skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are you saying the confidence we give doctors based on their years of studying and research just might be too much faith in the Government standard?

Yes, absolutely.

> What is your suggestion to replace that? As some careers demand a certain level of competency and skill (Doctors, Nurses, Civil Engineers, et cetera)?

It turns out someone else here has asked me the same question, please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645576 (my answer follows there).

> Maybe an apprentice/master system? Seems to work well for skill trades, why not for doctors?

Agreed. They do this already in a way, but if you combine it with a much more diverse set of options I think that would accomplish the goal.
I gotta say, the domain just makes me think of red turtle shells.
Never confuse movement with action.
- Ernest Hemingway
A tale of 10,000,000 books
From the Importance of Handling Nothingness to Better Expression through Type
Well, there goes my startup idea for converting a steering wheel to a 6 button keypad. Seriously, it was hard enough to "steer" without even looking at the smartphone they had.
It's not so bad if you subscribe to a small number of narrow focus sub-reddits, like hard science, C++, Math, etc.
I don't know, I've been pretty happy just building stuff the old school way. Never been a fan of package managers and especially not macports. I just don't trust 'em.
Please invite me to google wave :) dan { at } abtain {dot} com
Relationships and politics aren't the best examples - even the "experts" on all of these topics fail to demonstrate that they actually know what they're saying.

Even in topics like psychological research or evolutionary biology, people are willing to spout forth uninformed crap because they prefer their own "years of experience completing projects in the trenches against her psych lab any day." Dunning-Kruger is in full effect on HN, and it's a great argument for a liberal education.

The depth of the ignorance and resistance to modern science here is somewhat shocking.
search your inbox using
with:public
and you should find lots of public waves to view, comment in, etc.
Yes, yes, yes.

I'm glad the author mentioned pacman. It's definitely been my best package management experience. I still use macports, but it does feel pretty tacked on. That being said I'm definitely excited about homebrew [http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew]. Some initial weekend hacking with it left me happy that it exists and excited about where it is going. Cheers mxcl!
I'd like to argue for the inclusion of SQL to this list.
Regarding the category #4, this is a good tutorial on how to customize list views: http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/04/easy-custom-uitableview-dra...

The kind of things that show that you went the extra mile to add polish to your app.
As the instant after the Big Bang the Waveverse is pretty small. Or so it seems ...

Try this. Go to the search bar, if you're currently viewing your inbox it has "in:inbox", remove that and search "with:public". You are now amidst the maelstrom of hyperinflation of the birthing Googleverse.
By default gimp is floating. It's not hard to change the defaults.

http://nathanhowell.net/2009/03/08/xmonad-and-the-gimp/
Before this I didn't use any package management on OS X, because I didn't like Fink and Macports. But Homebrew is just plain awesome.
I am inviting anyone who posts a wave username from HN to a wave we created back when the first round went out.
Spotify Co-Founder: Notion of Overnight Success "Misleading and Harmful"
" it's good to believe Reservella is not connected to TPB, but it must be run and owned by someone. "

That's true in most European countries, but in the U.S. and certain other areas, it is in fact possible to have a company with not just anonymous ownership, but NO owner.

You can structure a company such that all stock works something like a bearer bond: whoever happens to hold the piece of paper is the owner.
Submit your birth certificate and proof that you're not George Bush, please.
I take issue with his object literal example for function arguments. My rule of thumb is: if it's a required parameter, list it in the parameters. If it's optional, put it in an object literal argument - but DOCUMENT it in a comment at the head of the function. Using a lot of object literals as arguments can get very hairy very quickly if you don't keep track of them, and keeps your code from being self-documenting. By separating out your required and your optional parameters, you can easily see which are which.

In his namespace example, also, he uses the new Object() notation, which is not nearly as concise as var foo = {}, which does the same exact thing (similarly, var arr = [] is better than var arr = new Array()).

We could rewrite the entire namespace initialization block as:

var MY = (MY) ? MY : { CUSTOM : {} };

This sets the variable MY to itself if it exists, otherwise assign an object literal that has a member property CUSTOM that happens to be an empty object. You could now create a new function, say, MY.CUSTOM.foo = function() { alert('foo'); };
I just got on last night!

I'm tomlong.
It gives the BSA something to do all day.

It just wouldn't feel like a Microsoft deploy without the getting smacked upside the head for $200 more $/user every time you turn around.

As someone who's done a few terminal server projects with centralized software installs, it feels a bit like being mugged, over and over. Its damn hard to explain to the end customer why they need yet another pack of $200 licenses for all the users to enable what (understandably) seems like a ridiculously trivial feature.
> the point of life is to enjoy whatever activity it is you are engaged in

I think sometimes we get so involved in thinking about what we are not doing that we lose some enjoyment of whatever we are doing. That, and great expectations lead to great disappointment but doing something with realistic expectations but great enthusiasm can really make your day.
Towards the end of the article the author lists other developers in the "appstore B" but I don't see that any of them have made any games. I think this is more of a comparison of games vs other apps in the store (although undoubtedly there is some crossover).

