skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typical "clever" designer wankery.

First, whether it's politically correct or not, the fact is that certain social problems are more prevalent in some demographics than others. There's more domestic violence among high school drop out first generation immigrants cohabiting than there is among married white college grads in Vermont. There's more AIDS among gay drug users than among heterosexual non drug users, etc.

However, it's remarkable that the public service messages are often targeted at the wrong demographics (both in content - e.g. the white middle-class couple in this photo, and in medium - e.g. in bus shelters in middle class areas).

Why is this done?

The vast majority of people involved in organizations that create public service ads are politically of the left, are innumerate, and hate admitting that problems are not spread evenly across all demographics.

So we get anti-HIV ads aimed at safe demographics instead of at-risk demographics.

This ad not only compounds that problem, but goes for the "clever" hook.

The excellent book _Tested Advertising Methods (Prentice Hall Business Classics)_ by John Caples and Fred E. Hahn talks about "clever" hooks - how, when they're A/B tested, they always fail. Creative types love funs, plays on words, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Methods-Prentice-Business-...

...but all the evidence shows that this DOES NOT RESULT IN RESULTS.

The fact that this new poster is deployed is yet more evidence that the people involved in non-profits are innumerate.

The unstated goal of almost every non-profit is NOT to resolve the problem under debate, it is to maximize the span of control and the comfort of the people working at the non-profit.

Phil Greenspun touches on that here:

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/

So, in conclusion:

BAH! This ad embodies everything that is wrong with non-profits and public service ads.
Slightly unfair quote, as his next sentence is

"The latter is not my standard of comparison (Symbolics Genera, the state of the art, is." ...

There were plenty of cool things about lisp machines. But obviously the world's taken a different direction. Nothing wrong with being an idealist sometimes, though.
Just a small bug: multiple clicks on the "Find Recipes" button produces multiple "timer" graphics.

I am not a designer but here are some of my suggestions:
* I'd tweak the margins/padding for example in the "find recipe" box the left margin should be a bit larger to match the top margin.
* Reduce some of the black text contrast where appropriate, emphasizing the important sections.
* Seems kind of busy overall, try eliminating or minimizing aspects that are not the focus

Just curious, what language is this written in? RoR?
Which is probably ideal if you're going to focus all your energy on doing one thing really well.
We obviously went to different universities.
Yeah, I've had a lot more luck than I thought I would asking people who quit early why they are quitting. Not only do I occasionally get actionable information, but sometimes those people who leave me recommend me to other people for whom the service is more suitable.
I'm familiar with game development. I make games for the iPhone in my spare time and I make more money than I ever have in my life, and my apps aren't even popular compared to things like Ocarina or Tweetie or Pocket God.

I'm truly, genuinely surprised, as most indie game developers I know have been lucky to recoup their costs, and fewer have seen any sustained revenue to speak of. Some got lucky, most have not.

What games do you develop, if you don't mind shedding the mask of anonymity? (I understand if not, I'm anonymous here because it allows me to actually speak freely).

At this date in time, I am the model for an iPhone business. A single guy making indie games. It might morph into something different in the future. I imagine there will be a separate path for business applications. Perhaps $30 CRM apps will be sellable in a bundle with enterprise software to large companies. But I don't think end users will ever pay $30 for iPhone apps except for very niche cases. Most people view their phone as an entertainment device, apps are on the same level as ringtones. The market may correct itself by flushing out all the players who can't make a profit on a $1.99 game, but it's not going to correct itself by suddenly having mostly $30 apps on the app store.

Maybe you're right, but I hope not. I'd be curious how you can afford rent on $1.99 game sales, what sort of revenue "more money than I ever have in my life" means, and whether you've seen more than one of your released applications succeed.
Epitaph for a plastic man
Yes, details are important.
Unfortunately the problem with implementing this in other sports is the same problem with implementing a centered camera view in baseball - infrastructure.

In order to get the awesome Madden-esque camera views that you describe (at least for outdoor sports), stadiums would need either overhead camera supports or massively zoomed in angles from the ends of the stadiums, and it would be nearly impossible to guarantee a consistent angle between venues.
Realistically, if you live in a large city, you really have nothing to complain about. Farmers, people in rural areas actually do have a case to make in this respect.

