jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Your experience in hiring full-time offshore developers?
I need a developer to help free up some of my time for non-development tasks in my business. I'm having difficulty finding a Rails developer in South Africa and even though we're not the most expensive country in the world, the salaries for developers in some other countries are still amazingly low in comparison.

I'm not necessarily referring to oDesk or other freelancing sites, unless the freelancer went on to become a permanent member of your team. I'm considering countries such as the Philippines or Ukraine, or any other suggested ones.

What's a good hiring process for doing this? Did you have to go through a few developers before finding someone who delivered quality work, or maybe you avoided this through careful screening? Any websites to help find people? (I see that workingwithrails.com has a nice search by country). Any other advice?
The North Pole is on thin ice
http://sciencenordic.com/north-pole-thin-ice
While the world’s political leaders have left the negotiating table again without an agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, the Arctic has greater problems than ever – 75 percent of the sea ice has disappeared.
Consul + Docker
https://github.com/progrium/docker-consul
https://github.com/progrium/docker-consul #docker + #consul = #funtimes A great way to start with two interesting tools. Must peruse the README.md
loner or just driven out      To belong or to be
http://minimalj.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/loner-or-just-driven-out/
my chat with a prof of ME @IIT Bomb ay in maddu mess a month ago
I asked him

“why didn’t you just kicked the job and moved on instead of fighting the ridiculous charges and consequences.”

He replied

“My wife told me not to ” :O [[wtf]]

And the answer he did not resist was “that would have been admission of guilt”
Youtube New UI & UX - Open Source Player for Youtube - Echoes
http://github.com/orizens/echoes
Echoes is a new UI Experience for listening and watching music videos and playlist from youtube.
Echoes is also an open source project based on Backbone.js which is driven by the community - for features and requests.
The Implementation of Lua 5.0 (and its virtual machine) [pdf]
http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf
DeScribd'd: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf
Review my project: Anonymous email
http://www.maskur.com/
Is this a useful service? Is it simple to understand? Other comments?
Watson wins the practice round on Jeopardy
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-01-14-ibm-jeopardy_N.htm
I saw the above article on USA today and found it interesting--imagine this as an interface to some particular knowledge base (for example, legal or medical). Does anyone know if it goes beyond just lookup, or if there have been any more technical papers submitted on Watson?
7 Signs You're Fundraising Too Early
http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/12/12/7-signs-youre-fundraising-too-early/
Learned the hard way. Have you ever had this experience?
Show HN: Rune Reader – A dedicated email inbox for your newsletters
https://runereader.co
Hi HN,

I'm Arnav, the creator of Rune. I've been a long-time reader of newsletters.

Historically, newsletters have been about sharing a collection of links or short form content. However, with platforms like Substack and Revue becoming the preferred publishing medium for many, newsletter content has become more long-form in nature.

As a reader, Gmail, Outlook and other general purpose email clients are less than ideal interfaces for reading this such long form content, let alone remember what I read by annotating, adding notes, etc.

After grappling with this problem for a while, I decided to build Rune – a dedicated email client for reading & annotating newsletters.

Upon signing up for Rune, you'll be assigned a unique email address that you can subscribe to newsletters with or setup autoforwarding to from your email provider of choice.

TL;DR: Rune is an alternative email app for reading and annotating newsletter content.

Excited for you all to try it :)
Ask HN: Why don't we solve the micro payments problem?
There have been countless times where I've thought up some little idea that would involve paying thousands of people a dime for a second of their time, the problem though is that it isn't worth it because there is a fixed cost associated with transferring money. So I got to thinking that if 1000 people could know, for certain, that they each had a 1/1000 chance of getting $100 bucks (minus, say 50 cents in paypal fees) they would be willing to do "dime work".

Right now I'm thinking of a one way function that could take in 1000 different concatenated seeds supplied by the workers themselves and, even in theory (not just in "there isn't enough computing power on the planet"), would map to a 1 in a 1000 chance to awarding someone $100 that nobody could game. Not even me, the employer.

