skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a mix of the pointless and the inspired. Telling me that viruses cause disease is stating the obvious and is something I'm unlikely to forget during my temporal accident. Telling me that C20H26O2 is a good synthetic substitute for progesterone is close to entirely useless. At least give me the structure or better yet a chemical process to synthesise it.

On the plus side giving me lat/long coordinates for useful ore deposits is inspired. That wasn't obvious to me.

As one of the other posters mentioned one cheatsheet really isn't enough. This is a interesting start but could have been so much better.
lots of ads.
Same here - I enjoy programming. I'm passionate about it. I can relate very strongly to the OP.

I program because I want to - because the very act gives me joy. I'm not crazy about debugging but it's a part of my craft and I even enjoy it sometimes.

Sometimes, I still can't believe they pay me to do this!
San Diego Divorce Mediation
San Diego Divorce Mediation Lawyer James D. Scott is a Family Law Firm specializing in divorce, separation, mediation, child support and complex divorce cases.
I think you may be wrong on the job of the surgeon. I've loaned my copy to someone at the moment, but from memory the surgeon considered to be the most skilled member of the team and was given the most difficult work. Classifying this as 'only writing specs' is disingenuous.
But then the phone company can just cut of the phone remotely, what would be the point of this technology?
It's good to see some smart thinking on the iPhone front, I find a lot of the closed source software lacking in features due mainly to the uncompetitive nature of the store..

"My app sells for 5$ with these features, Why add more when i can make another app that also sells for 5$?"

But of course I don't wish for a flame war, I understand there are many good developers on both sides, I just find this is a trend.
modelled add placement off http://digg.com/

might need to tone it down - thanks for the feedback!

Cheers

Justin
How to make extra income?
would an extra $600 or more a month,of immediate cash moeny help you meet your expenses?
I like programing, but it gets me bored real quick. Sometimes I think its the keyboard... I wondered about mouse programming for a while but then I got bored again.
>The "pleasure of making things that are useful to other people" only happens if you project isn't cancelled and actually gets used. Outside of a startup this confluence of events is heartbreakingly rare.

Why would a company pay you if no one uses your work? If I worked on stuff that kept getting cancelled or not used I'd figure the company was going to go belly up sometime soon!
If you're looking for student rental housing by any chance, that's what our startup is for... http://www.ratemystudentrental.com

For non-student housing, I use http://www.mapskrieg.com
I wrote to their PR person to see if they can offer us any advice -- I will post any response I get...
ILC 2009 Photos
Fast (Nanotech) Takeoff: Assessing Impact, Part 1
Motors, Brownian Motors, and Brownian Mechanosynthesis
How about Thomas Jefferson then?
And numbers. The tech press loves numbers as the hook. 600 TB of data or 12% growth in signups every month, whatever.
Bull! I'll phrase this in pragmatic terms, since you seem uninterested in ethics.

If you're pushing the boundaries of ethics, you have to realize that what is considered acceptable in one (sub) culture may be grossly unacceptable in another.

What is considered "business as usual" in one culture or industry will be seen as corruption in another culture or industry.

Now, there are a lot of inconsistencies and hypocrisies in our cultures. So, if you look around, you're bound to find strange inconsistencies. That's normal.

In short, for any culture, there are some forms of cheating that will be mostly tolerated or even glamorized, and others that will be seen as despicable.

What you've described is despicable, from a mainstream US / Canadian / Anglo perspective. It does not appear resourceful, at all.
I try to click around and read few times, but, it's very hard for me to get the idea on "why i should use it".
Maybe this high-concept pitch needs some reword. "Share your info with a single text message!". IMO, it's everything, and, it's nothing at the same time.

It probably works much better if i can have some context. As patio11 suggested above, "Business cards, minus the paper". Nah, that i got it on why i need to use the app.
Wha? The man discovered that lightning was electricity, hardly the 'Chop-o-Matic' of the 18th century.
I can understand the argument that lawyers are paid out of proportion to their contribution to society. But I've never understood the people who claim that they literally contribute nothing.

It's better to have laws than to not have them, and laws require interpretation. That's what the legal system does. It may be that most lawyering is pointless, but certainly not all.
This all makes perfect sense, but keep in mind that you are marketing to more than just developer customers. Your website needs to cater to journalists, curious members of the public, potential business partners, maybe investors?

And then you need to pitch journalists. They aren't going to find you on their own. If you want to do it yourself, I suggest writing direct, honest emails to journalists who have covered this sort of thing in the past. Don't worry about making it sound like a press release.
I see programming as very similar to playing computer games.

I have to avoid games as I avoid drugs and golf. I just don't buy graphics cards. What scares me in life as bad as heights are Eve Online ads...

