skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A cheap air pump for an aquarium will produce enough pressure for a string of air stones. I have a 10$ pump (2W) on my desk here that blows 4 stones and I still have to limit the flow a bit or the display looks more violent than soothing. More expensive pumps not only have more power but will also have a better design with less noise.
I call this phenomenon "fishing for prophecy".

Post a couple of prophecies, with "evidence" of course! Maybe some contradicting ones under different pseudonyms. Then, when the fecal matter eventually hits the rotary impeller, you can say you foretold this.

Makes you look incredibly smart...
Ask HN: Any hackers want to learn how to make models for 3D printers?
I was going to write some guides teaching programmers and hackers how to make enclosures for their electronics, and how to do 3D modeling for 3D printers.

I was going to teach people how to do it with OpenSCAD, a declarative programming language that does 3D modeling. Is there any interest in that?
This is awesome! I'd love to work in France, it just seems there are a dearth of tech companies there.
What's a good resource for learning about the web bubble of the 90's? I would assume that a large portion of the HN audience (including myself) didn't actually live or work during this time, so it's hard to compare to today's tech industry. Is it worth knowing the details behind it?
Plutocrats vs. Populists
Terrible argument, and here's why. The only thing being said here is that the number of people (and devices) on the Internet is larger. That's true. However, until you turn someone into a paying customer, that's a cost, not profit. Premature eyeballs force premature scaling, which is expensive both in the short and long term. (Even proper scaling is costly and risky, insofar as it requires a management team to hire people with talents it cannot directly measure; improper scaling is even more expensive.)

As awful as age discrimination is, the good news (for people currently 25-45, who will be 35-55 in the next boom) is that the trend will probably go the other way when the "social" bubble collapses. Why? Because investors are about to get burned, hard, by a bunch of startups whose founders cared more about being popular than making money. In five years, that will be the age stereotype attached to young founders.
Looking at this, I'm not quite sure what the thumbs up/down signify. For example, on the cancer Don't list:

Offer unsolicited advice. Telling people what to do when they don't ask for help is rarely a good idea, even if your intentions are the best.

The above has 2 thumbs up and 4 thumbs down. I can interpret that two ways:

- 2 people agree that you shouldn't offer unsolicited advice, but 4 people think this rule is wrong.

- 2 people thing you should offer unsolicited advice, 4 people agree that offering unsolicited advice is a bad thing.

It gets more confusing with this one:

Be patronizing or condescending.

8 thumbs up, 8 thumbs down. Would anyone disagree that you shouldn't be patronizing or condescending when talking to a friend about their cancer? I have no idea what the thumbs up/down means.
As an Android game dev, I'm not sure I like it. How is this not distributing my copyrighted material without permission? Just because my app is available free of charge, doesn't mean it can be freely distributed by the website owner.

And it's not just a control issue, it creates actual problems for me as a developer. It makes it easier to create rip-off's of my APK or adding malware and rehosting the package, or extracting my sound and art assets. And you know some of these users will be contacting me for support when something breaks because they are sideloading the app. I also can't automatically roll out new versions of the app to these users, causing fragmentation of the user base or bad reviews and ill will if I have to ban their old app version from my online backend.

While all of the above already happens to some degree today, I don't look forward to it becoming common practice. I'd actually prefer you not download my completely free (with no ads or IAPs) game at all if you won't do it through a channel I've setup.
Just a little note, your browser-dection page seems to be missing its Windows 8.1 icon (the icon image 404s).
That is true, but our benchmarking showed that it was worth it, since we saved so much on hardware/rack space compared to what we'd have needed to deliver equivalent functionality with a forking CGI/Perl implementation ;-)
With regard to the Second Amendment, it is undeniable that some of the material facts of "weapons in America" and "how society works" have changed since 1791. The text is also poorly written. What we ought to do is to decide what the Constitution should say about guns, and then amend it accordingly. Instead, we've tried to amend it by stealth, because we don't have the maturity as a society to be confident in the amending process.
Fan of the Week plugin for Facebook pages. It chooses one fan each week and highlights them, kind of like an employee of the month. http://www.fanpageapps.com/

Last month made $474.85 from premium upgrades, $152.53 from ads. The servers cost $144.63.

The app has been added to 601,409 Facebook pages so far. For each of these pages I do a weekly dance with FB to look at their feed, see if access tokens are still valid for automatic posting etc., so it makes for a pretty interesting server usage pattern. http://i.imgur.com/Q1WylAY.png
How long have you been running the hosting company? What level of input does it require from you?
I haven't been following this too closely... but a 5% "sales" tax on a free option is $0.
Sure, but this isn't just the manufacturers working somehow against Google's goal to have android be truly open. Google is actively participating in this process rather than resisting it. Android is, for example not licensed with copyleft or some other construction designed to keep it open, and Google itself builds its most significant end-user functionality as closed components.

