skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This may be me, but I can't see any company needing a website that costs "tens of thousands of dollars or more" not being better off hiring someone for in house work. At the rates people are talking about in this thread, say a $15,000 website design should be taking around 250 hours, or around 2 months of work for a single employee. If you're going to invest a quarter of the yearly salary for a web designer in your site, its probably going to be in your best interest to just hire one so they you don't have to keep contracting out every time you need a change made.

Mind you, I can see the preference towards just doing a one off contract to have it made, but only if your site is going to remain relatively static. Each time you want to make a change to it though, you'll have to re-hire someone to do the work, or try to hack it together in house. If you're going to be actively developing the site though, (I would prefer to) have the designer in house, so he can weigh in during the design meetings for other things too.
They've definitely changed their policy. This is an e-mail I received from Amazon a while back:

Hello,

We are writing to inform you that we need to refund your purchase of the book 'The Little Prince or Le Petit Prince ILLUSTRATED (mobi).'. This book was added to our catalog by a third-party who we now believe did not have the rights to make the book available for sale. We will be removing the book from our servers, making it unavailable for re-downloading from your archived items. Any copies you already have on your Kindle devices will not be removed, but you may choose to remove any such copies yourself.

The total refund amount of $0.99 will be credited to your account in 3-5 business days.
Unless you were planning on ray-tracing a scene near a black hole, what good would this be?
The research I've seen on TDD seems to essentially point to two things: quality and productivity is positively correlated with the number of tests, and people who use TDD tend to write more tests. People who write the same number of tests but don't use TDD get similar benefits to people who do use TDD. So TDD is itself useful primarily in that it ensures that you actually do write the tests. (Unfortunately I don't have any citations handy to back that up; that's just my recollection of what I've read on the subject over the years).

There's that ever-elusive "it improves design" argument for TDD, but that one's far harder to prove either way, and I've personally seen it cut both ways: sometimes things end up more nicely decomposed, and sometimes they end up wayyyyy too decomposed.
I'm confused. Institutions which prefer people educated at elite universities aren't "maintaining a polite fiction." They're using a proxy for quality. They'd admit as much. It's imperfect, and they'd admit that too, but I don't get the "anti-anti-meritocracy" sentiment here.

When firms go recruiting at elite universities, they say it's because they want the best of the best. They don't say "all individuals are equally gifted." This strikes me as a total misunderstanding of why educational credentials are valuable.

I agree with the original poster, though. The "clubbiness" of elite schools is part of what gives them value.
I myself was absolutely amazed at this demo. It makes me feel like I'm not innovating at all!

At the same time, this isn't exactly new. GWT did something similar with Java (although it wasn't necessarily as polished) and as others have stated there are similar things.

I guess the question is - do people really use this, how often, and do THEY make money?
Better not because you might open up YC to liability, it is their site after all.
Oh, that's interesting. I'll dive into this community maybe a bit more. My initial reaction is the community here seems to be catering to very beginners and up. And maybe what I'm purposing is a bit more for people who already have some skills at blogging and some established readership, who just want reviews and not tips on adsense, etc. Also I think what I'm purposing keeps the draft a bit more private since the post would only be shared with a smallish body of reviewers.
I used several photocopied books when at university. Basically someone would run off one copy of the relevant chapters, then we'd take that to a copy shop and they'd run off a dozen copies of it double sided and bind it nicely. A lot of people did it and no one ever said anything.
Of course it's clear how to avoid violating them - use a guideline compliance checker. Me, I like GuiPli, from Comline Systems - it scans my bamk acount and social network inbox, looking for freebies or even direct payments from companies whose products or services I have blogged about. If it finds any, a little red light goes on, and I add a disclaimer like this:

Note: the author has received compensation from ComLine Systems or its PR company for this article.

You don't like the government butting into the media world? Fine, let's go back to the days of Payola, allow advertisers to make blatantly false claims without giving you any grounds for legal recourse (you'd think you could sue, but that really depends on the government's agreement that a tort has been committed) and just toss out any guidelines about keeping advertising and editorial separate. Screw the consumers - they may have a legitimate interest in knowing whether the author of a gushing article got compensated for their glowing words or not, but let's face it, th less they think, the more they spend!
Shed Skin: An experimental (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler
Inferior males get lucky too - a study on finches
That must be a cultural thing then. In europe the 'no' is loud and clear, when it's no.

What does happen is that VCs are careful not to burn their bridges, they'll not feel comfortable enough to invest but they can't rule out that you'll pull some rabbit from an otherwise empty hat in the future and then they don't want to have the door completely closed.

This is indeed quite common. But when it's 'no', it really is 'no'.

