skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah yes, I see what you're saying. Real numbers are easier to reason with and get correct results than percentages.

I think my point is slightly orthogonal since I misunderstood you; if you tell someone that something is "10%" they will think "that is pretty bad" whereas "1 in 10" is more likely to get a "hey, that's not too shabby" response. Percentages sound "worse" than numbers, even when they are the same (at least to me). Perhaps because they are harder to reason with?
I dont know Elon Musk biography very much, but Gates, Jobs and Page/Brin
are/were very hard workers..
(Gates sleeping under his desk or in office couch are well known)

Of course there are "fast bucks" stories like, instagram, tumblr and the likes.. but i thinks this is more of a bubble effect.. too much money around.. overvaluations, etc.. but (i think) that these stories are the exceptions, not the rule
Why would a female Elon Musk be better than a male one? Are males inferior?
Original article from NASA, with more details: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/display.cfm?IM_ID=550...
> All of your contributions seem to denote someone who doesn't really have anything worthwhile to convey in writing.

Please refrain from this sort of ad hominem response, it adds nothing to conversation.
> All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as a git repository.
> I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.

That's how language has always worked. There are people who are still uptight by the current "misuse" of words like "awesome" and "hopeful", but those of us who grew up with different meanings in common usage mostly just shrug.

For technical terms, usually I can live with words having domain-specific meaning that differs from common usage, but "theory" is one I still can't get over. It causes too much miscommunication.
I'm not arguing the value of the content, just the original intent. HTML was just meant to be a markup document language to display rich text over http.
Sodomy Hazing Leaves 13-Year-Old Victim Outcast in Colorado Town
These are the same captchas they use on Gmail for registration and what not.
Nice approach. I personally can't force myself to get rid of books that I've read, which is not very rational, because I very rarely reread books. But other stuff I try to get rid of, or not buy at all.
Wouldn't my referrer point back to this HN page?
I agree that an individual pictures or movie has the potential to be understood by a larger number of people. Even by a "radical" margin. :) However, that's not a unique feature of the Internet, it's similar in all means of communication. In media older than the Internet, pictures and movies have had an impact across linguistic communities.

But the vast majority of pictures and movies aren't the My Lai photographs or the moon landing. Most pictures and movies just don't communicate a whole lot of thought, it's amazing when they do, which is why photography and movie-making and music are such arts! That's because the vast majority of everyone doesn't have the capability, opportunity or sheer (in fail videos: bad) luck to take a picture or a movie like that.

In other words, visual arts might be a more universally accessible when it comes to receiving side, but they are much less universally accessible when it comes to the producing side.
What happened to Coding Horror after march 2012?
it's system complexity and how that makes it hard to maintain, change or validate.
A reply to this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5914243
This is even more pathetic than creationism. This is on par with insisting that the earth is flat. Denial is a hell of a drug.

Using condoms ever killed anybody. Stay save. And if you personally refuse therapy, ok. But HIV does cause AIDS and has a one hundred percent lethality. In case you affected use the remaining time.
Good article, makes an important point about complexity.

Just want to add one extra thought though:

he or she will run reports against the usage data to find
out whether a given feature is often used. That data can
then be run past the product managers who can help decide
whether it's sensible to just drop the feature.

It's important to be careful here, and it's one of the traps that is very easy to fall into (see Gnome). Just because a feature is only used by 1% of your users doesn't mean it's not important. You might have 100 features only used by 1% of your users each, but if you take out all 100 features, chances are you've taken out at least one feature that every single one of your users depends on, and now your product is a lot worse instead of better.
Given how doctors recommend sinus rinses these days, I wonder if adding some silver to it might be effective against ongoing sinus infections, especially since the rinse actually goes in and out, so you're not actually taking in much of it.

It's impossible to find serious information on it though because of all the quackery.

I'd love to not need antibiotics for those things, but they are often very effective: I stop being sick from one day to the next.
What about the part where, given that in the absence of a used game market games can be rapidly price slashed (since the entire ordeal with games in the first place is that the plastic disc and the burning cost cents, you are just reimbursing the development costs and eventually adding the sweet profit). If you can sell a game for a dollar, it is almost certainly a profit, because it only costs you pennies in transaction fees, bandwidth costs, etc. The argument is always the optimal price point to maximize returns, but digital distribution lets you be fluid with the prices.

You could launch Halo 5 for $150, and drop the price every day by $10 to $50, and then $5 a day to $20, and then $2 a day to $2, and there would still be thousands buying on day 1.
This is also a web page
Do you have a good citation for the primacy of linguistic communication?