Really what this article is about is that a non-game developer went head-to-head with a company that has made and marketed several successful iphone games and came out "losing".
Yeah, I've got to second this, really had no idea what the site did.
Which creates hard science and C++ reddit communities at the expense of a general reddit community ("reddit" is an epithet here), when the general HN vibe is the reason many of us are here.
Well yes, I am being silly of course and deliberately taking things to the extreme. I suppose what I am trying to establish is a data point we can all agree is wrong so that those supporting the actions of the CEO have to separate themselves from this point somehow. The clear similarities are that the CEO is in a position of power over his employee and there is no attempt at rational engagement before the verbal attack.

The CEO has in effect told his managers that they should use threats as a normal management technique and that reasoned discourse is an inferior business tool. For a high-tech business this seems unlikely to be correct. I can't imagine this approach being routine at say Google.
I was thinking about that but then again, SQL really is about as domain specific as it gets, then you'd have to put every other DSL in there as well... tricky choice.

The languages above are all 'stand alone', not application specific, in other words you could conceivably program anything in them, that's a little hard to do in SQL.

Using stored procedures it is turing complete, but I still doubt anybody ever wrote an application completely in SQL.
and this recently http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5547
Here's my 2c. Feels like information overload. If I click on 'Books to read' on the homepage, I'm expecting a list of books to read. Here's what I get:

* Picture of Phil with some unrelated stats.

* List of karts created by Phil, with the option to 'watch them all' (is that ever useful?)

* The list of books to read. Each entry has 8+ possible actions. The only useful visible info about each book is its title and a comment.

* Another unrelated list of 'most watched karts'.

* list of karts watched by Phil.

http://www.kartme.com/user/115/karts/47

I'm not sure new visitors would stay long enough to understand that page.

I would suggest you decide where the focus should be for each page and remove everything that is a distraction.

For instance,

* remove Phil's data from the left column (belongs to a profile page)

* remove the redundant title "Phil's Kart Books to read" from each entry in the list.

* remove or tone down the right column.

* show a summary extract for each book, show the price and option to track price (or automatically track price when 'karting')

* strip down possible actions for each entry to 3 or 4.
Same here: mattmichielsen [at] gmail
Portfolio Management Formulas is not based on the Kelly Criterion (i.e. maximizing the expected value of the logs of the returns). The latter is not applicable to trading (Academic promotion of such notwithstanding. Kelly himself in his 1956 paper only shows it as applied to gambling. Are we to believe he was unaware of a potential trading application, or that brevity precluded that?) It is specifically because the Kelly Criterion is applicable to gambling and not trading that prompted Portfolio Management Formulas and what followed. -Ralph Vince
Bummer, did not make it this year :(
Stole the words from my mouth (er, fingers?). I love this motivational on this quote:
http://content.artofmanliness.com/uploads/2009/08/hemingmoac...
In court, probably yes. But in the press, probably not.
You're not alone, major bummer this morning :(

Screw it, I'm going to start my own Startup School... with hookers and blackjack! Actually forget the Startup School.
Marco, did you do any marketing for instapaper? How did you promote it?

I'd love to see a follow up post to this about how to Market to App Store B. Include everything from naming and screenshots to networking with bloggers to buying ads.
Just got on this morning :D

helenlee14
I have some horror stories I could share with you... I've rewritten more than one application where the entirety of the application was originally written in SQL (HTML presentation included) and then just emitted when the SQL was called.

I'd also argue that SQL isn't as much a DSL as I think you suggest, it's the de facto choice when programming on the data layer for any RDBMS (sure, the implementations may vary slightly, but if you're writing SQL that's often your only choice for a language at the DB level).
As many reasons as there are not to do this (some of which are pointed out in the comments), it's hard to argue with 66%. Sure, it's novel so that's part of it, but I think the basic idea of making things fun to get people to do them is great.

On another note, the easiest thing to do in that case would be to remove the escalator. ;)
This bug was solved after the title went gold and shipped in US :/ We did not find out about it until a few users emailed us. The bug got through SONY and our internal testing...

-It was a first gen PS2 game that had to get pushed out since it was considered a launch title. The dungeons in the game were seeded and randomly generated - In some instances, a lever to proceed to the next dungeon was made inaccessible due to the random seed that enclosed the lever with 'wall' tiles - the player either had to start the game over and hope the dungeon was seeded correctly, OR play through the game without finishing that particular dungeon. It was not total killer in the sense that the game could still be completed, but it was tough to know that such a glaring bug got through...

