skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just some quick observations. I like the general minimalistic monochrome theme. It's just the execution that lacks.

Logo - The simple wordmark is fine, but you should render it with a bolder font - That thin looking plus looks cheap. Also, the rendering should be antialiased - right now there are some really rough jagged edges in the logo text. Make sure it's evenly positioned (There's more padding under than over it as of now).

The font looks great, but you need a better fallback. You haven't linked the web fonts in properly, because some in places it renders as intended, but in other places it falls back to the browser default, which is a serif-font in most cases. It looks hideous in contrast to the very modern typeface.

The hero-block should have text positioned a bit further down (Same issue as with the logo). Also, consider bolding the first line to add contrast to the subheading.

The buttons in the hero bar have the fonts positioned wrong. This might be down to my system not picking up the same font as you have used. I would suggest to just use plain helvetica for buttons and main text and leave special fonts for headings.

The columns in the main section are too wide on my screen. I would suggest that you set the page in a fixed width grid - it's simpler to control the layout. Also, the gutter is way too big, to the point of having less margin on the sides than gutter between columns, which makes the layout look cut in half.

On the front page, you have two links between columns, that are centered. They look strange like they should have gone together with the left column, but have drifted too far to the right. At least put a horizontal ruler above, to separate from the columns above.

Hope that helps.

Edit: Just noticed. If you resize the page under a certain size, the menu jumps down below the logo, which is fine. But since the text is white and the background is an unrepeated image, it becomes white text on white background. Related - on the shorter pages (Such as contact), the footer ends before the screen does (on a large resolution anyway), which means that the white background comes after the dark red colour. Just set the same dark red colour as body background.
This post has a very naive understanding of online advertising. Here's a breakdown:

- If you're thinking of advertising in terms of just slapping on some Google Adsense then you need high amounts (millions of users per month) of traffic to make reasonable money.

- If you're thinking of specific kinds of targeted advertising, this can be very powerful depending on your niche. If you can hire a sales team to push advertising in those niches, you may be very successful, especially if you can show quality ROI to advertisers. eg. a cancer hospital advertising on a site with cancer related information.

- If you're thinking of other kinds of advertising, business partnerships in terms of 'upsells' to a free product work really well too.

The above is a gross generalization but claiming that 'advertising' is a broken business model is laughable. There are definitely certain use cases where online advertising can be your business model and of-course others where it would absolutely not work.

The main downside of advertising supported business is that advertising can go in and out of demand, so you add an additional issue/unknown/risk in terms of product revenues.

TLDR; most high traffic sites can make reasonable money from online advertising.
I'm sure Apple could be held responsible. What I don't know is if attempting to collude to distort the market is illegal or just actually making such an agreement. As the answer was no are Apple technically in the clear?
Your $35,000 / yr is no where near the peak. If you are average to below average as a developer then getting a degree could help (entry level out of college seems to be ~$80,000 in NYC/SF). If you have some heavy contributions to F/OSS or an extensive github profile, then you have already have a lot of nerd cred to cash in, and getting a degree is not as necessary.

One of my friends is a college dropout. He has been programming for 15+ years now, and is one of the most productive and thoughtful developers I know, earning roughly $150k / yr. The lack of a degree has made it difficult to get past the front door of large companies, but it does not stop him from getting CTO solicitations from well funded startups.

You also frame this question as an all-or-nothing decision. This is simply not true. You can test out the waters by taking a few classes part time while you are working. If you like it, keep going. If you don't like it, figure out what it is you don't like, and adjust your direction.
I've always kind of worried about scenarios like this given my dependence on 1Password. To mitigate, I ended up getting 1Password for my phone so that I can access my passwords, even if my computer falls in a lake. I also try to avoid treating Dropbox like a backup. It's great for syncing, and I know they keep revisions, but I have a local TimeMachine backup, as well as an offsite backup through Backblaze (still need a password from my database for this). I could always recover my passwords from the TimeMachine backup if all my devices were to disappear at once.
Try using kippt. They have a Chrome addon that allows you to save HN stories into your links.
If you can, please drop me an email with mine.
Now it's almost fixed because each program store its libraries it its directory.

And wasn't this pioneered on OSX?
A more constructive response would have been your browser version and a screenshot of what the train wreck looks like.
No? What does it matter?
In my personal experience 90% of people with ideas think about advertising, when in reality, only 5% (I'm guesstimating) make serious money with it. Or maybe even less.
Just a though: what prevents the OS from keeping several versions of a library installed, linked dynamically to an application that specifies which version it needs?