Another typical VC disease is to want to be the second investor in your company, but never the first.
Could this also be about distribution rights/licences?
> Standardized tests simply do not have a history of predicting success at anything on a micro level.

This is empirically false. Read about the Longitudinal Study of Youth. Children took tests, grew up, lived their lives. You cannot argue the data out of existence.

> The law doesn't say that you can't use IQ tests for anything of economic importance. It says that you can't use them to discriminate.

There are many practices which are not illegal per se, but put you at dire financial risk liability-wise.

Read about the actual consequences of the precedent set by the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. decision. Talk to a lawyer about whether it can ever be safe to include a traditional IQ test in your company's hiring process. The problems involved in demonstrating "non-discriminatory intent" and "performance applicability" are insurmountable. Unless you have extraordinarily deep pockets, the sheer expense (not to mention PR debacle) of fighting such a lawsuit will sink you before you are at any risk of overturning the precedent.

> It's also very possible that the test scores aren't used in society because are relatively meaningless.

Once again, the falsehood of this statement can be uncovered by anyone who cares to look. We aren't talking about an organized conspiracy here - only a generation's worth of toxic political correctness.
For a blend of the two you could do something like:

* A draft can only be viewed by reviewers approved by the writer
* When a post is published, it also turns world-readable on the reviewer site, including the reviewers' comments
* Let the writers add any reviewer they want to their list of approved reviewers

This lets new writers see which reviewers provide the best feedback, and they can add them to their pool of reviewers. The number of approved writers and feedback quality could be used as the base of some sort of karma system.

Each reviewer sees a "Most recent" or "HN frontpage"-like list of articles available for review. No action should be required to decline reviewing a article, to prevent popular reviewers from getting swamped.

For a business spin and to provide an incentive for reviewers, you could also add a fee to post a draft and distribute (part of?) the money to the reviewers based on their karmic score. Make the size of the fee based on the size of the article to review.
While I haven't worked on any project demanding this kind of scalability, I'm struggling to believe that garbage collection would be a bottleneck here. Modern managed environments these days are ridiculously fast and the garbage collectors are shockingly efficient. It's not 1994 anymore.

I think they are more likely to have performance issues because of the dozens of complex webservice xml-rpc calls that are required just to get a simple piece of data (as it is usual in enterprise systems).
So in your scheme (no pun intended) "good" means "preserves orthogonality and easy to reason about."

Most of the problems mentioned in the article have been addressed in Smalltalk. (Not just about Macros, but about features and supporting standards. Other problems, like the minimalist precedence rules (all math operators have the same precedence) come with the language.)
TweetSaver - Write a Post, Get 3 Months Free
Google LatLong Blog
I just helped set one of these up yesterday at a book store(networking, port forwarding, etc.). Its pretty badass, though I haven't seen it in action yet. Its going to access google's scanned books too!
I think the lesson to take from this is that metadata is always harder and more important than you think.
If you are looking to foster real collaboration (as opposed to copy editing and spell checking) I would use a private wiki to let all parties edit the post (or leave comments). I think a discussion board serves a different purpose, preserving authorship of each contributor and allowing you to have a discussion instead of reaching working consensus on a common narrative. Both are useful but serve different purposes.
I suppose that it's really a matter of preference (as mentioned towards the end), because I personally dislike the way, for example, some PNG files might open in Preview or possibly Photoshop if I created them with PS.

Recent case in point: I received HTML files from a designer that opened in Dreamweaver because that's what she used, but I really just wanted to open it in Safari. (I never use Dreamweaver)
Mathematics of the Small-World Phenomenon (from Networks, Crowds, and Markets)
> deals were on the order of tens of millions of euros

Early stage folks tend to be more lightweight than the processes you mentioned. Less technical due diligence (because there's less to investigate, obviously, etc)

> some may even have an angel fund of their own

Increasingly, this is not allowed.
So, by your logic, because you might be lied to, you should not even ask. Smart.

Regardless of the truth of an answer received, when we ask questions, we gain information. If you ask a question and are lied to, you have gained valuable information about the person, among other things.

It's all about information and you get that information by interacting with your counterparty. Even if they sit there and don't make a peep while you talk, you should be gaining valuable information (unless you're a unobservant). If they open their mouths, you gain even more. If they put something in writing, you have it in writing.

The most valuable information often comes from what people DON'T say or when they lie. Don't have time to discuss further today, but people figure that out on their own over time. Maybe.

In our "Do you have any conflicts of interests example?" If you ask and you are lied to, you have what you need. They are locked in. They have made a representation, in writing. You have relied upon it, and you have told them that you are relying upon it (before you peel back more layers of the onion). It has legal and ethical consequences for them.

