skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now I am no longer the only one that makes fart noises as they scroll!
Abercrombie & Fitch and the general ethics
You essentially brought them on as a 1099 contractor for the day, so in January your accountant sends them a 1099-MISC and they report it as earnings.
this is how you get your kid jnto programmig
Sure, the amount of total work may not be fixed, but the amount of work that certain highly-trained specialists can do right now for a decent pay is fixed.

I mean, yeah, I probably could cut lawns around town for $1 / hour, but I'd like to keep programming for $100 / hour.

(btw, I'm all for immigration and people getting decent wages. But, there's also a lot of unemployment in the US - which we should try to address.)
I'm a founder and CEO at MobileDevHQ[1], a startup focused on App Store optimization. We have been doing this work for almost a year and a half now and have built powerful tools for understanding the App Store, including keyword research and market/niche finders.

Appsleak looks interesting, congrats on launching! The app ecosystem needs more tools to help it mature and advance.

To those of you interested in understanding markets/niches and keywords in the app stores, it is important to note a couple main points:

First, there are large differences between Google/other web search volume and search volume in the App Store. At MobileDevHQ, we do lots of work to uncover those differences and provide realistic pictures of what is happening in the app stores themselves. For example, the volume on Google for "puzzles" likely has little relation to the volume in the app stores.

Also, competition as defined by number of search results is a great start to understanding the difficulty it will take for you to rank highly for a particular term, but it doesn't go far enough. At the end of the day, it is not just about number of results, but also the factors that the app stores use to rank results, and how "entrenched" those factors are in current results. You can only begin to understand this with lots of data, which is why we have been collecting this for years now and have even released a tool we call Sonar to help developers and marketers understand when an App Store changes its search algorithm.

There are tons of things I could riff on about App Store search, but those are the 2 most common thigs I see people missing, so I wanted to make sure I mentioned those in particular.

[1] http://www.mobiledevhq.com
And another. His performance was measured over a very long time period, including a period where the market was likely much less competitive than it is now.
We did a very similar thing with a hacked-together VESA mount hanging on a window. It worked great! I highly recommend putting your stats up high and in a prominent place—you can't help but look at them, and that leads to good awareness and good discussions.
PLOS Labs CFP - develop disruptive ideas and products for science communication
Such a powerful sentence.

Lately science looks like olympic games without anti-doping control...
Avoiding Unnecessary Paints
This document is 4 months younger than IE 7.
One category which I definitely think should be billable is the interview when there is no actual job or no job as advertised.

There were a bunch of stories going around about some insurance company calling people in to interview for database jobs and then trying to sell them on insurance cold-call sales positions.

Another one is those interviews at large companies where they must conduct x number of interviews, but they already have the person they want and they're just going through the motions. This would be difficult to prove, but I've heard managers directly say they are doing this.
“How to Build a Working Digital Computer” out of paperclips (2013)
I think it also highlights the underlying mentality that prestige matters more than integrity and "if everyone does it then it's fine".

If tax-funded scientists can't uphold high standards for themselves, the public is entitled to demand them to do so.
What about asking whether the StackOverflow user base is an unbiased sample of the population of programmers? Here's a possible theory explaining both the greater competence of old programmers and their rarity, based on the StackOverflow data (please, before tearing me apart, understand that I don't necessarily believe in this story, but it is arguably as plausible as the whole old programmers flee the industry theory):

- Older programmers generally don't care or are not aware of stackOverflow and modern technologies in general. That would explain their rarity on SO.

- Given the first point, it takes an older programmer an unusual dedication for his craft and curiosity to get interested in SO and new technologies. So this sample of old programmers really is some sort of "elite" of old programmers. Hence the impression that they are better.

This is the problem when using proxies for populations: the accuracy of the conclusions are upper bounded by the accuracy of the proxy. In this particular case, the only reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from the study are:

- Old programmers are rare on SO.
- Old programmers on SO tend to be more knowledgeable than young programmers on SO.
If we're talking about H-1Bs, the main reason the US is 'strict' is that nobody has the political will to do anything about the cap.

Ten years ago, there was a 195,000 cap for H-1B visas - this year, thanks to legislation expiring, it was 65,000. Politicians aren't really prepared to handle legislation around increasing the number of visas available or comprehensive immigration reform because their support could be used against them when campaigning ("my opponent supported non-Americans taking your jobs!").
If the point is that fixed in stone "arrive at work a 9, leave at 5" hours don't make sense, sure. Even some of the most regressive government bureaucracies recognized that in the 80's and have some degree of flexibility.