I have become profoundly convinced over the last 15 years that words (& to an extent, text), is the generally best mode of communication of meaning, beating out things such as video, images, smells, etc. But I've been generally unable to articulate that idea cleanly and persuasively.
IRC with about 5 users, the rest just drop in at any time and expect every detail of the discussion to be remembered.
I saw Kevin Systrom speak on a panel moderated by Kevin Rose where he said "Instagram is not a photo company, it's a communication company". While it might be a communication company someday, it very much is a photo/video company now and they should spout fewer pithy aphorisms and spend more time building kickass technology. IMHO.
Well, it looks relevant to me. Incentivizing something is similar to legalizing it whereas removing barriers is similar to decrimilizing it. And broadcast radio and TV work for my purposes as an example. They do not directly charge consumers for the information they share yet they manage to make a buck. I will note I am 48, so maybe I am remembering a broadcast era a lot of members here would not remember.

Note to self: Folks on HN routinely think sex and prostitution references are irrelevant, not on point, not a meaningful example, ad nauseum. Maybe someday I will remember it gets perceived that way, even though I think we are all adults and it should be nbd.

But thanks for the feedback. Have an upvote.
My dad was part of a company in Boston that only had employees with an IQ of 140 and up. I asked him how it went and he laughed and said it naturally fell into ruins. Key point: there's a lot more to employees than just quantifiable numbers like GPA, IQ and such.
But they do not (yet?) support pull requests, so you end up with a number of disparate forks.
I'd definitely buy another copy of Neverwinter Nights if it ever got the Linux version on GoG.
When I use incognito mode, I see about 200k of Javascript. I wonder why we're getting different sizes.

The largest file I see is the ?shva=1 /mail/u/0 file, clocking in at 173KB.
Ha so true! Thanks for posting.
There are 3 platforms I care about, Windows, Android, and Linux.

For the last 2 weeks I've been taking actions that attempt to pull-back my public footprint and re-exert control over my privacy (admittedly illusory) to a point where I feel more comfortable. One of the biggest "oh crap" moments was when I realized my phone is powered by software derived from a Google product.

Windows desktop should be straight forward enough to connect.

Personal Linux server farm with services that are open to the general Internet, but for outbound traffic not related to something I serve, my servers are at the mercy of the security of the feed I have.

As far as how close it has to be to an exit, I'm completely indifferent. There are trade-offs that I'm willing to accept (in some cases, extreme) as I record over 20 years of habitual internet behavior.
Right, and there's a very strong argument to be made for a text focus on Hacker News. As I said, it depends on what the purpose of a site / web page / etc. is.

The point was that words are not the heart and soul of web design. There's nothing that argues in favor of an inherent bias to words over other forms of expression. That's my position.
Sorry, but this is not true in many dimensions:

1. He doesn't have an RSS feed. That's a medium many people use it to connect.

2. He doesn't have a mailchimp (or other) list to subscribe to. That's another medium people use.

3. He didn't optimize for Google. That's a huge medium people use to reach content. (he uses analytics, though. guess why)

4. Font size is set in pixels. This is the wrong way to do it if you want to be optimized for reading. You should set it in "em" to have the size of the browser default. Another reason why you need a professional to design a site.

It's true that we are sometimes (or in many occasions) taking the features to the extreme. But there is a reason why they are there. That's the new web. Learn how to use the feature to improve the experience, and not to make it worse.

Not using is just moving us backward.
Sounds like VizWiz (http://vizwiz.org/), but less useful.
Yeah, try to download a dvd over a standard broadband and you and your friend will be playing maybe tomorrow.
I feel very similar that the Government has stopped working right but have no desire for downsizing it. We should in fact increase spending on big projects and push for the hard things that traditional short term capital doesn't want to touch. Things like AGI, Space Colonization, things like Sonny White's Eagleworks, things that could transform our society in short order. I would love it if the real dreamers like Paul March and James Woodward got sizable funding for their work on Mass Fluctuations and their work on the origin of Inertia, Eric Lerner got some money to work on Focus Fusion, Kirk Sorensen could really build and engineer his Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors on a large scale and countless more less known scientists and visionaries got to pursue their ideas full time and with significant funding. A well functioning Government and visionary investors if they focused on people like that could really move the ball forward for our society and the world. I think we have great potential for greatness, if I ever get to be 'king' I'm definitely going to give money to those who want to really reach for the stars. I wish our Government thought the same way, hopefully with the right direction and moving away from the quarter as our yardstick we can get there.
Thanks, fixed that. I’ve never had a strong opinion on suing over inaccessible sites since I’ve never run into a public site I’ve had to use that was completely inaccessible. The issues I’ve had with accessibility have been more with software. If I was going to suggest anyone be sued at this point it would be Microsoft. While there desktop OS is accessible neither Windows Phone 7 or 8 is. I could give them a pass on 7 especially if they knew it was a stopgap measure. Windows Phone 8 shares common code with Windows 8 though. One would hope this includes accessibility API’s but Microsoft has made no statements that I can find about whether they will ever include screen reading software in Windows Phone 8 or at least provide an API so someone else can.
No, but the success rate in homelessness rehabilitation isn't relative to any other places success rate, it is in terms of itself.
Privacy Rights Groups Struggle to Attract Attention in Congress
One of the key things about FizzBuzz is testing divisibility by 3 and 5. There is a lot of software you can write without using the % operator, so perhaps there are large amounts of self trained programmers who never learned about this?
We've raised a $5.6M Series A from Union Square Ventures and Flybridge
This x10.

