skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been thinking schooling this week; More and more of the poor people I know have gone on to get real jobs lately, (The local job market is really hot, if you are a nerd, and nearly all of my friends and many of my acquaintances are smarter than I am[1] so it's really no surprise.)

I ended up using a craigslist ad to find someone to help me shovel out the office. The random I got had an IT-related degree from one of those schools you see advertised on daytime TV, and was having a hard time of it, even in these good times. (I mean, uh, she had windows experience, so not really my field, but someone has to maintain the exchange servers and desktops for all the people hiring my friends.)

>because at the time ('60s), public universities had very low tuition, and even what low tuition existed could be covered by part-time work on campus (e.g. in the cafeteria or library).

This is still true for community colleges and state schools. The problem is that a degree from one of those schools doesn't mean as much as a degree from a good school, (or really, from what I've seen, much at all,) precisely because it's something most people can get.

This supports my theory that degrees are about filtering rather than about learning.

My belief that a degree from a good school says that either you have rich parents, or you are smart, hardworking and have some hustle. With partial scholarships, this isn't a binary thing, of course.

The idea is, though, from an employers perspective, for a lot of jobs, having rich parents (and connections who are also the children of rich parents) can be just as useful as being smart and hard working.

But yea, if a degree is about filtering and not about learning, then obviously, a degree from a school anyone can get into is of dubious value.

Perhaps, from that perspective, what we want is a cheap school with a brutal dropout rate? But it's going to be hard to change the current status quo, as it works out pretty well for the elites; The rich pay big bucks to go to school with the best scholarship students. It's a fine system for the children of the rich (the quality of your peers, I think, has far more to do with educational quality than the quality of your teachers... and hell, if you are one of the elite, destined to control means of production? you /need/ to know competent people that can actually work.) It's also a great system for the smart people that make it on scholarships; they gain the contacts and access to capital that their birth denies them.

(I mean, as a coder, rich people contacts are generally less-useful. So I guess that means google and facebook should start focusing their recruiting efforts on people that went to good schools but didn't pay for it.)

[1]To be clear, I'm not stupid, but my own set of prejudices and my own brand of arrogance means that I don't have all that much tolerance for people noticeably dumber than I am. It's not a virtue; I recognize that I would be alone if many of my friends shared my prejudice.
The alternative is design by an elite group with a strong opinion. I'm very much in favor of that model provided that this elite group is knowledgable about all the tasks that users actually want to perform.

I think that's possible for consumer electronics but not for general purpose computing. No one can design for data center sysadmins, data scientists, financial analysts, architects and mobile salespeople at the same time without making mistakes.

Being opinionated in an area where your opinion is irrelevant is just being stupid.
I switched immediately to the per-capita numbers, but I still knew that since California was biggest, it was worrying to see Texas with a higher gross spend!
From personal experience this is not isolated to gaming. As a gamer and coder whenever I spend 2+ hours just before sleep on gaming, heavy coding, research I tend to get a bad sleep. I guess during coding / research it's because my mind stuck with certain problems (hence eureka moments in the morning). Also I look forward to the next morning so I can try out all these new ideas (which always causes me to wake earlier).

Right after gaming or a mind stimulating movie (i.e. Fight Club) again my mind is too busy with the stuff so sleep quality is worse than general.

For the last 4-5 years I consciously try to put a buffer between all these active engagements and my sleep by watching a sitcom or just doing light reading in between.
Bret Victor seems to be the sort of guy who makes things for the sheer joy of it. They may not always work brilliantly, but you have to respect the creativity and effort that went into them. When I saw his page I was surprised by how it was achieved without Flash. I think that was the point of him making it: to show that surprising things could be done.

This harks back to those showoff pages at the dawn of the Web, which showed surfers things that surprised and intrigued, and did it without adhering to common design conventions. The sort of page that you raised your eyebrows at and bookmarked right away, because that sure was some genius and artistry behind it there. It's nice to come across these things, especially today when mostly everyone uses major platforms, templates, plugins, and conventions.
They get as good MPG as my 13 year old Sentra.
Am I the only one who's a bit sad that the biggest success of a nice open-standards protocol (XMPP) has been it's usage in a closed-down proprietary form? I mean, Whatsapp have done some cool stuff, but I really would have liked to finally see a dominant but open instant messaging network.

Howcome Google hasn't bought these guys?
On the other hand, .split() with no argument splits on any amount of whitespace (\s+, as a regex). That's often quite a useful edge case to have handled for you. You can also do .split(c, 1) to limit it to a single split. It could still split 0 times, though - it just depends which edge cases you want to handle.
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The difference is that - for a chunk of people - this functionality isn't crap. It's actually useful.

It's out of the way for people who don't care. It's there for people who do. I've seen folk go "that's so cool" when the amazon stuff came up.

