skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your relationship with the people you know will change, regardless (been there, done that). Many of my long-time crowd are ecstatic to make $15/hr, and we still hang out on a regular basis.

After a few mistakes, here's the tack I've learned to take.

Treat everything you give as a gift. Don't expect _anything_ in return, and say so very clearly. This keeps you from giving more than you would like to, and prevents the recipient from asking for more.

Any kind of loan leaves the door open to additional requests; after all, they're going to pay it all back, so what's a little more? Which leads to resentment if you decline.

Considering it as gift prevents you from going overboard - if a gift is inappropriate (paying off a friend's debts falls here), then don't do it.

In my experience, the best way to give money to your friends isn't for the necessities, but for the luxuries. When I go to a party, I bring plenty of really good booze and/or beer. If we go out to eat, we go to nice places, and I pick up the tab. On trips, I pay the difference between the Motel 6 and the Sheraton (or whatever).

Part of it is couching it all in the right terms. You aren't doing this for them, you're doing it for yourself. I don't like cheap vodka, I like the good stuff. I don't like Motel 6. Then don't bring it up again.

The tone you want to set is that you don't want to share your money, you want to share your experiences. After all, that's how we all became friends to begin with.

ADDENDUM: it is also important to leave openings for your friends to help you, in whatever way they can. Right now, I'm prepping my house for sale, and I've had a stream of friends come over to help me clean and fix things. I could just pay someone, but this way is much more fun.
Top States for Entreprenuers
The essay is provocative. We are definitely (consciously or unconsciously) signaling something by the way dress. And what about the cars? I think this is even worst!
Why is making money from advertising any more risky than trying to sell product directly?

It's actually the opposite IMHO. If you're selling directly to people, you have one chance to get it right. You need to be 100% sure they will buy what you're selling, at the price you're proposing. Also for several types of service, charging the user may not make sense - who would pay for access to a search engine?

With advertising, you're effectively acting as a middle-man, providing the users with the opportunity to buy millions of different things related to your own service. The risk is ridiculously low. That's why advertising as a model works so well on the web.

Both are completely valid, good business models. It's just funny how 37singles take every opportunity to make out that a business making money from advertising isn't a 'real' business.

The thing that hurts the model is silly people who slap up adsense, don't do their research or learn about how to make advertising work, and then moan about how they only make a few cents a day.
On a vaguely similar note: http://www.hel-looks.com/ (unusually dressed people seen in Helsinki)
Fashion is complicated, certainly all the reasons in the article play a role.

But it also serves as an advertisement for fitness, fitness in terms of energy and thought you can devote to staying in fashion.

If you're a bit hurried and busy or just lost in deep thought like programmers, you don't have the resources to be on the cutting edge of fashion, and you tend to look a bit dumpy.

If you're in real distress, you tend to look really like crap, what ever you're waring is strictly serving the function of protecting you from the elements, and nothing else.

Like the peacock's tail, fashion is advertising excess resources.

In some way it can also advertise genetic fitness, as in you have high social IQ and can read the crowd's mind.

And then there's the I'm so proud of being a hacker I walk around looking like homeless person crowd, that's advertising that you're kind of a dick.
"learning some formal type theory might help" -- understanding formal type theory is not a prereq for understanding Java. If you are you suggesting that knowledge of formal type theory is needed to be an effective Scala programmer, then as I pointed out, Scala is more complex than Java.
this kind of reminds me of the quote in "balls of fury" movie "game not in paddle...game in you..."
Pink was considered a masculine colour 100 years ago, and blue was feminine.

Reference:
" In the early 1900s, The Women's Journal wrote that pink was a "more decided and stronger colour" that was best suited for boys. According to the Journal, blue, was "more delicate and dainty" and better for girls. "
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200901/20090128.html

The original radio broadcast is available online.
what are you all talking about? I've been using 64-bit firefox 3.0 (debian's iceweasel) with 64-bit flash (ever since 64-bit flash became available), no nspluginwrapper, and I have no firefox stability troubles at all.

I restart FF every week or so to keep its memory usage down. I typically have 30-50 tabs open at a time. Is it because I use flashblock?
It's not about 'not learning anything new'. There are plenty of new concepts in languages that don't use archaic or oddball conventions just for the sake of being different, especially if there isn't a technology driving the adoption (like there is with Objective C).

Especially in things like Scala; ':=' for assignment is from Pascal, and Ocaml, to me, feels like a really verbose Lisp.

Programmers are much less likely to pick up a new tool if its syntax is so radically different from what they normally work with that there's a steep learning curve just to become accustomed to it.

