skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most obvious way for a programmer to pitch to their projects is to use a committee of experts, like YC does. I'm sure we could come up with other methods too; maybe some sort of web-based voting scheme, for instance.

Government contracts are nice for solving certain problems, where you have a narrow goal to achieve, but don't address other problems, such as those that call for a more general, trial-and-error, research type approach. For example, say you wanted to work on Emacs, or the Leo editor. I doubt you could get a government contract to do that under the current system, despite the fact that your work has the potential to benefit all the programmers who use those programs.

You may be right about academia being the best way to go. I myself dropped out of college after two years. It felt like a big waste of time to me. You have to do a lot of irrelevant work and it's expensive as hell. The prospect of enduring another two years of that, followed by a Masters program and then a PhD just makes me cringe.

I don't see any reason why we can't create an organization with minimal bureaucracy that allows hackers to do their thing.
Hmm never thought of it that way. So being an application developer has a more direct tangible effect on the end user as compared to being a software engineer. By that definition then most startups are built by application developers. I guess I know where I'll be specializing in from now on.
Unfortunately, I find that all too credible. Shenanigans or not, it's easier than ever to start a career in showbiz these days.
Characterizing the problem as one of "just laziness" is intellectual laziness. For one thing, the environment is dramatically different. People have an easier time sticking to rice and beans when that's pretty much all there is. In America, unhealthy food is not only more accessable but heavily marketed. You can't expect people to make similar descisions on average in such different circumstances.
You always could, but you needed to drag the little move handle in the top-right corner. (Looks like three diagonal lines.)
Some sort of reverse workplace discrimination? Its certainly a red flag of some sort.
Somewhat related: http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/

The data is sorta flawed- it ranks SF #1 since their methodology doesn't take into account steepness of terrain- but nevertheless, pretty interesting.
Is mashable better?

I like TechCrunch better, I think. But TC has an acerbic vibe that might put people off. If only we could tell who had the higher value readers.
Tether it to a large mountain.
Thanks for that - I was pretty unsure about what was going on.
Harnessing Digital footprints: The dark side of Web 2.0
By stripping the line of all context?
I thought someone would think that before I submitted the comment. Funny.

This type of experiment is quite common.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22sleep+deprivation%22+rats+ex...

They use different methods to keep the rats awake. Some say the rats died after 3 weeks, some 40 days... It's pretty much a scientific fact by this point that prolonged sleep deprivation ultimately leads to death.
Very nice! Added to my bag of tricks along with M-Lab[1].

[1] http://www.measurementlab.net/measurement-lab-tools
When you're talking about floating structures measured in miles, it doesn't matter. You could do it with small temperature differences. You could float a half mile geodesic sphere with only a degree or two of temperature difference and ordinary air.
I wish it were more commonplace. I've been in the industry for ten years, and my current employer of two years has been the only shop where there are scheduled code reviews. I think it's great, and I enjoy reviewing other people's code as well.
You are correct - apps are linked with your iTunes account, not your AT&T account. I was able to transfer paid apps from my iPod touch to my iPhone when I upgraded without a problem.
Wow, Hilarious -- Here's the first video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJChMx1TrEI

I had never seen this before, and a lot of this stuff is great.
Dupe. This was posted last week.
In passing, while playing with Google Trends, there seems to be a long term inverse correlation between media coverage and search volume for terms such as 'study' and 'research', as well as for the term 'statistics'.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=statistics,+study,+research&#...

The annual cycle seems to correlate strongly with college schedules :)
Charlotte Workers Comp
Workers comp attorney in Charlotte, NC
IPhone app to give and get [video]
I think this is particularly relevant for verbal communication, and less so for written communication (where, as an example, you can employ DRY as a confused reader can go back and re-read what you wrote).

Some of the key components of programming, however, are also key to good communication. Make a point, and progress directly to that point rather than waffling around. If a term is ambiguous, discuss possible definitions and agree on one (or use a different term).

What about Write/Communicate, Test, Iterate. Say or write something; ask or check if it was understood (eg, by having the person repeat it back to you); if what you get back isn't what you meant to communicate, communicate again.

And finally, take responsibility for your communication as you would for your code. Don't blame the listener any more than you would blame the program or language. If you wish to be understood, seek first to understand the other person's communication needs.
I think excellent designers use both intuition and data. First you need to have the intuition to know what the right question is to ask, then you need decisively prove what the correct answer is to that question.
The more conclusive your tone, the less valuable is your argument. Many great programmers are excellent communicators.
Georgia CDL Suspension
A commercial driver's license (CDL) is your personal ticket to earning a living. Now, you have been arrested and charged with a DUI. This is no ordinary traffic ticket.
Great. Then while all these yokels are out chasing fools' gold you can use your superior intuition to out-compete them. :)

Where can I see your design work? My company is looking to hire some designers on a contract basis.
Los Angeles Internet Class Action Lawsuits
The growth of business Web sites and pay-per-click advertising on the Internet has been matched by a growth in fraudulent activities.
Or it's all staged -- the escalating anger in the boss comes off a bit too much.
Please read Hackers and Painters: http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html seriously.
This op-ed tells us exactly what we'd expect to hear from a member of the schooling establishment: Force people to attend more school, have the government pay more to encourage school attendance, and have the government rank colleges and universities directly.

