skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If anyone is looking for tips on working with offshore programmers, read Max's few but timeless points!

He nails his experience about getting designers from Romania. They have really great taste! And Russians for math-related complicated programming. And India for cheap average quality programming work(btw, Indian designers are in general pathetic). These have been my experiences too over 8 years of being on both sides of the outsourcing market(as a freelancer and as someone who has hired folks offshore). It is an art working with people offshore and if you can manage it, it can give you a real edge especially in starting phases.

Curious, are you deep into affiliate marketing?
What would be interesting to know is if Twitter got this list from somewhere else, or if they actually analyze which passwords were most commonly chosen by its tens of millions of users in the past

I thought it was the journalist's job to research, not the reader's. Would it be that hard to fire up an email to Twitter and say 'hey, this is Techcrunch, we have a question...'? It's not like this is urgent news and must be published right now or become worthless...
In fact, in many states the merchant must explicitly charge the tax to the customer, he cannot legally just include the tax in the price he charges for the item.
As others point out, what Amazon does is probably legal. It's also probably required; as a publicly held company they're required to pursue the best return possible to investors. Stepping up to pay a tax that's not legally required would violate that duty.

I think the states can make a good case for requiring mail order consumer businesses to pay sales tax. Bezos says that his employees and business don't receive services from states, but they do. Without functional streets it would be impossible for Amazon to have their products delivered, at the prices they currently charge. Less directly, police and fire services ensure that their customers and contractors can operate safely and with minimal disruption. More abstractly, a functioning economy and legal system promotes the economic well being of its citizens, without which Amazon could not function. At all.
>I don't invent shit. Look at what is invented already and make it a bit easier to use

This is great advice!
Trace Detection Systems, like the GE EntryScan, are available. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s9GuPMWh9A
Quality of traffic matters a lot. iJigg gets over a million uniques a month. But most of it is from Thailand and thus, we barely breakeven. I know sites getting a fraction of our traffic and making few times our revenue.

So yes, traffic means income. But that is super oversimplification. User intent behind your traffic matters a lot.
Sergey Brin gave a few maybe-helpful links:

http://too.blogspot.com/2009/10/journey-of-lifetime.html
what is the point in separating the two, can't you be both?

i would be willing to bet that the majority of people here that consider themselves "entrepreneurs" or are working in startups would identify with almost every single one of those points.

are we all hacks? or is there one point on there that makes you a NON-entrepreneur compared to everyone else who thinks they are?
Vintage Lingerie, Pin Up Lingerie, Pinup Undergarments
They are just really well thought out devices. For example my BB "knows" when it's in its charging cradle (and displays the clock and mutes all notifications apart from voice calls) and it knows when its in its holster (and switches from ringing to vibrating). Or on a plane it's easy to make it flight-safe. They're designed from the ground up to be with you 24 hours a day. That sort of thing is hard to describe on-paper but it's why no BB owner lusts after an iPhone (or whatever).
What are the extreme OOP flaws still present in PHP 5.3? And how does the needle/haystack issue relate to PHP OOP?
2009 As seen through twitter hashtags
The comments start off pretty good, but do get worse; it's not surprising they're closed now. That's an awful lot of student loan horror stories.
Of course it is. If governments didn't force employers to withhold income, I doubt income tax revenue would be nearly the same. And paying use tax is pretty much a joke.

My point is that he's using vitriolic language to accuse Amazon unfairly (who are abiding by the current commerce laws) when the same could be said about the shoppers (who are not). Attacking either won't lead to an acceptable solution.

I don't think we should interfere in interstate commerce at a federal level. Rather the states that care will need to form a solution for all out-of-state commerce taxes, something that's happening anyways.
Streets aren't paid for by sales tax. They're paid for with taxes on fuel and vehicles paid by the companies making deliveries in the state.
Demand Media is prob the answer. If there's enough interest for custom reality TV, DM will pay ppl to make these videos.
This is Michel Zalewski's project. I think it's been around for awhile. It's one of a couple of tools that all work by watching your requests and then probing the sites you hit for common vulnerabilities; essentially, it wants to use you as a spider.

Zalewski is very into passive detection of things (he's behind p0f, which is one of the more famous network security tools), and so that's ratproxy's "hook": it's just looking at your traffic, not generating many thousands of probes.