Sure, both languages have some interesting features, but there really isn't anything driving the change beyond that. Scala lacks a decent web application framework (Lift is rubbish, I'm sorry), and they seem to be targeting that space. OCaml is interesting, but I don't see any major new technology driving its adoption.
Things Your Startup Should Copy From 37signals
Never give up: The story of the man behind Tetris.
It'd be nice if these sort of links on github went to a nice friendly "What the hell is Ack?" page. With a nice summary of the project etc. Like in the big green "Sign up to github" box maybe? So people can see at a glance what the project is about.

I know there's a README after some scrolling, but it's not really obvious. There's a load of hex strings which seem a bit premature, and a source list which again assumes I know what the project is all about...

I kinda prefer how google code shows things :/

eg http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/
Many organizations care, but frankly have little to no hope of actually differentiating good and bad programmers.

I personally have seen this in both sw dev firms and other firms (financial and biotech) that have internal teams of programmers. Hiring a poor developer was somewhat in the noise in overall outcome - in other words, a slow programmer who produces some code that "kind of" works might be judged as above average based on other, non-engineering talents (personal communication skills, perception as non-trouble causing, etc)

Part of the problem boils down to "it takes one to know one." Even that assumes that you've already got a good programmer and that person has hacked the hiring process enough that they can effectively filter out bad programmers.

I'm thinking lately about how we (the hacker community) can help non-IT people judge programmers. Credentials don't seem to be the answer, personal networking is hard, judging code is usually a flame-war between language acolytes, and in the meantime . . . users are working too hard. Heck, your typical (non-software oriented) organization can't speak to whether or not language X or Y is the appropriate fit for solution development.

An interesting angle for me would be to hear your thoughts about how to build a good programmer and how you would market that person to employers, assuming that employers don't have a super-hacker on board who can help with candidate filtering.
Intuit Not Out to Change Mint Says Founder
It sucks to be a web designer.
staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony

Nope.
Ask HN in Europe: Any advises on buying European domain names? Registrars etc...?
Do you any advises on buying European domain names? Registrars etc...?
From the article:

Following the close of the acquisition, Aaron Patzer and the Mint team will remain in charge of Mint.com to continue both its principles and its fast pace of progress.

We’re not planning to change Mint.com and make it like Quicken. Quite the opposite. Aaron and team will also run Quicken and Quicken.com to ensure this doesn’t happen. Plus they will benefit from this larger pool of resources. I want Mint thinking to infuse Quicken.

While the post comes across as genuine, I wonder if by spreading the Mint.com team thinner, across all the Intuit products, they will really be able to "...continue both its principles and its fast pace of progress."
Ack is a joy. It's almost completely displaced my use of grep for code related purposes now.
How we keep animals alive aside, do you think any form of natural death is better then a quick kill? Predation, sickness, old age? How common do you think is a painless, old age related, death during sleep?
Does anyone know what kind of performance you can get out of this? I love the idea of a Haskell->JS compiler, but the YHC JS backend seemed petrifying in terms of efficiency (even though it's cool as hell).

My current project uses Obj-J/Cappuccino extensively and it's working well for me. For my next project I want to play with something else, so far I've looked at:

st2js: nope, hate Squeak

scheme2js: works well but debugging is extremely painful, due to the specific combination of unreadable JS output and that both the source and target language are dynamic. also, I wouldn't use HOP at all, and the GUI/library stuff seemed integrated with it.

Clamato: one to watch, though the last version I played with (when it appeared on HN) made my browsers lag badly

ocamljs: haven't gotten to play with it yet, but this seemed promising. not sure about how it handles partial evaluation/currying, though, it didn't seem too sophisticated when i i looked at it. (let me know if I'm mistaken)

haXe: lots of the features I like, but I loathe C syntax for these kinds of languages.

pyjamas: i like python but not when it's executing in an environment where i'd normally get real lexical scoping and lambdas. :)

also there's obviously GWT, but c'mon, I want to have fun.

any others I'm missing?
Another bug report. Bracket matching incorrectly counts brackets in strings.
But, like you alluded to, even within humans, there is a vast range of conscious capabilities.

I'm not entirely certain that that is what was being alluded to (although feel free to correct me if I'm wildly off base). Some branches of philosophy (especially philosophy of mind, especially philosophical idealism, especially solipsism) that are internally consistent but raise the question of whether consciousnesses other than one's own exist at all.

A fairly common question, for instance, when talking about strong AI is: How can we tell if it's conscious? Since we lack any real sort of objective metric for such a thing, there are two plausible answers: 1) We ask it, or 2) We follow our gut and make a guess. Both of these answers have fairly obvious problems with them. All of those problems apply just strongly when we're dealing with the idea of animal consciousness as well, or even with the idea of anything other than oneself being conscious.
@osipov

" then as I pointed out, Scala is more complex than Java."

I didn't comment (either way) on this.