If the point is that modern work is so special and creative that it is more of an artistic creation, and thus requires "passion" (translated as work 60 hours a week), than no, that is a ridiculous assertion and a work practice that should be illegal.
> I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts.

It still surprises me how many otherwise clued up people regularly do this sort of thing (it doesn't surprise me that the inexperienced masses do, but people who have some technical and/or business experience behind them should know enough to be more automatically cynical).

Far too many people are quiet happy to hand access to their accounts to third parties despite all the past occasions when this has turned out to have been a bad idea. Heck, you'll probably find that it is a direct violation of your terms of service with the email provider: many have clauses stipulating that you will not share your authentication credentials or otherwise allow 3rd party access under pain of account cancellation.

The other one I don't get is letting apps like facebook exist on a device that contains all your contacts without any control to stop them accessing said contacts. It isn't just that they can use them for behaviour that I consider spammy, there have been occasions where apps have corrupt a significant number of people's contacts list (like when facebook "accidentally" replaced many contacts email details with new "facebook" addresses, much to the irritation of those affected). I know people who get up in arms about the slightest hint of someone being interested in their personal details, who are happy to let any old developer/distributor of some free game or other such have full access to everything on their phones and don't see the cognitive disconnect they are experiencing.
The Onion.

That is all!
Btcd: A Full Alternative Bitcoin Implementation, Written In Go
You misspelled "competition" as "competiton".

Also, the phrases don't really seem good, and seem to be based on unfiltered web searches, instead of app store searches or at least filtered web searches.

For example with "photo" I get:
- shutterfly
- photobucket
- photo editor -whited00r_tested.ipa
- walgreens photo
- photo editor

Obviously, aside from the obvious "photo editor", none of these are useful.

Also, it's down now.

The abstract idea is interesting, but the current implementation doesn't seem useful.
The article was not about cancer. The whole point of the discussion is about reproducibility in scientific research. I was merely applying the same discussion and concept to a different branch of science. HN is a place for nerds to discuss interesting things. Things like science and it's applications. As far as I'm concerned, that is what I did.
"Letting" someone not get treated because they can't afford it is no different in terms of my obligation than "letting" someone not have a new car, a new TV, an education, clothing, food, or anything else they need to live.

None of us are born in hock to the needs of others. If we were, that would be moral slavery.
That's true. I've heard of people in North America ordering things like mechanical keyboards on Amazon.co.jp and using a forwarding service like Tenso to ship it.
I am curious what "add IDE features" means. It seems like a wide-open feature request.

A few things I can think of:

* Better support for background tasks .. :mak, :grep, system(), :! without interrupting editing.

* Fancier errorlist and locationlists. cexpr()/lexpr() really make you fit round pegs into square holes.

* Better omni-completion performance (any completion dialogs other than <C-N>, buffer keyword completion, are unusably slow for my purposes).

* Built-in support for some filesystem operations. NERD_tree/:! can be clunky, and dropping into the shell isn't always ideal.

* Real shell buffer .. I know I'll get my head cut off for this because it is quite emacs-y, but it would be nice to be able to run my shell in a buffer. At the very least, it would be nice to have :sh be a somewhat capable terminal that could handle colors and generally feel like a normal terminal.

I'm excited to see 7.4 because it looks like some real new direction for the project, for better or worse. I'm sad to see VimScript de-emphasized, having invested a good bit of time in getting good with it, but VimScript is pretty slow, so this is good news.
And in ogg as well as mp3, to boot. Settling once and for all the great question which of these two codecs is more efficient at encoding flatulence.
That verification seems very reasonable to me. Somebody's home is on the line, more information than I, say, give Amazon is OK.
Live In Infamy
Thanks for the interesting tool.

Perhaps a couple of examples (from the time of writing) of niches you've identified with it would be helpful to first-time visitors?

I know there's the slideshow on the homepage, but after putting a search phrase in there's nothing that immediately grabs me and makes me think "wow that's a big opportunity". Perhaps it's just me being mostly ignorant of the mobile market, but it's some honest feedback.

There's a typo in the App Store/Play headings ("Competiton").
If the government starts paying (at least some) of people's medical bills, there will be a committee somewhere that determines who is deserving of care and who is not.
The ten year entrepreneur
It's educational and confidence building to DIY for a simple circuit. Try a board with all "though hole" components first.

Start with a simple schematic, maybe a 555 timer flashing an LED[1]? Grab a PCB layout program, such as gEDA/PCB [2], Eagle [3] or an old version of Protel. You can even use an everyday drawing package, such as Inkscape for really simple boards, if you think a CAD package is too complex. Alternatively, use a resist pen [7] to draw the circuit directly on your blank PCB.