Ideas?
I think 3rd party apps using yfrog's API still use Twitter passwords, not Oauth.
http://code.google.com/p/imageshackapi/wiki/YFROGupload
I'm sure this applies to any of these image sharing services, of course, but I'm particularly disappointed in yfrog, since they use OAuth, ostensibly. Are people serious about this OAuth thing? We should make it known that 3rd party apps aren't playing kosher with your passwords.
The Lambda Calculus: Its Syntax and Semantics
http://mathgate.info/cebrown/notes/barendregt.php
A classic is available for free on the web.
Show HN: Outserv – Blockchain Search Engine with GraphQL APIs
https://manishrjain.com/outserv-graphql-blockchain-search
Outserv enables you to run production-grade GraphQL Search APIs over any blockchain data. In our tests, all the transactions in the entire (15M blocks of) Ethereum blockchain were indexed by Outserv within 12 hours from scratch, ready to be served — a 10x improvement over conventional methods.
BUG is an open, consumer oriented, extensible hardware platform....
http://linux.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/open-consumer-oriented-hardware-at-last/
If the BUG comes to fruition, it is currently in stealth mode start-up mode, then you may well be able to develop all of those consumer devices you've been thinking of all these years but didn't have the money to develop.
Steve Jobs Resigns, Linux turns 20 & HP has an identity crisis
http://basementcoders.com/2011/08/episode-42-steve-jobs-resigns-linux-turns-20-hp-touchpad/
First post, long time lurker on HN. I'm the editor of the podcast linked to. We focus on developer-centric topics and technologies, thus HN is our ideal listener. Tech-savvy and critical. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you look on the RHS of the site, you'll find links to prior eps as well.
Control Firefox to Scroll/Refresh/Close from Emacs
http://wenshanren.org/?p=747
It’s very common for me to program while read documents in a web browser, and I think it’s annoying to switch between the browser and the text editor constantly.

Here I have a few Elisp functions defined, which allow me to control Firefox to scroll, close tabs and so on.
Reusing {{ Mustache }} templates
http://jknack.github.io/handlebars.java/reuse.html
In this section you will learn how to reuse Mustache templates in Handlebars.java
Ask HN: Suggestions for Making Enterprise Java More Enjoyable
I'm currently a university student and do programing work for my University. Since the stuff I work on was also written by student programmers, it has become pretty ugly over the years and my boss wants to do a rewrite over time of the webapps we're in charge of, (email and phone systems).

The situation: Java stack. We have to connect to LDAP, Exchange (we're transitioning from 2007 to 2010), Oracle SQL and a Cisco Phone Call Manager.
We've been transitioning to Spring for a while now and away from Tapestry. We also use Hibernate. We have some C# code to interface with Exchange, as well as some SOAP that my coworker manges to communicate with Exchange and the Cisco call manager.

The boss wants to fully transition to Spring. I will work on this for the next three years, so I want it to be as enjoyable as possible. Two questions:

1. If we have to use Spring, what are your recommendations for other enjoyable technology alternatives to do what we are doing?

2. If we could do anything, JVM-wise what would you recommend? Play or something? I don't know. Scala would be pretty cool (or even Clojure) but I think my boss would have trouble finding someone to maintain my code once I leave ...
An Exploration of Dynamic in .NET 4
http://iamnotmyself.com/2011/03/28/an-exploration-of-dynamic-in-net-4/
Breakdown of typing in .NET and the evolution toward dynamic types and their interplay with static types.
Commons backs gay marriage bill
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21346220
It's still got to go through the Lords, but this great for equal rights advocates.

Though, apparently, 175 or so MPs still think gays eat da poo poo.
Blist: an asymptotically faster list-like type for Python
http://stutzbachenterprises.com/blist/
The blist is a drop-in replacement for the Python list the provides better performance when modifying large lists. The blist package also provides sortedlist, sortedset, weaksortedlist, weaksortedset, sorteddict, and btuple types.
Email Still A Preferred Method Of Communication Despite The Emergence Of Web 2.0 
http://internetrack.blogspot.com/2008/05/email-still-preferred-method-of.html
"Consumers prefer email as a primary method of communications in their personal and business capacities; they will continue to prefer email in the future despite the rise of online threats and the emergence of other communication channels and web 2.0 applications."
Show HN: Spark + Twine = sensors + lights + API
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sparkdevices/spark-upgrade-your-lights-with-wi-fi-and-apps/posts/349336
Hey Hacker News,

My Kickstarter campaign, Spark, just announced a collaboration with Twine that lets you hook up sensors to lights. Add in our REST API and I think it's a pretty cool system. Let me know what you think!