The funny thing is, it starts by saying, "American education was once the best in the world."

Gee, I wonder what made it worse?

If there is such a thing as a crime against humanity, what these jokers have done to education ought to qualify.
Foolish Scotty! The corporate world is no place for human beings!
"Show and discuss your code, without emotional attachment."

Not my experience. I have always had emotional attachment to my code. My love for my code is what has enabled me to grow. Passion is half the battle.

I got the impression that he meant that it's easier to receive constructive feedback when you're less attached. Not every line of your code is perfect, so if you're able to stand back a bit from your code then you'll be more open to improvements. It's something I still have trouble with sometimes, but I usually try to be less attached to my code.
The tricky part seems to be retreating the arm into the box after switching the machine off.
Was Your Project "Done Right"? How Do You Know?
Portland Oregon Personal Injury Attorney
The Law Offices of Daniel Snyder, is a Portland, Oregon law practice committed to providing personalized legal representation in cases involving automobile accidents, employment law, and civil rights law. The attorneys at our firm have a long history of recovering financial compensation and personal satisfaction for our clients' physical and emotional injuries.
Caliper brakes are old tech. V-brakes work great on tandem bikes; I'm sure that thing isn't going any faster than a tandem on a downhill, and it weighs about half as much. That said, good caliper brakes will slow a solo rider down just fine. If you can brake enough to endo, you can brake enough.

I also disagree with your statement that this is not an electric bike. It is, and it is marketed as such. It has bicycle geometry and bicycle weight, and notably lacks a pair of heavy-ass gyroscopes. This is going to handle like a cargo bike.
The How-Tos guide probably drove significant traffic.

I'd say you take those out and TC would be ahead.
OP overlooks one critical detail:

When you write code, you are not only writing to the computer, you are writing to other programmers.

Once your code is compiled, the computer doesn't care what you said in your source code. It's only looking at the object code that the compiler created. (I omit the obvious case of interpreted code.)

But poor saps like me who have to maintain your source code are stuck figuring out what you meant.

OP has it backward...

"Good Source Code" = "Good Communication to the next Programmer"
i wouldn't say better or worse, just different.

seems to me that mashable is more consumer/enthusiast oriented, while TC caters to people in the industry. or as the SAT would put it, TC:Mashable -> HN:Digg

It makes sense that they eventually got a larger audience than TC, since there are more enthusiasts than pros.
Good idea! Now can someone who is artistic design a nifty logo like the ShareThis one (www.sharethis.com) to go with the bookmarklet?
This is a truly worthless article.

Consider UDP (the protocol). It is not DRY, yet it works extremely well for some types of problems. The article suggests that programmers, by their nature, are unable to conceptualize that some problem domains require redundant information.

I'm quite surprised that this article made it to the front page of HN once, much less twice!
If poor people are eating unhealthy food because of marketing it is still laziness. Take the time to find out what's good for you, it's not hard.

My point is that no one can honestly say that they are fat because they can't afford good food. There are tons of excuses, but it comes down to personal responsibility.
Entrepreneurs on Twitter
More raw data to the cockpit is unlikely to help. Pilots have a lot of things going on and varying levels of weather knowledge and experience (even professional pilots - weather is but one thing you train on).

A professional meteorologist on the ground who can interpret and summarize the relevant information is of way more use.
Part of being an expert is finding the right balance between accumulated knowledge and tactical flexibility.

"Intuition" and "common sense" are nothing more than predjudices. They may be right; after all, prejudices are usually founded in real-life experiences.

The problem comes when you over-generalize those experiences and crystalize that over-generalization as knowledge.

A silly example: you run a test on a website about button colors and red is the best color and that it made a large difference.

There are a lot of lessons you could possible take from this, e.g.,
1. Users prefer red buttons over any other color
2. You should always test button color
3. It's important to think about what draws users' eyes and test that, including buttons.
4. It's important to test everything, no matter how small

Learning (1) is probably wrong. Red might work in this situation, but not in another. This is the problem with learning tactics in general. As the competitive landscape evolves or the situation "on the ground" changes specific tactics become less useful, and might even be worse than an alternative you've precluded because of your "expertise."

(2) and (3) are probably good lessons to take away. (3) is better because it opens your eyes to new, possibly fruitful things to test, although (2) isn't bad.