This stuff is much closer to the adds folk get in Google search. It's often relevant to what they're doing at the time.
Well, why everyone should please "average user"?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2012/07/21/finlands-j...
I've had similar problems ordering a server this weekend. I've used the UK site to order on Friday evening a server which was supposed to be available in 24hrs. One hour later, I received an email confirming my payment has been received.

I kept wondering what's taking so long, only to receive an email on Monday morning saying "Unfortunately, we only provide services to Republic of Ireland or UK customers at the moment" and asking for "a copy of your ID (passport, driving licence)" and "a proof of address (utility bill)" to be sent over email(!!). I am in the UK, but they can bugger off.
I agree it is a small sample - although not uncommon for psychology studies.

I'm going to see if Dr Kyle (who wrote the post) can hop on here to give us his view.
> I'd just copy the policy from whoever your nearest comparable is. It is fairly specific to your application and needs.

While bearing mind that legal documents are often copyrightable and you may need your own to be independently drafted.
SEEKING WORK - North West, England, UK

I mostly use Corona SDK (have 3 apps on the iOS App Store), also have basic knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS, JSON, XML and WordPress.

Currently unemployed and looking for full time or part time work.

My CV on Google docs - https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1xmRXziXTaKKqNoeH0wA...

thedavebaxter[at]gmail[dot]com
Good addressing of concerns raised.

>> Personally, 12.04 with Unity was what truly sold me on Ubuntu, and I suspect the same will be true for far more users than they lose over it.

This is a correct observation (at least my own anecdata verifies it too).
Berlin, Germany - Fulltime - stylemarks

We’re a small, international and ambitious team of developers, product and business guys rethinking the way how people buy and sell things. We're building a product in a multi-billion euro market, and have a clear path to revenue.

Currently we are looking for an iOS specialist who is above all, a quick learner and seek out the latest in tooling, iOS open source or clang features.

We are also part of the newly launched Hubraum Accelerator, based in Berlins famous betahaus and are closing our seed round in two weeks. Our team includes a successful serial entrepreneur, a senior backend developer (10y+) as well as an iOS Developer (4yrs+).

Full job description can be found at http://stylemarks.de/jobs

If this sounds interesting email me at marc@stylemarks.de

Applications outside of Europe are encouraged.
The number of companies that I find who are willing to allow remote work are the exception, not the norm. The number who will accept remote people on the business side of things are even lower.

One reason is that there is quite a lot of evidence that, all other things being equal, it's considerably less efficient than co-located teams - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4800412 for some references.
Instatart: your photo as a pie chart
> If a programmer cannot see what a program is doing, she can't understand it.

I really agree with this. An aspect of any "new" programming language/environment should be continual and immediate feedback.
Decorator Pattern - Decorating Properties of Instances
5 Cool Justin Bieber Facebook Covers for Bieber Fans
FWIW, I'm on BT and http://promobay.org/ is blocked
Exactly. Try using product studio team foundation server web client with Chrome.
Point conceded - was just going with current 'talked about' OSes - but you're right in that they probably can't be compared.

I'd still like to see research done using the following - results could be very interesting.

A designer is told to create a screen for some fairly complex feature - something that has at least 10 inputs into some kind of algorithm.

A

Designer is given free reign to just make up some UI entirely how he thinks it should work.

B

Another designer is told to make different versions which are then tested by users. Users should be asked what and how they want the UI to work and how the different versions should be changed. Based on popularity of opinions by testers, that design should be changed to match what most testers prefer. Should have at least 3 repetitions of user testing and feedback.

After this, A and B are given to a new unrelated testing group who need to rank the UI from both A and B without being told about either or having anything explained.

Common sense says B should be better, but I don't think it's guaranteed... Anybody in a university position currently in a position to set something like this up? The results should likely be worth a research paper regardless of outcome!
Wow, Gaelic has to be one of the most unintuitive languages in the world to pronounce.

I've read that word probably a hundred times in various news articles, and always pronounced it in my head as Tao-Seech, which I'm assuming is ridiculous to Irish ears.

I'm a bit interested in Irish culture so I've informally learned some pronunciations here and there to see if I could start to get a handle on Gaelic words: the only pattern seems to be that I'm always wrong :)
That limits you to the United States Postal Service, since USPS does not accept packages from other carriers.
SEEKING FREELANCER: Koding.com
https://koding.com

- Devops / Developer minded SysAdmin: this is a very important role, PUPPET, Chef, AWS, Linux, LXC, OpenVZ. Xen, VMWare, you should just have this immense desire to automate and simplify everything, and be a product person, plan, implement and ship - not a maintainer that lives in their cave until things crash, and apply one off server tweaks.

- Frontend Developer: HTML, CSS, Coffeescript - Familiarity with Node/Ruby/Mongo/Mysql, cool github projects is a plus, have to have your own website when we click your link, it should make us want to hire you.