What does this mean to you as a startup developer? Not much. Tools like ratproxy may tell you about a few vulnerabilities you didn't know about --- in which case, hey, free money! --- but you still need to know how to test your application manually for everything ratproxy does, and several things it doesn't.
> as a publicly held company they're required to pursue the best return possible to investors. Stepping up to pay a tax that's not legally required would violate that duty.

There are lots of circumstances where paying extra taxes could boost long-term shareholder returns, so your conclusion doesn't follow. The classic example is where there's the threat of onerous legislation being introduced unless a 'voluntary' code of conduct is adopted.
Install Google applications on Fedora 12
E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry
Wish I was there. This is THE European hacker conference.
This is a pretty silly question. Lists of most insecure passwords have been posted since the dark ages. Meanwhile, Twitter doesn't store passwords and can't analyze them (without going through contortions).
In the New Model, it's good for a site like TC to leave obvious questions unanswered, or even a blatant error or two in the story. It triggers comments and followup stories!
Two folders, 'sandbox' and 'projects'.

'sandbox' is organised by language, with code snippets and small projects in each folder. If anything becomes of the small projects they migrate to the 'projects' folder. Anything in the projects folder means it must be in a repository, git or svn.
I wouldn't concentrate so much on certain programming languages, instead I would concentrate on designing programms.
I don't know your background. I guess you are learning on your own, so I would recommend http://www.htdp.org or http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute....
Some people will recommend Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. This book maybe the best on programming, but I don't think it suits a selfteaching individual.
This advice is so bad I think it just gave me cancer.

The OP is asking "what abilities are required to effectively build complex web apps and services?"

99.9999999999% of data structures in web programming are arrays and hashes. Look those up on wikipedia and read it, then you are done, now get to work.

Processor architecture??? Is that really to be taken seriously? Not only was it previously not relevant to the OP's question, but its becoming more irrelevant because virtual machines and the "cloud" paradigm.

OOP details are great if you are going to write your own libraries or plugins, but its not necessary for cranking out websites. Most of the time the OOP you are going to be dealing with you can fake.

Javascript is a must have, but you don't have to get so fancy with it. Just enough to drive a popular framework. I'd recommend jQuery, it seems to be the emerging winner.

Learn the CSS, broken browsers, and the box model, which will waste so much of your time.

If you just want to work for yourself try a few web frameworks and go with what works for you. Using anything from PHP to rails to Django, you could take over the world, they are all good.

Look into scalability. Its fun stuff to learn about, even if you never lucky enough to need it, here's a good place to start http://highscalability.com/

As part of scalability look into AWS like EC2, EBS and S3, they are game changers. You don't have to use them, but if you need them, they are there to save your ass.

Learn about "viral" marketing and how sites go viral.

Learn about database backup and recovery, and as part of scalability learn how you can scale databases.

Learn about unit testing, QA or even something like Selenium, figure out which works for you best and in which ways.

Learn to figure out what users want and what itch you need to scratch.

Figure out how to make interfaces that don't suck. And when you do, let me know how.
You see, there are lots of enterprenuers out there

His description of entrepreneurs is, I think, not very good.

Im sure there are lots of people like he describes who would call themselves entrepreneurs.

But every good one that I've met or "seen" doesn't even half fit such a stereotype. In fact I suspect most really good entrepreneurs are hacks just the same :)

Dont mix pretenders with the real thing!
Each project gets its own folder that contains branches, helper scripts, release files, notes, etc. Nothing related to the project goes outside that folder... except:

Working copies, demo code, samples, etc of dependencies of my projects are kept separate to avoid polluting my backups with stuff that isn't mine.

When learning a new language or framework, I consider it the same as a project and make a corresponding folder. Good to keep learning material, notes, project Euler snippets, etc.

Random snippets, quines that print sierpinski's gasket, and other useless stuff goes into the "Snippets" folder.
PHP is mostly an imperative language with a C-like syntax. In imperative languages with a C-like syntax most OOP is just syntatic sugar on a pointer called "this" with a bit of RTTI checks for casting. If your code is unmaintainable with out OOP, OOP isn't going to help.

A far more effective skill to have is to figure out how to build a complicated application simply rather than switching to language that makes it easier to increase line count and have semi-working code.

