skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did my own little analysis of Hacker News readers based on the ~20,000 of you that visited my blog recently:

http://www.dangrossman.info/2012/08/21/what-hacker-news-user...

Of course, I didn't survey people or have access to demographic profiles from other sites, so it's just a breakdown of systems. To summarize, the average HN reader runs Chrome 21 on a pre-Retina MacBook.
I can't wait until the very last challenge just says: "SURPRISE, you typed in your password when you started this event, which is the most common way that someone's password will get stolen."
I'm not sure why they would add identi.ca? Since it's a StatusNet install, Tumblr could run their own StatusNet instance and keep the users on their own namespace.
Toss a gherkin in a roll: Sony patents TV-adverts-into-games idea
here is the video from erlang-factory 2012 which kind of goes in more depth (and width) : http://vimeo.com/44312354. the pdf for the talk is available here: http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...
One-molecule-thick material has big advantages
What I found most disturbing was that most people who visit Hi5 are people in the 25 - 34 age group. That was before I realised it is not a website dedicated to the Australian TV show for small children.
Seeking Freelancer - mobile app development
Seeking iOS or Android freelance developer with some experience in the use of sub-audio tones or digital audio tagging. We have funding and the constructs for an exciting app that works similar to Shazam or SoundHound but with a very different use case. Express your interest and experience, providing 3+ URLs of mobile apps that you were directly involved in developing. Thanks. mark.peden (at) frontier (dot) com.
Struggling to Recover From a Cyberattack
This would be a phenomenal way to build something like app.net.

With full decentralization it could really become a true 'protocol'.
The great thing about the issues that you raise here is that they can be impacted by voting for city council members who are more supportive of startups. I'm not familiar with city politics in Mountain View, but maybe if the community got behind candidates who were in favor of relaxing these restrictions there could be some change there.
Quite to the contrary as what is being supposed, a deluge of mediocre developers has actually ruined more than one platform.

Pre-Nintendo, the entire video game industry crashed because of awful developers. When Nintendo broke into the scene, they were notorious for their stringent quality guidelines and hated for some time as a result.
Obama and Romney duke it out in new iOS game from Infinity Blade developer
Narihiro Nakamura: Ruby’s GC Innovator
Every day I wake up and I think 'If only we had more social networks!'
This should be covered in school.

Zero is positive. Mathematicians use some silly convention where zero is "neither positive nor negative," while any sensible programmer can tell you it's positive since the sign bit is zero, like every other positive number.

The way schools teach our kids to count is clearly wrong too. Everyone knows that, when counting a collection of n items, you start at zero and end at n-1. There have been a good number of HN posts decrying the education system lately, but oddly enough none of them addressed this specific issue.
The title is supposed to tell us whether the article is worth reading. Most anyone who cares about Hacker Dojo already knew about their retrofit funding problem; there's little fresh news here.
The Trials of the Game Developer
I dunno know... Would like to seem them do some deals. Seems like they are just picking up their toys...? Bait and Switch not the image you want for your brand. So much public goodwill, a pity go to waste. Maybe they are hiding a Trump card somewhere? With apple or something else.
This is a really nice plugin. I actually already had Ctrl-N mapped to a horizontal split, but this adds more functionality.
See also: Structure101 by Headway software

http://www.headwaysoftware.com/products/#/define

PS: I am not associated with them in any way.
The Men of Pinterest
I feel like I have to respond to some of these, as the response is kind of a lot of out of date information. Here goes:

forest is actually obsoleted by the built-in subrepo feature.

bookmarks are always on now - the extension is now a no-op.

transplant is (mostly? it was for my needs) obsoleted by graft - a core command that's smarter.

mq I don't personally use anymore, because of bookmarks, rebase, and histedit

hsitedit - ships in the distro now, off by default (see below)

inotify - hg status /is/ fast. This makes it stupid fast even on absurdly large working copies (extension is subject to some race conditions though. I don't recommend it. bos is doing some work to make this faster w/o the extension).

acl: I think you're missing the point? It lets you have certain users allowed to push mods to a subset of files /without/ having to resort to multiple repositories (which are a hassle, even with submodules or subrepos).

Also, there's a reason some of these features are off by default - most users shouldn't be touching them. Having a barrier to using them has been (in my experience) a real benefit when trying to train newbies.

Also, some of us think pager is a misfeature - it drives me bonkers anytime git "helps" me in that way.
Yes, but also remember that you're not measuring HN readers, you're measuring HN readers who thought your link was interesting. There are many (popular) links I don't click.
I am 23.25 and I do generally keep quiet. I would imagine the comments and submissions are generally by the older crowd who have more refined technical knowledge. As far as I can tell, the status quo is to only comment/post if you have expert knowledge on a topic
"1. Sprinklers and fire exits? Arguably necessary."

