seeing the Karma of others. But experiments have been done here before, and a lot has not worked. People REALLY hate change around here ;)

On the other hand, the larger the community gets, the more real it gets. And the truth is simply that the world is snippy. They are opinionated, they don't really care, and reality pretty much sucks. Well, at least that's how I feel by the end of most days. So if you want honest opinions, you kind-of have to take the good with the bad.

Don't get me wrong, what drew me in to HN was the brilliance of the discussions too. The fact that people seemed to really care about each other. It felt like sitting in a room filled with only the smartest people, all of whom had intriguing insights into their areas of expertise. Man it was awesome. Do I want this back? YES.

The only way I can see this happening is if everyone over a certain amount of Karma, and that have been here long enough, get hand-picked and invited into an elite HN community.
As someone that had a lot of fun there for a year:

The ministry of health & the media are constantly scaring the easy-minded. Bottled water in plastic bottles is your instant death for example. Cellphones? Yeah, they boil you. A lot (as in, I've never seen anyone do that before I went to Tel Aviv and saw lots of people over there do that all the time) of people talk with their smart phone extended in front of them, via speaker. Shouting (and sharing the partner's voice with the world). The people that I actually interviewed why this would _ever_ make sense said that radiation from phones is far too dangerous near your head..

I loved my stay, I'm still sad that I left. But a couple of (mostly health related) ideas shocked me nearly out of existance. I had a bunch of environmental/health related moments of utter, painful disbelief.
Spot on.

Also: both skillsets (UX and visual design) are empirically testable for usability.

That's the one-note-flute Jakob Nielsen's been composing orchestras with successfully for over 17 years on his Use-IT site: http://www.useit.com/

As has been noted: Nielsen never created a beautiful thing in his life, but damned if they haven't been usable.
Yep. I came here to post this. UPS definitely has your credit report.
I'm sympathetic to your point, but I fear that the worst offenders are among those least likely even to read the guidelines, much less adhere to them.
Ok, I'll try that too.
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/postgresql-is-our-new-de...

Despite the reasons they gave, did they see the writing on the wall that made this the time to make the leap?
Ctrl-F "Friedman Unit"

0 results.

HN, I am disappoint.
He mentioned that IDEA, not the implementation nor Tor were invented by the Navy.

I have no sources on either, but it does seem plausible that solution similar or exactly the same in the concept was used for communication during warfare.
As wrong as it sounds, maybe it's for the better to have a forum where pedophiles can aggregate knowledge on how to safely (physically speaking) molest children. Also, I have to say that while I find the idea of sex with children repulsive, having a place where you can discuss the topic should be 100% ok.

Child rape is awful, talking about child rape is unsettling, but having someone proactively monitor my communications is even more unsettling. It feels like a stranger offering me candy.

Besides, for this particular problem, the best solution seems to be what we're already doing - tell as many children as possible that if someone tries to rape them, there are people who will listen and help.
If I'm at a fancy restaurant I need my cell phone because if it rings, its the baby sitter calling.
You do know that that's exactly Tesla Motors' stated goal, right?

http://elonmusktesla.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/truly-affordab...
This is slowly becoming reddit :(
The Internet is not a hugbox

Surely there's a some balance point between "hugbox" and "hatefest". Also, we're not talking about the Internet, but a small self-selected community of humans that happens to connect via the internet.
They are a part of the DMCA that protects internet service providers who transfer illegal data with an automatic protocol. I think the intended case was to protect ISP so they would not need to police their network.
How police tracked down Steve Jobs' stolen iPads
I'm impressed with their positivity but then they have effectively just been granted a monopoly.
Sony MDR-V6 Studio Monitor. Rock solid, nice long extensible wire, less bass then it's related model. I think they look great too.
It's awesome how similar some of this looks to Smalltalk IDEs, with some bonus improvements. It's true that it's high time someone picked up the baton on the concepts they pushed, and I'm pumped to see that Light Table is picking up that baton and running with it to present even more interesting possibilities.
Login w/ facebook? No thankst.
How about people who are not using the App Store as a monetization vector at all? Ie I'm talking about people who sell apps to big corporations and the like. I would imagine that that is a completely different ballgame?

