skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> "What is your job description? What do call yourself, or tell people you do?"

I tell people "I do computer stuff". Anything else sounds pretentious and stupid eg "Senior software architect", and is usually more information than they really wanted.

"Software Artisan" just sounds ridiculously pretentious.
"Most Valuable Professional" - see: http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
dead?
http://gitorious.org/drupy/mainline/commits/master
I will be sure to use this as I move to Boston next summer. This is an awesome list to get dialed in to the Boston community. Thanks
You can use a daily needs calculator, like the one on nutritiondata.com, and plan out the food that you eat every day. It's not going to be exact, but it's better than eating what you feel like, when you feel like it.
Ask HN: Why the "obvious" HN submissions?
I've been on Hn for a couple years now and have only recently noticed a proliferation of "obvious" submissions. The exact meaning of "obvious" is debatable, but no one would argue that things like google.com, facebook.com, and the like are especially so. Should I flag these submissions or is there a good reason for them?
Bazaar 2.0 released
This was really good and surprising. I did not knew much about Taylor and Taylorism, except the vague stereotype that he and his acolytes were nothing more than scientific slavedrivers. Finding out that some were labour advocates is at least surprising.
I've wondered about the motivations behind these posts too. If anyone can shed some light, please do.
Last I checked (a few years ago admittedly) GNU Smalltalk didn't include line numbers in error messages, which made it hardly usable for anything > 300 lines. Does anyone know whether it changed?
OK, I'll bite. If a set of tests on a feature that I'm working on runs in 15 seconds instead of in 30, I'll save that 15 seconds dozens of times. The benefits of a faster computer add up fast and shilling out a few hundred extra dollars is well worth it. Luckily, my employer got that. Especially fortunate since it doesn't seem like my Z61m will be replaced anytime soon (as we aren't doing so well) and a 2GHz core-duo with 2GB of RAM is only now starting to be limiting. If he had gone for a budget option, I would be tearing my hair out by now.
there are several themes including the standard squeak one. aqua look is just a theme, it isnt using native widgets. if you wanted a different look and feel you could implement.
> He had no idea whether it would work when he set up the relationship so he was taking a risk and she wasn't. His risk paid off.

And was she taking no risk either? She risked non-payment just as he risked non-delivery. Even if she didn't specifically take a few minutes/hours/days to make the cards, if we grant that the bingo cards have value as intellectual property, then she must be risking it by sending them to him.

More to the point, does taking a risk justify perpetual profit? Should an author profit forever from a book? Patents never expire?

> Should the fee be renegotiated whenever he finds (or more likely, creates) more value?

If she signed a long-term contract, then she could keep it. But it sounds like she really is free-lance/at-will, and a renegotiation could happen every time, sure.

> Should he also pay higher hosting fees, and maybe more for his domain because now it's worth more?

Again, why not? Such fees or taxes are common; consider property taxes. What are they but a 'higher fee' because some piece of land is 'worth more'?
Great feature but Quicktime can only records videos in the current screen resolution.

And honestly, I don't think a 6-step tutorial is necessary for this.
The overwhelming majority of the major crime is in the south side of Chicago and the far West. It's still the safest downtown of a big US city I've been in.
They're usually by newbies to see if that submit button really works.

They probably should be banned automatically somehow, they add a lot of noise to the new page and sometimes they last quite long.

Flagging them helps getting rid of them, the more people flag the sooner they're gone.

Also, see http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

Another explanation is that link spammers use something general to see if they can post 'any link' without further credentials, usually the same author will follow up with a spam link a couple of minutes later.

Some hours of day the amount of spam is quite amazing.

With HNs rise in popularity this will probably get worse, so getting rid of the spam early is an excellent way of discouraging it, and that includes such 'trial balloon links'.
Duplicate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229
i like gnu smalltalk but the lack of some of the gui tools is a drawback for me.
The weather comment cannot be stated enough: this is a large factor in what makes or breaks Chicago as a viable home. Expect to have varying degrees of "cold" weather from Oct/Nov to the beginning of May. Also, Chicago is an absolute mecca for everything Big 10. This tends to give a lot of the 20-something places to go out a very frat-ish feel (being a big city there are other choices, but it is something to be aware of, good or bad).
Also along with the release, a new design for the web site has been made as well http://bazaar-vcs.org/en/
Of course it is possible! I've worked with several turnkey contract manufacturers in the US that would be happy to build 100 circuit boards. Some will even do PCB layout and help with circuit design. Mechanically, places like protomold and quickparts are a good source at low volumes, especially if you can hand them a CAD file of the enclosure design.