"Arguably"? No, they're absolutely necessary. It's a multi-tenant building. Why should my property and livelihood be threatened by your inability (or lack of desire) to follow the fire code?

"2. ADA compliant bathrooms and wheelchair ramps? Not part of a reasonable MVP[1]."

A reasonable MVP should include the ability for a social, interactive space to be inclusive. And sorry, it's not the same as a startup deciding what features to include in their initial launch (which arguably happened a long time ago - this, now, is when the details need to be nailed down). Oh, and the ADA is Federal Law, precisely because of businesses and such that felt that discriminating against a subset of the populace was an "acceptable" omission (for their "MVP" or otherwise).

"3. As for "building permits", they are just a tax by the local government"

That they are. Building permits are a method of more fairly distributing the cost of amenities and public services. You have ongoing property taxes for maintenance and upkeep, but a development may trigger a review - is water, power, sewage, traffic control, parking, adequate? Such reviews cost money. I'm confused though, how you then chose to quote an out-of-context example about "some" (unnamed) cities choosing to root out code violations - something not entirely the same, and actually largely designed to find people who have chosen to skirt their community obligations by not using the permit process.

For the record? I'm absolutely for the Hacker Dojo and wish more existed around here (and / or that I had the time / ability to found one).
I actually think both of you are right. It's not about exclusively communicating with your friends or exclusively following celebs, it's about both. What you care about combined with a personal audience to discuss it with. The kid you found as an example subscribes to Paul Ryan's and Newt Gingrich's feeds along with his friends' feeds. Twitter can target Republican, right-leaning ads towards him. Maybe he discusses politics with his friends online and off.
This is a great post and thanks for sharing it. While I've never worked at Zynga, my friends that work there tell me that the culture is work hard and get rewarded accordingly. A lot of people don't fit into that culture and it's okay. It self selects.

For the people that complained about the culture just for the 'big payday', then you missed the point all together.
Shiny! Have you considered writing some tests for that? Mercurial's testrunner and .t files makes it pretty easy.
Same problem here -- Paypal/Gumroad offering a price of $34.
I just watched this on Youtube and was not disappointed. There was just a great clarity to the question-and-answer format of the dialogue; the animations and sound effects fit the exposition to a tee. I hope they're still making brilliant educational videos like this, somewhere.
Just how much of an outlier is a 61 year old male? No pixels on the graph for anyone over 54!

Learning new stuff, e.g. writing Android & iOS apps, keeps the mind young, much like lifting weights and aerobics keeps the body young ...
Great job. Humbled to be part of it!
Can I still get it for $25?
What is a useful way to find initial customers for a B2B product? (As other commenters have noted, mTurk is more useful in a consumer setting.)

Is there a way to find initial customers in a scalable manner? i.e. scaling it across many different business ideas and potential customers?

This would be a great service that a lot of people would pay for. I know, I know, I'm asking for marketing to be commoditized and turned into a service, which is hard. I don't really know how to do it.
Yes, but adding code creates negative value.
Want to be Surrounded By a Thriving Local Games Industry? Grow Yours
Considering the average 60+ year old male still thinks Facebook is about the entire extent of the internet apart from online banking and Amazon, yes.

The only 50+ developers are those that have always been developers.
12 Hotel Secrets by Hotel Staffs
Seriously love this ctf, the style and everything is quality. Hope I have some more time tomorrow to slash away at it. THANKS STRIPE!
Twitter bought Posterous which is a direct competitor to tumblr, so this does not surprise me.
Embracing the Spirit of Ubuntu
I still prefer Acme to vim

If you could expand on that (compare/contrast), I would definitely be interesting in reading it (blogpost, Show HN, etc).
I don't believe so much to the consistent twitter experience alibi, because I just never trust or believe in companies highly funded which have not still a proven viable business model.
To my mind , they are at the mercy of their short term vision investors which oblige them to monetize everywhere in all possible short term strategies.
All of which ignores my first point that the owners of Hacker Dojo failed to do their due diligence here. IANAL (neither a lawyer nor a libertarian) but a couple hours with the right lawyer perusing their lease upfront and none of this would be happening because either the lease would have been amended to let them off of it in the case of this sort of event or they'd have been told to walk away and build this somewhere else.
This poll from a year ago regarding age is probably more representative: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588

Results pasted here:

Age Points
--- ------
0-10 39 (0.6%)
11-15 32 (0.5%)
16-20 462 (7.5%)
21-25 1620 (26.4%)
26-30 1945 (31.6%)
31-35 1049 (17.1%)
36-40 488 (7.9%)
41-45 269 (4.4%)
46-50 117 (1.9%)
51-55 54 (0.9%)
56-60 35 (0.6%)
61-65 19 (0.3%)
66+ 19 (0.3%)

edit: Found a male/female poll here from ~3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309. Another age poll from ~3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039