- Backend Developer: Go, Node,Python,Ruby,Coffeescript, MongoDB, RabbitMQ are the things we use. More you know these, the better. If you miss some, don't worry, if you have a strong OOP background, and designing/working on large scale apps is your thing, just drop me an email.

We're open for remote, part time or full time in San Francisco. Only thing we don't want is that you have multiple clients. You can be a student or very experienced individual, and work for Koding 20 hours a week, or work a day or two. You just shouldn't be managing multiple clients and not show up for Koding because your other client had emergency. We want Koding to be the only thing you think about, when you're not working, when you go to sleep, when you wake up.

At this stage we're more willing to have VERY experienced developers, and we're very generous with rates. Our current freelancers have stocks in the company, we don't favor in house developers (alright, maybe just a little :)). Some of our freelancers make more than those are in the office. Your location has no significance to us, just your work. If your work is awesome, your compensation is equally awesome.

This summarizes the type of person we want, (my contact information is here)
http://blog.koding.com/2012/06/we-want-to-date-not-hire/

I also want you to try Koding, for that please drop me a note, I will send you an invite.

Little about Koding: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/koding-launch/

And this is what we expect from our freelancers,
http://blog.koding.com/2012/08/freelance-developers-you-are-...

Hope to meet soon!
There are probably much better news sources for most industries.
Besides, there's a small(very small or even very tiny) subset of mobile users who are actually using WhatsApp. Not even 50% of my smart phone using friends have 3G activated. Not 100% have Internet on mobile. So, you have to use SMS anyway, if you require messaging. + WhatsApp is very much broken - a broken identity management is one of the many broken things.

I ended up being textually abused by two persons when I first started using WhatsApp few months ago. The old cell numbers of many of my friends were assigned to others when they changed numbers and those were still in my phonebook. My friends forgot to dissociate the numbers from WhatsApp database and when I pinged(didn't pester) them(assuming they are my friends) two of them got pissed off real bad. And I was like - "WTF! This is WhatsApp?". So, WhatsApp assumes that as long as the user hasn't dissociated the numbers that user is still using WhatsApp and is doing with the same phone/account. See bottom

>>"the moment they have to pay, everyone will switch".

I can confirm at least three of my friends have already uninstalled the app after first year. It was eihter money or almost mostly very limited usability. the new player http://hike.in looks very promising. Hope it's not vapour. Especially the feature where it fills a huge hole - the other party doesn't need to have http://hike.in app installed and an internet connection is not a requirement for both the parties.

>>of nobody in person to have "ever paid for any" app

It's not as common place as in western countries(or purchases on that scale) but I sure know a lot in my circle who use paid apps. Really many. Well, I also pay for a lot of apps both on my Galaxy Nexus and Macbook Air but when it comes to buying one of those double digit dollar apps I do stop before buying and think whether I really need this? And is the free alternative isn't good enough? I have never had YES for either of the two questions, except once. I think this is good :-)

bottom: That was the last day I used WhatsApp. KakaoTalk is far better in that way, but except Koreans no else uses the app it seems.
I was thinking in buil a similar system... the rpi working as web server and "talking" with the arduino via USB connection. But i'm in trouble with the Rpi script/programation... the arduino side is quite easier for me. could you help me with your project and code?? (jorgefnarciso [at] hotmail.com)

Thanks
Whatsapp is the perfect example of "solve something people need". You don't need to solve it "perfectly" or "10 times better".

Combined with network and lock-in effects, it's a great business on a good enough application and an obvious idea. Which makes it even more impressive.

P.S. I think many tried to do similar things before or after but failed. So I'm not quite sure what make whatsapp stand out. Any ideas? First comer? Better UX? Cheaper? Better cross-platform support? Better marketing?
Not really no. I'm I don't think I spelled it correctly but it's phonetically correct.

"Mar yea" would be a dismissive description meaning something like "..as if" or ".. not!"
Why we don't use an ORM
http://jsfiddle.net/uzMPU/3165/

using window.requestAnimationFrame just because we can!
Ask HN: ComboApp, GTekna, are they worth it?
I know this question is very likely to make an outcry but I still would really like to get some input regarding "App marketing agencies" (as they define themselves) like http://www.comboapp.com/ and http://gtekna.com/.

I'm about to release my first own app in a few days (http://www.waitapp.net) and although I'm fairly proud of it, my pride isn't going to do anything to promote it. Services supposedly provided by those "agencies" are pricy but so are in general marketing and promotion efforts when related to more traditional products and still quite necessary when you want to bring your product to the public eye.

Once again, I'm fairly proud of Wait, my app, and I believe it stands a good chance in front of other iPhone timers, but I can't rely on an hypothetical AppStore promotion, and I still need at the very least to jump start the word of mouth.

Unfortunately, an app, regardless of how good it is is as good as dead if nobody knows about it.