(4) is the opposite of (1) in that it's an overbroad lesson that is hard to apply and if done religiously would probably paralyze the decision-making process.

Anyhow, that's how I think about applying "data-driven" processes to business, marketing, and product decisions.
Well isn't this a great business model for someone without competition.
Google Open Source Blog: Introducing Android Scripting Environment
I'll try.

The application developer is most interested in designing user interfaces. They tend to have lots of ideas for new apps and new features. They want to impress people with new stuff.

The software engineer wants to fully understand domains and be able to solve just about any given technical problem. They want to be trusted by people to perform in the most challenging of situations.

After better understanding the distinction, I have more respect for people who call themselves Software Engineers, and can back it up -- people who can fix a messy database, perform security audits, bring up a system that went down, or create a complex system. I also wish I had a really good software engineer where I work so I could focus on application development, and not on improving database performance, which I can do, but isn't my passion.
Is the barrier actually high?

Besides the obvious cost of acquiring multi-million dollar jetliners (which, if bought new, typically have to be ordered 5-10 years in advance of delivery) and signing leases for gate space and hiring ground crew at airports and so on?

You also need FAA and TSA approved operations plans, adding for instance the cost of screening all your employees and equipping your planes with things like black boxes and weather radar.

Then you end up like Virgin America, who can't fly to Chicago because the incumbent carriers there claim there are no available gates at O'Hare (despite the number of flights in and out of the airport being down like 10-20% from previous peak).

Doesn't seem that high to me...
Ask HN: please review my webapp: metracks.com
Perhaps... Perhaps not.

Scotty takes the piss out of his boss during some of the meetings by lip syncing some of the guys overuse of buzzwords.
Why can't I get people to participate in this market research?
I've been an online community grrrl for a long time, and I've been a software development person (in one role or another) for even longer. So when I told a client I'd help out with a market research study examining the tech adoption trends for PHP developers, I was sure that the community would cheerfully participate. Especially since anyone who did the 30-minute phone survey would get a $25 Amazon gift certificate AND a summary of the results; that's worth somethin', I figured.<p>I was wrong.<p>Despite posting a "help on a survey" message on several forums, people have stayed away in droves.<p>To some degree, I'm sure, it's because I'm looking for people with a specific background: in the US or Canada; regularly using one of {Joomla, SugarCRM, Drupal, WordPress, phpBB} for paying/outside work (not the company's own intranet); willing to talk to a charming geeky person on the phone. But I expected that the number of people meeting that criteria is far higher than the results would imply.<p>I realize that some people don't want to give out their email ID to ANYone, but if you're going to be interviewed by phone, how else can you be reached to say, "How about Tuesday at 2pm?" This isn't spam, dammit; it's real live market research asking about the tools and platforms you use and how you choose them.<p>If YOU are not shy, of course, I hope you'll participate in the survey ( http://www.marketsurveys.com/sb/sb_s.php?s=120&p=100121&g=4d4502a838 ). But really, I'm looking for input on why I've gotten such lousy response.
A Job Queue is a great thing to have, especially when it provided for you, but it's hardly "revolutionary."
But to be a space elevator replacement you would need a tower that could bear load up to geosynchronous orbit.

That's not what I'm suggesting.

Build the tower as high as is practical, say 100 km. Then launch your space elevator satellite and lower the cable down to the top of the tower.

The cable has to support its own weight, so it has to be thicker at the top than at the bottom. It turns out that the cable thickness has to taper exponentially (basically, this amounts to a rotation of the catenary problem).

So not having to support the last 100 km of cable at the end translates into a weight savings along its entire length.
So, taking the contrapositive: The better you communicate, the worse you program? I don't think that's true at all. In fact, in my opinion, the mark of a truly great programmer is someone who can talk about his or her code.
I disagree. The roots of programming and writing are the same -- creativity constrained by rules. In programming, your creativity is bounded by what the computer will accept as valid input. In writing, the rules are procedures like grammar, spelling, and style.

A good writer knows that effective communication requires re-iterating the main point. This may conflict with "DRY", but it doesn't conflict with following the rules.

Anyway, there are many excellent programmers that are poor writers. This is probably not some sort of intrinsic property of the Universe, but rather due to the programmer's lack of practice in writing. If you don't do something, you aren't going to be good at it, programmer or not.
it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps.

If it wasn't for the coverage of this incident, I would never have known of the "coffin corner." How would market forces operate on factors of which the public is not even aware?
So by this argument Paul Graham is either a terrible hacker or a lousy communicator.

I don't think so...
Bing-a-thon(?)
Instead of flying a lot lower and slower, how about marginally lower and slower? You could give the plane 50 knots leeway in speed and still fly over most of the weather out there.