Shouting out about how awesome your tech is when it's someone else's tech that you didn't exclusively-license is lame.
I don't find text to be bleak or characterless; if it needs design that badly, then it's not well-written. And judging by the audience for things like ReadItLater and so on, I'm not alone. I just want the option to read text the way I want, not how someone thinks I ought to be see it, which is more often about getting me to look that providing me with a comfortable reading experience.
I agree with this. This is a clever way of soon rolling video ads on your Facebook timeline. Audio could be disabled by default and the experience would feel less intrusive.

Systrom specifically said that videos will post natively to the timeline.

--

Q: Will videos post natively, on FB Timeline?

A: Yes. You’ll be able to see videos right in your timeline.
That plane is not a replacement for the A-10, unless you kid yourself. The loiter time is atrocious.
For anyone who's unfamiliar with the term "Mythical Man Month," it's the title of a book which argues, amongst other things, that assigning more engineers to a late software project will make it even later.

The book can argue more convincingly and thoroughly than I can, but briefly: When new engineers join a project, they have to spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with it, so they're not productive for a while. They take time away from the project's original engineers by asking a lot of questions, which actually means progress slows down.

Further, more people means more complexity to manage. There will be more miscommunication, more instances of engineers' work conflicting with other engineers' work, more differences in coding style, etc.. With more than 200 people on a project, I can only imagine the nightmares.

I'm not familiar with the F-35 codebase. But I have a hard time imagining it could benefit from 200+ people working on it simultaneously.

I'm also skeptical about this idea of 24/7 shiftwork. Will each person will have their own little piece of the codebase that nobody else touches? If so, then why have a nightshift? Why not just have everyone work in the day, since it's all in parallel anyway? If not, how in the world can you have engineer A coding a given module on the dayshift, who then hands it off to engineer B on the nightshift? Software is not like laying bricks. You can't just come on the next shift and pick up where the last person left off. You lose all the context they had in their heads while coding, which is absolutely essential.
Assume they have access to the original pricate keys.
Indeed, that was one of the very few moments of absolute bliss you could find in submarines, was to be on the surface in the middle of the night with just you, the lookout, and the thousands of stars in a clear night sky, leaving a phosphorescent wake.
It has changed since 2005.

It changed dramatically in 2011, just after it was purchased by Microsoft (a PRISM Partner).
Hypoxic regions are caused by an influx of various nutrient-limited organisms (hence why fertilizer is bad) which trigger a feeding cycle that destabilizes and ultimately kills off the oxygen-producing organisms in the impacted region. Once they're gone, carnivorous inverts which survive well in low oxygen environments move in and stabilize the environment to its newly-barren state.

I don't know for certain, but I'd guess that the chemical dispersants actually contributed to the reduction of hypoxia, since it introduced a new limiting factor for the organisms which start the cycle. That said, I'm sure dispersants aren't biased in what they poison, so it's important to note that this is probably a positive-looking indicator masking devastatingly negative phenomenon.
There are apps where they don't need to do that, such as Hangouts/Gtalk, and possibly even Drive.
What kind of performance are you looking for, and what traffic mix?

Testing various consumer routers with VPN for performance is on my todo list. I know the WRT54GL is probably fairly antiquated at this point, but I have some newer DD-WRT supported routers like the WNDR3700 to try.
like a commenter suggests on the original post, end users don't care how something is built, but how well it solves a problem of theirs. It's like drucker saying costs have nothing to do with price. So, you can build things with bloat but it'll put you out of business. You also have to do right by your users. Not doing stuff because it's hard isn't a good excuse (a lot of the time).
Do you have evidence for that? I've worked on cognitive ability testing as it related to workplace performance, and have never seen anything that deviated dramatically from a normal distribution, especially at the high end.
My problem is trying to cull the wheat from the chaff. I have so much crap and so many things mixed in with it that I don't have time to make sure I'm not throwing out my children’s baby pictures with my junk.

But this could definitely solve part of the problem, and provide some well needed motivation.
This is a meaningful distinction, but as far as I can tell, not a practical one. I have never seen any way to make something free-as-in-speech without as a side effect making it free-as-in-beer. Speech itself is free-as-in-beer. Even if you charged admission for people to hear the initial speaking, the things you spoke are no longer yours to profit from once they've been passed on to others (unless you take measures to abridge their free speech). Can you name a piece of free-as-in-speech software that cannot be had without paying money? There definitely seems to be a tension there.