I note that you are implicitly conceding that what is commonly considered to be Android is indeed not open.
Maybe I misread your blog (http://jackgavigan.com/about/), but it seems all your startups have failed? So how did your "few classes in strategy and marketing" work out for you?
Thanks for the feedback! The ups and downs are just smoke screens right now. Its just to show future functionality. We're about to present at the hackathon presentation.
Your comment was akin to "Fix your attitude, you asshole".

Let me rephrase your comment to something you would approve of:

---

>this particular MBA actually knows what exception handling is and wants to know why the fuck we're not doing it.

It's not fun to be berated at work in front of colleagues, and the purpose it supposedly serves can be accomplished by taking the role of mentor, not drill instructor.

Don't you think that's a bit harsh? It's a bad mistake for a coding expert to make, but perhaps coding wasn't their first skill, or they had a bad teacher. Call them out legitimately with their faults, let them know that certain best practices are required, and move on. Or even better: If the organization is large enough, have a coding standards document in place, like the Linux kernel and other large software projects do.
The path to riches
What's the best way for an average person to invest? Can and should ones buy index fund, or just lower-risk hedge funds?
Glad to hear you are well Amit! I am registered because of your posts and story.
Then it's time to switch to MacBook Pro?
Chip designers see dollar signs in Bitcoin miners
And even if you just go by numbers, it's not likely that technology will be available to the entire world population any time soon.

As of 2008, 22.4% of the world population was earning less than $1.25 per day[1]. 870 million people (one in eight) were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012.[2] Even if they could afford smart phones or internet service, it's not likely that you could sell them a lot of stuff on the internet, or convince companies that they should pay to advertise to them.

Also, it's the poorest countries that have the highest birth rates. Some developed countries, like Japan or Italy, will soon have declining populations.

Companies like Facebook have already picked up all the low-hanging fruit -- the people in developed countries who can easily afford internet access and smartphones. Getting additional subscribers will only get harder once they have to start looking to lesser-developed countries for new subscribers. The era of exponential growth may have already passed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Absolute_poverty

[2] http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20f...
Worked on VineTube(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsinthe....). It was turning in $2000/mo in revenue before we sold it for $7000.
* Visits from Enron's gas pipeline guys to learn how to install routers for their network commodity project
Best of Grunt Resources – October 2013
> Pair this with the fact that I have a CS degree and know about 8 languages

i don't follow. what happens when we pair a and b with this fact?
It's hard for me to see how I'm living in a walled garden here. If there is a Microsoft walled garden, Hacker News is very much outside the wall, isn't it? I'm here, not on MSDN, trying to have a reasoned conversation with intelligent people from different backgrounds, showing code samples, and asking openly for information about other languages. What else should I be doing?

> The very fact that you're comparing C# to Node.js (!), of all things, just confirms it.

The node.js comparison is fair, I believe. We're talking about language support for asynchronous programming, particularly the evented I/O programming idiom. That's exemplified by C#/await, and the Node standard libraries, and python/twisted, and I'm sure a lot of others.

Node is a very popular, visible platform which takes evented I/O as a core concept, so it's reasonable to compare the implementation of the idiom in C# to the current poster child. Is there a better comparison I missed?

> We've had CSP, Occam, Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo; now we have Erlang and Go.

Agreed. That's fine, and I specifically called out Erlang and asked for more info. However, the others you list suffer from not being mainstream development languages -- TIOBE[1] doesn't list any of them in the top 50 languages. Occam may well do it better, but since I can't pay the bills writing Occam, I'm more interested in the languages I mentioned -- JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java, and C++. Feel free to throw in C, PHP, Perl or Objective-C. Do any of these languages have better language or core library support for async programming? Do they result in shorter, more readable, or more reliable code for parallel and async operations?

Your original reply -- "Almost every time I read their exhortations it feels like they're blissfully unaware that other languages have already had their own mechanisms for doing concurrency." -- suggests I'm unaware of something. Can you please start telling me what it is.

[1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
[2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
"Skill" as a catch-all term is a meaningless word bandied about by those trying to sound as though they know what they are talking about.

There are two sets of attributes, the first (commonly called "skill" but perhaps better called "technique") describes how well you can carry out the "motor" activities of your job. The other, and more important in critical circumstances, is "judgement".

To describe it by analogy with driving, in the beginning you concentrate on developing experience in operating the vehicle, eventually this becomes more or less automatic. People call this skill and they are wrong, it is a set of learnt reflexes. More important is judgement, knowing how to maintain road awareness, knowing when and how to overtake, when to speed up and when to slow down etc, etc. NB when people talk about the dangers of drinking and driving it is impaired judgement they are mostly talking about (although there is some impaired skill such as poor reaction times which stops them getting out of problems their degraded judgement has got them into).

Judgement comes with experience and follows skill acquisition. With surgeons you would hope they know how to make a cut (they have technique). What you really want is someone who knows where and what to cut (they have judgement).

And yes, all of this applies to programming and systems design.
The state of New York, every couple of years, publishes a report that rates all of the heart surgeons, including how many operations they did and how many of their patients died. This data is shown at both the surgeon and the aggregated hospital level:

http://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/diseases/cardiovascular/

AFAIK, NY is the only state that does this. Looking at the report gives you a good idea of how complicated doing any kind of indexing of performance is...for example, there is an attempt to calculate expected mortality rate, as a high mortality rate for a surgeon may indicate that that surgeon, being the top of his or her field, may deal with the most critical and difficult cases.
Here is a link to the medical journal article discussed in the newspaper column submitted here:

"Surgical Skill and Complication Rates after Bariatric Surgery"

John D. Birkmeyer, M.D., Jonathan F. Finks, M.D., Amanda O'Reilly, R.N., M.S., Mary Oerline, M.S., Arthur M. Carlin, M.D., Andre R. Nunn, M.D., Justin Dimick, M.D., M.P.H., Mousumi Banerjee, Ph.D., and Nancy J.O. Birkmeyer, Ph.D. for the Michigan Bariatric Surgery Collaborative

N Engl J Med 2013; 369:1434-1442 October 10, 2013
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa1300625

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1300625

"Background

"Clinical outcomes after many complex surgical procedures vary widely across hospitals and surgeons. Although it has been assumed that the proficiency of the operating surgeon is an important factor underlying such variation, empirical data are lacking on the relationships between technical skill and postoperative outcomes."

My mother was a surgical nurse at my state's best teaching hospital. She once was able to line up the "all star team" when one of my near relatives needed surgery. When the best surgeon at the hospital operates with the best surgical resident at the hospital, assisted by the best anesthesiologist and the best team of surgical nurses (my mom, of course, did NOT join the surgery team, as it is just too tense to operate on a near relative) work together, the surgery outcomes are fine. Informal referrals like this work for patients who know someone who knows who the good surgeons are. For the long-term development of better patient outcomes, it will be important to have a data-gathering system that turns informal impressions of who does good work from anecdotes into carefully measured data that are shared with hospital administrators and residency program teachers and insurers and others who have power to nudge poor-performing surgeons either to improve their skills or change their areas of practice.
Yeah, I have cellular data for the App Store turned on.

I didn't mean my comment to be a knock against Apple, as it was clearly my fault (first time with a severely limited data cap),
but just to illustrate how easy it is to accidentally use up the small amount of free data T-Mobile gives you.
And no one tried to justify it.
People often forget that the medical profession's highest priority isn't the health of you, the patient. If you were to grab a medical ethics book you will first be told that the well being of the population as a whole surpasses any individuals rights.

Let's assume a hypothetical where doctors are ranked, let's also assume that insurance will pay for all doctors. Naturally demand for these physicians or surgeons will rise dramatically. If we take Ontario (Canada) as a case, we can see a situation where there is not a free market and physicians can't start charging more. What happens? Well wait times become significantly longer and people start waiting longer to see the best physician possible rather than having a more immediate operation with a lower ranked physician. There is, of course, increased risk the longer you wait for an operation even as simple as a hernia. But patients often don't understand that and can't make logical choices without being 'forced', for lack of a better word, and told they must do it soon with surgeon X. In this case overall population health decreases, complications, morbidity and mortality rise from delays. You also run the risk of complex patients being unable to be operated on by the best because they are too busy doing an operation on a cut and dry case. This is the case in Ontario (largely anecdotal evidence, albeit from a very large pool) where people flock to Toronto on the perceived notion that surgeons affiliated with the most academically prestigious medical school are better than those in a community centre.

It is important to ask whether the lower ranked surgeons should or should not be able, and allowed, to perform the operations, if they are unqualified they shouldn't be allows to practice. The idea of rankings to improve patient care really rests on the notion that the lower ranked surgeons have an effectively higher risk rate (note that I did not say statistically significant). Saying that complications go down from 2% to 1% with higher surgeons while significant is not effectively a difference that should affect choice. I don't know the precise numbers but this is something that must also be considered before making any judgements. While I have no vested interest, and no opinion on the matter, it is important to think why the system is the way it is rather than blindly changing things in the name of progress. This system would allow physicians to charge more in the US (due to more demand, which has it's own slew of ethical considerations) and the medical establishment is greedy to say the least. If the top surgeons could make more money with little to no harm they would.
Huh?

Just to be clear, I was talking about McGinn. Are you making an assumption that critique of candidate A implies support of candidate B?

