skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A fair question. It's essentially the design equivalent of optimizing your db code: Will your business suffer because you get 8% fewer writes per second than you could with some refactoring? Probably not. But it all adds up to the responsiveness of your web application, and likewise, the easy-to-miss typographic nuances add up to the overall impression of quality of the product.

By the way, to be designer-pedantic... There are actually no fonts involved at all here, as far as I can tell – the original logo appears to have been an original calligraphic piece, and the new one is an iteration on that, further refining its calligraphic form.
I love this idea, and think it's the winning move.

A problem I see is in the details, where I wouldn't want to lose X million dollars just to force a dialogue. If I were the entire decision-making branch of Amazon, I would only dedicate X million dollars to something guaranteed to produce change, like deploying numerous robots (or whatever).
Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers Skyrocket (2012)
I've heard cases of iPhone 5s spontaneously combusting in china. I wasn't sure if they were just fakes or if there was a real issue with the battery. Thankfully, they are kind of small and the accidents are not fatal, yet.
We should minimize the risks as much as possible. For RC aircraft (better chargers?), and definitely use fully optimized charging systems in electric vehicles, and for 787s.
We use blimp (http://getblimp.com). Works very well.
To extend on this idea a little bit, once you have the data in graphite you can use it as input to an alerting system. As an example, here's a Nagios plugin I wrote to do that- https://github.com/sciurus/grallect
I think these "quirks" hit on legitimate inconsistencies and confusing interpretations. Most of his expectations seem pretty commonplace.
My previous internship title was Software Engineer but my title was changed to "Software Designer" because someone is enforcing it.
Such a fine line between refreshing and pointless.
You aren't even addressing my comment.
Why is it inconsistent? It's consistent with techno-anarchy: scarcity is a solved problem. Without finite resources there is no longer any point to capitalism, a system which allocates finite resources.

So people are left to live life how ever they see fit. No more commercials, since that's pointless. Without commercials, there's no TV shows just designed to get viewers since you no longer need them. If you manage to make something new you may as well share it with everyone (via a replicator) because... what else could you do? "Karma" is all that's left to chase.
When you got your resume thrown out because you have a female sounding name, it has NOTHING to do with higher ups, whoever threw the resume out was HR, and thus very probably a woman.

A problem might exist, but targeting the wrong target won't fix it, stop blaming the "higher ups" for decisions (conscious or not) taken by the ones that took those decisions.

I very much doubt there is a company where the CEO made a explicit rule for the HR don't hire any women.
Esquire’s Rens Lieman Asks You to Hack His Data
Oh thank God. I really like him.
My replies to your points:

1. Do you have stats? In absolute terms, a whole lot of people hiring programmers have programmed themselves. How do you know the other people hiring programmers are "the vast majority"? (I sincerely wonder about it. I cited two numbers by two bloggers, one says it's 80% of the cases, the other says 90%. I have no idea, but I intuitively feel it's less than 50%. Are there real stats?)

2. I mentioned Ron Garret because I replied to an article mentioning him and Google as a proof of something that this example actually disproves, not because I thought it's a good example to generalize from.

3. I agree, which is why I said that people overvalue early option grants (hoping for the value to rise tenfold which it probably won't); I added to that an explanation why late option grants past the point where value can possibly rise tenfold are undervalued (because the money you make is the difference in prices, which rises with the absolute value of the stock price even if the growth rate goes down.)

I said near the end that I'm not sure I'm reading the original article as intended so you could say I misrepresent it; what I am pretty sure of is that a whole lot of people read it very closely to the way I'm reading it in my reply, and I'm writing for those people.

Your "biggest takeaway" is exactly what I'd like the takeaway to be; all I'm saying is that SaaS/freelancing career is not the only path to succeed in "programming", and that there are other paths you might want to take and you'd behave differently if you took them.
I assume because he switched to DDG for privacy reasons, not because he thought the search was better. Also DDG has some search features that neither Google nor Bing have.