I was just trying to say learning type theory worked well for me when I was learning languages with powerful type systems (Haskell in my case), especially in understanding type errors. It may or may not work for you. It is just an experience report/suggestion.

I don't care if Scala is more complex than Java or not. Apologies if you thought I was making a claim to that effect.
Fifty is quite an investor, he's got his hands in at least one palo alto startup i know. Wouldn't be surprised to learn there are more
Ah. Now it somewhat makes sense. It's still a heck of a lot of clicking.
That's what I gather, too. Looks like an added service is that they will notify you when similar marks to yours are filed. (found here: http://www.trademarkia.com/press-release.aspx)

I am interested in seeing how (if?) they implement that. A mark is more than words; It is also the colors and shapes that comprise the mark. I wonder how they will determine whether a mark is similar when someone picks a logo that looks like yours.

It doesn't seem like their claim of "Search all U.S. trademarks filed since 1870..." is correct. Trademarkia doesn't have the mark that I filed in August, but it is on the USPTO website.
'Comet' is sill largely misunderstood really. The idea that your webserver might have tens of thousands of HTTP connections all intentionally held open for a few minutes or until data is ready, to some people seems completely foreign. Doing all that in a single thread is also often a strange concept for them to grasp.

But, it's increasingly going to be the norm as the <buzz-word-alert> "Real Time Web!!!" emerges.

It's cool to have another open source option for people who want to do real time stuff.
Do no^H^Hmore evil.
I would be highly interested in the background of the friend motivating this article. Is he a java-only-person? Does he develop/know multiple languages?

I am asking this, because just looking at this snippet, I had no problem understanding it in a glance (which rates it as not complex), given that I know and was reminded of haskells and pythons list-comprehensions, a rubys block-structure and printf (don't hit me if these things are entirely different in scala, but this is how I just read it, and apparently, it was close enough to understand what this snippet does).
So .. did anyone else read this post and immediately think,

"Aha - so peacocks must find humans wearing Fubu to be astoundingly beautiful! " :)
As for the instructions being given in English, I fully expect, when visiting another country, to see signage in the country's official language.

It's expected from a tourist to learn at least a minimum of the local language. If I move to another country, I better learn the official language. It is a bit too much to ask the locals to extend the courtesy of accommodating my language needs.

What's next? Klingon? Esperanto?
Why not send an email to each domain with a list of everything they find? Or create an administrative 'audit' tool that will show all domain documents that are being shared publicly.

Do that a month or so before they push the hits into Google results and no-one would have any reasonable basis to worry or complain.
Ironically, giving interest-free loan can produce complicated tax implications. It seems that loaner potentially may be taxed on the difference between 'reasonable marker interest rate' and (in this case) 0%. Receiver may potentially become liable for gift taxes.
They've already started giving new hires and co-ops Lotus Symphony over Microsoft Office. The good thing about Symphony over other options is the tight integration with collaboration tools (TeamRoom, Jazz) and email (Notes).

That being said, if there's a customer with an issue, or a new grad looking for a job, and they use Word as their default word processor, then there's always Microsoft's Word Viewer which lets employees view Word files.

In my opinion, people need to stop making such a big deal out of this. From what I've seen, no one is really upset about the change, and it's definitely saving the company a lot of money. So if employees don't care, and shareholders are happy, why does it matter?
Google-jstemplate
Not to mention the fact that really good programmers hate, hate, hate working in lousy languages.
A search engine for US trademarks.
I used europeregistry.com to register an Italian domain name
I could have always have pointed it at the actually readme
http://github.com/petdance/ack/blob/master/README

I just thought in this case the root of the project might have made more sense. Maybe they should put an excerpt from the README under the standard project blurb with name, homepage and clone url.
I don't think the issue is as black-and-white as the headline. It reminds me of the bit Top Gear did where they "proved" that a BMW M3 got better mileage than a Prius. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKTOyiKLARk#t=50s Their point, of course is that the diver makes a huge difference - enough to offset a huge difference in cars. But obviously the show wouldn't exist if all cars were equal!
Awkward he is. But also smarter than he looks--which is true for most of these guys probably because of the growing up they have to do in dealing with the stardom.

I had Tyler(and bunch of other bball players) in my Debate class last semester. (Our first debate was East Coast vs. West Cost. My team was to defend east coast. We beat Tyler/Bobby:)
That's not much better for me, still half a page of 'stuff' before the README starts :)

I didn't mean to derail the thread though, but it's always irritated me about github links. I click on one and have no clue what the hell the project is.