Regarding your examples, sounds like you might have had unethical people inside your company and got what you deserved. Birds of a feather flock together. Also sounds like you guys were as trusting as schoolchildren and got fleeced. You did not ask the right questions, such as about conflicts. You did not require the right, or any, conditions precedent. Smart.
It's interesting placement to be sure- I would expect they are competing against other rapid development tools, so would price it in the several-hundred dollar range. (WebObjects, Adobe CS, etc).

If they're trying to undercut their competitors, I think it may be an error.. Charging $20, rather than $400 will make people think it's cut-rate, and not up to the challenge.
No one who's making a professional/moneymaking website will be stopped by a $400 charge.

This makes me suspect that perhaps they're after the Wix/weebly market. Drag and Drop a website, rather than a professional-level tool. These tools are consumer facing, and don't generally resemble the Atlas versions I've seen much.

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited about Atlas, and look forward to buying a copy, but I'd rather do so knowing that that company is making enough to hire competetant engineers to keep expanding it! ;)
After UK import and sales tax, the price-drop will mean nothing:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/ar...
Three Americans won Nobel prize for medicine for telomerase discoveries
I don't understand the fascination with these google suggest results. Yes there are a lot of people, and yes they type similar things and google shows the most common. We all know this isn't google and it isn't interesting.
When implementing policy you need to deal with politics. These decisions are not made in a computer on data alone, every bill will hear numerous testimonies and requires the judgment of lawmakers.

What you're proposing is counter-intuitive to most people's everyday experience, ie. wearing protection is safer than not wearing it. Sorry, but if you really want to convince people you are going to need more than data, because the other side will have their own stats - and crying mothers and all that jazz.
Because the 250 hours aren't spend by one employee working fulltime for two months, but by different AD, IA, UX and PM people working together asynchronously. At the client, he'll be on his own, sharing an office with the bookkeeper and the support/sysadm guy who'll mock him for using a Mac.

Because at the agency the web-designer can work on 5-15 $15.000 projects a year, and spar with a bunch of similarly creative people continuously during the day. At the client, he'll work on everydays chores like putting press releases on the blog and updating the Facebook page, waiting for the few times a year when there's something that needs fancy layout.

Also, it's much easier to plan when you pay for a project, rather than having a guy on a monthly salary. And most agencies have nice retainer-deals so you can actually have a designer when you need him.
I think hiring a web designer is an awful idea. It will cost you 4x what the website should cost to design. And then you have to keep them busy once they're finished with the design.

I would imagine for $15k, you could have some sort of CMS for changes.
A more detailed account appears here: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202434318786&Foun....

RIP, Mr. Johnson, you will be missed.
Funny how the author completely ignored a similar college in a similar situation. Yale is building two new residential colleges to add to its current twelve. Construction is underway already. Saying that elite universities purposely limit the number of students admitted is baseless. It's not as easy to expand as one might think. Furthermore, many of these universities do graduate level research that can be world changing. That's also another part of an university's mission, which the author also ignored. This is quite ironic given all the Nobels being handed out right now.
I am a bicycle commuter. Relatively new, actually, by many peoples' standards. I've been doing this for 3 years. I loathe bike lanes, and segregated paths in the US, from what I've seen, also need help. If they're open to use by pedestrians, you'll always end up with people walking three-abreast taking the entire path, or people with mile-long dog leashes made of clothesline-esque material, among other ridiculous hazards. Physically separated bike lanes don't solve many problems, really. They cause quite a few that've already been mentioned here.

Education and good on-road bicycle routes would probably do a lot more for bicycling. A example of a good bicycle route would use residential roads with low speed limits and traffic calming devices. Intersections with arterial roadways would have traffic signals, and you might run into bike/ped-only accessible things, such as a pair of back-to-back cul-de-sacs connected by a sidewalk or no-through roadways obstructed with bollards to keep rat-runner motorists at bay while allowing others the ability to pass through.

This would keep cyclists on the road where they belong, but off the major roads where they cause frequent irritation among impatient motorists.

Then, education will be needed to teach cyclists a few things that many seem to easily forget:
* Traffic rules apply to all users of the road
* Bike routes exist that might add a little distance to your trip in the name of comfort and safety.
* Be seen, FFS. All it takes is some cheap blinkenlights and a light-colored t-shirt or jacket.
> All of the entries on his list are either libraries, programming languages, or testing tools and frameworks.