I stopped doing C/C++ etc since scripting languages are like Counterstrike with a wall hack (no direct experience of cheating in multi user games. I'm too old for kid stuff.)

Unlike you, I still wouldn't do Windows again. I had some stomach problems for a while and know that Windows programming is worse than starving. 1/2 :-)
21 apps Apple doesn't want on your iPhone
The H1-B is all about getting a steady supply of 3-5 year programmers at 50-75K rather than paying citizens 75-100K.

When my last startup got acquired, it was small enough that the acquiring company just convinced us all to move from London to Silicon Valley. Some of us decided to stay permanently, and the company got us H1-Bs and put us on the Green Card process. I'm pretty sure all of us were making more than $100K.

Having been on the H1-B process, I just don't believe what you said makes sense. The visa process costs the sponsoring enough time and money that it really doesn't seem worth using it to hire cheaper people.
It would be nice to click on the links in the individual tweets.
911 is an exception to just about every phone security measure. Example: You can take the SIM card out of your phone, and it will still be able to call 911 (don't try this).

I suspect it's kind of a rare case where someone steals a phone to call 911, and doesn't intend to give it back.
> seeing something I've just written work for the first time

When some large piece of fresh code works on the first try, I call this a "hole in one" :)
George Orwell writes at least as well as E. B. White. His "Politics and the English Language" is better writing advice than Strunk and White, and was recently submitted to HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542250

Besides the copy of the essay linked there, there are other copies on the Web, for example,

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

showing the importance of this essay. I think undergraduates (or even high school students) would be better off reading Orwell's essay when they learn to write than reading Strunk and White.
Papert is not talking about an alternative to teaching math skills, he's talking about a method of.

The traditional method of mathematics education is not the same thing as the subject of mathematics. It can be taught with computers in a constructionist manner, it can be taught straight from Euclid (the old "traditional method"), it can be taught (poorly) with "New Math", or to use an example that should be familiar: it can be taught with bingo cards.

These are not all equivalent, obviously, but none has a monopoly on learning.

[Edit: I'd also point out that Japan and South Korea also have an extremely competitive and intensive educational environment (with correspondingly high rates of school refusal and suicide among students) and a huge amount of cultural buy-in that can't simply be transplanted. I believe these are much bigger factors in the relative performance of those countries than the differences in the content of their education.]
>>> It turns out that most of the New Zealand ISPs have restricted SMTP access to prevent spam.

Is this true? Do New Zealand ISPs block all connections to SMTP servers? If so, this is quite outrageous and would solve nothing. Relaying email and connecting to an SMTP server that generates email messages are completely different things. Besides most decent SMTP servers get client connections over SSL these days which would make them harder to block.
What a bunch of BS. The whole industry does nothing but copy itself. Hello - FriendFeed? Where do you think they got the newsfeed idea from? It only makes sense that innovation would cycle back to Facebook.
The same thing happened to me.

I was classified "Exceptionally Gifted / Learning Disabled" which seems like a contradiction in terms but seems fairly accurate. The school would bend over backwards for me because of the LD issue, but I saw little difference from the EG part of things. Mainly it seemed like they had no idea what to do with me. For example: I was in a remedial English class in 8th grade and then bumped the next year into the Honors English class which I passed by the skin of my teeth.

PS: While I spent a few hours taking a lot of 1 on 1 tests I don't know if they did a real IQ test and I got over 160 or if it was a "soft test" and they used the same term.
As an aside, you seem to be suggesting Wordsworth << Tennyson. Perhaps you can make a case for that, but I don't agree myself. Just an aside.
"This is what PR people do. Journalists are different, have different taste, and find different things interesting."

You might experiment with PR Matchpoint to find journalists who have written on similar topics in the past. The site lets you cut and paste in either your entire press release, or else your website copy, or your keywords. It will then return a list of journalists who have written on similar themes.

These guys presented at NY Tech last week. According to them, there isn't really any other way to do what they do because all of the other databases of journalists are sorted based on beat or a few keywords, but not the actual text of what the journalists are writing. I haven't actually tried the site myself yet, but I probably will fairly shortly.

http://www.prmatchpoint.com/
Corollary: Most early Apple investors are time travelers who aren't into football.
Ha, cool, I used to work at Rediffusion and I heard a similar story about when a UPS pilot got the SC to do the phugoid behaviour 'properly' by taking him up in a plane to experience it.

When they tried it in the sim, both of them were similarly thrown around and a terrified few seconds as neither were able to reach the panic button :-)
Have a look at http://lispforum.com There are also many open source projects you could help (with code and/or documentation) here: http://common-lisp.net/projects.shtml
Story Behind “The Secret History” Part IV: Library Hours at an Undisclosed Location
Why You Should Break The DiggBar
I like how the pics page lets you see larger amount of data (pictures) at once than is possible just using Twitter, although you might want to check out the layout on that page in Chrome -- some of the text gets covered by ads.

