skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The `:age.gt => 5` was really a mistake. Since IIRC, I invented it, I think I'm qualified enough to assert that. ;-)

Something better might look like: https://gist.github.com/4113718

`5.days.ago` is actually harmful IMO. You get used to stuff like that, and then (if you're me at least), you basically forget how to perform basic date/time operations without it. Is +int on a Date referring to Day? Month? Year? What about on a Time object?

Custom percent-expressions would be a more elegant solution I think, allowing you to embed truly distinct mini-languages in Ruby: %date(5 days ago). Or %time(-12 hours), etc.

You could always overwrite modulo on classes that didn't need it: `Date % "5 days ago"`. You lose syntax highlighting that way though.

I guess my point is, there are other ways. I've put 5 minutes of effort into these alternatives. Monkey Patching can be a harmful crutch.

Though OTOH, these days I think Ruby would be entirely better off if it just included ActiveSupport into stdlib, and it could benefit from the optimizations available as a first-class Ruby library. It's basically defacto, and despite being involved with a couple different alternatives, I think that'd be best for everyone.

At the end of the day, I think if you want to make a strong argument for/against monkey-patching, it's best to leave ActiveSupport out of the discussion. It's so prevalent, it's hard to make a general case either way since pretty much everyone is aware of how to avoid stepping on it.
Yes, thousand times yes! Every time I had to use gmail (after their redesign and before I found a setting to use text labels instead of icons on buttons) was an exercise in frustration. All-gray small icons might look good on mockups but they are terrible and not informative in real life usage.
Paris Hilton disagrees
http://gawker.com/5648787/paris-hilton-owns-the-phrase-thats...

No matter how absurd, anything is possible. Welcome to 2012
It's interesting to consider that at this point, people are going to start planning things like COBRA coverage on the assumption that they'll be able to automatically obtain private coverage in 2014; this bolsters the case against any partial repeal of guaranteed issue, as it'll screw lots of people over if they do it.
I think mileage definitely varies! I use Parse on a large app in production (100,000+ active users) and haven't experienced any downtime or slowness. Although perhaps my use-case is different to yours. You should try getting in touch with the Parse guys, I've found them very helpful and responsive. Just thought I'd offer the other side of the coin.
Personality traits/Characteristics of Software Developers
1. Needs a working demo link.
2. In order to run the demo app locally, I had to install radpress - I expected to simply be able to run the demo app after closing the repo.
3. I like the editor in admin section.

I do prefer using reST for writing articles. I had found an existing blog which provides it. After using it, I realize the lack of preview option of the editor. My preference is to use https://www.stypi.com for writing the article and simply use blog to post it.
There's also motorola razr-i (europe only).
Meet Branch Groups
Can anyone confirm this part?

With all that up-and-running, I immediately headed to the Windows Store (the virtual one with apps, not the physical one with Surfaces) to get some apps. Total nightmare. In the ten days I’ve been using the Surface, that Store has either been down or completely unresponsive a large percentage of the time. It just hangs and hangs and hangs, seemingly forever. I restart, re-open and some things work, then it hangs again. I’ve been trying to download one app for days — still no luck. I’m sick of restarting. And the back-button just isn’t working. Joy.

I expect a dirth of apps at the start but this sounds like a PR disaster if true.
Great, thanks Patrick. I didn't even realize that I was self-indemnifying my abilities up front with a phrase like "for free"...but in retrospect it is exactly that. If I'm confident in what I can do...why the need for offering free services?

Thanks for the advice, I'll try to put this into practice. :)
Parse has first-party SDKs for Windows Phone, OS X, iOS, JS, and Android. There are third-party interfaces for many languages (PHP, Ruby, etc). It's not an Apple-only solution.
On a related note, does anyone have some informed opinions on the best type of business entity (e.g. LLC vs S-Corp vs C-Corp, etc.) to set up for a consulting business such as this?
Good design is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - So true
Fudge, English at 5 AM is not my forte. I meant "functioning" rather than "that one that gets mental co-citations with Lisp but whose definition I cannot conveniently call to mind at present." (n.b. I suspect that there's some business problem you can solve with that, too, but personally I'm pretty pedestrian with regards to programming methodologies.)
Wow. That's hot! Welcome to USA.
Happy to hear that you're interested! We'll definitely have cohorts starting after mid-August, it's just not listed on the site right now.

We actually went out to visit Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco and are huge fans of Shereef, Dave, and the rest of their team; hopefully we can create a similar experience here at home.
Please add Erlang as well.
Players aren't getting any invite quota yet, so I have none. I would recommend hanging around their IRC channel. That's where I got mine.
Ask/Show HN: Disrupting James Cameron :)
Hi guys,
YC rejects here :D

As we won't be in the valley in January (it seems we messed up the application from the beginning, as neither the demo nor the team accomplishments were viewed - which is a shame as I'm proud of those things :)),

we want to ask THE SOURCE (that is you) about the project we're making.

You can see the proof of concept video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNWyL2WlaPk

The basic idea is to create videos with motion capture and green screen effects without any technical or animating skills.

What are your general impressions?
What effects would you use from those seen in the video (animated character, changing background or both at the same time).
Do you have a Kinect? If not, would you be ready to buy one to be able to create such videos?

Looking forward to your input
What dog would have an easier time tracking and killing John McAfee than a dog bearing the reanimated head of one of McAfee's own dogs?
I understand its a blog, but his post had not a one bad thing to say about windows 8. It was also exclusively about windows laptops. He might have written better articles, and I'll give this a shot. As a sponsored post though, this one is less than subtle.
Starting in 2014 - it will be illegal to have lifetime caps on health insurance. Also limits on "essential services" will be illegal. They are loosely defined as:

- Emergency services
- Prescription drugs
- Mental and behavioral health, and substance abuse treatment
- Preventive, wellness, and chronic disease management
- Pediatric services
- Maternity and newborn care

Excluding based on pre-existing conditions will also be illegal starting in 2014. Until then - California has a health plan for pre-existing conditions here: http://www.pcip.ca.gov/Home/default.aspx and you can find information for all state here: https://www.pcip.gov/
What about that last part doesn't seem serious to you? To me it reads like he is trying to prevent other people from getting wrapped up in the mess. Seems reasonable and decent enough to me.
Cisco to acquire Meraki for $1.2B. Is Meraki SDN's second $1.2B exit?
Most consumer products that use icons to represent user actions would communicate more clearly by simply labeling the controls in English. Yes, even in parts of the world where English is not the main language spoken at home, it is a lot easier to look up what an English word means than to look up what an icon means. (Have you ever tried to use any online search service to visually look up what an icon means? When you ask your friends about an unfamiliar icon on a website or on a tangible consumer product, do they readily know what it means?)
I sort of agree. You can definitely bill over $100/hour in Poland (or Belgium, where I'm located) if you're an experienced consultant, but patio11 was billing that much before he changed his pricing approach.

Do you know of anyone that bills 20k$ a week in Poland?
Hackathons for Week of November 19th, 2012
Thanks for the advice! I'll give the honesty (without self-degradation aspect) a go.

I've done freelance programming in the past, but the gigs were mostly "build us a CRUD app" type jobs. Paid well, relatively easy work...but not really want I want to be doing. I'd rather be doing bigger picture work like funnel optimization, testing, metrics, etc.

Unfortunately, I also don't have as much experience with this, which is why I think my default instinct was to offer "for free!" as a risk-reducer. The analysis or quick report on their processes is a good idea, and would make me feel more comfortable in the situation I think.
> Paris Hilton disagrees

That's not a good example. Consider "Sun Microsystems". Can "Sun" be protected? No. Can "Microsystems" be protected? No again. Can both together be protected? Yes, of course.
Original video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNWyL2WlaPk
You can see a couple more proof of concept examples here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZVZ7DetCFo
> diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is)

Can you point me to some literature about this please? I'd be interested in finding out how you, and the voting majority in the UK, have convinced themselves that diversity is so laudable a goal in and itself. I understand it on an evolutionary biology level, but not in terms of the make-up of a technical community[1].

As a bonus I'd also like to know why so many people think that it should be artificially manufactured when it doesn't occur organically. These ideas are not self-evident to me, but seem to be for a large number of people.

[1] Unless of course, your ulterior motive is to reproduce with members of the opposite gender of a variety of nationalities.
Thanks for catching that. Our website currently doesn't have a section for families - but we plan on launching this soon.

If you send me your email (mine is in my profile), I'd be happy to notify you when it launches.
Or maybe just Paris :P
I haven't used the buildpack, but based on working with Parse and watching the screencast, here are some guesses:

1) Parse is more full-featured. Parse includes significant automatic support for things like modeling users, comes with UI components for e.g. sign up, and includes e.g. a UITableViewController subclass to automatically support things like automatic paging.

2) While Parse's documentation is superb, these features come at the cost of flexibility (though you don't have to use all of them, of course -- it could just be a REST backend if you wanted it to be, like the heroku buildpack seen here). You'll tie your iOS app to Parse with PFObjects, whereas you're much more flexible with a backend agnostic approach that you'll get just using a REST web service.

3) The Heroku buildpack will probably tie better to CoreData. There might be a clean approach for this with Parse (when I used it I was pretty new to iOS) but I ended up having PFObject and Core Data representations of objects, which is rather clunky. Conversely, if you aren't using Core Data, this build pack wouldn't be helpful for you.

Some conclusions: 1) people who are learning to write iOS apps and don't have experience writing a web server should probably use Parse because it will be easier. It is my suspicion, as a few others have commented, that you will run into problems like "Oh, how should I deal with user accounts and passwords" that Parse will handle, but you'll have to figure out if using the buildpack. The buildpack comes with all the advantages you'd associate with Heroku -- other people know what those are better than me.

Let me also say that Mattt Thompson is an inspiration (check out his github and NSHipster.com, which are fantastic and foreshadowed this project) and I predict this buildpack will be as awesome as he can make it.
" you have a community of scientist that can talk about the data and if something sucks, it can get called out."

This is the entire justification for credible journals in the first place.

You can't wish non-credible journals out of existence.
Ask HN: How to find the right job as new graduate?
Obviously, the best way to find the right job is through your network. But what about when you're first starting out and your network is small, largely still in college and mostly ineffective?

Among the classmates that I've talked to – at least among the ones who view it as more than "just a job" – it's a frustrating experience. If you look at job boards, most of them are either asking for an entry level .NET developer with 3 years of experience with UML modeling, which sounds like a terrible fit, or they want a senior engineer.

One friend got hired at a megacorp in Seattle and is trying to lure me in that direction, but as someone who doesn't live in Seattle, NY or the Bay Area and likes where he lives, that reduces the number of attractive megacorps that I know of to zero. Don't get me wrong, I live in one of the major tech centers of the U.S., just not one of those three.

When I was looking for internships, I had very occasional luck just sending out random emails to attractive companies, but the hard part is finding those attractive companies. In the end, I ended up taking something that wasn't right for me because I had to support myself through college. (It's also a big part of the reason I'm a month from graduating and don't have any significant side projects to show.)

What if I want to hack JS/Ruby/Python instead of translate UML to Java and .NET? Is it unrealistic to find something along those lines if the vast majority of my experience is Java and C? Is a recruiter the right answer, or should I just suck it up for 6 months or so while I get some personal projects under my belt in the technologies I want to use? Do I need to be more open to relocation?
[Infographic] Who’s the Highest Grossing Bond and What Sweet Ride Did He Drive?
Teaching Artificial Intelligences using Quantum Computers (2011)
Can you point out some of those.
I'd recommend Ca$hvertising.
Hopefully, Congress will stay deadlocked and let the fiscal cliff happen. The projected short recession now is a small price to pay for healthier footing 10 years from now.
Hope I'm that crazy by 67.
Have a phone number and an email address on your website.

I'm surprised by how many people complain to me about "I can't find work", but

A) don't know how many people are looking at their site

B) don't even have their own website (outside of, maybe, a github repo)

C) don't have a phone number on their website

D) force me to jump through some sort of BS "contact form with captcha" crap to contact them

I get "well, I'll get flooded with spam!!!"

1. not my problem
2. i don't care
3. so what?

"I'll get too many phone calls!"

Really? That's your biggest concern? You can't find work but are concerned about getting "too many" calls?
Important take-away - don't ever start compromising on your hourly or weekly rate. Patio is correct - it's very difficult to recover from that. Plus, in my experience, clients who want to bargain on your compensation are already devaluing what you do. I had a client who complained about my rate, and wanted to cut it substantially, because "there were lots of kids around who would work for less." I responded by telling him that he should hire one of those kids, and I would gladly hand his project over to them. I guess he reconsidered, because that was the last I ever heard about lowering my rate. I still work for that client, and have actually raised my rate by 50% over the last few years.

Don't undersell yourself!
It was our crowdfunding plugin for WordPress - http://ignitiondeck.com
In addition - if you live in California - Cal-COBRA covers you for 36 months, and also covers companies with less than 20 employees.

More info: http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0100-consumers/0070-health-issue...
I remember that the Sun Microsystems drop in office in SF had a "quiet room" that the developers loved. No phones at the desks, and absolute quiet. But disagreements would break out when the spaces outside were all taken up and sales people needed a seat. Some just yakked. Others brought in cell phones and felt that as long as they used a hushed voice, they were honoring the silence. Other people felt that allowing a cell phone to ring and then taking the call outside the quiet room as you talked counted as quiet.

The office manager ruled with an iron fist, fortunately, and she really didn't care if someone didn't like her, so these folks got the boot. She saved that quiet room, as far as I'm concerned.
> The test suite is really only a small part of the service ...

All I am saying is the claim is false, and it's the first thing people will see. Those who understand computer science will instantly realize it's an impossible and maybe intentionally misleading claim.

If all you want to attract are ignorant, possibly litigous customers, no problem.

The problem is with copy writing -- you need to hire a good copy writer. Consider this example -- a patent medicine manufacturer discovers his product is just like all the others, and is no better in any way. He might want to say (honestly) "Our product is just like all the others".

But instead he hires a skilled copy writer, who pens this gem: "No product, at any price, can cure your headache faster than ours!" It's very true, and also very clever.
Suggestion:
In practice, for stock-options, volatility is strike-dependent ie implied volatility has a skew (lower strikes have higher implied volatility - the leverage effect). Also, the volatility is dependent on time to expiry of the option.

Also, as I've mentioned in the HN thread for your previous article, single-name stock options which are exchange-traded
have an American exercise type. The valuation of these cannot be done using Black-Scholes if they are (a) long-dated (ie time to expiry is quite long) or (b) they are deeply in the money/out of money or (c) have an underlying which has a significant dividend yield (in which case you'd want to own the stock rather than the option).

Puts behave different than calls if the exercise-style is American (puts have a limited upside - so you wouldn't wait too long if the underlying stock has fallen far enough - your payoff is not likely to be larger).

You may want to discuss this and option greeks the next time.
Double Fine lets you vote on what their next game is.
It sounds like a Lofstrom loop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
How to launch a new website design, when your old design is perfectly optimized
The cannon idea is really interesting. Musk's initiatives are all about reducing the cost of long term operation in order to disrupt the market. Most of the operational cost of air transportation is (I believe) in the take-off. If you eliminated the need for the aircraft itself to takeoff by projecting it with a rail-gun then this could theoretically reduce costs greatly. Essentially creating airline bullet gliders. Just a theory.
LOVE this point...definitely have felt this before at feefighters. however, there are benefits to TC other than just getting signups (especially for non technical startups as some have mentioned). you just have to keep in mind that PR has varying goals:
1) Exposure- people will remember you and refer you when they see you in top press
2) One TC doesnt build traffic/signups, but multiple articles over a long period of time will
3) Brand equity grows with media exposure
4) now you get to put the TC logo on your homepage=social proof=higher conversion
5) Links!

we are planning on doing a big pr launch for matchist when this kind of exposure will serve us well (timing is everything with pr)
It might not be. Considering for a minute that he:

a) is probably somewhere on the Autism spectrum

b) is primarily surrounded by people who want his money

c) lives in a country where people will do a lot for money

I'd say this guy is the main prize in a mental Capture The Flag and is most likely being played from every angle by everyone he knows.

From what I'm hearing I just feel sorry for the guy and wish that he could be taken out of there and given proper psychiatric counseling.
Forgoing patents on it is a bad idea if it means that a troll will immediately patent the idea after Musk releases it.

If only there were a GPL for patents...
>>many people have built and written up methodologies for using code to make money for businesses

Would you mind pointing out some examples, or naming the field of literature? When I googled "optimizing business processes with software" I got a bunch of ads for software. I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for.
The result is that, by making sure the pool of speakers is diverse to start with, they can pick the best papers blindly to gender and race, and still get diversity.

By your logic, as a caucasian person I shouldn't submit a presentation to GoGaRuCo because they are determining the pool of speakers based on diversity (read: gender/race/taste), before they determine what I have to say. Since I somehow have a lighter shade of skin and because I have these dangly bits between my legs, I'm no longer eligible for inclusion into the speaker list.

I'd call that a clear case of discrimination.

Edit: Since I can't reply directly to fatbird, I'll reply here. I see we're using "diverse" and "diversity" differently here. Looking at your comment again, I can see how you are thinking. I personally don't know how BritRuby opened their CFP process. I assumed (ass - u - me, I get it) that they would just open up the CFP to the Interwebs and papers would just roll in. Maybe they did something differently, and narrowed their advertising for papers, there's not enough information to know whether they did that.
The Start Menu wasn't good because it was never utilized right. Many years before I ever saw KDE, I started organizing my apps in categories (Viewers, Networking, Storage, System, etc., I've refined the list over the years) and found that most apps can be reduced to a single icon, rather than a whole folder with a bunch of icons you'll never use, or only use once (websites, demos, documentation. And the whole "put your app in a folder named after your company" was one of the most user-hostile things ever invented.

Opening the Start Menu only to type something in seems like a useless hybrid of two disparate ways of interfacing with the computer. Once I get it set up, it takes very little effort to keep it organized in a way that's useful for me, as opposed to just being advertisements for the companies who made the software I use. I can find any app I need usually in 4 clicks (Start, Programs, Category, the app I want). That's incredibly fast, at least when Explorer doesn't have to swap in 3 gigabytes or whatever it's always doing that makes it pause for ridiculous amounts of time for the most trivial of operations.

The Start Menu was only ever "useless" because it was never implemented intelligently. Just like that useless shovelware pre-installed on new computers, it was just another place where every company that got access to your computer dumped a whole bunch of crap, most of which was only useful for _them_, not you, the user. Kind of like the \Windows directory back in the bad old days.
Nice try, but there's no way I'm clicking that link.