If you're looking for someone to help you out, go where those people hang out: places like sci.electronics.design on usenet, Circuit Cellar Ink forums (http://bbs.circuitcellar.com/phpbb/), Embedded.com forums (http://www.embedded.com/tigforums/index.jspa?categoryID=1), and maybe even chat rooms like #edev.

If you're looking at less than 10k units, I doubt it's worth the effort to go off-shore.
That's a noble argument, but I think it's wrong. Someone has got to make the trains run on time. What I mean is, there will always be people in this world whose function it is to flip hamburgers, drive forklifts, raise livestock or work in HR. Without them the whole edifice comes crashing down. Rather than demeaning those callings, you should acknowledge that it's because of the hard work of untold millions that a few of us have the freedom to devote ourselves to higher causes. A lot less research would get done if we all had to grow our own food.

Also, I have always found the get-rich-so-I-can-do-good mantra to just something people tell themselves to rationalize their blind pursuit of wealth. The chance of this happening is hilariously remote. Anyone who is playing the odds would be far better off taking a job as a social worker, teacher or relief worker.

Not to mention the fact that you don't exactly need millions to make a difference. I have a friend (http://www.qfund.org/) who took $50,000 and built a school for 500 children in Africa. She has made more of a difference in people's lives than the next 500 nerds in they Valley who are trying to strike it rich so they can build a spaceship, combined.
paolo has greatly advanced the state of gnu smalltalk. you might want to give it another look.
Pay $5000 so you can fund someone else's startup!

A prerequisite of "angel investing" is that you actually invest. Here we have a group of "advisors" funneling other startups' money (not their own) to a company of their choosing, and taking any upside in their equity stake!

Sick. This makes Boston look pretty bad, and xconomy looks worse for even giving them publicity for this.
SPAM bots "tasting" the site. They will come back later to see if the post is still there, and if so, they hit the site with the actual "payload".
History of Django's popularity
The New York Times Best Seller Books - Week of October 3, 2009
I think github is having trouble. I'm getting the same but for this and other projects.
Also, check out Startup Bootcamp next week at MIT. It's free and features many founders and entrepreneurs, including some from YC.

http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu
Their GDP (PPP) per capita is between a third and a fourth of the US GDP per capita. That's not a third world country.
How not to test that mysqld is alive
yes, by the looks of it:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=5ba...
As Goladus says it adds a whole list of pre-requisites and a compile stage when installing software.

Windows isnt too bad because there is Windows binaries that do work ok. But on Linux the current offerings of MySQL in Python have always been a bit shaky.
Same here, SBCL + slime for no-web stuff, and it's great. Never tried lisp for the web; for that I find perl + catalyst a very good solution.
The iPhone OS doesn't allow background processes for third-party apps. So normally Loopt would have no way to update your location except when you open their app. The carrier deal lets them get location data straight from the carrier, whether their app is open or not:

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/09/04/loopt-att-work-399mo...
OT: Since I have enabled showing dead links I have noticed one submitter whose stories have been killed for no clear reason:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=billpg

He has been around long enough. His stories are about average, not really excellent, but there are worse stories. Yet his last four stories have been flagged to oblivion or removed by someone. I have googled the stories themselves and they were fairly OK. Can someone shed a light on this?
I wonder what they consider to be 'Drupal' about it. Is there a CMS architecture to copy? A well-thought API specification for plugins? Some decisive way of templating and configuration that has set a standard for every new CMS to come?

In other words: wouldn't it be better to try and improve it, instead of making the same mistakes Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal all made and try for some real extensibility?
For certain very restricted values of "anywhere," I suppose.
MIT MediaLab Sourcemap: Platform for Open Supply Chains
I was also looking for an example. I'd like to play with it, but I'm not exactly an OpenGL or Haskell wizard.
Are entertainment and politics more meritocratic than startups?
I've been commenting on HN for a while now, but I'm posting this under a different username so that, when I get burned at the stake, I'll be able to forget about it and move on next week.

And, before I begin, let me say that I'm not accusing anyone, from pg & the YC team, to angels, to venture capitalists (all of whom I greatly admire) of anything. I am simply stating an empirical observation.

So, to ask the question: Are politics and entertainment more meritocratic than startups? This might seem absurd, until you look at the data, and, as it turns out, there's quite a bit of data.

For example, take a look at the Wikipedia list of people who went from "rags to riches" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rags_to_riches). This is, of course, not a complete list or a statistically random sample, but the trend is obvious: it's mostly entertainers and politicians. The only person on there who's arguably a startup founder is Larry Ellison, and his company is much less of a technology company than a sales company. There are founders of other kinds of businesses- Sheldon Adelson, the casino baron, and Lakshmi Mittal, the British/Indian steel baron, to name two- but no technical startup people.

To approach it from the other direction, look at the most famous startup founders. Bill Gates- his father was a name partner at the largest law firm in Seattle, Preston, Gates & Ellis. Larry Page and Sergey Brin- their parents, all four of them, were top computer science or mathematics professors. Michael Dell- he started his company with a $500,000 loan from a relative. Mark Zuckerberg- his parents were both doctors. There are, of course, exceptions, but the general rule seems to be in this direction.

Or, to take a third angle, look at any list of orphans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_orphans, http://thirdworldorphans.org/gpage.html34.html, and many more). There are lots of politicians and entertainers and demagogues and novelists, but very few startup founders (and scientists, for that matter); Steve Jobs is the only one I was able to find, but he was so young when he was adopted that he has no memories of his biological parents.

So, what do you all think? I've only been able to list famous people here, because those are the ones I can look up, but any investors reading this probably have a better data set- what have you found?
software expense = development cost/customers
I don't check the classic HN page enough to know whether or not they're diverging a lot lately but as of now they do look pretty dissimilar.
IPhone & Apple Mail Privacy Hole
The article itself was perhaps a little disappointing --- it mostly discussed syntax rather than semantics that I find confusing. It did link to http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad..., though, and I am finding that very enlightening.
haha, great executive summary Torn!
Amazon Announces Mobile Payments Service
Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose [video]
It isn't so much a history of management consulting as it is a history of the advent of business as a science.

Interesting that Conde Nast, The New Yorker's parent company, has recently been a high profile client of McKinsey.
Apple claims Woolies is getting fresh with new logo
You're absolutely right, and he's updated his blog to briefly address this.
the dropdown suggestion bar will reduce the 584,000 somewhat
If I suspect a person has problems with their Windows install or needs a website built "for this great business idea, you'll see, we can split the profits, you just have to design the website!", I tell people I'm a database administrator. This discourages questions.

Otherwise, I generally tell people I'm a code monkey or a web designer.
When people ask what I do, I tell them I "play with computers", or that I'm a "code monkey". If anything more formal is needed, I give a job title.

It's not something worth spending much time thinking about.
The article did a rather nice job of talking about this, and the difference between mere interest in multiple subjects -- "flitting" from subject to subject promiscuously -- and actually doing real work in multiple subjects.

How many "hackers" here are accomplished authors -- not technical books, but social subjects or good fiction -- and accomplished programmers, and have accomplished something notable in another unrelated field?
Just the rules of Magic cards involve a lot of mental computation. The full rulebook actually includes a description of stack-based execution of triggered events to avoid race conditions and ambiguities, and it is possible to build decks that exploit card combinations to create infinite loops that win instantly.
Google Talk 1.0  Free Download
FastCompany has an article on sourcemap -" Where's my iPod Made? SourceMap Has the Answer"

Link: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/sourcema...
Has it ever been proven that the Mint exit was under VC duress?

Didn't Aaron publicly refute this himself?
I always say I'm a programmer. Is that ok?
That was a mistake. (He submitted something from hubpages.com, which is very popular with spammers, but which was mistakenly set to autoban instead of merely autokill.)

In general, though, please send me an email about situations like this rather than posting about it.
Drupal.org tracks download statistics for contributed modules. So one way to get a sense of how many Drupal 5 sites are out there in comparison to Drupal 6 sites is to look at the versions of popular modules that are getting downloaded. In particular, see CCK and Views.
What's wrong the versions from your distribution's package manager?
Good strategy.

The worst thing is being known in the family/extended family as "A computer guy" - someone to ask when your crappy Windows XP machine won't boot.

When faced with this tricky situation I usually explain that I last used Windows about 10 years ago and have no clue how to make their Vista/XP thing bearable, and they back down.
If I'm reading that right, you want to see how do-notation is desugared?
The best explanation I could find was http://metafoo.co.uk/practical-monads.txt
The two sections "Binding lines together" and "Lines that don't return values" explain it nicely.
Ask HN: Help develop a site idea, would this be possible?
How would one go about developing a site which offered suggestions to people who wanted to step outside their comfort zones?

Sort of an opposite of Aamazon suggest, where instead of 'you may also be interested in', it would suggest things which you would find challenging to your thinking.

(I got thinking about this as I tend to find that as I get older I tend to gravitate towards ideas and beliefs that reinforce what I already know to be true rather than challenge me).

(Does such a site already exist?)
If drupal addons can be dropped into this thing, then yeah, they are drupal. My first serious web app was a ZenCart install that I deleted, but whose database I kept and wrapped with some surgical Common Lisp code. Database-driven software is easy to phase out, and even if the UI is all gone, the original design remains in the form of data model, API and protocols.
PHP is only capable of $quantifiable_performance_improvements at the cost of ugly, ugly code :p
I agree with you that #1 and #2 are the most important areas of human endeavor and achievement (although I'd also add Art to #2). But I think #3 includes a lot more than you might at first think it does. The guy behind the counter at the local fast food joint is, in a very real way, part of #3. After all even scientists, doctors, etc. sometimes need a quick lunch right?

As for working toward building some capital in order to do grand things... I'd love to see someone work up some stats on how many of the people who get rich from flipping a start really go on to spend a significant part of their time/wealth on #1 or #2? Or is that just some bullshit line that people tell themselves to justify all the time they're spending pursuing the almighty dollar (or euro, yen, etc). Once they're rich, do they try to make the world a better place? Or do they just buy a big "crib" with a pool?
why is this a serious privacy hole?
As much as I love to read about Twitter, there's no real news here. We already know about lists & geolocation.
Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge
Cheers admin! will do.
Journalism is best when it's used as a weapon against both political sides, it's job is to be in the middle telling the average person these peoples lies.

Pro-lifers are anti-abortion rights, but they don't want people associating them with anti-rights because it's considered anti-American, they'll be seen as un-American as terrorists. When a country has free speech enshrouded in its national constitution, anti-rights is unpatriotic, but pro-life is seen as patriotic.

These games are already played, I see no problem with journalists playing them right back against the people trying to subvert media coverage for their own means.
What do all these phone apps do? Mostly marketing
Excel can be very useful for cleaning up dirty data, once you are familiar with it. I don't know whether Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), or whatever has replaced it, currently supports regular expressions, but back around 1999 or 2000 defining a reference to Windows Scripting Host (WSH) provided that functionality. Very useful for making and extracting pattern matches; in my case, I needed to identify particular codes within a large, freeform text field that multiple people at multiple facilities filled in each in their own fashion.

Excel does have plenty of quirks, which can be rather aggravating. My un-favorite: Applying a text formatting function to something like 2334d2 resulted in 233400 rather than 2334D2 because the formatting function was hard-wired to recognize "d[number]" as specifying an exponent even when your formula or code was applying text formatting. (Which interpretation apparently, as I was eventually told by someone with experience in the area, comes from Fortran. The same thing happened with "e"; at least "e[exponent]" I was familiar with; "d..." caught me by surprise).

So, some bozo or bozos send you a lot of semi-regular data. You shove it into Excel, where some of your cleanup is automated, and Excel makes it very quick to navigate around and manually fix the rest.

BTW, I've not used OO Calc for anything significant, but I continue to read here and there that for serious spreadsheeting, it still cannot compare to Excel.
Code sharing sites being used to share emails and passwords
>> "Even your code, after six months, becomes a stranger to you. Especially if you have improved your coding skills meanwhile, the implementation will be very hard to grasp at a glance."

Maybe this is true when you're just starting out programming. In the early days when you're still discovering big things.

But once you've been doing it for years you're likely to change less, and have settled on styles that work for you.
I don't know. They're always submitted from newly created accounts. I don't know if it's spambots or new users trying out the submit feature. Probably a mix, but mostly the former. It can't hurt to flag them, though they'll always get killed eventually anyway.
Top Tech Talent from Yahoo, Microsoft, Canonical Join Rackspace Cloud Computing
As someone that lives in the Suburbs of Boston, and has the desire to get involved with becoming a startup, this list is invaluable!
I think being exposed [or not being exposed] to computers from a young age will affect your ability to synthesize new concepts and analyze old ones in technology.

Either way, these are all hugely outliers. The best way to get wealth is clearly inheritance.