Zach
Ask HN: Metered Pricing vs. Tiered Pricing
Hi HN,
Metered pricing for SaaS seems like the model that best balances customer usage and value with the vendors costs and margins. Why don't we see a greater proportion of metered pricing vs plan tiers?

For example, let's look at the survey market. This market seems ideal for a metered pricing model but all the major players use tiered plans (with limits).

We're struggling with this at the moment with Psychstudio, particularly with university classes. By charging per seat we've "encouraged" account sharing (against our TOS) in some cases and have had to customize plans for others.

Pricing has been a constant experiment for us for a long time now and whilst we think we've got single academic/researchers under control, our Lab pricing breaks down.

Metered pricing could be the answer, but would be a lot of work for a small customer base and a solo entrepreneur and does not seem to be used much at all in our industry or in adjacent industries.

I'd love to hear your opinions and experiences, so please, enlighten me!

Thanks,
Ben.
International entrepreneurs in international waters
http://blueseed.co/
What are your thoughts on this ?
BOOM Greatest presentation evAR? Domo Presentation
http://jc.is/i9fq8w
from the creator of Tonchidot... comes domo.
Need to make $5000 for medical expenses. 
Hi. I am a regular reader of HN. I am posting this under a anonymous username, I hope no one minds.

I am currently in a bit of financial distress, and need a little over $5000 to pay some medical expenses.

Any suggestions on how I can do this?

I was hoping to make a portion of it by providing some kind of freelance service online. I am a very good web designer and am skilled with Photoshop and Illustrator, however I dont have a portfolio or any client testimonials (since I dont do this professionally).

Is there anyone here who needs some kind of web design? I could design logos, websites, user interfaces for your apps, or even print designs.

Please contact me at stefanowebaria@gmail.com. Thanks.
An app that  breaks the reality and fantasy boundary
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yyxixi.xiximobile
If your chair can speak? If your dog can say? If the past ones can talk? Curious what are their responses.

Here comes XiXi, an app for you to find out the answers!
WindML 0.4 released. Machine Learning Framework for Renewable Energy
http://windml.org/
The windML framework provides an easy-to-use access to wind data sources within the Python world, building upon numpy, scipy, sklearn, and matplotlib. As a machine learning module, it provides versatile tools for various learning tasks like time-series prediction, classification, clustering, dimensionality reduction, and related tasks.
Modern Ads for Discontinued Tech
http://www.adamsonic.com/blog/?p=582
The NSA can't hack my Polaroid!
3D buildings in your maps, a breeze with OSM Buildings and CartoDB
http://blog.cartodb.com/post/85719060234/osm-buildings-brings-cartodb-to-a-new-dimension-with-3d
76 museums will open in Berlin for the Night of Museums. OSM Buildings brings CartoDB to a new dimension with 3D Highlighted maps
Ask HN: Love in the Time of Coronavirus?
I have a New Year's resolution to have at least a date a week with my spouse. We thought it might be a good idea to nudge us away from the default "take out / dine in + movie" that had become the lion's share of our date nights after we married. We have a decent streak going and I'm trying to prevent the coronavirus crisis from derailing us.

I thought I'd ask the community: how are you spending time and nurturing the relationship with your significant other nowadays? We're planning on effectively sheltering-in-place so any suggestions we can do around the home/yard would be super helpful.

We're profoundly lucky in that we're still in good health and our jobs are affected in minor ways (thus far). We're mostly worried about family and friends. I think continuing to try to have these >= weekly date nights will help with our mental health.