So, yeah, is it worth shelving a stupid (maybe) amount of money with those agencies?
Yes blue light inhibits melatonin release, although to my knowledge there is still very little reliable research on in-situ, naturalistic use of devices on sleep.

Agreed that this is a small sample; however the use of both subjective and objective measures is a step forward.
For me video games greatly affect my sleep. I was a teenager when I realized this and that was when I stopped playing games at around 9pm so my brain could reset and do something more relaxing.

I don't think this is exclusive to games. I often have the same problem going to bed straight after coding. I still have things on the mind.

I find the hardest game to sleep after is Starcraft. All that multitasking and thinking about a silly loss. Can take 30-40 minutes to get to sleep if I jump into bed directly after playing a game.

Did anyone use to play Ultima Online? Surely you had the recurrent dream of being dead and struggling to find your corpse? "Must find corpse! Can't lose stuff!" I would then wake up and remember I signed out at Brit bank, relax and go back to sleep. I had issues.
Apple Branches Out. How’d They Do?
Unfortunately, international policy making is even more opaque and convoluted than the US legislative process. ITU has been several years in the making, and at the penultimate meeting back in October, it's likely that almost all of the big decisions were finalized.
The classic look suffers from the same issues. The padding is far too heavy on most of the UI elements.

If you use Eclipse on OSX or Windows with a lot of project folders loaded at once, you will see how much better it is than on Linux.

Maybe this is the issue I'm having when trying to explain the problem I'm facing. A lot of people seem to think that I'm complaining about the new Juno interface when this issue has been around much longer than Juno.
Yes, you can change individual pixels or sub-full-screen regions. But because the pixels are cells of white titanium-dioxide particles suspended in a liquid, simply writing a new pixel value may leave a few particles floating around.

To correct this, older Kindles and Nooks used to flash the screen all white and then all black before displaying a new page. Later models only do this every few page turns (I think on my Nook Simple Touch it's 6).
> the extreme amount of volume and limitations of storage space.

Speak for yourself then. I've already got 10TB of storage at home in a case the size of a shoebox. It's got my entire life in it (at least every file I've created since university), but most of it is storing my movie and music collection. So, realistically your entire life can fit in a 1TB drive once you exclude videos and transcode audio. 2-4TB if you're a person of interest.

Do know that 1 Backblaze 4U-server holds 135TB. They are building a datacenter in Utah with 100,000sqft[1] of rackspace. 20,000 racks per floor (I don't know if there are multiple stories) gives you 29.7 petabytes if they used a Backblaze solution.

So yes, if the US govt wanted to record everything you did everyday they are more than capable of doing it, now.

[1]http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
Websites Design for Mobile Applications: Trends and Examples
In this article, we'll describe the most common trends in the design of websites for mobile applications.
It's unusably slow on your instance of Firefox. Works fine here in FF 17 / Ubuntu 12.04.
However, consider the following:

A UI for creating a shopping cart. We can rank two different variables here:

1) Number of users making a purchase.
2) Number of users returning goods because they didn't actually want it.

If we focus only on the first option in our user testing (as any shopping cart user testing will do), we will generally make the 'fine print' descriptions of items as small as possible. We will make it very easy to buy an item with a single click. This is going to give us the best 'purchase rate', guaranteed.

However, we are going to get increased returns as users will miss important product details. We will get lower 'user happiness' with our store as users will feel a bit cheated and have to turn to external sites for more information. In the long run, users may stop using our store entirely and our purchase rate will fall.

This is a classic example of 'short term' or 'greed' based optimization. I feel nearly all UI testing I've seen does not cater to variable B - only to variable A. Catering to variable B isn't even really possible with a UI or A/B test?
It passes up revenues equal to 51% of its budget ctrl+Z'ing its own taxes selectively.
Don't really agree, at least not based on my experience with it.

The key difference being, with google I am specifically searching the "world wide web" and may type something that suggests an interest in making a purchase. Companies can bid against each other to decide the value of these searches.

When using unity dash, I am basically searching for programs that are installed on my computer. Or occasionally for a file. Doing a primitive text match against "thunderbird" with an online catalog is unlikely to help.

Once you are in this mindset you start to think "why should amazon get special treatment?" and you say "hey, we should search ebay too and what about netflix and pornhub?" and suddenly you have an entire screen full of crap and are leaking information everywhere.
Advanced web typography with font-feature-settings
It has seams for a lot of people.

Personally, every upgrade I've done has resulted in a broken system. I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary. Half the time I'm left with a system that won't even boot and I have to do a fresh install.
What a simplistic way of seeing things
What the most popular browser is doesn't matter on its own. But I would still expand your <=IE8 to include all of IE because, while IE8 and lower are hopelessly outdated, IE9 is still a poor HTML5 browser and new and shiny IE10 is already behind both Chrome and Firefox.