For people who still like Google search more, but want the privacy, I'd suggest startpage.com. I see even the Tor Browser Bundle uses it as the default search engine (you can still switch to DDG and others, too).
I think you want a mutable wife. Otherwise you'll eventually have to throw her out and get a new one.
Malala Yousafzai, 15 year-old schoolgirl shot by the Taliban, addresses UN
At the same time the Lisp community is one of the fiercest in supporting the idea that nothing that can be a function should be a macro. Metaprogramming just because it is clever is more abhorred in the Lisp community than any other I've seen.
Half of Scotland’s Electricity Needs Can Be Covered by Tidal Turbines
Great post, awesome to see how much of a craft(wo)manship design actually is. :)
>I've had the opposite experience, where when people notice that I'm female, certain companies get excited for the chance to have a "token woman" on their team

My wife noticed that too. She has basically the exact opposite experience as the author. Her name is also gender neutral, but more commonly male. As soon as she added "Ms." she started getting interviews. Comments like "it will be so nice having another woman around here", and "we have too many men in the IT department and 99% of the applicants are just more men" are apparently normal, even from men.
Let's not exaggerate. Per mile, airliners are roughly 10x (one order of magnitude) safer than cars. It is generally true that driving to/from the airport is the most dangerous part of an airline trip, but not by a particularly large factor.
wtf are you talking about? The revolutions have increased work times, not reduced them. It's basically unions that have reduced work time.
IFTTT THIS: what missing channels do you want on IFTTT?
I just suggested AnyDo via https://ifttt.com/help/channel_suggestion

I'm interested to see what's on everybody else's wish list, but I don't have enough karma to create a poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
are you saying Microsoft helped to wiretap email?
Nice to hear you enjoyed it. SVMs are indeed quite familiar in the machine learning community. But I think (and hope :)) that more introductory material will help others. And the examples on one-class classification is not that exhaustive. I hope to be able to write a follow-up on novelty detection in time series; that is the main subject of my master thesis.
Hack Your Workout: These Songs Make People Take Bigger Steps
Not just a fun fact, but also an informative fact.

Thank you for the update and chuckle!
Yep, those were all points I noticed too. For example:

* the CTA is below the page fold which means LOWER conversions. It's also grey. I didn't see it during my first scroll. Perhaps changing the button to the yellow used in the picture would work.
* the sign in button should readily have a "sign up" button next to it
* the pricing link isn't really a link, like you said. I didn't even realize it was until I read your comment. I think that pricing should be available right below the page fold after the CTA, much better placement.
* the main image on the page is pretty low-res, I think it'd make more sense to blow it up so you can see the detail and overlay text over it (but so that the legibility of the text doesn't decrease)
* the wall of text is something I never really read. I always take note of successful products and how they convert. Both mailchimp and basecamp and many others keep their home page a single page site, unscrolling for the most part.
Makes me think about the post I read from Nathan Kontny
http://ninjasandrobots.com/what-people-really-want

Its really hard to do this if you are not completely immersed in the problem yourself. The legacy players who have this strong position have the years of understanding the problem and that is why they command the market and at times dont even have to innovate to protect their position.

If you yourself are not your customer, it is very hard to execute, prioritize etc. For enterprise businesses this is extremely critical. Also when I say Problem I just dont mean the actual product. It also includes decision makers, sales cycles, budget cycles etc etc. The whole decision matrix around a enterprise product needs to be understood.

Actually I dont think Rakasheets has failed. You just have an expensive Prototype. If you want to continue, spend the next month in customer offices selling this. Forget adwords or any other such mechanism. Your best customer acquisition channel will be Word of Mouth. Small Business owners know many other SMBs and they share such stuff. If you can crack a few they will share that positive experience with their friends and colleagues.