Any suggestions/recommendations/comments are appreciated. Stay healthy.
How To Succeed Like Apple
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/how-to-succeed-like-apple/
Ultra-Awesome Article.
IBM produces first 'brain chips'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14574747
IBM has developed a microprocessor which it claims comes closer than ever to replicating the human brain.
UK's atomic clock 'is world's most accurate
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14657002
An atomic clock at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has the best long-term accuracy of any in the world, research has found.
Paragon Partition Manager Professional 9.5 32-bit/64-bit Free until 10-18-2009
http://www.paragon-software.com/free/giveaway.html
I thought you guys might appreciate this.
Free Dynamic Price Scrollbar (jQuery, HTML, CSS)
http://designmodo.com/price-scrollbar/
Let us get on with the technicalities of these free dynamic price scrollbar available online. jQuery, HTML, CSS, adenine action and other cutting edge programming techniques are being used to design and develop various types of vertical as well as horizontal scrollbars containing expressive datagrids for the user’s perusal.
Sitebox.io - A Dropbox static site generator [new product, feedback wanted]
http://www.sitebox.io/
A build this new product together with a friend of mine and I think it is pretty unique in the marked. I'm looking to get some exposure but mainly feedback.

Please comment or e-mail me if you have any tips.
PHP frameworks benchmarked by Symfony
http://symfony-reloaded.org/fast
php frameworks done in house by symfony, interesting but take them with a grain of salt.
BitCoin - all time high (MtGox) - $49.64USD per BTC
http://bitcoinity.org/markets?currency=USD&exchange=mtgox
Looks like the online currency has hit an all time high on MtGox just a few minutes ago...
Ask HN: Is my SaaS a cost saver or a value provider?
I have a SaaS that let's people extract data from PDF and Video files. The reason I'm asking is I want to know on what side of the fence I am on in order to know how to price and market my SaaS better.

Common theme about all of my customers is that.

They are already have the pdf and video files that they wish to target.

They have tried other methods such as manual or paying someone.

They have successfully been able to extract data using my SaaS.

Now I charge an "all you can extract", unlimited plan for my three plans (small, medium, large). The only difference is the number of workers as you go up the plan. The more workers, the faster your overall data extraction.

The price range starts from a few hundred dollars a month to a thousand dollars a month.

I am guessing that the main value from my SaaS comes from saving people lot of manual and time consuming labor. Am I a cost saver?

I am also seeing that the data that is extracted is of value to the customer, but they chose the data they wanted to extract from a resource they already knew ahead of time. Am I a value provider in this case?

If I am a cost saver, then ultimately, is lower monthly plan or higher monthly plan the answer? My competitors charge similar price but they are metered. These folks come to me because of my unlimited plan. The equivalent of hiring a human and paying wages is also unmetered but much more expensive (I assume around $1000 for an intern). Does it make sense to market the time saving features from this angle? "why hire 5 interns when you can pay ten times less than that with our SaaS" ?