/me is off to checkout ack (Haven't used it before, and looks useful).
It may be because Pat Buchanan has such fine examples of articulation and argumentation as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_byv2uQHEI

Failure to update in light of evidence is most definitely an indicator against brilliance.
Are small businesses taking advantage of Unified Communications?
Proceedings of the ICFP 2009
Yeah. I have a relative who is deathly afraid of flying and she has tried taking anxiety meds. She said they just make want to talk to strangers more about how scared she is. ha ha. It breaks down normal social barriers but she is still deathly afraid. I think she'd rather try to keep it to herself as much as possible.
TB3 doesn't support conversations out of the box, but I'm thinking about doing an add-on to experiment with that. With our new global database, it should be possible to do something interesting.
One of my favorite things that it sortof related to this is HUGE sunglasses.

My friends wear them all the time and it's a bit sad. If you're really pretty, why would you hide your face behind huge sunglasses like that?

Then it dawned on me. Celebrities wear them to conceal their face when they go out in public. They don't WANT to be noticed, so they wear huge masks over their face.

People saw these "upper status" girls doing it, and they copied it in an attempt to appear the same.

Thus: huge sunglasses as a status symbol.
You've hit the nail on the head here.

See Scott Cook's (Intuit's founder) blog post:
http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/intuit-not-out-to-change-mi...
It's amazing how many reprints this blog-item is getting, considering that the original source material was only a single ambiguous sentence:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Sep/0049...
Ask HN: Anyone studied Spanish abroad?
I am planning to study Spanish abroad for two months on a scholarship next summer. Googling around there are literally tonnes of so-called schools that offer instruction.

Anyone know how to tell the good from the bad? I am open to traveling anywhere in Latin America. Would appreciate if anyone has personal experience with any school.
Office 2010 Web App Davetiye | iYiblogcu
That's just not true as the CEO himself admits and as their job postings and SERP rankings reveal. Mint were absolute masters of SEO and PR:

http://spyfu.com/Domain.aspx?d=-3624320565025573542

http://www.onecubicle.com/page/jobs/job/4581

"We didn’t have money for writers, so most of our original blog content then was guest posts from other personal finance blogs, plus a couple of columns on people’s worst financial disasters. To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice."

Instead, we relied on press. It’s where I spent 20% of my time. I’m spending it right now while writing this."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/14/the-value-of-techcrunch...

Having an awesome product certainly helped but it was in conjunction with their other efforts.
MS Office is a great suite of software but if you don't actually utilize its extended feature set there are good alternatives that cost a lot less. I think more companies will go this route in the future or at least migrate to Office Online. One of the biggest issues I see with Office is the expense of keeping a homogeneous environment. Every company I've worked for seems to have at least 3 different versions of MS Office at any given time. Sometimes more. We have a decade span -- Office 97 to Office 2007. That presents a lot of support challenges. With a cheaper, or free, product you can always keep people on a standard version. I find the variation in Office versions with radically different UIs (2k to 07 for example) makes switching to an alternative a bit easier. People have learned to hunt & seek for features so if something is in a slightly different spot in OpenOffice it's not a big deal.
It might improve flagging accuracy if you included it on users' profile pages. Give people a metric and they'll tweak it. The result might be dramatic.
It's a nice way of linking when you know what you're going to get but it's a lousy introduction to a project.
I thought that was weird as well, who want's to run two competing projects? Quicken Online and Mint are basically direct competitors. Which one do you spend your time on? When you have a new feature do you put it in both?
Music Industry Wants Apple, Amazon to Pay Up
That is exactly what ZFS does.
Indeed. It turns out that Defaults Matter. Who knew?
In my experience pigs are easier to train than dogs (they learn more quickly) and are less easily distracted. I trained pigs for 4-H and showed them at the county fair. I could walk a pig around with just a cane to tap it and keep it going the way I wanted. Bringing my dog to the fair would likely take all of my strength trying to hold the leash. Dogs require acclimation to novel stimulating situations or they forget their training. Pigs don't seem to care.

The interesting thing to me was that if we forgot to feed them they would always seem to be able to take apart the fence and get out to eat. The patriarch got out and visited the other pens before he passed away which reinforced my feeling that they treated each other like family.

Read the first google hit for pig intelligence if I haven't already gone on too long on the subject.
It's kinda sad to see people judge people by their career, appearance and environment.

Facts:

-Just because Curtis Jackson is from a poor neighbourhood doesn't mean he's dumb or not business savvy.

-Just because he's a rapper doesn't mean he is always thinking about bling and 24 inch rims.

-Just because he is a rapper doesn't mean that he doesn't care about nothing but making money.

-And just because he hasn't had the best education and a 100k MBA it surely doesn't mean that he can't seal good business deals and manage his wealth.

When people talk about someone like Donald Trump it's always huge respect in everything he's done or doing but when it's anyone you wouldn't expect it from it's "I'm surprised he can actually talk so smart". Really?