Good luck!
Read again. I'm not saying the technologies enable advertising. I'm saying it's in their best interest to have people do all useful work inside a browser, with a technology stack they control, increasing ad impressions and being able to provide ubiquitous user behavior tracking. This is the holy grail of advertising and would strengthen their monopoly even more.
I really want to read this, but the site goes completely bonkers on iOS. I can see some content but it's wedged behind this top banner. They don't really expect people to read through a tiny gap in their images, do they?
evernote, google calendar, remember the milk, diigo - and not only more channels, but also more actions for every channel.
You should have told them that you specialize in back-end servers.
Mattt/rocket - A proposed hybrid approach to real-time cloud applications
As a man in a pretty male-dominated profession, (Military) I can say that this is the case. It's exacerbated by blatant sexism, but the biggest rational fear is that women expect the environment to change when they arrive and that this change will be detrimental. The current culture and environment has been tried and proven to work, and they're fearful of a change in that culture impacting success.

Having worked with women, I'm of the opinion that it really depends on leadership and the maturity of everyone in the shop. If you have scumbags around that are allowed to act unchecked, then a woman can destroy a shop in a matter of weeks. If you have good leadership that clearly outlines proper and improper behavior, then things usually come out ok.
the contents the 404 page is also funny

http://jessicahische.is/404
I had a bit of money saved (just a couple thousand), but I decided that 3 months of debt going after something I wanted was worth the risk.

Worth noting that I still paid her rent the entire stay.
So you're saying that code duplication is only (usually) a symptom of failing to factor out a relevant abstraction, rather than something to be fought in itself? On the first reading, it looks like you say "there's nothing wrong with code repetition" and then immediately list all the things wrong with it; instinctively, "a logically or structurally common aspect of the problem didn't receive the recognition in the form of an abstraction" is synonymous with code repetition.
Precisely. Add to that the fact that the situations you most commonly find yourself in are the result of choices you make, and therefore the behavior serving you best is a result of these choices as well, and you'll be making the same point as I'm making - namely, that there are different paths to be taken, and you'd want to behave consistently with your chosen path.
Given what one can do when trusting a walled garden, and can't without, is there some reasonable concern critics overlook?

Say, apps having access to other apps' data could unfairly modify cached user data, frustrating legitimate multiplayer gameplay? i.e.: write an app which auto-maximizes all player capability stats?

To wit: cheats may become easy to perpetrate and hard to block when full sandbox access is not prevented.
this is not at all bizarre, you just need to know what dynamic means. the best answer i could come up with is "definition is execution". for an enlightening moment, see this piece of code:

def a():
print "a called"
return []

def fn(x=a()):
x.append(1)
print x

fn()
fn()
fn()

i suggest typing this directly into the interpreter instead of a script for better effect.
My entire site design and copy have been a source of downright embarrassment. In fact, this week's "challenge goal" is a brand new home page, landing page and sales page design.

The copy itself is going to need to change to reflect the pivot from inventory to ERP, so happily "Inventory management without the suck" is going away.

> The "not interested" inversion of "contact us" is also pretty weird and announces that you expect people to not be interested.

Curiously, I thought this myself when I put it up. To this day, I can't fathom why I thought that was a good choice of words (or why I never changed it).

> Then as you scroll it's just a wall of text all the way to the end.

I had been experimenting with the "hybrid copy"[1] sales page that Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers has been a proponent of. It's worked incredibly well for my actual landing pages, where a user knows what the product is about when they click whatever link or ad brought them there. However, I took it way too far by doing "hybrid copy" on the home page.

The new design I'm working on is going to be the classic home page with a brief overview of the product and a CTA linking to the "hybrid copy" features/tour page.

Edit: I neglected to mention that the "hybrid page" experiment resulted in a noticeable increase in new trials.

[1] http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-copy/
They used Lithium batteries because they are light, small and powerful.

Can Lithium batteries fail? Yes. But keep in mind that flying along with you and the batteries is many tons of flammable fuel, wrapped in aluminum and carbon fiber, which are also flammable, with miles of high-powered electrical lines running through it all. And we know from TWA800 that those are enough, by themselves, to bring down an airliner.