-Fix was made for the Korean version :)
Basically a check to make sure that wall polys did not enclose any levers prior to generating the dungeon, if the lever was bounded, re-seed, generate and check again...
Ouch. Ok, I'll take that evidence, SQL goes in. It will show at the bottom though, I can't insert it in the right spot.

I feel your pain btw. That must be quite the mess.
isn't this one of the goals of the Chrome OS?
- SQL (see comments)
Me too pcestrada [at] gmail
How would one decide on having mastered a programming language? http://norvig.com/21-days.html suggests it cannot be done in a short span of time.
I am DTrejo on wave (as well as here).
/r/lisp is the only section I read and it's devoid of stupid jokes and multipage puns.

/r/programming would be cool if it wasn't full of naive pre-undergraduates. (why do those people find everything "interesting"?)

/r/programming has this sort of questions: "Kripke Semantics of Computational Tree Logic is hard, can someone teach me" .. Of course, they don't tell the guy to go fuck himself and get a library membership at the local uni, so they all take turns explaining in 140 characters entire fields, all while doing ASCII-math with the Reddit equivalent of BBCode. Amidst all this crowd-teaching, someone will come in and crack a Bush joke, get upvoted a few thousands points, and all the replies will be puns about temporal logic, atheism, weed and George Bush.

Sad.
If I'm Verizon and I'm selling the Motorola Sholes, I want my potential customers to know that the cool app they saw their friend using on a G1 last week also runs on the Sholes. The ads I've seen so far have been T-mobile, so maybe others will try to do that.
Didn't seem to have much basis in reality. I'm not typically changing lanes every 1.5 seconds. Having said that I'd never text while driving.
Let's say if you dared to take on a short time high pay job with your reputation at stake on delivering ?
I've been playing around with this framework a bit for my own blog but never had the time to finish it. It's actually very powerful and a nice piece of code. It's so generalized to deploy to several servers and the MU framework that it's a bit of a hassle to install on a single blog.

With this I really hope someone takes the video framework and creates a usable plugin for single blogs. It would be quite awesome to have.
I use this function to create namespaces:

var namespace = function(ns) {
var scope = window;
var tokens = ns.split(".");
for (var idx = 0, len = tokens.length; idx < len; idx++) {
var token = tokens[idx];
scope = scope[token] = scope[token] || {};
}
};

For example: namespace("Zen.Ui");
Pardon me, but what's so advanced about these techniques? Anyone writing JavaScript for living should already know these things. You want to talk advanced? How about lazy function definition [http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/lazy-function-definition-pa...]? Or say actual advanced JavaScript? http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/
I'm still a little new to the game, so I've only had one hacking job thus far. It spanned 4 years and taught me a lot about what to do and what not to do. I could type a small book about all the crazy things they did in that company and the nightmare of spaghetti code, the needlessly complex 3000+ table database, but I'll try to focus on just a few things that went wrong over the years or that needed fixed.

Two of the previous employees got into a debate on whether or not you could directly connect to the database through JavaScript and fetch recordsets, etc. To prove that you could, one to the developers did just that...and left it in place...in production...with the full connection string and user credentials in plain site in the javascript code on the page.

Countless sql injection holes were plugged over the years, but not before we got hit with an attack that plugged javascript ad code into 50 or more tables and a few hundred thousand rows.

The initial developers used ".inc" as the file extensions for include files like headers, footers and database access. These files sometimes had html, javascript, asp or all 3. You never knew. The problem was IIS treated these like text files and would gleefully serve them up if accessed them directly - revealing server side sourcecode, more connection strings, etc, etc.

Our accounting "system" was woefully inadequate. Our sales people always said "yes" and we eventually ran into some clients that wanted their invoices formatted and calculated in a way our system couldn't handle. We were always far too busy to take the time needed to properly engineer the new solution, so this one clients bill was done manually - through SQL Management Studio - every month, for close to two years before I left. Reconciliation of the bill, was also done manually. The kicker is, billing was done based on dates that assignments were completed. These dates were not only not locked down once billing had begun, but new assignments could be injected into the billing period long after the invoice was generated, because multiple factors. Needless to say, it took me half a day, once a month to reconcile their invoices and on several occasions, due to the very manual nature, payments were applied to the wrong assignments, transactions, etc. Once to the tune of $200,000. That was fun to fix. :)

I could go on and on and on and on....
Security and Acceleration - The Sweet Spot of Application Delivery
Non-web startups, anyone is doing these?
Is seems that most of the people talking about startups imply a web app. Which makes me wonder if anyone is considering an embedded or more traditional desktop/server software product?
Typewar (By Eldarion)
The most annoying off-topic discussion is the meta-discussion.
I agree, I really didn't know where to look/read to figure out where to start, or how to start
No, the crime is copyright infringement. Almost all countries have signed the Berne Convention treaty, and made copyright infringement illegal according to national law.