From my experience, guys who can't meet girls (or the opposite) still complain no matter what city they're in, no matter how stacked the odds are for them. I think that straight guys should consider themselves lucky -- imagine if you were gay and could only date 4% of the population. Not only that, but gay guys can't even tell who else they could potentially date and who would be offended by them asking!
Six sigma is a farce, and trying to manage people with a set of bastardized statistics horseshit as your polestar is failure personified. If you're managing a machine shop that mass produces gears you might have use for six sigma. Outside of manufacturing quality control six sigma is truly the badge of inept middle management.
Impressive stuff. Unfortunately, Jefferson had faults beyond owning slaves; it's possible that he unwittingly contributed to the mixing of church and state.
Startup Law 101 - Legal roadmap for a founding team at company formation
Arguing that OKC data is better than Gallup's (as the article implies) isn't a strong claim of statistical validity, it's ignorance of the basic principles of statistics.
heck, you might even be able to work out a gig where you can interrupt your contract to be with your customers if you need to. if you have unusual skill (or are willing to work for below-market rates) you can usually find someone willing to be flexible.

that said, you obviously have a limit on the total time and effort you can put into a day so that might not work if you are already coding 8 hours a day on your product. but if your product is 'pretty good' and you are mostly marketing and waiting to be noticed, it might make a lot of sense to shave some hours off to sell to other people.

But then, most of my marketing is 'do something to try to get noticed' - i imagine if most of your marketing is cold calling or otherwise direct customer interaction, then it might not be so easy to take hours off.
In my expirience the the mix of XML and code quickly grows into a worse situation than just having a decent programming API in first place.

In Flex, which also sports a declarative layer, most seasoned developers seem to try to avoid it as much as possible - because it gets in the way when complexity grows.

Same story with XUL, which perhaps would feel a little less like broken glass if they had omitted the "X" from the name.

But well, I have never coded a win32 GUI, so quite possible XAML really is a step up from what they had before.
I have never (and would never) ask a candidate to allow me access to a private profile. However, I have rejected a candidate for what they posted on their blog.

Posting things on the public Internet that reflects poorly on the candidate shows a judgment issue that is a valid reason for rejecting a candidate.

In the case I'm thinking of, a cursory Google search on a candidate I would otherwise have hired showed that he had at least one job that he had quit without notice; this job was not listed on his resume. In addition, this first-person blog stated that he had shown up to work so hungover he could barely see, on more than one occasion.

Should I have hired this person, given the red flags I found via Google and that there were other equally-qualified candidates who did not have those red flags?
Maybe it's time for a break then. There may not be an 'end' with lots of money and a princess and a pony. Taking a break might be a good way of recharging your batteries and coming back to things fresh.
Yes, I did do the design. I emailed you a few other details.
> Vista is a good operating system. Much better than XP.

Depends. I occasionally run Vista for testing, and I do it in a VM with 1.2 GB memory. It is not pleasant.

You may say that's my own damn fault, and you may be right, but it still feels offensive to me to need 2GB of RAM just to run the OS at an acceptable speed.
Man I hate hearing about this stuff. I was raised on these types of foods and now it's like crack to me. As an adult, I'm having a really tough time giving them up.

I'm sure I just need to learn new habits and have some will power, but sometimes I wish they'd just outlaw or ration unhealthy food too. It's just too damn abundant...
I'm also disappointed by Python. It doesn't make using windows any more tolerable than before.

But maybe I'm being unfair, expecting my programming language to solve the problems of my operating system.
Top Software Companies to Work for in 2009 According to Employees
What do you need to perform at your absolute best?

I need to know that the rest of my life is taken care of. Relationships included.
No. That is to say, you can't have one without the other.

Think back to all the neat ideas that came up during the dot-com boom, and then remember that many/most of them failed in the end.

In the early stages of a business, you have to have the 'vision' that wows people enough to make them want to invest in you. From that point, execution is what keeps you in business.
You might be able to make a case that the institution of the limited liability corporation, as it currently exists in some particular place or time, produces more good than harm; but you cannot make that case by declaring minor variations in the institution to be "psycho".
So at what point of abandoning some of the fundamental ideas do you have something else entirely?

I hate all this "dream" talk, it's not a dream it's been implemented. If you don't want to use it fine, but don't pretend to be taking all the good and leaving the bad. Imho having to deal with Java classes is just substituting one bad for another (or worse).
Well, the thing is we can easily figure out balls/strikes with a combination of the overhead cam and the side cam. The issue is that you can't really air those in the run of play and the networks generally only show those angles when they prove that the ump was right (either by MLB edict or a gentlemans' agreement not to show the umps up).
I don't know either, although that hasn't stopped me from opining about it on kragen-tol from time to time.
Until we have lightweight drone type cameras that can be placed at any point of a 3d mapped field...

Imagine the fun of that, you could control the cameras in almost a 3d software setting.

Or maybe one day computer vision will be so good that it can infer any angle/point on a field from multiple inputs.
If you live in China, maybe they'll give it to everybody for half price during the week of National Day (Oct. 1st) as they did with Office last year to celebrate the "liberation" of the country by communism.