For conditions like the ones that the Air France flight was going through, this would seem prudent. You can't fly above thunderheads like that. Might as well get yourself into a safer part of the flight envelope in case something bad happens.
I may be mistaken but I am pretty sure that according to The Millionaire's Mind, they also tend to be wealthier.
Leveraging Linux in a Lousy Economy
Both are tested to 150% of their maximum rated load.
This might be worth a psychology paper somewhere. This seems easy enough to quantify. It's not much more than flimsy conjecture.
I'm not talking about excuses, I'm talking about your expectations. You're holding people born in America to a higher standard of discipline than those born elsewhere, and poor Americans to a higher standard than rich Americans.
This is how Scotty views himself:

http://www.scottyiseri.com/Welcome_files/shapeimage_1.png

An anime assassin in a world filled with cuteness.
Wow, a blog post of mine from late 2007. Wasn't expecting that on HN this morning.

Here's the update for 2009: everything I said earlier remains true to a first approximation. AdWords is far and away the largest expense for my business and it also has the most predictable ROI of anything I do. Day in, day out, without my intervention it continues making me money. I really can't bang on that enough -- in 2007 prior to Conversion Optimizer I was having to log into AdWords and adjust daily, now the thing just runs on autopilot and I check back, oh, a little less than once a month?

If you've got questions, fire away.
And the theatric "you're fired, get the hell out" thing at the end? The firing end of that conversation doesn't usually work like that, either --- except in the movies.
Hmm...
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=713873
If anyone has any idea of a ballpark, I'd love to know.
Summary: A first-rate Linux hacker pitches to large entities interested in customizing a linux solution for their (hardware) platform, also pushes IBM's high-performance realtime solutions for the enterprise.
Auto Accidents San Diego
Auto Accidents San Diego
One major difference: it takes a lot of work and resources to turn a startup into a public company, but it takes little to turn an artistic work into a product. One might argue that record labels provide most of their value by finding good music, and saving customers the time it would take to do that on their own. (IMO this view is far too charitable to the labels.) Even then, internet is already doing this job better than the labels, and is still rapidly improving. The law should keep up.

Saying that artists benefited from their arrangement with the labels is akin to saying that indentured servants benefited from theirs. That is, true in a narrow sense--the indentured servants did get food and shelter, didn't they?
Ask HN: Any good networking libraries in Python ?
I am looking for networking libraries to do some packet manipulation. (Scapy is one). Do you guys have experience with any or suggestions ?
I agree with you. It's exactly like the race debate. People who think that statistics are useful for judging individuals are dumb.
It looks like this is good news for anything that targets the JVM though, as it looks like the path to Dalvik bytecode is:

.java -> [javac] -,-> .class -> [dx] -> .dex
/
??? ------------'

Has anyone done this, with Clojure, for example?
There is a maximum safe speed in turbulence (it's called "design maneuvering speed") and I really doubt they would exceed that in these conditions. (You want the wing to stall in case of severe turbulence, because the alternative is to overstress it. That's why you don't want to fly fast.)
The most novel thing I've heard about Dalvik is their zygote technique for minimizing app startup time. The zygote is is a Dalvik process that's loaded and ready but for the actual bytecode it will need to run. To start a process it first makes a fork of the zygote, which allows for more shared memory and a more expensive initial setup time for the zygote without any penalty when creating new Dalvik processes.

I dunno if this technique necessitated writing their own VM however.
You don't need to buy new jetliners to run an airline. You can go to ILFC and rent them. Even big guys like American and Continental do this for some of their aircraft.

One webpage I found suggests the lease price for a 737 is between $50,000 - $100,000 per month (which seems reasonable, or maybe a little low). Wikipedia says YouTube's bandwidth costs are estimated at $1M per day, so the hardware cost of a couple aircraft doesn't seem all that expensive.

(Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about commercial aviation.)
Could this be a viral ad for Bing?
Do you really need age, gender and country to sign up? Remove that signup form and replace it with a "Try" button that lets people use the service. Attach the registration code to the onunload method of the user's "home" page, popup a dialog asking them to register to save their settings (requiring only login-name, password and email "in case they forget their password", for now.) Ask more personal questions to help them improve their experience or find others like them. You can even get home address once you are big enough and start launching parties or local events.
This sounds inspired by SEDA (Staged Event-Driven Architecture). http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/
It was about time someone made good use of it, too!

Is there more info available? The white paper is nice, but not too packed with detail.
How hard was it to rig up your conversion tracking to Google? Was there any fear you had putting such a thing on auto-pilot with your wallet? Any ways you would have wanted it to be easier? Are there changes you'd make that might improve your ROI?
Slightly cheaper than EC2 and incoming bandwidth is free, which is huge for some apps. Looks like a winner.
Acer to launch 3D notebook
Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest