skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can definitely be debated if the current state of education is the best one, but that isn't really how your original statement read. For the record my reply wasn't meant as an attack on you (as in ad hominem), but on your statement which is far too common on HN.

I think social sciences when done correctly do produce good thinking, as any theory is only as good as its reasoning. In my opinion the real tragedy occurs when soft and hard sciences mix. Many times, especially in this setting, because someone with a hard science mindset doesn't understand, or ignore, the premise of soft science. I personally think this is why there are so many wild disagreements on things like systems engineering within the tech community.

It can also be argued that college isn't the best format (age, place, duration) to learn social science, but that can be said about many areas of study. It would also be to, as much of the debate do, ignore the lack of alternatives. In technology there are many examples of people dropping out and having success, at least as a practitioner, in their field. In many other areas this isn't as true. It might even say more about CS education than anything else.

Of course college also has value as an experience. It's where many people find their independence and meet long standing friends, colleagues and partners. Which would be perfectly fine to do anywhere else, but plumbing probably isn't it.
Show HN: Global voting system using Twitter
3 hours ago I had the idea for a global polling/voting
system, using nothing but tweets...

It went live 5 minutes ago!

...

To start or participate in a vote, just Tweet something this:

"#twote #bestdatabase #couchdb #redis"

...

Results: http://176.34.235.38:8000/

Code: https://github.com/sreuter/twote

Me on Twitter: @sreuter
Ask HN: Do the pro-Google voting rings get paid extra to flag these articles on Saturdays or do you donate this time?

edit: http://imgur.com/wvB8lgH
I'm curious about how you would go about "charg[ing] more."

Do you contact current clients and explain why you are raising prices and charge them your increased price on the next job? Do you just state it and not explain?
of course a more careful repeat of the experiment is should be done. Without too much prejudice to scientific "professionals" (who very often aren't) - the experiment was done by high school students, after all.

But the post I responded to did not request a repeat, it totally dismissed it by saying it was "almost guaranteed" that other factors contribute, and that's what I take issue with.
MMO Strategy Guides - MMO Strategy Guides
Think about it, the host server gets the path string raw, it's up to it how to interpret it.
are there a lot of opportunities in the node.js market as compared to say asp.net or php?
Ah, I see. If so, how did you guys manage to connect the Moverio's glasses to an x86 PC? IIRC the glasses use a proprietary connector, and no info on the specs/protocol of the connector (nor the Aux connector on the back of the control box) is publicly available.

Did you guys receive the specs from Epson directly, receive dev glasses which doesn't use that connector, or reverse-engineer it yourselves? Is that information confidential or under NDA?

I strongly feel that ancient control box is holding back the full potential of the glasses and would love to connect different hardware to it. The connector spec/protocol is the only thing preventing that. I'm not very hopeful but if there's any information on it I would love to know.
Not an expert, but from what I understand it's a trade off. Super-capacitors hold much less charge than batteries.

There was a very interesting article about them on HN last year IIRC.
Nice work.

This would take some work (more on the server's part than yours), but I think it would be more accurate if you tested the links for 301 redirects and consolidated the results accordingly. For example, in the ASP.NET tag one of my pages has 112 links to an older URL (http://encosia.com/2008/05/29/using-jquery-to-directly-call-...) that 301 redirects to a newer URL (http://encosia.com/using-jquery-to-directly-call-aspnet-ajax...) which has 129 links itself. It would be interesting to see only the latter URL show up in the list with 241 links.
Here's a system I've been thinking about. Separate users into classes. You could deputize a hand full of trusted users who can deputize other users with their up votes. If X number of deputies give an upvote to a user's comment Y number of times, that deputizes that user.

The further away a user is from an original deputy, the more X and Y increase before a new person is deputized.

Hopefully, this will give you a class of users who tend to vote intelligently and comment with information that adds to the converation. Votes by these users would carry more weight than the general community.

Edit: It also automates the process so you don't have to hand pick more than the original deputies.
This is Water - David Foster Wallace's commencement speech from 2005
The most important thing to learn/know is the mindset of the buyer. Applies to pretty much any industry, but for freelance development it's even more important.

Business owners, project managers and the like hire experts who fit their needs and here's the part to take note of "solve their problems."

Their problem might include some Ruby, PHP, C# or whatever language work, but that's not what they are interested in. They want to know you can get the job done and solve their problem in a reasonable amount of time, within budget and without causing them extra headaches.