Why don't they offer the same deal for July 4th in the US?
That is why they have a lower priced starter version, and why OEM's can get less expensive licenses.
The overengineering and non-deployment of SSL/TLS | Brad Ideas
Jackson Was On A Cocktail Of Drugs For Months
I'll let the highest ranked submission decide what to do with this. At that moment it looks like that's you. :)

Let's give it another 30 minutes and make a decision at 3PM PDT.
the effort to go from $2K/month to $1.5K/month is probably not worth it if you have the option of contracting yourself out; at bay area computer janitor contracting rates, (and I imagine good devs are more expensive than SysAdmins.) that's less than 8 hours of work. If you are good and have contacts, you can realistically expect twice as much; but if you are good, $500/day is reasonable to expect without expending too much marketing effort.

Being frugal is good too... but sometimes spending money makes sense, I think. Me, for example, I drive a $3,000 car, and pay $750 in rent. (I live in the south bay, my girlfriend and I split the rent on a $1500/month duplex) . Paying more isn't going to free up any time, so I don't. But I do hire someone to clean out my house once a week; It seems like a big win, as that saves me a lot of time, for a relatively small amount of money.
The way the post is marketed indicates that it's entertainment, not analysis.
I don't think Vista needs a $150 video card, but your right on the memory. (When Vista came out, it might have needed a $150 video card- but prices have since come down.)
He inadvertently revealed the secret mantra of comp.lang.lisp. Purity supersedes productivity, practicality, and pragmatism.
It's got you talking about it, so it's working on some level.
X complains about their job. Y says "fuckers should try my previous job", which implies "X has no right to complain because they have it easier than I had".

By that logic, Y has no right to make this complaint if anyone who has worse job than Y exists. They do exist, therefore Y has no right to complain about X's complaining.

Y's position is inconsistent. It says "You have no right to complain because your job isn't hard enough, but I have a right to complain because my job is/was hard enough".

It establishes an arbitrary baseline of having-a-difficult-life and consequent implied manliness/human worth that Y is above, but X is below. It's a way to smugly look down on someone for not being as awesome as you are, while trying to project a humble "I did a shitty job" image.
Yeah, you're being unfair, especially if you've used both Python and Java and consider them equivalent in terms of laborious configuration details. When I say CLASSPATH hell I mean the whole configuration mess that is maintaining a java environment. If you have any tips on making this not suck in Clojure it would be great to hear them, otherwise I am switching back to Python.
The only candidate I think to make this a surprising finish is the 'Grand Prize Team' which has another of the long-time leaders 'Gravity' involved and has structured itself to accept any and all team members who care to join.

Probably no one would have won this contest if it wasn't for the fact that many of the top teams published their results, and so there was cross-pollination of ideas. Pragmatic Theory didn't contribute in this manner. Kudos to them for making I think a significant improvement on the best of the published models however.
A classic mst presentation (can't wait for the YAPC 2009 videos). After I saw this, it convinced me that even as someone learning I can still participate and contribute back to the community.
You never know that, especially with relationships.
Triple negation in the last sentence really helps with understanding. That being said, you should probably keep embarrassing personal details to yourself (and maybe your friends). Why would you want the company to know the embarrassing thing (since it doesn't affect work performance significantly)?
I find it strange that the original author only suggested proprietary alternatives (Lisp Machines, Mathematica), noting that Common Lisp itself not immune from these same criticisms. What's also interesting is this:

Java itself, at its helm had/has people such as Guy Steele who knew that since people would be unwilling to adopt languages such as Common Lisp or Smalltalk, best they could hope would be to "sneak" many of the features these languages originated (reflection, generic programming, garbage collection, DSLs, object orientation) to the people who would benefit the most from them. Java was a great covert vehicle for this "feature-sneaking", with its C-like syntax and enterprise buzzwords.

Now with Scala and Clojure (as well as Jython and JRuby), it seems like this an even more ambitious to sneak powerful programming tools and paradigms (dynamically typed languages, functional languages) to the professional programmer community, this time by saying "this is just a jar/war file".

If the goal is adoption of proper Lisp-from-ground up architecture, then sure this "sneaky" approach isn't going to get anyone there. But what if the goal is better code and more productive coders?
Cool Uniforms and Flying Cars: How will the future be for information workers?
But it must be good since I see that same comment so often.
I imagine they'll be charging less for Windows 7 preinstalled on netbooks, just as airlines charge less for round-trips with a Saturday-night stayover.
You can see this sort of thing starting to creep into NFL coverage, I think mostly FOX Sports. They have a number of robotic cameras strung across the field on wires, and they use them to put together some fairly impressive replay scenes, though they can't follow the ball very well with them so you don't see them cut to during live action that often. I'm not sure how you start introducing this to sports like baseball with its non-uniform stadiums and fields, although things like the NBA and NHL seem like great candidates and I am sure you will continue to see this spread. I think ESPN's Axis uses something like it in baseball and basketball already, but that may just be fancy editing/extrapolation with existing angles.