But we also know that that happens very rarely, because engineers can mitigate dangers if they are aware of them.
Here are 3 tools to boost your productivity like crazy.
I’m wondering if there is any progress in the Solar Roadways Project. I doesn’t seem so.

http://www.solarroadways.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep4L18zOEYI
I thought it was a good approach as well, but I have a hard time fitting it into the math I know. I've been learning category theory so I may take another stab at placing it. But this all takes time.

And the book's layout is fairly disjointed.

I may just begin experimenting with the theory, rather than placing it, my life is short.
X, Wayland, and now Mir.
The very fact that there are now 3 divergent display managers is indicative of that fragmentation we're talking about here.
That "terrible" product has more users than you ever will becuse it's makers understand that sales and marketing are far more important (and the product is not as bad as you think).
How important is personal interaction to most programming jobs, really?
The Snowden drama is all that's keeping this relevant. The public tends to be like a sleeping person. If you tell them the house is on fire, the first they will do is try to get rid of you because you are a nuance. If you persist they will give up on trying to be rid of you and try to find out why you won't stop and attack that instead, unless it appears harder to be rid of than you are.
I just started looking for contracts on job boards (notably jobsite.co.uk, which may not be the best but has worked for me). When applying for them I ticked the box to allow the website to publish my CV to any/all agents.

I then spent about two weeks telling people that no, I'm not interested in a perm role, and got work at about the end of week 3. (for reference I'm a server-side C/C++ programmer with an interest in crypto and about a decade's experience).

That's when I registered a company, bought domain names, got accountants (nixon williams, they specialise in this, seem to be ok so far) who handled tax registration etc etc.

-- edit --

happy to answer any further questions. I'm only about a year in and on my second contract.
it can't be, that wouldn't make sense. "def" is no different than "for" or "if".
Maybe not hire the cake-baker, but interview them ... which is required to lead to the former.
That's for the extension devs to handle. I'm personally in favor of the following:

1) Users can enable or disable any permission they like
2) This is transparent to developers - i.e. if you access geolocation, you'll always get one. It just won't be the right one if you don't have permission.
3) The extension is allowed to query which permissions I've given. So devs can handle blocked permissions more gracefully if they choose.
Ask HN: Seeking Freelance Mobile App Developer to Build Simple App
Hi,

I was inspired by this post on HN some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5420588

...And after reading it started the startup I'm currently committed to working on, Sub Sonic Software.

I'm looking for a freelance dev to build a simple cross platform mobile app for the 4 major smartphone OS'.

I have a page on my website about it here: http://subsonicsoftware.com/Developers.html

The actual job posting is here:
https://www.odesk.com/jobs/Simple-Cross-Platform-Mobile-App-Development_~~dcb76a048ecaf226

I'd like to hear from more people who might want to take on the job, so I'm posting here, too.

Thanks,

-c
I'd rather be offended and have money in the bank than the other way around.
That's what you got from what I said? I'm saying that people think because communication is digital, and digital is easy to listen in on that we should be listening in on it. I say fuck that. Today it would be easy to listen in on anyone anywhere with a little hardware. Easy is not a justification for doing something.
My understanding is that the qualified dividend tax rate is technically a different thing than the capital gains tax rate, and they only happen to have the same value - not that that's very important to this discussion.

More importantly, this is partly incorrect as it applies to employees. Employee wages are an expense deducted before corporate profits are taxed; I believe (though I'm less confident) that in the case of profit sharing money going to employees could face double taxation.

Most importantly, though, "double or triple taxation" is misleading. Every time the money is taxed needs to be taken into consideration, to be sure, but the ultimate question is the overall rate, not the number of passes. (Please, please, please QUINTUPLE TAX me at 0.01% per pass...)

With loopholes and exemptions and deductions and sliding scales and different rates in different jurisdictions and everything, that's not a simple question, unfortunately.

Oversimplifying, though, for a single example...

Consider the following individuals in a State (fictional, if necessary) with no corporate or individual income tax and no tax on dividends, interacting with a corporation in the same State. The corporation turns a profit (income minus expenses) of $2 million/year, some of which it saves year-to-year and the rest of which it pays out in dividends.

1) Middle-class employee of the company.
2) Super-wealthy stockholder in the company.
3) Minimum wage employee of the company.
4) Middle-class stockholder in the company.

1) Makes 75000, takes standard deduction of $6100. Pays $14492 in income taxes, plus $9300 FICA (half of which comes from employer, but it's still a tax on the employee's income) for a total of $23792, or an overall tax rate of about 31.7%

2) Assuming their income is such that they can be reasonably assumed to be paying the top bracket on their average dollar (this person is really making a ton of money, and it's not all coming from this company): A dollar of corporate income that will wind up in this person's hands is taxed at approximately 34%. The $0.66 cents per dollar that he's receiving is then taxed at 20%, meaning a total of 47.2%.

3) $7.25 * 40 * 52 = $15,080 / year. They pay only $901 in income tax, but the $1870 they pay in FICA brings it up to $2771, which is about 18.4%. They may or may not qualify for assistance under one or more of our various current means-tested systems.

4) Profit within the corporation is taxed the same as for the wealthy investor, but now the $0.66 cents per dollar income is taxed at only 15%, for a total of 44% instead. This assumes they are making more than $36,250, which seems fair - but if they are not, the tax rate on the dividend income is 0%, so they are paying in total only the 34%.

I'm not making any particular point regarding what tax policy ought to be, just trying to shift the focus to numbers that are more meaningful.
Why would I want to support a developer that treats me as a criminal off the bat? I might as well be a criminal and just pirate it at that point... Self fulfilling prophecies at work.
I'm not sure which part of what I said is described by the "dirt path vs highway" metaphor, so I don't quite follow this thread. I was speaking of a more "programmery" type of career vs a more "businessy" one. Within the continuum between the two, there seem to me to be plenty of "highways" and "dirt paths" everywhere, regardless of where you are on that continuum.
it is consistent but it's arguably bad design. it seriously hurts composability.
Not knowing anything about Grails, does the Log4j DSL not do the equivalent of generating the XML config, and if not, would you have preferred a system where you could choose to write your own config or let the DSL do it for you?
Well... There is some evidence pointing that way. Or, better, that the Boeing folks took the wrong approach.
I love YCM.

My only issue with installation was that I would prefer to actually upgrade my systems clang, instead of just installing it in my home dir, and there aren't step by step instructions for doing so.

Once it is installed it is great for C lang stuff and python. It makes me wish other languages had equally good support you could integrate. Perl omni complete is super slow for example. But I know that isn't you.
Actually, it's been some months and my memory is vague on details, but I seem to recall that someone has done this in the browser. Perhaps/probably via an emulator.

Hmm...

I'm in a bit of a hurry, but this sounds familiar:

http://www.metafilter.com/122001/Visicalc-on-your-iPhone
Sunroof
That's why in my Chrome extension that allows you to discover whether pages have been submitted on reddit as you browse [1], I was cautious with the fact that reddit is sent the URLs over HTTP.

It has a Privacy section in the settings that lets you enable Wait For Click so URLs are only checked upon explicit request. It also lets you exclude domains or URL regular expressions from automatically checking the URL, forcing those to be Wait for Click.

Plus, it comes with smart defaults. Default excluded domains include popular banks, Gmail and Google Docs. Default excluded regular expressions match Google/Yahoo/Bing SERPs and various protocols that you probably don't want checked.

All it takes are some smart defaults and a small amount of development [2], and you can protect your users' privacy. It's worth it.

[1]: http://kerrick.github.io/Mostly-Harmless

[2]: https://github.com/Kerrick/Mostly-Harmless/blob/d61d79aa85a6... (20 LOC in my extension)