As far as I can tell, very, very few businesses actually make any money off writing and selling free software. They either open-source some tertiary part of a larger non-free piece of software, or they just give the software away for free and try to make money on support and consulting contracts.
Show HN: 597 days of iterating
597 days ago, I posted about the project our team was developing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183322 - here on HN, and today we're finally taking the wraps off what we've been working on since then.

At it's core, what we've been building is an end-to-end solution for creating, storing, and working with structured content in a way that's accessible to anyone. You can check out an introduction - http://team.marquee.by/introducing-marquee/ and dig into the technical/philosophical details of our approach - http://team.marquee.by/on-content/.

When we just started out and got rejected from YC's 2012 Winter class, HN provided us with invaluable feedback that greatly helped inform how we explored the space.

Today we sit a solid year and half later with something that we're not only proud of, but are incredibly excited about its potential. We've seen a lot of people enter the publishing space over that time (and seen some of them go), been through an accelerator program (TS NYC 2012), took a since-aborted stab at fundraising, launched one of Time's top 50 sites of 2013 on our platform - http://techland.time.com/2013/05/06/50-best-websites-2013/slide/narratively/ - and are starting to get a good bit of validation for where we had hoped to see the market go.

I'd love to get the HN community's thoughts on our progress and, more generally, our approach to the space.
Where Rich People Live (AKA Maps of iPhone Use)
Proof, if it were needed, that the past was not the golden age that people sometimes make it out to be.
What's the difference between you and eg. http://unblockvpn.com/ who offer easy VPN access for less than $5 a month?

Or how is your product easier to use?
You can't hoard transit. It's a service, not a good.

You can, however, use it. Which is a good thing (a social good!). Even more, transit capital is allocated by use, not by profit. More people using it should (in a non-stupid world) lead to more investment in the infrastructure, which has long term positive benefits for everyone (or, at least, has had them every time in the past in NYC).
Writing software is all about managing complexity.
This is a fantastic read, and is written in a very readable manner. Thanks.
Read fine for me
Anyone else think the referenced 37Signals "Know Your Company" idea was interesting?

I wondered how it worked w/o asking employees to sign up for anything, and this is what I found:

"What they came up with was Know Your Company, which poses one question to all employees via email, three days a week.

The queries vary from day to day.
Responding is optional, and answers are attached to employee names.

Workers can also choose whether they want their replies shared with the whole group."
Well, 2 seems contraindicated for all least those residents of Stockholm who were near the rioting that took place last month.
By "forge" I meant using the private keys (obtained through FISA, or possibly cracked) to either decrypt or MITM SSL sessions, not using one of their own CAs to create a valid but obviously fake certificate, which I assume is what you thought I meant.

Maybe "forge" was the wrong word.
Ask HN: Where to Find Freelance Work? 
Where does everyone get their leads for freelance work? I'm looking to land a couple projects to last me a few weeks until our startup finishes the fundraising process. I'm a fullstack dev as well as a UI/UX designer. Any leads would be awesome, thanks!
"If Apple had listened to customer feedback, the iPhone would have had a physical keyboard. "

If the iPhone got a physical keyboard, I'd totally swap my Android phone for it. I absolutely love Android, but my Nokia E75's physical keyboard just beats any touchscreen by a long way. Also I really miss physical buttons for music control beyond volume. I say this after owning a Galaxy Note 2 for half a year and absolutely loving it. It's just the touchscreen that every modern phone has that is so sucky.
I used to think estimation questions were useful. I still think that estimation ability is something a programmer needs for exactly the reasons you state.

However, I used to ask one estimation question (How many hours have you spent coding over the course of your life) on all my interviews. Over time, I lost interest in it because almost everyone got it "right" (took an acceptable route and arrived at a reasonable estimate). The only people that got it wrong were ones I decided to reject for other reasons (this being a semi-technical but mostly ask-about-experience phone interview).

So, although I agree it's a useful skill, I don't think it's worth askin estimation questions from my personal experience.
Agreed. At it's heart, web design should be about conveying information effectively.
Very good point, this can be an important factor. (I also have a very iterative coding style.)
> where there exists a mixed system in which you are not allowed to have no health insurance

True. If you don't have one you have to pay a fine. Which is troubling if you couldn't pay for it in the first place. I have that problem at the moment. I guess it's mostly my fault for not taking every help I could get. So far I haven't gotten any troubling mail, but I'm sure I'll be in trouble once I have to get back into it.

Everyone around me feels uneasy about this. I didn't have the need to go to the doctor in a very long time, but I can relate.