We'd have to change some system calls, of course, from load("blah.so") to load("blah.so", maj_ver=4, min_ver=2). But couldn't that solve a part of the problem?
I do agree that there might be some privacy concerns over google, but for contacts I actually don't really care.

Lets say I use your service instead of Google, I will protect my contacts from getting into Google's hands (this is only if I don't use gmail/google voice/google plus, which I do so they get my contacts anyways). Now I have protected my contacts, against google.
But I have 173 friends/family that also use Gmail. This means that every single one of them probably has my email/phone/address and uploaded it too into Google Contacts. And if I haven't uploaded my contacts, someone else will do it. There is no way of protecting yourself against this sort of social network.
Thank you Henry. Much appreciated - check back in a few hours and hopefully it will be sorted.
It's amazing how much more value your work history can bring than a degree. As a high-school dropout (due to boredom from not being stimulated and learning anything new) it concerned me quite a bit that I wasn't getting the same opportunities or salary as others in my field. I now know that very few places actually care about that degree - and those that do are shooting themselves in the foot imho. As for salary - I had to tell quite a few of my friends that they were getting severely underpaid when I thought I would be the one in that position.
I already download and install lots of source package, which doesn't seem particularly any better than windows. How many github repositories bother building a deb package?
First of all I agree with gf - the site does a horrendous job in explaining what it is. Add screenshot, actual content. People aren't looking for "simple", "familiar", etc. We're looking for what problem does this solve me with my contacts.

And oh I've got a few. First is that I contact people in different ways - phone, email, gtalk. I want it all unified in their card (Google does a meh job with this with their "linking" feature, but still misses obvious doubles). Not only that but I want a unified history - not a call log, not a message log. I want to see when I last contacted the person, not how.

Secondly - reminders. People need to be contacted sometimes. I need to call my mom later today, email a future client in a few hours etc. Not only that but as a good son I want to call my mom every day, unless she already called me. This is easy to check and to implement and I have no idea how it not standard. There is an Israeli android app called "Assistive" which kinda helps with this but not really enough. It basically sets reminders for missed calls. This needs to be taken further.

Just these two features will practically revolutionize the way I communicate with people, but I can keep on going on other things I want. You've chosen to do contact syncing which is a nice feature my phone already has for free.
Fair enough. I just assumed it was obvious, which is probably a bit hasty.
What it takes for governments to access personal information
>Here in France companies wont even look at you if you don't have 3 years of experience. It's ridiculous.

This is true in most places. I would suggest looking at things you've done outside of professional work that would differentiate you and show you really enjoy what you're applying to do.

It used to be getting a degree would satisfy this. Now the majority of people have degrees so you should look to do other things to differentiate you.
The users are the product. Advertising is how you sell them. If you think about the advertising model as selling your users/visitors then the high volume required becomes more obvious. You don't sell an ad slot for $1k. You sell a user for a tenth of a penny.
I think he meant `not fancy`. Fancy speech is not the same as effective speech; rather, I'd say effective speaking is very much in the realm of eloquence.
Exciting News
Very much so troels, thank you. An unbiased, outside view of the design is critical. Working on it now.
Yes, exactly this. TPB's IP addresses are blocked at ISP level, and the response has been to set up many reflector sites (e.g. malaysiabay.org), and mirrors.

A complicated interactive site is of course much harder to mirror than a bunch of magnet links.
Packet radio has increased in popularity in recent years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Amateur_Packet_Ra... Might be worth looking into, although I'm not sure how practical it would be for the RPi.
Drawing the line: almost any categorisation has debatable cases, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It's quite obvious that an app like Firefox is different from something like Qt or Python.

Dependencies: the distribution provides, e.g. Qt 4.8 and Python 2.7. Applications that support the distribution work on those versions because their developers knew that's what they needed to support. That's how it already works for open source apps.

Usefulness: if the user wants a shiny toy, they'll go and get one. If that turns out to carry malware, it's just as much of a problem as if they were trying to install something 'useful'. It's not about what you consider useful, it's about what users want to use.

Why should you care: when a new version of, say, Libreoffice comes out, why should I have to wait 2-8 months before I can benefit from it, on the 6 month distro release cycle? Windows users can upgrade the same day. Some things, like Firefox, now get fast-tracked updates, but there isn't the manpower for any distro to do that for all apps.
Advertising is a beautiful business model that can work very well. I mean, it's obviously working for a LOT of people. And very well.

The only reason I don't want to do ad-supported products is because I believe in delivering value that users are willing to pay for. That's the kind of products I want to build. Simple as that.