Is anyone here in that situation?
Shit HN Says Links
How is the brain like a social network?
It says they stored 44 petabytes total (70 billion * 700 kilobytes), and 700 terabytes in a single gram (which is 5.5 petabits, not 4.4 petabytes).
If I ever ate lunch with you, how would I know you were annoyed when I set my phone on the table, ringer off, and face down? Sometimes, I just don't like having it in my pocket when I'm sitting down to eat. Never thought that I'd be annoying anyone.
pg, I have notice two (2) recent trends that have, in my opinion, degraded some of the quality of this site:

1. Postings that are more advertising than informational, which I briefly commented on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350447; and

2. Members who submit their own postings.

Briefly, while I appreciate the sharing of information, any content that becomes an obvious sales pitch doesn't belong on this site. When I read a posting from this site, I want to learn and be informed - I do not want be sold on something. And - there may be disagreement with my second point - I do not find any significant value when a member submits their own positing, because I feel they're trying to sell me on something. (Please understand this does not apply to "Show HN" - just to articles and blog postings.)

Overall, I really appreciate members asking for feedback on their projects. They should be challenged and not degraded or insulted. This is a great community with great insights, so it's up to everyone to be "good neighbors".

Edit: Grammar.
Does Your Startup Pitch Suck? Call PitchPhone And Practice
It's good that you're rejecting that attitude, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate the grandparent's point. Some people can't learn to code because their mind just doesn't work that way. Just like they probably have some skill that we probably can't learn because our minds don't work that way.
Before going too far with this hypothesis, its worth considering that general conscription doesn't mean that everyone has combat experience in Gaza - there are a lot of people whose military service involves office work, or patrolling quiet borders, etc. It may be that this sperm bank has a high proportion of combat veterans because getting into a top combat unit is something that many of the best male Israeli high school students aspire to, but in general, a lot of people serve in the IDF in positions that wouldn't expose them to DU.

This is especially true of older people doing their mandatory reserve service. My understanding is that if you have a particular skill, the IDF will find a way to use that. Actors get reserve duty entertaining soldiers, professors get reserve duty in the IDF education department, etc.
Chris, if you're around, you mentioned that you're now building Light Table in Light Table. Does this include the front end Clojurescript? Because I would love to move my Clojure / Clojurescript project over to LT if that's possible.
He needs to talk to a lawyer.
I just wanted to give Eduardo a shout-out to build a company that provides a tangible benefit for low-income families. I know that in the US it's hard for this segment of the population to get into the electronics payment system, and I imagine that in Brazil it's similar. It's great to see that the system is free for the end-user. In the US, most companies that target this market are predatory and charge exorbitant fees[1], like the now defunct Kardashian Kard[2]

Somehow I'm not surprised that Visa/Cielo is playing dirty to get their market share back. I hope you find a way to fight back.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/business/chasing-fees-bank...
[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/30/us-kardashian-debi...
Using your own example, you don't go to newly graduated doctors and say, "I have this great idea for a general practice. Let's open a shop together split it 50/50."

I think Dan's point is that if you believe strongly enough in your idea, then it ought to be worth the time investment required to personally execute it. At the very least, take it to a level advanced enough to be able to sell the concept (and yourself) to prospective partners/employees and get them excited.

If you don't think you have the aptitude to learn the nuts and bolts of the particular execution, then you should probably refocus on another idea for which you are qualified. Alternatively, you could try and convince someone else to execute your idea and hope that he or she takes you along for the ride.
"The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got" with Rob Pike
I think it's a mistake to equate all "non technical people" as "idea people" which is what I seem to be reading in your post. There are people who are just "idea people" who have no particular skills in terms of technology OR business.

But real "business people* provide a TON of value. Someone who understands marketing, distribution, sales, fundraising and all of those things? Tremendously valuable to startups (at least some classes of startups). Find me somebody who can construct and execute a solid marketing strategy, craft a good "core story", do market research, develop solid positioning, and who understands PR and how to get stories placed, someone with an extensive personal contacts list which includes the kind of customers you're looking for, someone who understands the fundraising process and has connections with investors, someone who can cold call a customer, get a meeting, make a presentation and close a sale.... find me that person and I'll offer them a significant equity stake in my startup, to join up as a non-technical co-founder, even if they've never written a line of code in their life, and have no interest in doing so.
Jeremy Hammond, aka. 'Anarchaos', the Lulzsec member from Chicago, who was raided and arrested[1] by the FBI used Tor and it is mentioned in his indictment as one of the points that lead to his identification.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/stakeout-how-the-...