Buy a PCB making kit, which includes a blank piece of PCB, chemicals and instructions [4]. Follow the instructions [5]. Solder the components on [6]. Turn on the power!

[1] http://www.instructables.com/id/Flashing-LED-using-555-Timer...

[2] http://pcb.geda-project.org/

[3] http://www.cadsoftusa.com/eagle-pcb-design-software/

[4] http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=HG9990

[5] http://www.jaycar.com.au/images_uploaded/pcboards.pdf

[6] http://www.staff.vu.edu.au/sokolov/library/datasheets/solder...

[7] http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=TM3000

---

Edit: add resist pen suggestion
Does it bastard-cruft up the URLs like feedburner?
Why are you travelling half way around the world? (funding, hiring, vacations, etc.)
Red Gate in Cambridge UK was offering a free iPad to anyone who came in for an interview (after being pre-screened, of course):

http://smyword.com/2010/04/red-gates-free-ipad-and-an-offer-...
Those are some pretty misleading statistics.

First off, pediatric cancer is NOT the leading cause of death for those 15 and under[1]. It's up there, but "unintentional injury" takes twice as many lives.

Second of all, not many children die (1200 per year), so even if something is the leading cause of death, it doesn't mean it happens very often. Cancer kills 10 times as many people between the ages of 35-44. If you add up all adult cancers it's probably 20-30x the number of deaths.

Also, just because money goes to adult cancer, doesn't mean it can't help. Most drug are developed for adults first and then tested in children. It's not like people are ignoring pediatric cancer.

Before you get so upset you should really sit down and think these things through.

[1]http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_All_Deaths_By_A...
Never heard anyone arguing HFT is terrible because the trading floor died either. These are straw men constructs designed to paint HFT critics as luddites.

I'm undecided about HFT's ability to provide liquidity in the market. There are certainly some drawbacks (e.g. you have to have high capitalization to afford HFT colocation), but there might be some tangible long-term benefits as well.

But I'm more concerned about how much of a waste it all is. Jeff Hammerbacher famously quipped that "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," when referring to developers pounding at the doors of google's and facebook's recruiters. HFT is similarly unfortunate. Somewhat useful maybe, but overall a depressing use of brilliant minds.
Only if you ask it to (no other way 100% reliable method of tracking clickthroughs, though we are working on a JS alternative).
JS API sniffing is the new User Agent sniffing.

How far we've come in 20 years.
Version numbers are infuriating. Dates don't overflow, people! If you're doing incremental development that doesn't have a concept of a "stable release", just use dates. This applies to projects like Firefox and the Linux kernel. I was pretty annoyed when Linus went with 3.x. Eventually, it's going to run into the same problem 2.6.x did. Date-based versioning would have lasted forever!
Building Wasp Lisp and MOSREF for Android
Oh yes, the suspense and rollercoaster thrill of the "watching a person type a 2100 character string" setup would just make the "listen to a half-second fart noise" that much more amazing.
Absolutely, open any pull requests you see fit.
I didn't tell you things are good the way they are, I told you that the internet will always be centralized and p2p will never go mainstream.

You don't go forward innovation

Innovation is irrelevant to p2p because p2p has already been invented. Nobody wants it, and nobody has wanted it for 20 years, that's its problem.

This is such an ugly topic, I don't even want to even try to talk about it. It's just not interesting.

That uninteresting ugliness decides which technologies go mainstream and which ones fail. If you want to stick your head in the sand, this conversation is over.
> What I do support charging for (in event of not getting the job, which hasn't happened yet) are reference checks.

That's true? I've honestly never heard of that before. But it is fascinating.

Though it sort of begs the question, what is the point of a reference check?
I just remembered these (I knew I'd seen some game examples in Go):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRlY9dFVLg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMMbf6SRb9Q

which are game examples as part of a game engine framework written in Go, seems to move smoothly with lots of objects including 2d physics.
I see a lot of my old cow-orkers on LinkedIn listed as "consultants", or owning their own firms. To me, that means they can't get jobs. Oh, the rock stars had no trouble. But (to be unfair) the "B" level players are falling by the wayside.

Maybe they're not interested? Maybe they're all really consulting and doing well? I don't have enough data.

Personally, I'm going to keep programming for a living as long as I can. It's fun (except for the death marches, which I've made a conscious decision to avoid).
Anyone know how long it would take for the 7.4 update to reach MacVim?
My Mercedes stops itself if I don't see traffic in front of me hit its brakes.

I have a friend who turned that off after his car unexpectedly braked hard in traffic because a piece of paper blew across his lane.