Gender Points
------ ------
Male 1375 (95%)
Female 71 (5%)
Bah, yet another "can you spot the CGI" test. I've never seen one that wasn't badly imbalanced in favor of CGI, by using tiny (400x300) images.
HTML5 vs. Apps: Why The Debate Matters, And Who Will Win
Friendica does that already. No one cares. Potato chips are potato chips. No one cares about the brand, but everyone loves them, even though they are not free.
Doesn't a law school give everyone an official rank to put on their resume?
When Is Government Web Censorship Justified? An Indian Horror Story
I finished first three levels. I will continue with the rest tomorrow.

I think if they didn't provide code, it would have been really difficult. Is everyone feeling same way?
How do these compare with the general world population with an internet connection?
larryliuqing@163.com, reply
http://mv-voice.com/news/show_story.php?id=5207

The city also began pressing for more codes to be met.
Weekly rattled off what appear to be significant costs:
$150,000 to make three bathrooms compliant with the
American Disabilities Act, $130,000 for fire sprinklers,
and potentially thousands more in building permit fees and
other improvements.

"They want us to commit to a traffic study, build concrete
walls around the dumpster and have the landlord re-slope
the driveways," Weekly said.

City staff said that it hasn't been determined whether the
building has adequate exits and parking.

City officials say code enforcement officers saw the Dojo
advertising events online that would exceed the Dojo's 49-
person occupancy limit for a building without fire
sprinklers.

As I said, it always starts with things optimized for optics like fire alarms (who could be against that?), but the moment you start digging you get the requirements for "traffic studies" and "concrete-enclosed dumpsters".

----

ORIGINAL POST:

Well, I think we're at a basic philosophical impasse here. I'd argue that you probably have never dealt with the details of the regulatory process, and that if you did, you might feel differently; regulations are by their nature safety or security theater, optimized for optics. Most of the startups who've encountered specific regulations (Uber, AirBnB, Square, among them) tend to be much more skeptical of their wisdom than the public at large.

But, even more deeply, we don't want to live in the same societies.

You don't want to live in a place where crazy hackers can pack 50 people into an area zoned for 49, or have a building without a wheelchair-accessible bathroom. Stated in a less flip way, you don't want to be on the hook for the risks taken by others, and you want to force them to comply with certain cultural mores that you consider the basics of civilized society.

By contrast, I don't want to live in a place where other people can impose irrational regulations without concern for practicality, cost, or consequences. I don't want to live in a place where other people aren't content with making their own places wheelchair-accessible, but want to impose their own ethical code on me as well, via fines and DOJ sweeps, among other mechanisms.

Ultimately a lot of this boils down to population density and the extent to which someone can choose risk freely on their own. I'm very skeptical about the necessity of the ADA and cynical about the regulators enforcing the building permits process; you are not. I believe that government should be focused more on preventing actual crimes than doing sweeps for ADA violators; you may believe the lack of said accommodations to be discrimination, and therefore a reasonable priority for the federal government. So I think we'll have to just agree to disagree here.
Following recent rumors that Apple would buy a chunk of Twitter, maybe Twitter begins to close itself to fit with Apple vision of closed but mainstream and consistent user experience.
I graphed that data real quick:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chxl=0:|0-10|11-15|16-20|...
39 people who are either lying or accidentally clicked on the first option.
Robot Taught To Recognize Own Arm Movements In A Mirror
Keith Devlin on Khan Academy and Its Critics
The price advertised on the site is $25, but when I go to buy it's $34 (which incidentally is incredibly steep for an eBook). At least where I'm from there are laws against that kind of advertising.
I got 4/5 (and the one I got wrong was the one I was most unsure about).

Even with the small nature of these images, there's certain things that stood out as either not worth the hassle to get right in 3D for a catalogue (too naturally imperfect or detailed), and others where it looked like it would take way more time to make realistically in 3D instead of just taking a photo. Some of the lighting effects were pretty poor too.
I'm 23. I just avoid being as flagrant of an asshole here as I am on 4chan.
This post seems to be fairly focused on the hours worked. Long hours are only one small contributing factor into the entire work environment. A point the author may have unknowingly conceded by his reference to Facebook employees working similar hours without the same reputation.
How do you convince a friend to join your startup?
Hey HN,

What are some tips for convincing a friend to join your startup?
Yes. The "keyfingerprint" might be the server's public key for purposes of end-to-end security of the connection. (No more SSL! There's better libraries now.)

cjdns has a simple approach: your tcp6 address is your public key. This the right idea. Leverage what you already have that is unique (not to imply IP address is necessarily truly unique, e.g., anycast).