I know PHP isn't cool anymore but at the same time, Facebook was built with it. One person can't build Facebook (in it's current incantation) so it's pretty useless to try and find the magic framework that will let you. Figure out how to prototype quickly: once your userbase exceeds the capabilities of whatever tech you have picked you'll usually have enough users to find capital/revenue or have it knocking your door down. At that point it's easy to find the skills to port to whatever the language / paradigm de jour is.

Figure out how to make the SMTPs of the world not the X.400s once your not building X.400 you can implement SMTP in just about any language.
I'd put it this way: Some people are born to be independent businessmen. They read the theory, they talk the talk, then they take the step and start off in business.

There is the other way - just making money on the internet, and there is no grand plan behind it. It's more of a thing that just develops itself without some type of enterpreneurial drive or theory behind it.
so obviously, he is very entrepreneur-ing, but he is choosing to differentiate himself from people who call themselves entrepreneurs. The reason he wants to do this are what he is writing about.

basically, he gets things done and makes money, even though he is using old tech. he isn't buzz worthly, but he is successful in his own way.

for what it is worth, i really like working with people with this attitude. (except the next step is often looking for bigger markets)
College asks students to power down, contemplate
$HOME/Projects/<Project Name>/
$HOME/Miscellaneous/<Language>/<description/
$HOME/College/{Fall, Spring} <year>/<class name>/{Lab, Project} #/

Which is all mirrored in a private svn repo I've got running on a VPN.
they are supposedly trialling super-convoys in the UK - where a truck or van equipped with the right electronics controls 5 or 6 trailing cars using driver aids an auto pilot.

I'm told it's a success so far (by someone working on the project) so it might not be utter bunk to transfer it to planes - who already make extensive use of "driver aids" and auto pilots.
I feel like there are whole marketplaces I'm not aware of - where do people go to find offshore help? I've universally found poor quality, which ends up with me paying people I know personally a ton of money to grind out boring crap (or doing it myself), when I'd much rather pay them to work on the interesting things.
Philippines = best SMO posters in the world and cheap.
Schneier says that security worked in this case, because passengers subdued the bomber. But as others point out, that only worked because the bomber screwed up. And it was only an issue because the bomber was allowed on the plane, with a bomb; let's not forget that.

Now the TSA may be considering restricting people to their seats in the last hour, with nothing on their lap. (Does that mean no blankies too?)

I eagerly await the first no-tolerance arrest, when a passenger leaves his seat against regulations in the last hour to subdue a bomber.
The key lies in documentation. The better you explain it on paper, the better the result. Especially with India.
After being able to downvote and change your topcolor, all you get out of having karma is proof that you spend way too much time here.
I don't keep any snippets around on my machine - just have a knack for remembering how to get to a specific snippet via Google.

Each project gets its own directory that contains everything needed for that project (unless I have a shared framework, library, etc). All the projects are committed to a private SVN repository although I am taking a serious look at Git lately.
It was a one-true-language, one-user, no-process-isolation, whole-machine IDE pretending to be an OS. With all the implied advantages and disadvantages. It would have been a nightmare on the modern internet. Root it and you could rewrite anything.
You cant have fighter jet reaction times when people are walking around inside the planes. Also you have clear air turbulence, wind shear and all kinds of nasties up there.
Ah yes, Allison Stokke. Not only is she cute, she's actually very good at pole vaulting.
Despite what a lot of people will tell you ;) Python isn't really a web app language (really, at all, in the slightest). Stick with PHP or learn RoR.

In all seriousness if a web app is your aim, and you have on in mind, then stick with what you know and get good at it - it will suffice :) at the end of the day there is no particular limitation with PHP that RoR or Python will solve - if you get the point of having to worry about scaling etc. then they all have the same issues/solutions :)

EDIT: if your going to disagree that's great! But lets hear some reasoning - there is no logical reason to pick Python to learn from scratch if you already know PHP and wish to start a web app. Seriously speaking it's a waste of time; python is a killer language (and by far my favorite) but PHP and RoR are much saner choices for a web app :)
A lot of it comes from experience. After outsourcing for a year, you can judge pretty accurately within the first paragraph what a person is good for. The way they communicate will tell you a lot.
I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about this.
I agree with your conclusion. but I had to downvote for the poor presentation of the answer.
A company I worked for used a relatively big web company in Romania, hiring a few developers over there to work full time on their site.