You used to be able to choose among a group of 4 or more camera angles on a couple of the DirecTV sports packages as well, and you likely still can do that. I know NASCAR is deep into that sort of thing, but I am not a fan so I don't know much about it.
My problem is that I was raised with the food pyramid. Grain as staff of life etc. I look at corn flakes or wonderbread, and my subconscious health barometer reads "all clear." I'll consume these products without thinking about it.

It's really difficult to re-train myself for a more modern understanding of nutrition.
That case is inapplicable; it deals with static factual data collections.

Bus times are dynamic, estimated facts. The act of estimating, via the use of proprietary means, is what gives NBIS the right to "own" bus (estimated) arrival times b/c estimations are just interpretations.

Obviously, NBIS has no ownership to historical bus arrival times, b/c those are actual, irrefutable facts.
Depending on the demands of the job, the medical test may be very important.
I think googling someone's name is fair game. You get to see what projects they work on, what communities (i.e. job related) they are part of etc. By yes, there is a line to draw. And definitely facebook and myspace are on the other side.
1) There's not enough information returned by the submission process (a single RMSE number per day).
2) The information you do get is on half of your submission, but it is the other half that counts. So you get no information back on that.
Tk? HTML? XUL? I think that's what XAML is.
hey! who changed my title?
Of course, this advertisement is in Germany. A quick google search for domestic violence demographics in germany didn't pull anything immediately useful (and neither did wolfram alpha). I'm willing to bet, though, that the demographic range for domestic violence there is a little bit different than in the USA (especially considering their racial demograph is quite a bit different: 2.1% turkish, and 6.x% 'other', mostly other european countries).
Window damage on Atlantis threatens six month delay to STS-129
It's pretty clear that better is better than worse.
Actually, you can have a vision with no execution. I have a ton this instant.
Selection Bias much?

Volunteer polling is about as un-scientific as you can get. Did it not occur to them that people who are willing to answer poll questions about sex are probably going to have different opinions about sex than someone who isn't willing to seek out the poll?
Very interesting article. IMO, vision is important, but without having the ability to execute it, its essentially worthless. When we launched a lot of people said and some still say that they had similar ideas, but it was us who executed it.
Seesmic’s CEO: We built it, they didn’t come
It is interesting, how if someone doesn't like something they seem to see it as their mission to make sure no one else uses it? (or it appears that way, what I think it really means is self promotion, and its easier to tear down then build up when building your profile in public).
This is a real problem with a lot of small communities that don't understand why the awesome thing they like hasn't taken over the world.
Search for all the apps that were rejected by Apple, pick one topic that you like most and start hacking away.
Oh no! Hackers!
This is because many people here still vote by agreement, rather than for comments that are interesting, insightful, contradictory, terse, and so on. This happens on a much larger scale with lower-rated comments. I once saw the word "no" with a score of 50~, which made up for the contributor's running streak of -5~. It wasn't that their contribution quality became better, it was that their comment hit that major "upvote when you agree" fault in our system. It's infuriating and seriously reduces our quality. I try to upvote even poorly composed devil's advocate comments just to counteract this, because even reckless disagreement is often a gold mine of those little bits of information that you didn't take into consideration, but should have.

Vote for what you think others should see, not for what you agree with.
Yes. Execution is far more important than vision.

Ideas are easy to come by. Turning them into something is the hard part - and doing them well is even harder. For too long there was this myth about "first mover advantage" that overwhelmed logic and actual observation.

Amazon wasn't the first mail-order bookstore. They weren't the first online bookstore. However, they're the best online bookstore because they "executed" it best.
How is it more about you as an employee than anything else? A positive drug test merely indicates that one has done drugs in some capacity over some recent span of time. It gives no indication if one would engage in illegal activity on company time.

Of course, it's absurd to suggest companies make sure every worker isn't high on the job every single day, but that doesn't change the fact that it's judging someone based on something which could have absolutely no bearing on their work.
For someone who's not familiar with Ruby, what advantages does this provide over the built-in hash method on objects?
Symbolics Genera [..] can never be un-created

Can it be recreated?
Before the idea is out in the market, then I'd say that vision is slightly more important than execution. BUT, once it's out there and it's clear people want to buy it, then vision takes a back seat to good, solid, competent execution.

How many market leaders actually invented their markets? The business world is full of the remains of "visionary" companies who just plain got out-executed.
Well, you can either have just "perfect" implementations of an obscure language very few people are coding in, or you can also have an implementation of a similar language that is imperfect while actually gaining mindshare for both languages.

Who's more likely to bother looking at some other version of lisp, someone whose experience is C++, Perl, and Java, or someone who's used Clojure?

This isn't the perfect as the enemy of the good so much as the perfect not willing to let the good be its friend.
Google CEO says worst of crisis is over