But in general to be on the network, you have to at least one unique item: your network address. So leverage that to make other unique identifiers.

To encrypt communications, you may need to maintin encryption keys. So leverage them to be part of each peer's unique identifier on the network.

Connecting to strangers, and only using the network to get each and every bit of infromation from the outside world, is all fine and good, but this sort of peer-to-peer networking is much more valuable with peers who you can identify in person. Without using a computer. You can exchange all the above numbers (identifiers) on business cards.
Are the typing mechanics different in latter/advanced lessons? If so, it's something I need look into. Or is this a different problem?

I preserved the whitespace the project authors used. I'm a little picky too regarding these details, but I want users to see code in its original form.

Thanks for the feedback
I think this just bureaucracy run amok. It's something from an 80s movie. Regulations have their place and I don't want to get into any discussion about "big government" but I think this is a bit too far for something that has become such a community icon. Also, I find it odd if they are already at $173K, I would think there would be several alums or those sympathetic that could shell out a measly $80K, that's a rounding error for many successful programmers in SV.

Also, I agree with others that the headline was ridiculous. By this standard, many people's middle class homes are "illegal" for one reason or another. However, one positive of the sensationalist headline is it might make people pay more attention and possibly donate.
This is really well done. Surprisingly well done. Way better done than average.

I'll tell you how I'd like to use it. This may seem odd, but I'd like to be able to upload code that I'm interested in learning, and then type over it just like in these lessons - but not to speed up my typing, but rather for learning.

Writing is a unique channel for learning new things. (Reading is too, of course, but everyone knows that.) Even if you're merely reproducing keystroke-for-keystroke what someone else wrote, following in someone's footsteps helps the brain absorb new patterns and is particularly good for something one's a beginner at. If what you're copying is the work of a master, then you're absorbing really good patterns. I would totally use a tool like this for that purpose. It's a way of learning with one's hands.

But pure typing efficiency? That's hardly a way to become a better programmer, only a more prolific one, and more code is not what we need in this business.

So basically I wish I could subvert the purpose of your tool and send it off in a new direction. :)
Sound piece of advice to those who think grades are the ONLY factor in doing well in life. Passion's more important than that.
What's ironic then, is that Nintendo has slowly lost its dominance over the video game console industry by its slow erosion of its developer base.

PlayStation was hugely enabled by Square "rebelling" against Nintendo and siding with Sony, while XBox has broken through at least partly through its fervent support for its developers.
Have you ever tried their website with 'Ask Anna'? I actually wasted my own time formulating a very direct and specific question, got a 'hold on, I'm thinking' response, then 10 minutes later found out that it wasn't a live text-chat with customer services, but a terrible AI, whose final response was 'have you tried looking at the catalogue?' (yes! and its not there. Which is why i need to ask someone a question!).

Thanks for wasting my time Ikea! Better to just not have that 'feature' there at all IMHO...
Balloons.IO now supports Facebook login
I did not realise that. Wow, the NY times is really turning into a tabloid these days...
There are reasons for the Win RT API. Security (and the lock in) and responsiveness are two that I can think of. It's not just because "groups at Microsoft don't like Win32".
مشاهدة مباراة ريال مدريد وبرشلونة بث مباشر 23/8/2012 | عرباوى
was updating some things, its fixed.
Pardon me for a shameless plug here, but I had jump in as this is an interesting discussion where we have at Flutter have long thought about it. We came up with a simple gesture to play/pause a song (itunes/spotify) by asking thousands of humans what gesture they would use if they did not have mouse/keyboard/voice. Almost everyone came up with the one we picked... even for next set of gesture, we're looking at static human gestures that are micro and intuitive (and doesn't make you fatigued).

When we released the first app, we got countless emails asking for hand-swipe as a next song gesture. We had felt a long ago that even though it seems natural it is completely impractical in certain context (i.e. coffee shop) and doing hand swipe 20 times starts to wear you down. It was important to try this number of times as same gesture can because to go to next slide or next photo or next album.

Hence, we ended-up picking thumbs-right and thumbs-left as metaphor: flutterapp.com/next

We will also hit our 4th Million gesture this month. That's 4 million times someone has either played or paused a song.

Please try our app and send feedback - would love to get your thoughts on this!

This is one of the best thoughtful discussion I've seen on this subject! thanks all for stimulating thoughts. I just thought I had something to share...
Hikers and Backpackers – Who are They?
Does not putting in abnormal hours means you don't love what you do?

I find (personally) that I become more creatively and emotionally effective when I've had rest, exercise, proper food and non-work social endeavors. I don't remember the last time I stayed up past 2am for work, or a side project. But I still love what I do, and want to do it well.