I've never used or looked much into TDD, but it seems to me that that's where TDD would be best: areas where input is easily done programmatically & where output can be easily checked for whatever property. How does one test a big GUI app - write some sort of binding to xlib to move the mouse around and go through routines? I'm sure it's possible, but I suspect it's pretty difficult to come up with useful but reliable tests.
I believe the $20 fee is only for access to the beta program. My understanding is that you will have to buy Atlas when the final version comes out, and they haven't disclosed the price of it.
Ribosome scientists won the Nobel chemistry prize
Prey: open source software to recover your stolen laptop
Also check out http://github.com/tomas/prey
Includes a discussion of Stanley Milgram's famous experiment ["with a budget of only $680, he set out to test the speculative idea that people are really connected in the global friendship network by short chains of friends.. he asked a collection of 296 randomly chosen 'starters' to try forwarding a letter to a 'target' person, a stockbroker who lived in a suburb of Boston.." & found that the MEDIAN length of successful paths was just six] and clarifies a common misconception about it:

"It doesn’t establish a statement quite as bold as 'six degrees of separation between us and everyone
else on this planet' - the paths were just to a single, fairly affluent target; many letters never got there [all but 64 in fact]; and attempts to recreate the experiment have been problematic due to lack of participation."
IPhone App Store Developers Aren't Getting Rich
You're absolutely right, I made a mistake. You were the one equating worth with a c-level position (which is unsubstantiated by the article) not the author.

My apologies for the confusion.
On github: http://github.com/tomas/prey/
Communication pioneers win 2009 physics Nobel
Jeff Bezos Eats Kittens
A email spam tool could be justified this way.

"You despise sending email. But a lot of others don't. This tool is for them. Of course - you can't make a tool that makes everyone happy. And people who despise getting spam are not the target audience."
Also important, the number of people affected by unhealthy diet will be substantially higher. This is why they say there are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Risky foods, to me, are ones that are likely to give you a heart attack when you're 35. Ones that give you a 1:45000 chance of illness (to say nothing of serious complications) are quite safe.

Not to mention, we aren't exactly comparing apples to apples here. Leafy greens covers a heck of a lot more individual food items than oysters.

It just goes to show that you should never, ever take statistics at face value.
Ask HN: Review my site www.readfresh.com
Hi folks, this is a personal project. I'm looking for ideas to improve it.

http://www.readfresh.com
Nice, most complicated part for me was getting images "up to the spec.", since I am mostly competing with desktop software, that pre-install drivers and fonts my EPS files needed to embed OCR fonts (it took tons of time to produce them accurately).

Here is the proud result (rasterized back from PostScript):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ean-13-5901234123457.png
Ah! That makes a lot more sense, thanks for the clarification.
Committee editing of blog posts is not a way to go. Blogs are good because they have a distinct point of view and voice. Group editing would have the effect of homogenizing the distinctive voices into something more bland like you find in wikipedia articles.
This is brilliant. I don't think the concept could be applied to P2P networks, but if you own the site, this seems like a great way to prevent/reduce/capitalize on piracy.
That was also the most common password in a user database that I did anonymized analysis of in my distant past. Depending on your definition of safe, I'd say yes.
I believe that was quietly killed off during the 3GS upgrade.
What I see far too often in these debates is the following:

Person A claims "Process P is good!"

Person B retorts "Sez you, can't prove it to my satisfaction!"

And the debate rolls on and on about whether we can prove P or not. I am not blaming Person B, but the question I want to put to them is this: Can you prove that whatever you are doing now works? Or is it just a case of you feel it works for you?
I think for me, it was the same thing while learning calculus than anything else I have learned. I had to do a lot of exercises to really get the material. The chain rule for instance, seemed alien to me initially. It wasn't after I decided to do a lot of the problems at the end of the section that I truly could see the pattern. With me, I tend to only see patterns that I know exist (although sometimes my brain confabulates and confuses me).
Man Hacks Slot Machine, Wins $430k, Gets Arrested
That's true of automated testing in general, really. It helps to design the GUI as a thin layer around a bunch of code that can be tested, scripted, etc. in isolation, rather than tangling the major functionality with the GUI code itself.
I put "bad" in quotes to indicate I'm using the same language as the author of the article. I like macros (and side effects) in spite of their dangers. I just think lisp advocates are being simplistic when they suggest macros are not more dangerous than functions (as the author of this piece does):

"...in order to understand function A that uses macro B, of course you have to know what macro B means, but in order to use function C that calls function D, you have to know what function D does. Big deal."
I think the use of an invisible identifier to label the mapping between a file and it's app is a really non-intuitive interface. Getting rid of files without extensions and making it dead simple to know what will happen if you open a file improve the experience, even if it seems backwards, clunky, or non-sophisticated. I think this change is a really mature decision on Apple's part even if it isn't the traditional Mac way of doing things.
Was just about to right a similar comment before I saw yours. Also, productivity "gurus" who use their god-like productive capacity to... talk about productivity. Good times.