skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Seriously, not everyone is that hung-up about sex."

Feeling a need to put porn in your presentation about CouchDB is a hang-up about sex. There are all kinds of activities that, while perhaps unobjectionable in and of themselves, just do not go well together.

I do not understand how so many seem to have lost the idea that context matters. What might be perfectly appropriate content or behavior at a party or a club in mixed company can be totally inappropriate at a business meeting, wedding, funeral, or conference presentation. Why does this idea even need explaining?

DHH was commenting that doctors, lawyers, and other professional groups have far raunchier conversations than programmers, and manage to attract women just fine. So my question is: do doctors routinely slip porn into a presentation about a clinical studies trial? Does a lawyer slip porn into his slides for his closing remarks? Does anyone honestly think either of those would go over well?
Visualise your audience
The problem with bicycles in Northern Va is that the season is too short it is either burning hot and you will die of heat stroke or freezing cold and your fingers and ears get frost bite. I had much more luck walking (2.5 miles) to the metro station and then to work then riding a bike that same distance and it felt much safer. At least with electrics the heat stroke part is fixed.
Hell yes, my good man!
Interestingly he is doing it all basically without any money, just a lot of smart and dedicated people. He also says that his biggest problem isn't technical, it's getting all the official licenses, approvals and documents in order. The government doesn't really know what to do when some guy calls up and asks if it's OK that he fires himself into space from a home-made rocket.
"They gave the monkeys the bananas because they were [adjective]"

now it can describe a third noun...
Like the idea of keeping the previous values, though I'll try to see if I can do this without cookies.

In regards to the second idea, I'm trying to keep the site as simple as possible, and adding anything else will only hurt (imho).
So rather than fixing broken behavior of existing apps, we should instead bloat the platform with new features ripe for abuse? That seems... unwise.
Great discussion. Will try some A/B testing here and test bounce rates.
There are problems with biking (and e-biking) up here in Wisconsin that pretty much eliminate it as a primary mode of transport.

Minneapolis has the highest per-capita number of bicycle commuters in the country. Its weather is the same (or worse) than anywhere in Wisconsin and people ride all year round.
I really like the idea of showing the country times. I've been looking into ways to do this, but it isn't trivial. I will definitely keep keep thinking about this. I personally would find it really useful.
For that kind of commute, you probably want a rapid folding bicycle like the smaller-wheeled Dahons or the Mobiky Genius to take from bus to train to work.
Ask HN: Help a dev move to the Bay Area
Executive summary: Are any companies in the Bay Area looking for developers? Please drop me a line at alex@clutterme.com

Long version:

For the past two years, I've been working on Clutterme Inc., a Toronto-based startup with some moderate success. I've occasionally posted about it here. For a variety of reasons, my co-founder and I are closing up shop and heading our separate ways, and I would love to move to the Bay Area.

I am, unapologetically, a jack-of-all-trades. I pick up new languages or tools quickly, and I love learning new things, but if an old tool happens to be better, I'm happy to use it: best tool for the job. This does means that I am not, and will never be, a guru in any specific topic, but it also means that I will not bat an eyelash at a sudden change of direction or at investigating or learning a new technology. I pride myself on being pragmatic, and doing whatever it takes to get the job done and end up with a good product.

Some of the things I've made (short descriptions available at http://www.alexc.me):

- clutterme.com - WYSIWYG AJAX in-browser web page creation, made from scratch using Ruby on Rails, Prototype, and a lot of custom Javascript.

- Facebook applications - they currently have around 1 million installs, and were receiving 6 million page views at their peak. Written with PHP, FBML/FQL/FBJS, and MySQL (no frameworks).

- Some personal hobby projects with CakePHP and MySQL. Never as successful as the Facebook apps, but around 300,000 page views/month at their peak.

- Used a number of APIs - register.com, Paypal Website Payments Pro, Facebook, LyricFind. Right now playing with the Google Analytics API and Wordpress.

- iPhone applications - LyricFind and LyricFind Lite, currently at #4 (Canada) and #9 (US) in the free Music category of the app store. A couple more apps in various stages of completion or in app store approval limbo.

I've had a lot of fun working on a start-up, and I am definitely looking for a small, motivated team, that wants (and needs) to make things happen quickly.

I greatly respect the HN community, and I feel that a company whose people read HN is more likely to be a place I would enjoy working at - perhaps as an employer, you feel the same about me ;)

If any of this sounds like something you're looking for, please drop me a line at alex@clutterme.com. I am visiting the Bay Area for a couple of weeks, and I would be happy to set up any in-person (or phone) meetings.

(if anyone just wants to meet up and chat about random stuff, send me an email too! I had way too much fun at the HN Meetup last week, and I'm always happy to meet more people).
Any ideas where I could find all of the common abbreviations?
Absolutely.

My focus is on front-end engineering (Javascript, markup, and CSS), but I've written plenty of PHP, MySQL, and C++. I can say with absolute confidence that back-end engineering is orders of magnitude simpler and easier than front-end.

A lot of front-end engineers come to this discipline without CS degrees. Maybe they used to be designers or writers who happened to get into building web pages, and found some skill with it. There's a popular conception among front-ends that server-side coding is somehow more difficult or mysterious. That's "real" programming, they think.

That idea is 100% weapons-grade balonium. Client-side coding is much more challenging. If you're a front-end engineer operating under the assumption that back-end coding is hard, start spending some time reading the code for the components that you're interacting with. Pick up a book on OOP patterns. Behind the fancy lingo, you'll see it's actually very simple by comparison.
When the issue was brought into the spotlight, the "leaders" of the Rails community dismissed as "edgy".

Porn is not edgy. Walking into Oracle's Head Office and shitting on their conference table is edgy.

http://twitter.com/raganwald/status/1641756320
Awesome tip, will investigate.
where I stand, the best price per gigabyte of ram is obtained on dual-socket (8 core) opterons with 32GB ram (16x2gb modules). Right now, ram is my big bottleneck.

most single-socket systems only let you install 8GB ram (4x2gb modules) so I've got to buy twice as many single socket boards to get the same amount of ram. It's ok, I guess if you need more cpu than ram.

The other problem is that you usually have to go to a server-class board to get low-power CPUs. I know of no desktop CPU that can compete with the Xeon L series or the Opteron HE series. (Sure, there are low-power desktop CPUs, but none of them have the performance of the Xeon L or opteron HE. If you know of a quad-core desktop CPU that eats less than 75w I'd be happy to hear about it.)

I'm sure google pays less per watt than I do, but still, if you plan on keeping hardware around for two years, the ongoing cost per watt makes a big difference. Low power CPUs save serious money, even if they cost more up front.

Opteron HE bartons are ridiculously cheap right now. 1.8Ghz quad-core HE processors are around $100 on newegg right now. (2.1Ghz quad-core shanghi opteron HE cpus that you might actually want to use are closer to $300. Still cheap.)

Also, while I agree that you should prepare for any bit of hardware dying at any time, I think technologies like ECC in ram are important so that you notice when your hardware dies. I don't mind a box that is dead. I replace it. It happens. What bothers me is a box that is kindof acting funny. You know, when you can't tell if it is the software or hardware. Sure, you can do some of that at the application level with checksums, but it's difficult to do it at the OS level.
Good point. Will think about this one.
I clarified what I said in my response to Zed's post. I should have thought before making that previous response.
I'm pretty sure I'm not hung up about sex, and I'm still uncomfortable bringing it into semi-professional environments where others will be uncomfortable with it. Not because it's sex, but because it's unnecessarily provocative and rude (most of the people defending it seem completely stuck on the "you all think sex is bad!" trip, but a number of other non-sexual issues would fit the same bill, depending on the group you were trying to work with).

There are other social contexts in which I would fight for someone's right to display stuff like that (e.g., for an individual's right to have a personal off-hours blog with nudity and sexual content, or march in a gay pride parade wearing only a bullwhip, and not suffer workplace consequences if someone from HR happens to discover it)--but a coding presentation is one of the least important places, in my personal estimation, for me to be arguing for the right to show that stuff. By forcing it, I lose more than I gain: I get to see babes in the slides (big woop), and the people who aren't comfortable with it are told to go to hell if they don't like it, regardless of whatever other value they may have.

It's no particular skin off my male, porn-loving back, but I don't need to see stuff like that in a rails presentation (aside from the fact that it's distracting: as Alan Moore has commented about the difficult balance in writing intellectual porn, "too much blood to the dick means very little blood to the brain"). I can live without the slides, but I do need to be able to work with people who come from different (possibly conservative and religious) backgrounds. Having lived and worked around people like that for years, I may strongly disagree with them on some pretty basic social/political issues, but we can get along fine professionally without stepping into those waters, and they're often valuable colleagues. Much more valuable to me than porn in my presentations.
How can you call images in that presentation porn?
I like it! Crowdsource it. I'd probably want to have at least two people do it independently per country to make sure they aren't saying naughty things.
Not sure what you mean, but I presume the gray auto-replaced text isn't great?
Oops, it's actually a patch to gzip, not zlib.

It's included in newer Debian/Ubuntu distros and explained in "man gzip" I think this is the original patch: http://www.samba.org/netfilter/diary/gzip.rsync.patch
I'm doing my best to avoid that (for now) :)

But I agree, could be really useful.
It's not your fault you find school boring. It is boring. School is compulsory and so many of the children there don't want to learn and teachers don;t have much economic incentive to be inspiring because they have a captive audience. School isn't tailored to be responsive to pupils' interests to any significant degree, see http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com and John Holt's book "How Children Fail". My advice would be to look for other options and try to pick the one that seems best. You might be able to learn at home and possibly do some exams in places other than school if you think it will help. Try to get freelance programming work and see if you can get into programming without qualifications just by being good at it. If there are people writing interesting programmes or interesting material about programming and you would like to ask them questions or discuss some issue with them then you could e-mail them. The worst that can happen is they say they haven't got time. You might find college significantly better than school depending on your interests, how you use it and who the lecturers are. If you plan to go to college then shop around and look at lots of different places.
I might be offended by the word "bread". Is this my problem or anyone's using that word?
One cannot please everyone, and there is no need to feel sorry _every_ time you fail at that.
Trying my best to stay away from all that manutia for now, at least until I can justify the amount of work necessary to do that. But agreed, could be really useuful.
Never differentiated the two myself
The Most Powerful Business Model
Thanks! Any ideas how to make it simpler?
You're half-right. People should be able to express their ideas and thoughts in a manner that they feel most comfortable with, even if that included nudie pictures.

However, you cannot say that there should be no outrage had the presenter used offensive terms towards other races. You must understand that women feel the same way as people of colour, especially when it comes to professional conduct.

I'm not saying that no one should be offended and therefore the boundaries should never be pushed. However, there are right ways to do it and there are wrong ones. The reaction from DHH is in exact opposition to that of those who felt offended. Let me repeat that, exact opposition. He said on Twitter how there should be more porn in presentations and how images of semi-nude women are more acceptable than images of ninja cats. Would he have said the same if the presentation contained racially offensive terminology? Who knows? That's what is so disconcerting.

EDIT:
> DHH for one obviously doesn't care what other people think, and I respect the man for being consistent in his beliefs and not backing down before people trying to lay some pc guilt trip on him.

Sorry, meant to say more here. His reaction, at least to me, wasn't one of "I don't care what people think" as much as it was a big "Fuck you and your beliefs" to those who didn't feel how he felt about the slides. And the people he said a virtual "Fuck you" are contributors to the community, be it knowledge contributors or, as in Mike's case, promoters of HIS framework. What reaction would you expect people to have?
"If a woman tells you that putting giant sexually suggestive images in front of her made her uncomfortable, you don’t get to bicker about that."

Isn't this a sexist viewpoint itself? As if a woman's reasoning doesn't matter, just that you have offended, oh my, a female?
Why would we need an article? It would be about a paragraph long. I don't think this is really appropriate for inclusion in wikipedia.
Well, I made the article. It's pretty small, but maybe somenone wants to expand it?
Indeed - unless anyone can put forward a convincing argument for inclusion then I will flag it not notable.
While this is sort of interesting, it strikes me as largely price constrained. Really, the physical act DNA transfection is a menial lab task that is essentially glorified mixing where the major challenge is ensuring correctness and sterility (neither of which seem to be a concern in biohacking). At my college they'll let any enthusiastic freshman do that week one after just a couple hours of training (mostly concerned with correctness, sterility, and what drawer the pipets are hidden in).

The more interesting thing would be if they could biohack PCR, sequencing, or even cDNA creation but all of those run into intense price barriers rather fast as you start to need enzymes and machinery. Some of the basic assays could be purchased for rather cheaply if the cost (in the several hundreds for the materials to do around 100 tests) was split.

Not to say that all of this might become possible on the cheap in the future (PCR wouldn't be that hard if you purchase Taq polymerase, ~$100/100 rxns) but it amused me to read a comic excitedly proclaiming a DIY kit for unsterile, inconsistent transfection.
I had an English teacher in high school who was highly attentive to this sort of construct. He would return many a paper with "VPR" marks sprinkled throughout for 'vague pronoun reference' and points deducted accordingly. Certainly a common error.
Web service that makes/displays HTTP request/response (includes POST, TRACE, headers, etc)
Look man, you said you had a solution to the problem. What I said is hardly a leap. You have a funny definition of "drastic proportions".

I use hyperbole. I ought to have said "proposed" solution. Either way, your response was snide and still hasn't addressed what I said in that point. I think that what I proposed would help the two sides understand each other in a way they don't know, and in my experience the more people get to know each other the better they get along. The disconnect at the moment is that nerds think other people are wasting their time, and other people think nerds only do what they do because they haven't got anything else going for them. When you make people like stuff, they form bonds.

You're descending into ad hominem territory here. Please don't.

I need to apologize to the people I've argued with in this thread, because I've been much angrier and snappier in these responses than is appropriate for Hacker News. This morning I woke up to find a bunch of emails from people telling me my blog was broken in IE and I found this on the top of Hacker News. I've been writing a post for a little while now that I was going to submit here; I only submit things here if they're quality things. This is part of my daily writings, where I spill out a bunch of things on my mind without thinking about them, admitting all the while that I'm not putting careful thought into my writings. So to find that sort of thing here and discussed by people calling me a sad angry little man really just isn't a good way for me to start the day, and it's not how I want to approach my work. So I'm mad because I'm finding myself seriously debating something I wasn't exactly serious about in the first place, but I've got a sense of propriety about my writings and so I refuse to let people dis what I've said without defending myself. You've stood out to me as one of the people who's most deliberately ignoring the things that I'm saying, though this response was a lot better. Again: apologies.

Causes for these things are shared - blame is given to one side or the other for their own actions.

Okay. By that standard I'm blaming the nerds for deliberately setting up a situation wherein they're persecuted, when they could easily avoid the entire situation by not being so deliberately hostile. Does that work?
I don't want to bike to and from work every day. Sometimes I'm just not in the mood to be exhausted when I start working, or to exercise right when I leave work. The electric bike gives you the option either to exercise or to be lazy.
hey guys - the ranking system takes in to account both your self-rating (stars) as well as various metrics about the projects you've listed in your profile.
According to training I got as a volunteer in Washington, this drives native Vietnamese speakers crazy. I think it may confuse older Koreans as well. My grandma didn't get it at all.

I think this is a part of what makes English one of the best languages to tell a lie in.

Pauses can similarly change the meaning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves
Surely it's not too different from what Scaled Composites had to do when they built/launched SpaceShipOne. (Yes, stationary launch is different from air-launched, but the regulatory approvals as I understand them have to do with space, not ground launch.)

That of course doesn't mean it's not a pain in the ass...
#2 has a more specific meaning: it implies that someone else has claimed that you did say she stole your money.
I'd think the anxiety are outnumbered by the things that Facebook makes simpler. (I just add my relatives, and hope they don't mind that I occasionally use foul language. They usually don't.)
There are several things you could write about --- with sources --- in the article. E.g. Paul's experiment in social engineering to keep the quality up.
Great idea. There's definitely a need for something like that.
All this needs is a revenue model that can make these teams self-sufficient.
ahh. I live in the tarahumara region. Some times a little girl may run next to you. She may wear a big skirt and some really crapy shoes with a little heel. It is humbling.
Best of luck to proving notability. From what I can tell, the requirements for not getting hit by a speedy deletion for not being notable get more stringent every day.
I'm highly anticipating a 37Signals blog post titled "The Best Entrepreneurs Know How to Succeed Slowly."
> You obviously knew that would happen and you went on doing it anyway, so you fit into the category of people I'm talking about here.

Or maybe he just doesn't care what people think on this matter.
When I said "miles away from the kernel", I meant that the opportunity for the kernel to address problems in the application layer were minimal. There's little the kernel can to do, say, make SQL Injection less horrible.
get a real job.

Seriously. I hated school as well. I got a gig first working at a mom and pop computer repair place, and then as the windows/netware monkey at the county offices. At both jobs I worked with people old enough to be my parents or grandparents, but it really made me feel... human. they appreciated me and treated me like a real person. They treated me as an adult, really; it made sense, I was doing a job normally done by an adult (even if they were paying me minimum wage)

Add to that, if you don't have an education, you need work experience. I got out of highschool in '97 or so... and jumped in to a .com job. It would have been harder without the industry experience. I survived the crash, and make pretty good money as a *NIX SysAdmin now.

but I think getting a job that counts (even if it's supporting windows boxes in an office, it's still industry experience.) is very important. The social aspects are probably as important as anything else. just being treated like a human being is a wonderful (and shocking) experience for a high school student.

If I had to do it again, I would have fought my parents harder. I tested out of highschool in my junior year (the test is extremely simple.) but my parents wouldn't let me quit because they didn't think I would go to college and they wanted me to have a highschool degree and not an equivalency. That was, of course, such bullshit. most of my co workers have a bs or ms. I leave my education off my resume. Nobody asks to see my high school diploma. (sure, some jobs would be easier to get with a college degree, but really, most of them accept experience instead. Nobody cares about what you did in highschool.)