Something something, business and user interests aligned.
Ask HN: After connecting to a data source, what URL do you visit to test?
Interestingly enough maybe you should read your own links before drawing what you think are exact conclusions in your original post. From the wikipedia article:

Pornography's effects on crime and domestic violence have been inconclusive. Some studies support the contention that the viewing of pornographic material may increase rates of sexual crimes whereas others either suggest no effect, or conclude the liberalization of porn in society may be associated with decreased rape and sexual violence rates.

It loos like that, like violent video games, some people are simply predisposed to being effected from an external source. The hard thing is knowing whether the effected people would have presented the effects outside of any external influence. How's that for a lesson in learning?
You're right, and the problem here is a naive understanding of advertising as a business model rather than it not being a good business model.

I happened to go the opposite way. My first major project was an online advertising success. I naively applied my 'learning' to my 2nd project. That obviously didn't pan out. That led me to a better understanding of business models and how and where they may work. So I guess it can go both ways.

Most people are only familiar with 'big names' like techcrunch, lifehacker, facebook, etc. which are very much advertising supported platforms. That's probably why they think 'advertising' is the answer even if they're not building a high traffic web app.
This isn't true - I'm in the radio industry. High-level discussions have been taking place on the future of DAB digital radio, but there are no plans to switch off FM radio. It's FUD that's been spread over the past few years.

At the very most, we will see a migration of national (and possibly large regional) stations to DAB in the next decade. FM will still remain up and running for local commercial and community radio - and an expansion of this is planned once the spectrum currently used by national broadcasters is released. The current FM and MW spectrum is of little use for new technology like mobile broadband - they are more interested in the current TV spectrum and up into the GHz bands.

All this is currently under discussion, though, and nothing is confirmed. The status quo remains for now!
When Even Top SEO Companies Don't Work
I never listened to that speech, but as I was saying, great orators wrap powerful messages in a simple and clear language. And anybody that tried delivering speeches to an audience this way knows how difficult it can be.
Good advice. I'd lean toward no college for the OP since as you point out there are still tons of companies that care about results over pedigree, and that thinking probably makes them more enjoyable to work for too.
Why subtraction is the hardest math in product design
Presumably the parent meant to throw an exception and show a script-level stack trace, not silently exit with no diagnostic messages.

Insisting on doing something, even if it's the wrong thing, is much worse in most applications than refusing to run in order to avoid producing incorrect and misleading results.
It took me a couple of minutes to remember the pascal triangle due to the way you are presenting the triangle. I'd rather have it structured as such:

1
1 1
1 2 1
...

It makes it easier to understand when you say 'the two numbers to the right and left on the row above'. However, the way you present it may make it easier to find a solution since it hints to storing the numbers in an array that can be used in each iteration and highlights the relations between the positions of the numbers. But i guess much of this shouldn't be a problem to experienced programmers.
Microsoft plans 400% price increase for Windows 8
I'm in a master's program in comp eng. (software focus), but before coming to my program I was basically a wordpress hacker, and not gainfully employed like you. My education was in music.

The cost of my education is and will be nothing short of immense (loans). My classes aren't always amazing. Still, I hadn't anticipated the full value of my choice to come back for that technical degree. You don't just go to school to program or do homework. There's much more to it than that. A huge part of it is networking and peer collaboration. There's that old saying that if you look around and you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong place. My professors are incredibly networked and have brought me internship and job leads I couldn't have found on my own.

Also, I'm in comp eng, which is typically more of a hardware degree. I could have done CS, but I ended up in eng for a number of complicated reasons. Still, you mentioned the hardware thing in a comment, and I've found great value in studying some hardware. The ability to talk from high level language through gate level implementations is valuable knowledge.

I think the other thing to consider is the state and future of this industry. Naturally, it's incredibly bright, amongst a sea of industries headed for the garbage can. More and more, the masses will be flocking to where the jobs are going. I think the formal education might be helpful in this sense.

On the flip-side, you seem like you are already on your way. Nobody would not hire a candidate with ten years of real experience due to the lack of degree.

If I were in your shoes, it would come down to cost and networking. Can you finance it well? Will it give you exposure to people and places that will greatly accelerate your career?

Of course, I still believe in liberal arts and creativity, so there's also the whole education for education's sake argument :)
I would say that for an average group of candidates the results were about right. About 10% of "programmers" can write a simple program that solves a simple problem when asked - most can't.
I want to talk to family but I feel as if I can't. I don't know why. I just feel as if no one can truly understand the pain. We all feel love in a different way. My problem is now trust unfortunately and even if I found someone I would only be able to think about her. She actually gave my life reason. I didn't ditch my friends, people that I was around could not mature enough to actually become adults. I just want to rewind time and change the day that we fell in love because it just hurts so bad. Sure my family can express sympathy, but they can never empathize with what I am feeling. My wife took care of me, I can't even wash my own clothes without screwing something up. The biggest thing I worry about is not being able to take care of myself. What a disappointment you know?
I did found a job in a startup.

I am actually their first employee but again the employee valuation is way different from the offers I got in Cali when I was living there.
Want to lead a team? Learn how to trust.
Depending on where you live the mailman can even be fired or sued.
I was thinking about parrots. Not especially heavy, and can live 50-100 years.
If you do not monetize your solution it will often be more attractive and thus the traction you get will be misleading.

Probably the wisest thing I've ever read on HN.
Sorry, I could have expressed myself better.

Erlang does not provide lisp style macros. They provide macros, but they look more like templates and are limited. For example, a couple days ago I wanted to write this macro:

-define(line(Opts), case lists:keyfind(line, 1, Opts) of
{ line, Value } -> Value;
false -> 0
end).

I can call this macro as:

?line(SomeOpts)

Basically, the compiler will replace ?line by the template defined above. You cannot manipulate the AST via such macros and they contain severe limitations. In particular, the example above just works if you use it once per function. Since variables are not hygienic, after you use ?line once, the variable Value is going to be bound and it will be considered unsafe (because it is defined in just one of the branches) and your code will fail to compile if you use it again.

In case you want to manipulate the AST, you can indeed use parse transforms. But it requires a considerable amount of work to get simple stuff done and iirc you can just use one per module.
Nitpicking, but technically the $30/year membership is saving 16.7% on the $3/month membership and not 20%.
While total worship is crazy, it feels just as unbalanced to say that Steve's only quality was a toggle-switch on his charisma.

Maybe I'm reading what you're trying to say uncharitably though.
If one is willing to spend a little memory and disk space one can just keep different versions of every library around. I believe PC BSD is doing this (but have not tried it yet myself).
Pitching the retail price of Windows 8 at the same price you can buy a very effective Chromebook has got to be good for one of the two businesses.
Yes, they do care about restaurant sales, but, IMHO, only to keep franchisees happy.

I still think they'd be just as happy franchising robots.
I could be wrong.
this is a great point made
There are a number of concerns here. You probably shouldn't go to college for signalling, you'll bore yourself to death and do poorly (unless you have extremely good discipline).

On the other hand, going to college is likely to be both intellectually stimulating and fun. That would appeal to most people and it's not really an opportunity that comes back. Depending on circumstances, you might well be able to keep up freelance programming for money while you're in college which will take away financial concerns and keep you in practice.

Then there's the reliability of your self assessment. Quite frankly, agency web dev in PHP is not a great predictor of actual programming prowess - you can get very, very far in that business using Google and copy-paste. The way you lump ASM in there adds a good WTF-quality to the list, and, honestly, how do you know that you have a "good grasp of most aspects of computer science", never mind, how good is good and how many are most? Think hard about this, and especially about think about unknown unknowns here. When I first "got" QuickSort and understood why trees usually have log n characteristics, I figured myself pretty well sorted. I've since realised just how little of the tip of the iceberg I've actually ever even scratched.

College will, if nothing else, help you draw an outline of the iceberg, so you can better assess how much of it you've actually seen.

The way I read your post, you might well be in a sweet spot for just coding the shit out of everything for the next five years and doing better than your college peers. Most college grads can't actually code well. Or you might be the kind of guy who wakes up one day and realise you don't have ten years of experience, but one year of experience ten times over.
Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review by Jason Cohen
If you find these sort of ruby (ab)uses interesting, take a look through the ruby Koans solutions at http://rubykoans.com/

Playing around these examples led to a fun discovery: I'm 5 days away from begin 10000 days old. Maybe I'll take Monday off!
Are other senior developer positions in your area offering £50k to £60k? The equivalent $80k to $95k seems to be the going rate for junior/mid developers in the US.
Snow pusher
What portion of the other 10% make serious money with non-advertising models?
I say get the degree only if you want it mostly for reasons other than a career. The ceiling isn't low; there's plenty of jobs for developers without a degree, paying just as much. If you're making $35K now as others here say, you could soon be making $80K+ if you apply yourself. (A hiring manager told me he'd pay $85K for someone 6 months out of high school if they had 6 months home practice developing in IOS for the iPhone.)
I think there was an Atari "Joystick" available a couple of years ago that included an emulator with lots of 2600 games.
Cheap rents in NJ is not true anymore. Hoboken and Jersey City rents are pretty comparable to cheaper parts of Manhattan. Same story in Williamsburg.
That's an artifact of the HN display system. When it's presented to the candidates, it's definitely correctly centered.