Other than that, I'm not sure what the site offers me. Are the News / Tech / Gossip pages simply custom lists of people that are followed? Why do I want to use your lists instead of using my Twitter account, which I've already customized to include the people I'm most interested in following?

If your target audience is people don't twitter but might be into it, they're either going to end up moving on to actually using Twitter, or decide it's not for them. In either case, they won't keep coming back to your site.
Their entire social network they've built there.
He wrote a follow-up entry on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1319 It's mostly a response to the comments on Fark, so understandably he's a little bitter. Still, he does recommend an alternative: Joseph Williams' Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.
This story frustrates me like being unable to find a bug in code.

That is exactly the feeling, yes.

Here's an interesting fact about the profession of experimental scientist: You feel this way all the time. Actual science is not like classroom science. There's no money or glory in doing experiments which have known, explainable, predictable, well-established answers. Nobody will pay you to measure the value of G again and again, on the off chance that one day it will be different. We're all pretty well convinced that this doesn't happen.

Instead your job is to do experiments which have odd, inconsistent, unpredictable, poorly-evidenced answers. Sometimes you do those experiments for years and then find that the only reason your results are intriguingly odd is that there's a bug in your technique or your theory. That's depressingly common. Other times -- the interesting times -- you have to invent a brand-new theory to explain your experiments. And sometimes that theory is even correct, and you get to publish a bunch of papers on it -- perhaps you even get to name it! But you must constantly worry that your brand-new theory is a load of crap -- maybe you're just doing the experiments wrong.

If you can't learn to live with that nagging feeling of uncertainty you may need to find a different profession.

Why would you keep using the same instruments?

As others have pointed out: This is undergraduate physics lab. There is no money to buy anything. More importantly, there is no time to assemble another apparatus. (This is another reason why this problem is a great model of real-world scientific life. There is never enough money. There is never enough time.)

Moreover, let's consider the possibilities. The instrument was working the week before. With 20-20-hindsight, we know that it was working on the following week. Odds are that the problem was not with the instrument. It was almost certainly with the experimenters! We screwed it up. I just have no idea how, and I never will. Arrrgh!
How Companies Are Governed
Well, there are many, many people in the world with the power to link to the most amazing thing in the world with the effect of making it significantly more well-known. However, there are much less people with the power of creating the most amazing thing in the world.

So I'd say the former are much less productive than the latter if we define productivity as the propensity to create things of value.
Absolutely: devon@digitalsanctuary.com I also know a few decent recruiters in Chicago I could put you in touch with if you like.
> (I assume you thought I follow some other stupid ideology when you wrote that post.)

> The difference is that there are very few, if any, things I really connect to my own self image in a hard way.

> This means that I can list facts and possible events that will change my opinion. That is, my opinions are testable.

Like I said, I've played this game many times before. It starts with statements like the above. And, if it goes through "but those are the only ones", I've always been able to come up with another.

I'm not a mind-reader, so I don't know what your "religions" are, but I'd start looking around the "difference" claim.
42 Sites Where To Submit Your Tutorials
When you write tutorial , you want to spread the word and drive traffic to your blog/site. I’ve found great way to increase traffic and publicity, there ate many tutorial sites that are happy to receive your tutorial, and link back to your site. Here are all the possible places, where you can submit and publish them, where I think it’s
So in other words -- 32 million baby girls were murdered.

One Day, severe Justice will be served to these people.
The problem is, "breaking" the Diggbar can screw up traffic stats too. It will either result in an additional, invalid pageview, or mess up referrer stats.

We've elected to add a target="_blank" to all our links when we detect a frame around our content. The Diggbar will stay for the first pageview, but be gone for the second. And our stats are basically correct. We still see Digg as the referrer, we track the right number of pageviews, and life goes on.
Interesting article. Digg just seems so irrelevant these days. Yes, they have a lot of users, and can drive some high traffic, but it's all junk.

Maybe the people not bothering to block it realize that DiggBar is likely to flame out on its own.
Quick note to all you hackers out there: don't ever discuss rates in a way that can be googled back to your business.

Lots of reasons, but the top 3

1) Rates are always negotiable

2) Rates are always changing

3) You never want to have an "inside baseball" conversation in a public forum

I like the voting idea though.
I took a fairly normal route though school graduating at 16 with a B average despite a high IQ. Anyway, for the most part I enjoyed high school and hated middle school. But, I spent most of my time trying to have fun and minimize the time I spent doing things I hated. If anything I found my IQ helped by reducing the amount of time I spent keeping up.