FWIW, I don't know much about Murray, either. But McGinn is the mayor, not Murray, so I have more familiarity with him than the challenger.
> He raised public parking rates to pay for street maintenance upgrades, safety at schools, etc. But, a lot of city streets have yet to be repaired

And of course, Mercer in Lower Queen Anne is getting every single street corner re-done for...no apparent reason.
It turns out that writing web apps in C++ to run on $40,000 Sun servers sitting behind a $35,000 Cisco router hooked up a set of bonded DS1s is not actually a great way to launch a new web product, so I'm not sure I'm ready to concede that this was a "totally reasonable" way to develop products. But, I was there too, and yes, that is how everyone did things.

My point though isn't simply that things sucked, but that people should do some mental multiplication when they compare 1999 startups to 2013 startups; it's like comparing the Spruce Goose to a modern military UAV.
Ought "just lost their mother or grandmother" really be a single category? I don't know if I'm acting correctly, but I tend to approach those two conversations rather differently.
I was at a CDN startup in '99 and remember competitive slide decks with Enron's name on them.
Couldn't disagree more! We shouldn't try to provide poverty-level income. We should ensure that people can live with dignity.

As a side-effect, we will also guarantee that consumption levels won't easily fall below certain level.
so it's just that simple then?
It would be nice to have a per-country map of recent startups/initiatives like these.
My (perhaps contrary) view: programmer salaries for the 99% are not really inflated. Yes, there are rock stars (usually managers) getting $250k signing bonuses, but they're not the norm. I think that average software engineers ($70-175k, depending on experience) aren't going to see an appreciable drop in pay or job availability.

Keep building your skill base and stay the course. It takes weeks (for people with marketing acumen) to make the next hot thing but years to build a technical skill base. The latter has less risk, so that's what you should do. If your career and job conflict, invest in your career, because your job can end at any time. (This advice applies always, not just in late-bubble times.) Divide your time (if you can) between high-level/front-end and low-level/back-end work. The former's good because it makes it easier to get to demos quickly, and communicate ideas in a slick, technological way; the latter, however, is a lot more stable. C and linear algebra and Lisp (the idea) don't change as much over 5 years as web tools.

There is a bubble but it's not nearly as bad as the one in the late '90s, and I don't think it's going to wipe out the whole software industry-- it'll just slow down some parts of it.
I just started reading K&R coming from a intermediate Python background. Ritchie's style is both simple and engaging. End-of-section practicals are labeled 'experiments', and the hacker spirit pervades the book.

Even better, the tools that I was implementing were useful and it was joyous to use a pipe to redirect the program I had just written to perform a char count hist on itself. How meta!

This may sound trivial for the numerous pundits and gurus who make HN their haunt (salute!), but the feeling of joy and discovery is immediate, and the suscpicion that I will walk away from this book a better coder (:s/coder/thinker) is inescapable.

Ritchie's thoughts lives on, his body is just dead.

edit: %s/Richie/Ritchie/g
The quality of good judgment includes knowing whether or not how you move your hands hurts or helps your patient. A surgeon who operates with poor technique can fairly be described as a surgeon with poor judgment. (Disclosure: my basis of knowledge is that my mother was a surgical nurse at a teaching hospital whose surgeons invented many new surgical techniques over the course of her career. My mother was part of the team for some of the very first open-heart surgical procedures performed anywhere in the world. All of the best surgeons in that hospital had good judgment about whether or not to perform surgery, and what technique to use, or to invent, for a particular patient problem, but the teaching surgeons there also had flawless technique.)
Ask HN: Tae Kwon Do recommendations in/around SoMA or Millbrae/San Bruno?
I'll be spending more time in the Bay area and wanted to see if anyone has recommendations for TKD or other martial arts places.

Ideally a place where people are friendly and supportive but not afraid to politely criticize technique or effort to help others improve. Super double bonus for Sunday and morning classes. And for Tae Guk forms.

At my last school I was fortunate enough to learn from (well, about 2% of what he could teach) a Korean master, but asian, black, white, female doesn't all good as long as they are good teachers. Curriculum at the last school was 50% TKD, 20% Aikido, 10% Tang Soo Do forms, and 10% basic Judo grappling.

Figuring Chinese martial arts is out because my knees don't have the flexibility for it. Not that interested in a curriculum that's 50% sparring. Similarly not that interested in 100% Aikido or Judo (want to optimize for not having bad technique applied constantly to my wrists), or Shotokan/Tang Soo Do (can do a reasonable front stance but never going to be able to do a kata in front stance without bobbing up and down a bit).

My friend I'm sharing space with and I are looking in SoMA (up to Union Square) or Millbrae/San Bruno, and it'd be nice to be able to limit downtime getting back and forth.

Places I was looking at to check out:

http://www.hrksf.com/taekwondo/taekwondo.html
http://lawlerstkd.com/
http://www.dancelsacademyoftkd.com/

Feedback welcome here or in private (if discussing data that could be traced back to specific instructors etc) to avi at avi dot net.

Thanks!