Not to say it isn't a good feature. But it isn't perfect.
Your sales page says:

"We track over 400,000 searches representing almost 50,000,000 results. "

Really? Where do you get this data? Apple is certainly not making it available (for obvious reasons).
Brilliant. Thanks HTML5
Starting your first product
you nearly took a line out of the book. Third paragraph, page five,

"I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this book was already out of date by the time it was published"
Oh it certainly lacks rigour. I was just outlining "an intention to be rigorous" to see what the response would be. There seems to be, so far, quite a lot of interest in this kind of project.
Microsoft BOB-ing Android Must Stop
The Science Behind Men and Boobs
Four years later, iWork apps need Apple's attention
Interesting concept. Probably worthwhile as a teaching tool, but don't get your hopes up about it being good. The trailer doesn't impress, the 4.8 rating on IMDB is nothing to ignore, and I think wikipedia is being dishonest when it says "early reviews have been favorable" when in fact the two supporting citations both link to the same article that actually says this:

>Unfortunately, this means that the majority of the film consists of five men having a heated discussion in a stark, washed-out blue room in some anonymous government building. Other than Horton, we never even learn the characters’ names. The low-budget aesthetic and grounding in hard science is reminiscent of the excellent time-travel film Primer, but Travelling Salesman is far less ambitious. A few flashbacks help break up the film, but you can’t help think this particular story would be better served as an hour-long play.

And yea, it's clear that the film is at least partially inspired by Primer. I'm not sure if this really bothers me, though I once made a short film vaguely inspired by Primer and was harshly called out for it. Compare the trailers:

http://youtu.be/4CC60HJvZRE

http://youtu.be/6ybd5rbQ5rU
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but "it's been working just fine for decades" is not a good reason to not change something. In fact, most things would never improve or change at all since most people are terrible at determining what "works just fine" is until they see "works really well".
Jokes aside, I see this extension being used in one of those "causes" pages (not that I am against them) that parody the wrongdoings of an individual or groups of individual.

e.g. a site that features an oil company, who lobbies governments to give them tax subsidies for sketchy oil drilling projects. As the user scrolls through each bad points about the oil company, a fart sound is played.

Just my thought.
This is an entirely different issue than code; code mostly does the same thing when you run it twice. There's no such guarantee in biology. A cancer cell line growing in one lab may behave differently than descendants of those cells in a different lab. This may be due to slight differences in the timings between feeding the cells and the experiments, stochastic responses built into the biology, slight variations between batches of input materials for the cells, mutations in the genomes as the cell line grows, or even mistaking one cell line for another.

Reproducibility of software is a truly trivial problem in comparison.
This could actually prove to be useful (aside from the comedic value, and learning exercise). I'll test to see if playing audio offers will make a difference in conversions. One thing for sure, my girls will love playing around with it. :D

http://pullmyfinger.com is taken. ):
Does this site break the back button for anyone else? It's horrible, horrible!
Disaster Movies
"And with a lot of research going on, well, you can expect a lot of false positives."

Why would you expect a lot of false positives? Aren't results supposed to be reproducible at least 95% of the time?
Use of word 'Wrong Place' might be a bit harsh in my opinion, may be unfavorable be right fit. Qualified people taking job is not wrong, but they taking all jobs might be an issue, which is not the case at the moment but might be a reality if not controlled.
Peter Thiel announces 2013 class of Fellows
I was interested in this to parse some user entered data extracted from Facebook, and found Text Razor[1] to be pretty good at this.

Natural Language is a beautiful thing.

[1] http://www.textrazor.com/
The vim voting page describes the IDE features as a built in debugger and shell window.
Way to address the points. Ad homs and downvotes are the only recourse you have left, I suppose.
But who is going to pay to reproduce that research? What if that research took years to do?
We do a lot of crawling various data sources. We spent over 3 years building a really great infrastructure to do this well. This is how we can present rank tracking for you and your competitors over time. The last time I checked, I think the number was actually over 500k... I should update that page!
What is more troubling is not that so few of these results results are reproducible, but that it appears almost no-one is trying to reproduce the results of earlier studies. The ability of the scientists who wrote the paper to even get access to the resources necessary to try and reproduce the results is limited.

I'm reminded of Feymann's Cargo Cult Science:

"I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator
Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there
wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands."

For anyone who hasn't read it, the whole thing is excellent
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
Every so often there's a HN discussion about task effort estimation - usually that no-one is very good at it. Take your best estimate, one joke goes, then increment the units so days become weeks and weeks become months. It'll always take twice as long as you expect, goes another, even after you've doubled your estimate to take this into account.

Can one gauge productivity by tasks completed without a good estimate of the effort required for a given task?