My older sister also has a high IQ and ended up salutatorian etc, but she still had fun and a fairly large social group. My younger sister is an "Artist" who still managed to become the valedictorian and had a great time in high school. She even got into calarts.edu which is insanely exclusive. So apparently even if you focus on academics you can still have a good time.

PS: It's not hard to make large groups of people like you if you just try. IMO, the problem with many high IQ people is they don't like talking with normal people and fail to develop social skills.
I would suspect your case is not so typical. In fact the costs are such that companies like IBM and GE can bring programmers in from overseas, ostensibly for training purposes, but in fact for working on projects in the US. I've been on the hiring side of this, having paid "body shops" 100-130/hr. for talented folks who were always eager to jump ship for even just a steady 80-90K per year. Those brought in by the large outfits knew they could literally jump ship if someone were to obtain an H1-B for them.

I've also witnessed the green card "process" first hand within my own family. The numbers don't lie, programmers working in the same job while waiting for their green cards are paid consistently far less than the legal cost would warrant.

Mind you my experiences were all from the 1998-2004 time period, things may have changed since. Back then the body shops were grabbing the lion's share of the visas when the quota opened up annually.
Resume Writing for CEOs
For good reason. Numbers tell a story. Precise numbers tell a better story.

Good: Wrote software to save money.

Better: Wrote dozens of programs to help many people do a better job.

Best: Wrote 12 programs and refactored 6 database tables in order to help 143 call center agents turn around calls 18% faster, saving $41,500 per month.
What phone company can't "just cut off the phone remotely" today, without this feature?
Just imagine: these guys could have stumbled upon a great discovery.

Note: This sentence is crazy. As if the odds weren't 999 to 1 in favor of "experimenters made a boneheaded systematic mistake" rather than "experimenters have discovered the fifth force", or "one of the experimenters is made entirely of lead and has never noticed it before".

But, note also: This sentence is how you have to think if you're going to make a great scientific discovery. The folks who discovered the pulsar were sure that they'd made a boneheaded mistake. The folks who discovered the cosmic microwave background had to work through the "this has got to be a mistake" phase. Even once you are convinced there's no mistake, it can take years or decades to convince others that there isn't a mistake.

You have to work through your mistakes in science. You can't be afraid to face them. The good news is that it's a lot easier to practice this as an undergraduate than when you've got a whole lab full of students riding on the reputation of your pet theory.
I guess that is what separates software people from hardware people. You say "my homework literally blew up yesterday". I think that's a little scary, a hardware guy thinks that's pretty cool.
Don’t use @import
Props to the original poster for updating the HN link to go to the Topato page.
Hey tomuse.com -- it's great that you got to the top spot on Hacker News! Congratulations! But we know how to subscribe to an RSS feed, thanks, and we can decide for ourselves if we want to. So how about taking down that insulting banner? Thanks!
Being framed can also expose you to clickjacking attacks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickjacking)

If your site is mostly read-only then clickjacking doesn't really matter. But it's good practice to break frames around your site if you care about your visitor's clicks being spoofed (i.e. if you're running any sort of web application).

Twitter started doing this after they got hit by clickjacking a while ago: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/clickjacking-blocked.html
In a nutshell, I find programming can be immensely satisfying because it can be simultaneously a very creative and a very technical pursuit.

I find I need to be creative and technical. If I'm doing a lot of the one to the exclusion of the other, I start to crave the other. At the best of times, at least, programming gives me enough of both.
> I'd also point out that Japan and South Korea also have an extremely competitive and intensive educational

Just a few interesting stuff (partially relevant to the discussion).

The Russian Federation has a higher average performance in mathematics than the USA (TIMMS study 2007 on Grade 4 and 8 - it is available here: http://timss.bc.edu/TIMSS2007/mathreport.html). This is interesting since the USA would probably have more money to spend on education (since it is a lot more affluent). Hungary also have a higher standard than the USA at grade 8.

It would be interesting to see what these poorer countries do to get their educational standard above that of the USA.
You're inferring things based on your own bias. Nowhere on that page did I get the impression that they even believe, much less claim that those data are representative of true language popularity. They claim its impossible to measure. What is popularity anyway? Number of users? Programs? Bytes? A critical reader would want a definition of that term before drawing any conclusions, and if you read beyond the first paragraph you'll find that they define the what they are measuring precisely. Basically you're complaining that they didn't do enough to discourage lazy brains from jumping to conclusions.
I wasn't intending to troll the middlemen. I think it's fairly accurate to say they are the least productive members, they didn't produce the work we're discussing at all.

Of course they produce value, and do so in various ways. Butin this case they produced very little value to Topato, and certainly less than is customary. This is constructive criticism.