If I am a value provider, marketing vectors from this angle appear difficult because it's hard to know what data they are looking to extract since it's specific to each customers and there is a wide variance on what they find valuable. Some guy wants scientific data because they are a school, some guy wants linguistic data because he's building a service etc.
REST Service Discoverability with Spring, part 5
http://www.baeldung.com/2011/11/13/rest-service-discoverability-with-spring-part-5/
How to implement Discoverability and satisfy the HATEOAS constraint for a RESTful web service, with Spring MVC.
VC Financial Performance Requirements
http://getventure.typepad.com/markpeterdavis/2007/11/vc-financial-pe.html
A reader recently asked, "What revenue and EBITDA is required to receive investment? The answer to this question (as with many others) is, "it depends"...
This $2.42 3D-printed ‘sunshade’ makes Google Glass easier to use
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/21/this-2-42-3d-printed-sunshade-makes-google-glass-easier-to-see-and-less-creepy/
I worked with Next Fab Studio in Philadelphia to develop 'Sunshade' a 3D Printed Prism Cover for my Google Glass.<p>I open sourced the code and it's available for anyone here to print and test out: http://prserve.com/sunshade/Sunshade1.0.zip
How To Write SEO Optimized Posts
http://dailyblogtools.com/how-to-write-seo-optimized-posts/
How To Write Search Engine optimized (SEO) Posts.This Article Is Very Helpful To Write Posts For Search Engine.Its Very Important Task For Every Blogger.These Below Points Are Very Important For Good SEO. Start the Post Summary with a Key Word First, when you start writing a post, start with the main keyword. For example, the main keyword for this article/post is SEO, [...]
Scientists create a responsive patch that administers a course of medication
http://www.humansinvent.com/#!/15928/patch-spells-end-local-gp/
A group of scientists from South Korea have not only created this but they have taken the self-monitoring theory to a new level. They have made a responsive patch that delivers a course of treatment which means that when the patient needs a stronger dose or the ailment has been cured, the correct dosage will be applied accordingly. The rectangular patch is 2-inches long and made of stretchable nano-materials. Within the materials are heat-activated silica nanoparticles that monitor muscle activity and release therapeutic agents according to the body temperature of the patient.
Devise for Authentication in Rails
http://www.kiwiluv.com/techblog/?p=397
Oldie, but a goodie...
Cowboy riding a 40 meter rocket.@elonmusk
http://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/283040346538115075/photo/1
SpaceX's Grasshopper taking a test flight with a human on board.
http://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/283034463372464129
Double your salary - without a second job
http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&channel=guy.wisdom&category=career.money&conitem=5785beaaacad4110VgnVCM20000012281eac____&page=1
Some of the advice is very useful, i.e. target the right industry and company (soft developers should try to work for a big software development firm)
Inventing DualView: Displaying two images at the same time
http://www.humansinvent.com/#!/10403/inventing-dualview-displaying-two-images-at-the-same-time/
We visited Sharp Laboratories of Europe to investigate the inventor's story behind DualView - a technology seen on the dashboards of Range Rovers, Jaguars and Mercedes that displays two 2D images simultaneously.

"We had no firm idea as to what the best method of achieving the display was or if it was even possible."

http://bit.ly/SfRHQ1
Three types of online attack
http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack.html
"This is not a question between privacy against security. It's a question of freedom against control"
Ask HN: Advice for Transitioning into a Web Development Career
My name is Ryan. I develop software in C# and SQL for a local company, but still do help desk and a whole host of other IT things for them, at the same time. You guys may have seen my Cyber Punk Trainer, I posted on here a couple of weeks ago. I want to move into a more 'legitimate' development job, but I'm getting tons of rejection emails and putting in hundreds of applications with no response. I've been at it now for about 6 months, and, am honestly finding it hard to fight off the depression from being told 'No' so consistently. Once or twice I've done some coding tests for potential employers, but I still never make it past the recruiter. I've been told on a couple of them, that I did fine on the coding challenges, but for the most part it's sort of a "You passed, but so did they", type of response. I'd appreciate any and all advice you guys have to give. I just want to turn all this unbridled hunger, into a real career!
Thanks!
Show HN: MazeBall [not mobile friendly; sorry]
A colleague provided a maze-solving challenge that I reduced to a game that can be played at the following link:

https://ryan-duve.github.io/mazeball.html

The challenge is to find the shortest sequence of moves to get all the red balls to the green square, as well as an algorithm to generate that sequence. I made the game to guide my intuition and solved it in 188 moves just by eyeballing[1], but I am confident there are considerable gains to be made.

Warning: Javascript is not my primary language, and I have no idea how to make a good webapp. As a result, this is hugely unoptimized and probably unplayable on mobile despite my best Stack Overflow efforts and timeboxing the whole thing to this afternoon. If Javascript is your cup of tea and you are interested in helping improve this, drop me a message on Github[2].

Take a look, have fun and let me know if you come up with a cool solution.

[1] [see comment for long link]

[2] https://github.com/ryan-duve/maze_ball
15 Startup PR tips from industry experts
http://www.pressat.co.uk/blog/2012/08/hot-pr-tips-straight-from-the-horses-mouth-with-extra-neigh/
15 public relations experts give their top tips for startups.