skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what's the significance of these "hub" movies like "Big Momma's House" and "Passenger 57"?
Cant help feel the name was created by a programmer. Outside of the computer world. Are there examples using "foo"?

The UI looks a little bit copied from elsewhere on the net.

I like the idea of being able to create a quick poll and let it loose. Not sure if there is away to let it loose on the twitterspehre.

Am I correct in thinking you mine ( to a degree ) the realtime statements on twitter to help populate your thoughts or to just sound cool.

A major positive, I like you are trying to make money from the get go. ( Even if it is a little hidden = faq )

As always and most unlikely, would be curious to know if anyone has bitten and has paid to use it. You could benefit from a demo, or a reasons why paying $1 is worth it for a poll. That kinda stuff.
TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta15 is out, and it's good.
Yes, Amazon Prime is available in Japan. http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId...
"I think he is a programmer, but the author is probably writing this from first hand experience."

Yes, he is a programmer:

http://www.voyce.com/index.php/about-2/

Yes, he is speaking from experience:

"I’ve been responsible for doing at least one of these things myself over the years. Consider this post repentance for my user interface sins."

Anyway, the whole post misses the point. Choosing the exact wording of dialog boxes and creating icons are not the responsibilities of programmers working on large projects. If programmers have to take on these tasks, the either the company doesn't have a clue, or they can't afford to hire UI experts, graphic desginers, etc.

I can imagine that there would be some UI mistakes a programmer would make which a non-technical person wouldn't, but I don't think this applies to any of the items in his list.
Joe Average might not be able to appreciate the "foo".
I hadn't seen the netlog article before, very interesting.
I've had mixed success with elance - it worked out well enough that I will definitely use them again.
My obsession with your nostalgia...
How could you possibly miss the opportunity for a README or FIXME reference?
So if a VC firm overseas funds a startup, who gets the visa? Do you think the VC's overseas will be generous enough to let the founder get a US visa while they remain at their home country?
Yeah this is something I do frequently. I discovered it while studying for my qualifying exam. When I first took the exam, I failed using the same study methods I used in undergrad. I realized the scope of information I had to know was much too broad to be able cram or understand through past homework problems. So as I went through my study materials I wrote down the material after reading in designated sections, keeping the summaries to just one page. Then during further review I used these pages of notes. The second time I took the exam I got 100%.
I imagine that if these hacks where officially sanctioned and supported by the administration then they'd lose a lot of their charm and appeal. I also imagine the crackdown is more for show than any actual serious attempt to stop them.

Also sometimes kids get carried away and cannot fully think through their actions. My university had to crack down on these sort pranks or hacks after they escalated to the point where one caused several thousands of dollars of damage to public property . Just because you're a "genius" doesn't mean you have much common sense. However the crackdown wasn't an all out ban just stern warning that being stupid about it wouldn't be tolerated.
Can I design for startups?
I am a graphics designer but I have no formal education or any kind of real work experience. I also happen to live halfway around the world from everyone else and can only contact clients through email or IM. I have seen many other "professional" designers online, and I am proud to say that I can design better websites and user interfaces than most of them (both in terms of aesthetics and usability).

I am however in financial trouble and urgently need a steady source of income. I know that a lot of startups are on tight budgets and I was wondering if any might need a good designer who designs for a lot less than regular designers.

So my question for HN is if I might be able to get some decent regular design work from startups. If so, how should I go about contacting them? If not, what do I need to do to get there?
Hi guys, I'm trying to understand the ratings system. I've got -4 points. Any feedback? Thanks!
Built-in BASIC. That was key for me. No need to find the disks or install anything. You could be up and messing around with a small program within a minute.
The problem is that doctors charge ridiculous amounts even for simple treatments. If I have Bronchitis I know exactly what I need and the doctor knows it too. Yet he will charge a shitload for a 10 minute appointment.

The same with medical tests – the doctors draw blood and send it to a pathologist. They then charge you a 400% mark-up on that and make pure profit. Then it is the unnecessary x-rays (if the doctor happens to have a digital x-ray machine that he is itching to use).

If a doctor prescribes anything he will prescribe the most expensive antibiotics ever – even though a much cheaper run of the mill one will work as well (I don’t know why they do that).

Why do they want routine appointments (once a month) for chronic medicines?

No offence, but I think modern day doctors focus on ripping off medical schemes because there is no apparent victim.
I've always considered HN links to Paul Graham's essays to be PG+.
I don't know about other programmers but I got out of the game. I still program for myself but I got sick of people asking me for miracles. I was to make them happen but it drained me every time and was consuming my life. The other programmers had a more balanced view (corporate programmers) and didn't think about programming outside of office hours but I couldn't do that. I tried working for a couple of startups but they all failed so I decided to change industries. Programing is essentially problem solving and problem solving can be used almost anywhere. I still program on my own projects but not during work hours and to be honest it feels great.
From a UN Report: "More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year"

My point is: shouldn't a country like India put their research and money toward solving THESE problems instead of putting a man on Mars?
There hasn't been pork eaten anywhere in Egypt for the last 1500 years or so. And before then, at least for the last 5000 years, it was unpopular among a sizable chunk of the working classes, slaves, refugees and migrants from the North East.

Live and learn, PebblesRox, live and learn.
Hmm, "just starting out," "loves tearing it up," and "results oriented." So you want someone young that you can work to death and not pay very much? What exactly are you offering that would make such a person want to work for you? Whatever Seth Godin is telling you, we developers are people that are motivated by more than developing code for free so that business people can get rich. Maybe you can't find these great developers because they don't think you offer them anything that they couldn't get from every other nontechnical person that just wants to exploit them. I don't see one thing in your post that suggests that you do.
You'd think that someone who owned a ZX Spectrum would know that the minimum spec memory was 16Kb, not 1Kb. :-)
The Coptic Christian community in Egypt-- which numbers in the millions and predates the arrival of Islam-- raises pigs and eats pork.
Yes, but did you launch 100 Linux servers, store a couple of hundred GB of data, or run a MapReduce job?

You will...
Why Apple is betting on HTML 5: a web history
read what I wrote again: "for the last 1500 years". Also, the entire pig population in Egypt was 300k[1], how many people did that actually feed in a population of 25 Million[2]?

--

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/world/middleeast/25oink.ht...?

[2] Coptic percentage of the entire Egyptian population. 15% - 30%, depending on who you ask, of 81 Million.
The High Frontier, Redux (On Space Colonization)
mechanical_fish:

I'm not at all sure that we have the means to make the Earth less habitable than the Moon or Mars. The Moon is pretty darned uninhabitable. Mars likewise.
Assuming the absolute worst of the nuclear winter hypotheses to be true, we could perhaps destroy most of the higher life on Earth. But even after a nuclear winter the Earth would still have substantial amounts of water and oxygen, and almost certainly a functioning biosphere of some sort. [1] Which is more than can be said for the Moon or even Mars.
Meanwhile, we most certainly don't have the technology to reach an extrasolar Earth-like planet, and spending tens of billions of dollars to have humans dork around in near-solar orbit won't change that fact one bit. If you really do dream of settling other planets, you need to spend far fewer dollars on far more radical experiments. Or you need to read Charles Stross:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
Possibly both.
--
[1] Bacteria are hard to kill. Many of them thrive on the lightless ocean floor at extremely high temperatures. And unicellular creatures built our oxygen atmosphere, so the loss of it probably won't bother them too much.

Originally from this thread: From this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832280
Trading = Zero-Sum.
Investing != Zero-Sum
It's the fascinating history of branding. Apple invented the PC, but they poured their energy into selling the brand Apple rather than the term PC. IBM then came along with a machine called "the IBM PC", which sold a lot of units and was the subject of a lot of marketing. With the word PC as the actual name of the machine, the tendency to associate that term exclusively with IBM machines began.

(As I recall, the generic term for a non-IBM PC tended to be "microcomputer" or "micro" rather than "PC".)

That trend then leapt forward when Compaq started making PC clones. The clonemakers needed a word for what they were making. There was a time when you could call them "IBM compatibles", "PC compatibles", or "PC clones", but once IBM switched to PS/2 and OS/2 -- and proceeded to fade from dominance -- continuing to associate the word IBM with these things made little sense. Meanwhile, Apple wasn't trying to contest the term PC... instead they invented their own exclusive brand name, Macintosh, and sold the hell out of that.

So in the end the word PC ended up meaning a generic Intel box that runs Microsoft Windows or Linux.
I am a graphics designer but I have no formal education or any kind of real work experience

These are less important than a solid portfolio. Whether you're trying to reach startups or businesses in general, being able to direct them to a handful of sites you designed is a big help.
Well, what is your portfolio url? Your portfolio will determine if you are employable much more than a degree.
At present Plutonium is used instead of Uranium to seed Thorium. Annually consuming 880 kg of plutonium for energy production from 'seed' rods, converts 1,100 kg of thorium into fissionable uranium-233.
I am currently in the process of hiring designers for my current project. But I have to say, I need a good online portfolio. Just saying you can do better than what I have seen is not enough because I have a large list of designers with proven portfolios.
"but I got out of the game."

So what do you do these days, if it is ok to ask?
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.Walma...
SEO and SEM For Email
Yeah do you have a portfolio???
"I'm looking for a rockstar coder who can solve all of my problems, do all the graphics design and layout, magically take my half-cooked idea work in a perfectly scalable and performant way in multiple natural languages in only 80 hours per week for 10 weeks. And will be thrilled with the 25$ an hour I'm willing to pay him/her".

I grow weary of the above conversation (note it's not really ever much of a conversation. I mostly just listen, nod, and then tell I was joking when I said I was a programmer).
One interesting thing about C64 vs Spectrum is the C64 had a thriving 'warez' scene. For instance, there were tons of packers (eg, like a ZIP file) on the C64 (to save disk and tape space), and literally none on the Spectrum!
TeachThePeople out of Business?  3 Days of Downtime
At the risk of getting flamed to a nice crisp: I really don't like this posting.

it is:

- anonymous

- contains details that are none of our business, and
which seem to be put there in order to sway a potential
taker to hire you out of pity

- makes a bunch of claims but does not back those up

- asks for work but does not have any contact information
Trading = Zero Sum
Investing != Zero Sum
Where can I find Actor-based solutions to common concurrency problems?
I was looking to compare threaded solutions using locks of common concurrency problems like dining philosophers and sleeping barber to actor based solutions in a language like Erlang.
The article glances over a lot. We pair-program on production code over 95% of the time. Driving duties alternate every few minutes or even seconds. Pingpong programming is common. It's all facilitated by having dual keyboards and mice hooked up to the workstation. Occasionally the pair splits up virtually. Each half of the pair has their MBP sitting there on the desk next to the 30" shared workstation monitor. If the driver is taking care of a mindless task (just typing) then the non-driver can switch their attention to their own screen for whatever, but still be aware of what the driver is doing. Examples of windows you have open on your MBP while pairing are: Harvest for details time-tracking, Campfire to communicate with stakeholders and other devs, pivotaltracker to refer to story details, API references, etc.

On the people front, we do our best to only hire experienced devs that will like the culture and fit in. We're a boutique shop, so we can be very picky about who we hire. Candidates have to pair with us onsite for at least a week before the team decides whether to hire. We've hired qualified interns, but don't hire apprentice or junior-level folks. Occasionally we do extended pairing matchups with client developers in our office, but they have to fit in culturally for it to work.

I think pairing all the time is one of our most important competitive advantages. My teams produce some of the highest-quality code I've ever seen in 15 years in the biz. We are able to effectively leverage XP-style client acceptance in our process because our code is so defect-free.

I'm proud of what we've created at Hashrocket, but usually try to stress the importance of context and talent in making it work. Pairing all the time is one of those things where I have to advise Agile idealists that it probably won't work for them. :(
The correct name is Apple //e .. Only the original Apple ][ and ][+ used the squared brackets in the name.
Yes, and when you have a market-based system for violating laws, that's called "corruption."
He missed the zeroth sign: it sucks.

But then, off-by-one is the canonical programming error.
Picking 1,980 people from 100,000 and get 990 out of 1,000 who have DSX is in fact quite impressive--99% recall (in information retrieval) or sensitivity (in medicine). In information retrieval, you rarely get that sort of number out of unstructured data.

If you look at the predicted positives for rare conditions (as in your DSX example), you may find that 50% are false positives. It is still considered useful for many purposes. In medicine, for example, it is used as a first-round filter to screen people for another, more expensive/cumbersome test.
Because it will take you years and years of effort just to get the advanced degree that will enable you to try many of these lines of work, [1] at which point you may discover that you don't especially like them.

I can tell you about this experience at great length if you really want. ;)

(Dabbling in medicine or law is particularly expensive, because... it's expensive. You have to go into massive debt, on top of your potentially massive college debt, before you figure out that medicine or law can be a really miserable line of work. At least I didn't do that -- my years of career trial-and-error were cash-flow positive, though I didn't exactly live like a prince on my grad-student and postdoc salaries...)

Meanwhile, you don't have to do years and years of academic hoop-jumping before learning whether or not you'd enjoy starting a business, or working at a startup. (Or working at a big company, for that matter.) You can learn a lot just by trying it. You don't even have to wait for graduation.

---

[1] Beware: You may think that you can learn whether you'd enjoy (e.g.) archaeology by volunteering to help on a dig, or by being a grad student in archaeology. And that is a good idea. But enjoying life as a grad student or intern is not the same as enjoying a career in a given field. In many fields, professors spend most of their time raising money, managing people, playing political games, and writing papers and proposals, not digging holes, performing calculations, or building neat stuff in the lab.
Agree with others, start with showing off a great portfolio.

The second most important point in my opinion is reliability.

Once you get your first client, make sure to touch base regularly, keep them informed of the process and delays, ask questions and request feedback. If you do this (which really, is nothing but being professional) then you'll have an edge over most freelance graphic designers (in my own limited, but sad experience :)
I thought it had a lot more to do with the puritan/protestant work ethic than farming.
They're still funny even years after I finished my PhD :)
Another example of the kind of thinking that has made the third world great.
I'll second the call for a portfolio. Many people (myself included) are constantly looking for skilled graphicians, but we need to see what we're getting.

If you're suffering from the chicken/egg problem (no contracts == no past work to show) then just do what the guy did with the zappos redesign: Pick a site that you think could look better, apply your magic, and publish that in the form of a blog post or just add it as a "proof of concept" to your portfolio.

You can also approach the site that you chose directly with your new design - if it's good then they might just buy it.
I am sorry to say this.

Coding is no longer treated as adding value to the company.
I agree with the comments on this post.

However if you have a portfolio and are not anonymous, feel free to email me at: contact at eiso-kant dot com.
Agree with other comments. With regard to zinc, Cold Eeze lozenges or similar. The important points:

There are two zinc compounds involved; some lozenges only have one.

Researchers think that the efficacy of the zinc is largely topical. So, having a lozenge that dissolves slowly -- Cold Eeze are formulated as hard candy -- maximizes efficacy.

You need to start taking the lozenges at the first sign of symptoms. This may be difficult for some. For me, I can usually tell the difference between a cold and something else, like an allergic reaction.

Zinc is a short term boost. You need to look at your overall health, but for avoiding some acute episodes, it can help.
Also, that picture is an Apple ][. This is a //e http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Apple_iie...
Does technology greatly diminish human creativity by slowing memetic evolution?
Before the advent of the printing press, memetic evolution was much more prominent as stories were retold/copied with changes from one person to another.

But now that technology makes it easy for many people to see the same information, one could argue that memetic evolution has slowed down dramatically.

BTW, one could also argue that modern healthcare greatly slows down natural evolution in humans.
If so, how should I go about contacting them?

Well, it sure would be easier if your profile wasn't anon. At least put a generic web mail address in your profile.
Wow - so e e cummings and charlie the cockroach are now a professor.

Seriously - nice work.
-sorry for being anonymous. I though I'd be comfortable being honest when I am anonymous.
-The only calim that might sway you is that I am in financial trouble. But I stated it so you may understand my situation.
-I know I made baseless claims, the best I can do is to ask you to take my word for it and give some advice.
-If you need to contact me my email is iamfahadk@gmail.com.
Personally, I took the article as a warning against the common pitfalls of basic UI design. I felt that it covered several ui issues that are very prevalent in programs today (the excessive use of dialog boxes really hit it home for me) and that the author was simply pointing these issues out and giving a designer's perspective on them to help programmers avoid them. Not all of us (programmers) get guidance in UI design so I definitely see where he is coming from.
For all the people wanting a portfolio. I dont have one but I would love to prove to you that I can make great design. Just give me a design assignment and I'll do it for you. You dont have to pay anything or make any commitment.
I visited Cairo ~10 years ago. It was so polluted that your nasal mucus (can I say 'booger' at my age?) would be black by midday. The entire area around the Pyramids of Giza smelled like camel shit, to a nauseating degree. The museums and cops were in a race to see which could be defiled faster for a quick buck.

The only redeeming quality of the entire city is Khan el-Khalili (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_el-Khalili), which is one of the coolest places I've ever been.
This is true, but I think some of these problems cancel each other out. If this post did have identification or contact information it would constitute begging for work based on pity and unsubstantiated claims. As it is, it reads like an honest request for advice.

Which you have provided, implicitly. And your advice is pretty good. Though I think it could be phrased differently: The original submitter seems to be looking for a jolt of confidence, rather than a critique. So let me rephrase it in my Happy Voice [TM]:

- Yes, you can find work as a designer for startups!

- You should probably avoid sounding like a charity case!

- You should link to a portfolio!

- You should provide a name and contact information!

- It is possible that HN is not really the best place on which to do this directly! We do not enjoy being spammed with resumes! Consider (e.g.) putting all this stuff on your website and then writing a nice blog post or two and submitting those to HN! Or talk directly to a few of the companies that are always being mentioned here!

Good luck.
None of the pork was exported (or could have been exported)?
Not really. My claim in the essay was that prices didn't depend on the quality of the content. All I needed to support that were a few counterexamples to anyone claiming they did. Though I did see evidence of a trend toward magazines being priced according to paper content, that would have been more than a I needed.
To be clear, there's no checkbox associated with water vapor causing a runaway warming cycle. The ipcc radiative forcing metric pegs the contribution at less than 5% of the total positive warming, and cloud alebedo effect, spurred on by the increased humidity, is more strongly negative. The largest anthropogenic contributors are still greenhouse gases, directly.
"we are still the only species who have a chance of making it off the planet"

For now. Personally, I hope that, if (and only if) we humans do destroy ourselves, enough life remains for something else to evolve and have a shot.
He missed the case where verbs in the UI match the model of data within the program and not a normal user's mental model. Git, powerful and amazing and awesome and mind blowing and game changing as it is, is a prominent example.