I have never, ever sold anyone on 'php'. Always on their needs (solving a problem).
It says it requires iOS 6. Is there something in the app that requires it, or is that just a new mandate by Apple for all new apps? I won't be able to update my iPhone for another week, but I look forward to trying it out. It certainly seems innovative (and free!).
I will, feel free to take a look in a second.
Nintendo targets user YouTube videos
While I also consider these tax avoidance schemes immoral (and borderline illegal, but who am I to judge ...), I have to disagree with the notion that everyone (everyone else, because noone's getting the multinationals to behave anyway) should be paying their taxes in a straightforward manner and avoid all the little tricks for the Greater Good. I believe I have 2 good reasons:

1) in a democracy, people are ultimately responsible for laws and therefore for such loopholes. It is their responsibility to close them if they consider them wrong, not to avoid them out of sheer goodwill - they only put themselves at a disadvantage and reward those who benefit from loopholes (because these crooks will be richer in relation).

2) If only a handful of multinations exploit these loopholes, they will not be fixed. Those corporations can afford to invest millions in lobbying and bribery to keep their tax privileges. So there is only one appropriate reaction: everyone must try to benefit from these tax loopholes until it hurts governments so much that they are forced to act.
Has anyone seen a "teen's invention" ever work?
I've found many high quality clients through TopTal. Please use my referral link: http://www.toptal.com/?ref=35

Quick facts about us: everyone is really cool. You get to work with top notch clients. All the developers who work with us are seriously talented: we make sure, since you will need to take a short coding test and show us some of your code before we let you in.

I highly recommend it.

By the way, it's not like oDesk where there is bidding. Bidding is not part of the process. You can set a weekly fixed rate for full or part, or just set your hourly. No haggling involved. Clients know they are getting a developer of a certain quality when they choose us, and they know what that costs.
agreed (except that pretty sure radio waves will go through your leg). Also of note is that Ames tests on cellphone radiation are completely inconsistent.
The reason they attract upvotes, or at least not downvotes, is because the ethos of the site seems to encourage all views of a argument to be expressed and allowed.

I know I personally have dismissed down voting several "middlebrow dismissals" in the past because they seemed like valid counter arguments whereas outright useless comments like "lol this sucks" are easy for me to clearly distinguish. Maybe the rules just need adjusting to discourage mean comments whether or not the argument is valid? Is that the core problem?
As an experiment, I took a carton of books to Half Price. They went through them, and offered to buy 3 of them for a few dollars. The rest they said they'd take for free, but wouldn't pay anything for them.

They had limited shelf space, and the books that didn't sell quickly went to the recycler.

The problem with selling books on Amazon is if it, plus packaging, is over 13 oz, you have to take it to the post office. This, of course, destroys any economic or environmental benefit to selling them for less than 15 or 20 bucks.

Very, very few used books are worth that much. I do have some, and they've sat for sale on Amazon for over a year. Books less than 13 oz I'll sell for a few bucks on Amazon, but they rarely sell, either.

So I cut & scan with no guilt about destroying the books. It's sad, but they are worthless.
Interesting. This data may potentially be useful in evaluating framework/library/OSS trends and prominence.
> Maybe what HN needs, could be some way of giving people who want the heated discussion, a way to express these seperate from rest.

I like this idea. I'd say all who are hellbanned should see other hellbanned users' and they can nuke each other from the orbit in their own little sandbox.
This is basically what I thought upon reading the article. I find it hard to believe that a student, acting alone, would 'revolutionize' this industry, considering the dedicated teams of engineers and scientists trying to achieve this on a daily basis.

That being said, I would also like to eat my words here :)
Thank you, I'll check this out.
It's not that for all your current clients you charge more, just when you start feeling overwhelmed and you're getting requests for more work is when you say ok my rate is going up x amount. That way you keep quality clients high, less stress, and more money.
Most of my books are far too old for bar codes.
For everyone saying this is obvious: I'm one of those idiots that didn't quite get it and I appreciate this post a lot.

For the past week, I've been working on writing a little static site generator and putting it on S3 and I thought I was pretty damn clever for finally getting around to doing that... except now it turns out I'm clueless yet again. I'm looking at Cloudfront now, but I'm still not sure if has all the features that I was expected out of S3 alone (someone already mentioned Route 53 integration).
He created the bug that actually implemented the change.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851702

He's in charge of product design at Mozilla.

From his blog:
"Former Head of Firefox UX, now doing Product Design Strategy at Mozilla."

This is a bad thing because it essentially covers up an important feature, and does not inform users that the feature plays a significant role in the behavior of the web pages they visit.

This really needs some careful thought. I mean, Mozilla finds its roots in the very organization that created JavaScript. It owes to its users some clear communication on what JavaScript actually does.

Think about it this way: When the world Wide Web was born, it was a means to deliver text documents, marked up for an interpreter, but the documents were static. What you asked for was exactly what you got, and it stayed that way. You could look under to hood, and understand the information that was being shown to you.

But now? The pages that web sites deliver today are these absurdly sophisticated apparatuses, and what they do under the hood can deceive and manipulate your understanding of what actually happens when you simply try to read some text, or watch a video. Taking away the ability to put a stop to that removes power from the hands of the ordinary user.

Now, when a webpage is delivered, the user is actively prevented from understanding the nature of the information they have requested, and the manner in which it is delivered. This is less open, and less honest. Tools like "View Source" are deliberately defeated, when a "normal", less technically-competent user is prevented from understanding that the page source they may be looking at, in an attempt to understand what they are looking at, bears very little relationship to the final rendering of the page they are expected to use.

JavaScript is not (and should not) be required to deliver a web application. I mean seriously, a web application should be conceived without JavaScript as a requirement (gmail certainly delivers a static HTML version, and works beautifully, as such). It shouldn't be a requirement of the user, expose themselves and their devices to complex operations they may not understand, especially when they are interacting with a very large, very complicated internet, filled with other parties who may not act in their best interest.

We are being pushed into ever greater dependency on applications like Firefox, and we depend on these non-profit "open" foundations to advocate the end user.

When an organization like The Mozilla Foundation works against us, and operates in the best interests of large profit-driven companies (as specifically stated: in one of the related bugs, 537482: "GMail, Apple.com, Facebook, etc.")...

...well then, it's time to stop using Firefox.
How hard is it to make a copy or a screenshot of an e-mail and smuggle it out on a thumb drive?
Cast AR hands-on with Jeri Ellsworth at Maker Faire 2013
I'll agree that taxes in theory are a service fee. However, the part that many with libertarian leanings (for example, me) get frustrated by is not the idea of paying for services (I like cops & firefighters & paved roads), but paying into a grossly inefficient system and seeing so much get squandered.
In reality, probably not. But I frequent hacker news and I may be a sucker for wanting to stay up to date with the latest and greatest.

One can never be too sure about tech, but if something like Node was to become even more popular in the next five years or so, I would prefer to have been working away at mastering it over those five years. This is just my two cents, and not having a lot of experience I could be wrong :)
Flaky: datatypes for real world quantities
The iOS 6 requirement was initially because I was using some features in the Facebook SDK. But I dropped those features entirely. I honestly can't remember if there's any code left in the app that requires iOS 6. Thanks for the positive feedback! I hope you find the app useful.
I struggle with getting started on a project. I tend to spend days, sometimes weeks, thinking about the problems I am going to have to face when I start coding, and researching them. Then it happens. I sink into some sort of trance from which I am unwilling to wake from. People ask me to social events, I decline. I can stay in this frame of mind for well over a month if the project is important to me. I had a professor who said that it takes three days to get into the coding state of mind but once you're there you are in a higher productive mode of thinking. The only problem with this, as everyone knows, is that it is very easy to get shaken out of the state. Then you must spend another three days to get back into it, which is why programmers are often reluctant to break their focus - it wastes time.

It has gotten easier to enter high focus mode with age and experience.

I second techno music. Aphex Twin. Prodigy and NiN have been boons for me in the past.

I am 40
Emphatic disagreement.
The more I talk about what I'm working on at Wellposed,
the more I talk about how I'm solving problems, etc, the more opportunities I've stumbled into / potential customers I've found.

Amusingly, I've actually had more and more requests over time to start blogging about even the parts of my technical work that I'd consider pretty unsophisticated!

Point being (as businessy as this may sound), the more channels you have to engage with your customers in a positive, engaging, informative (and hopefully educational) manner.

I'm pretty sure that every business that is doing something sophisticated benefits from providing more channels for passive customer discovery and education. (or so I'd hope!)

That said, it could be argued that I've a pretty unusual business so I may have have opinions that won't make sense for normal businesses.
It wouldn't "distort" the results. It would enable you to get results at all. The number of likely uncontrolled results in this "experiment" means that it was worthless for anything other than getting children excited about science.
cool paywall
You are seemingly only permitted to be positive. This is the case not only for entrepreneurs but true for anyone: job seekers, execs, managers, you name it.

Having doubts or problems is an inescapable part of life, yet our public lives aren't permitted to reflect this reality. We need to masquerade: happy, motivated, fearless. I myself have agonized over this regarding my blog. As a participant it the job market, I can't shake the fear that saying anything negative will hurt my prospects in whatever path I may choose.

This dissonance with reality, the need to deceive not only others but yourself is at best tiring and at worst torturous.
Linkbot - Create with Robots
Get More YouTube Views (until the end) with Serious Games
Weird issues with add-on are definitely a problem, and with poor performance, one of the reasons I switched to Chrome. But when it comes to JS, and I'm willing to bet my bias as a web developer and website owner influences this, I don't think this should be easy to change.

Maybe Firefox needs a better warning when someone goes into the config; it wouldn't be the first time. But JS is not only a part of the browser, it's a core part of the web, good and bad.

For this reason, I don't believe that it needs to continue to be easy for someone who doesn't understand that to switch it off because of false or misleading information. The web has grown since JS really started being used, and won't be going away anytime soon.
I am also getting started with this process and these are things that have helped me:

It seems like you are very aware of what you are capable of. It's great to be realistic, but also realize that you are now in the professional market like everyone else. Like the other posts say here, NETWORK. Go to local meetups and present yourself as a real professional. Create business cards (BONUS: Make yours stand out from the rest). You will receive many business cards by going to these meetups. You can probably gauge what would make yours flashier.

Update your LinkedIn, Twitter, HackerNews, Blog, etc immediately with solid and presentable information. If you're unsure of how to do this professionally, check out other professionals' pages and emulate success.

Now, BUILD THAT PORTFOLIO. Even one side project is generally enough to show someone that you can do the work. Do you want to show off your skills, but you're not sure what to build? Take a popular site and build a small client for it.

This is one of the most exciting things you will ever go through. We hear about people building businesses all of the time, and it seems amazing. There is so much more passion - in my experience - when you are building yourself. Congratulations on taking this huge step!

Please feel free to contact me if you have any basic questions about the whole freelancing process. I'm happy to help in any way! (Email in profile)
Very cool board--interesting that it has both an Atmel micro controller and MIPS processor. I guess the AVR gives it full compatibility with arduino code and is just a slave of the CPU. I built a little wireless rice cooker monitor with a light sensor attached to an XBee radio, and would love to get one of these to switch it to wifi.
No argument from here about wastage. If I'm paying the rate appropriate for decent services, give me decent services please. Some of it may be as bad as we think it is (bureaucracies always have some degree of inefficiency), but a lot, thankfully, are managed by more level heads.

I encourage people to donate to their local volunteer fire and ambulance services for this very reason. Also, if your local police are having a fundraiser, you should consider helping. You can side-step the inefficiencies of government distribution (and the bickering) if you take an active role in directly funding these essential services.

Most of these should also be tax-deductible so you're just basically side-stepping the middle-man (the bureaucracy) and making sure the money is going where it's needed directly.

I mean, honestly, considering how many people are clustered together these days, we're just not equipped to deal with the chaos that will come about if there was no social infrastructure. These things run on tax money.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being libertarian (after all, the root "liberty" is in there). I'm just very uncomfortable with the casual disregard for all authority, order and in many cases, common sense, that some folks who claim to be libertarian tend to espouse. Last I checked being libertarian required a great deal of common sense, a sense of fairness and above all else, order and self-control.
"that's loser talk" pretty much works out to victim-blaming. you're saying that it's the fault of the people being discriminated against for not being tough enough to be successful anyway.
well I mean HN standalone.
Lubuntu, which is Ubuntu plus LXDE.

Ubuntu for the up-to-dateness (relative to debian) and stability. If I want something more up to date I can use a ppa if it exists, or pip, or compile. Mostly I take what's there and I'm fine.

LXDE for the minimalism. It's just windows and a panel, none of the Unity drama.

Canonical recently seems to be emphasizing Canonical (which is their right), so I'll likely go to Debian; LXDE will make the desktop part all but a non-event.
Feature idea: add a time filter, e.g. last six months, last year, etc.
Actually Keith Schwarz is an introductory CS teacher :-).
Thanks! We are very happy with the outcome as well.
> (which you signed by participating in said society)

This is what Plato has Socrates argue in Crito, but it is bullshit outside of perhaps a limited few scenarios (such as: if you are an older adult with the capacity to be politically aware, the means to remove yourself, and the emotional hardening or ideological emphasis necessary to abandon your friends and family.... in other words, if you are Socrates.) Those who actually have the ability to do as you implicitly suggest they should if they do not consent are a very small minority.

"If you don't like it, leave it" is the cry of those who are in privileged positions in society and think that those below them should suck it up and deal with it.

(Of course "leave" also becomes difficult for the extremely wealthy since, unlike in Athens at the time ("Any one who does not like us and the city, and who wants to emigrate to a colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, retaining his property."), we have "exit tax" for those people. These few people must be taxed in order to opt-out of being taxed.)
For desktop (and on my laptop) use, I dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint 13 currently. Going to upgrade to Mint 15 soon enough. Also have a lot of experience with CentOS for server use and Ubuntu 12.04.
What is next? A blogpost saying "Hammers are terrible screwdrivers. Don't use a hammer with a screw!"?
Mint, but they all end up looking the same to me once I throw i3 on them.