[2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/84134934/Hammond-Jeremy-Complaint - Tor info starts at sec 37.
Men, It's OK to be an Asshole
It's worse than that. I'm supposed to be getting a package sent from Europe. The sender just called me up to tell me that they cannot send it by UPS unless they provide my social security number.

Let that sink through: UPS has convinced the guy (whose business is to produce & ship goods, not to guard my privacy) that they cannot send a package to a random US person, unless they provide that US person's SSN.

I was sure he was joking - but apparently the US government requires them to do so: http://voices.yahoo.com/why-does-us-customs-want-social-secu...

Seems like UPS, Customs and the IRS are hellbent on cataloging any transaction I make with out-of-state sellers. I don't trust their security one bit, and I wouldn't be surprised to find "list of items ordered by beagle3", "list of addresses beagle3 lived in" along with my SSN and a lot of other stuff when they are hacked.

I'm not trying to avoid customs or anything (though this item is, as far as I know, not subject to any taxation or other custom regulations)

Anyone know a way around it? A way to receive a package without exposing my SSN?
There's a difference between merely hostile, negative commentary and constructive, well-founded criticism.

The problem that HN faces is that because of the voting system those drive-by valueless negative comments are getting amplified all out of scale relative to their value.

Imagine being in a restaurant. It's not so bad if there is someone in the far corner having an argument that you can just barely overhear or something a few tables over having a cell phone conversation. However, if the volume of those conversations were amplified such that you could barely continue conversing with the person across the table from you then it starts to become a very serious issue, and if that became the norm at that restaurant you'd probably stop going there as often.
I don't think the lawsuits are because Apple is afraid of competing with Samsung, I think they're because Apple feels they shouldn't have to bother.

From the Apple perspective they've done all this innovation over the past decade and Samsung is an annoying leech.

Regardless of whether or not you believe that I think the motivation for the lawsuits is not fear of competition.
IDology and other provide this as SAAS.

It's very popular way to verify identity online, for example when booking a home tour with a real estate brokerage.

Yes, it's creepy.
For some reason this reminds me of the movie Ratatouille, and the "Anyone can cook" theme.

For those who haven't (and won't) seen the movie, one of the themes (as I see it) is based around two different interpretations of the phrase "Anyone can cook"

1) The looser interpretation that upsets the "ultimate food critic" would be better phrased as "everyone can cook"

2) The interpretation that the movie guides us to (not quite as heavy handed as I'm phrasing it!) is that a cook can come from any background, we shouldn't think that the best cooks can only be found in the trappings of a well respected multi-Michelin-star restaurant kitchen.

The parallel for coding seems obvious to me, we often have very preconceived notions of what it takes to be a "coder", what background, personality type, etc. and we should reject that. The "suits vs. nerds" concept is a form of deception, because it leads us to think that "coders" must be "nerds" and "suits" can never be "coders", neither of which are true.

We should judge people by their ability and capability, not by the fashionable trappings with which they drape themselves; often suits, or nerdy/geekish behavior is merely a social camouflage with no deep correspondence to skill set.

Just my 5c
It does indeed, but we punted on including CLJS in this release because we didn't have enough time to test it. It should make it into the next release though :)
Hotel Lock Firm's Fix Requires Hardware Changes For Millions Of Locks
Creaky door does impression of Mile Davis Bitches Brew
Sergey Brin speaking at Wireless World 2000
It depends what your standard is. If your standard is merely memorizing how to get a compiler or interpreter to spit out "Hello world!" then, yeah everybody can do that.

But if you're talking about really learn how to program, for example to learn the skills necessary to create a basic blog with a database, login, posting, commenting, etc. Then, no, not everybody can do that. If you get some experience in the real world and try talking to people who aren't technical, it will become readily obvious that not everybody can do it.

It's not that programmers are "a special breed", stop being so coder-centric. There's plenty of things you're not good at and can't do as well. Or do you believe what we were told as children; you can do anything! Sorry, but you can't.

You'll never be a Formula 1 driver. You'll never be a fighter pilot. You'll never play in an international level orchestra. You'll never be an architect or civil engineer. Et cetera.

And billions of people will never be programmers.

It's not that programming is so intrinsically special, it's that it's one thing among many things people have varied proficiency for (the origins of that proficiency I have no idea and won't get into), and some have no proficiency for whatsoever.

This is all really obvious if you've spent much time with people who aren't programmers.