Theft is a different crime that has been illegal pretty much for as long as there has been laws.

Pirating a movie is illegal because it is copyright infringement, not because it is theft. Therefore, calling it theft is a lie, as any lawyer can tell you.
I am in this group as well. I lasted about 10 seconds and I probably have an idea of what it is but I don't know what you want me to do so I left. This is the type of site that needs a call to action for me to engage with it.
I think Android is something people will care about, not because of the OS itself but because of application compatibility.
Better namespacing:

function _namespace(){};
function _namespaceLib(){};

// Define your library methods

(function(){
var _private;
this.getPrivate = function(){return _private};
}).apply(_namespaceLib);

// Wrap your code with the new scope

(function(){ with (_namespaceLib) {
// Do anything you want here
var local = "only visible in local scope";

// The library is now in scope
alert( this.getPrivate() );

// Define your external methods
_namespace.myAPIMethod = function(){return local};
}}).apply({});

// _private and local are not accessible

_namespace.myAPIMethod(); // returns "only visible in local scope"
''.join(('dan.', username[:-1], 'n', '@googlewave.com'))
Google Maps From A to Z
I can't seem to find the article "Losing iReligion" on the Iconfactory blog -- but if the implication is true -- that Iconfactory is claiming their lack of success is a fault of the appstore -- thats a pretty ridiculous implication...for exactly the reason you point out here (and is the focus of the article).

What we think is good marketing (what the iconfactory has done), isn't just good per-se. What makes it good is its effectiveness...and by that metric. Ineffective marketing <> a bad AppStore.
If anybody needs a couch to crash on, I've got one free in SOMA, just a couple of blocks from BART.
This article says literally nothing. We're upvoting it solely because it has a controversial title. Is Zappos ruining HR? Maybe, but this guy hasn't explained how. He's just pissed that he keeps seeing them talking.
That kind of comments makes everyone of us who hasn't gotten one yet just jealous
Most of the responses seemed to focus on the cost aspect of purchasing the widget. I was trying to imply that there was a significant amount of time investment to go out and find someone who made it before you could even buy it from them. I've known several people professionally who would rather spend 6 hours hunting down a product they could purchase rather than writing it themselves in a similar amount of time. No, what they would have written isn't as robust or well optimized as the product they purchased, but it would have fit their needs better, and they would be better able to change the functionality as needed.

To create a better (real) example: I had a co-worker who, a while back, needed to have a handful of files converted from one somewhat obscure format to another. He already had a utility to do the conversions one at a time, but he needed to do several hundred of them and they took around a minute each to do by hand. He then spent all evening (by his words, I'm not sure how long that actually amounts to, but would guess in the 3-4 hour range from the way he talked about it) tracking down a software company that produced a bulk conversion utility, which charged $50 for the application to do it. When he told me about all the time he spent tracking it down, I asked him why he didn't just write it himself, since he definitely had the skills to write, at the very least, a script to read through the folder structure and do the conversions in the amount of time he spent looking for it. His response was that it just had never occurred to him to write it himself, despite the fact that he had the skill set to do it.

My previous example was due to the fact that I have seen many, many "companies" (read: high school/college kids with some php experience) offering widgets that could be hacked together in a couple of hours by anyone with a rough understanding of PHP and JQuery. They make their money by targeting a rather obscure, specific functionality, and waiting for someone to come along who just happens to need that function. In my discussions with a person who did this, he told me that he frequently gets emails about how a user had spent hours/days searching for something to do just that task, and that the widgets were often used on "tech" sites, where (I would think) the administrator should know at least basic PHP programming.
my hn username @gwave.com
i live in the mission and a good friend lives in soma

to give you an idea of prices

i live in a new 3 bedroom condo building with two roommates (24th and bryant) and pay 1150/mo plus about 50 in utils

my friend lives in an older 3 bedroom home w two roommates (sumner and howard) and pays 650/mo plus about 50 in utils

im very happy in the mission but soma is cool two, i wouldnt live in n beach too far away from everything

another friend lives right on market in a highrise and pays 1500 for a pretty big studio

hope some of this helps.
Harry Potter and the Childish Adult
Mr. Ek's concept of RPU (revenue per user) is spot on. If the music industry hopes to maintain any sort of positive relationship with their customers, they must maximize the lifetime value of fans rather than squeezing "as much as possible out of every single transaction."

Overall, its great that a company in Spotify's position is attempting to be so open. They're in a very crowded and high risk space--if they can embrace full disclosure, any business can.
While US companies have no obligation to act in the interest of human rights, it would be nice if they, nonetheless, felt compelled to do so.

Google claims "don't be evil" - this should extend to using information to help, not hurt, the oppressed people of the world.

Yahoo makes no such claim, but the beneficiaries of a free nation have a moral obligation not to choose short-term profits over the lives of those unlucky enough to be born into nations that have no such freedom.