The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code.

If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.
A few years ago, someone made a funny picture in response to a "which operating system are you" quiz. The image showed Sir Alec Guinness as Ben Kenobi, holding a lightsaber, and the caption said something like "You are OpenGenera. Far less clumsy or random than Windows. An elegant operating system, from a more civilized age." I tried searching, but can't find this image anywhere. Anyone have a link handy?
The obvious answer: try a few different options and report back here on how it went. Put ads on that one page. See what happens.

Then try an affiliate link for related books or stuff from Amazon. See if it works better.

Don't do anything that you'd feel bad about. I'm guessing that your goal wasn't to profit from such traffic. That's why I'm saying to just put ads on that one page, not your entire blog.
You could make a similar argument about DOS. Which is a shame.

EDIT: Except for the whole-machine-IDE thing, obviously. Although if you wanted to hand-hack assembler, you could, as far as I remember.
traffic does matter, the more traffic you get the more options you have.

5-10K uniques/day? Congrats you can get into the premium CPM networks.

1m uniques a month? Congrats you can start direct selling your advertising, without getting hung up on.

5m uniques a month? Congrats you can get into premium Google adsense, where they custom build your adsense units that will look like they belong on your site(meaning users will be hitting those links by mistake).

10m uniques a month? Congrats, you can probably raise some funding to pay yourself a fat salary while you hemorrhage money.

40m uniques a month? Congrats you are twitter, and you'll get a CNN article when you decide to change your homepage font from 11 to 12 pt.

200m uniques a month? Congrats you are Facebook, you can raise a ton of money at 1 billion plus valuation.

Basically there is nothing wrong with having excess traffic, you can always figure out a way to monetize it. i.e. how college humor started threadless tees to sell tshirts.

But traffic isn't everything, you can have a finance blog with 3,000 visitors a month, and be making 6 figures, just because the niche ads for your site are $20 cpc clicks, and $100 credit card offers.
I looked at about 10 of these that I hadn't seen before, and they're all either google-foo projects or their developers have @google.com email addresses.
Thoughts on Square
Two folders,

Sandbox: Contains code i'm working on or projects that i still consider active. Some of them i've converted to github.

Archived: Contains old projects or code, that are inactive, or somethings that are not on my plate in the near future.

For code snippets you might use gist on github, but i tend to use onenote. I have a queries notebook open on MS Onenote, and anytime i google search some new snippet, troubleshoot advice, configuration detail etc, it goes that notebook, with keyword tags.
Ira's work - This American Life http://thislife.org
Start at rentacoder.com(lots of individual coders). Another option is elance.com(better for larger projects; more companies bidding).

I was a top coder there in high school(early 2000). These days I use it exclusively to hire coders and designers for very specific projects.
It failed because of Activision's hubris in believing people were going to spend another $120 on a game after having had 5 Rock Band titles and 10 Guitar Hero titles. It failed because it asked people to aspire to be something nobody wants to be: a dorky DJ. Seriously? A DJ? Why not Jazz Flute Hero while we're at it?
I always felt like someone should write a quick, to-the-point ebook for outsourcing newbies on working through the outsourcing world. May be I'll pen that one day:)
if you want moar hackz plz, check out http://hackaday.com
Caltech: A Conversation with Charles Munger
Bingo! A lot of my programming projects, I do the db schema design and post it along with the other specs. Dumb it down as much as you can.

Of course, at some point if a project takes off you would want someone longterm. That's a whole different game(hiring a full-time developer offshore).
It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page.

Unless, umm, that page is itself dynamically generated, and just does the check there to avoid an extra roundtrip.

Still, well done 'leet TC h@x0rs!
What do you mean a 'hack' ?

Here's how to do it:

import os
OUR_ROOT = os.path.realpath(
os.path.dirname(__file__)
)
MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(OUR_ROOT, 'media')
MEDIA_URL = '/static/'

Drop that in to your 'settings.py' and you should be fine.
~/Projects/ for what I'm building

Everything else is in my svn repo that I can access from anywhere with svn+ssh.

Recently, I've started putting code spippets that I think I will re-use in my Dropbox.
Gathering content:

- Amazon Turk, while defining the sources yourself. ie- Go and find me a link, description, title, etc. for every presentation for Startup School 2009
- Virtual Assistants
- User submitted (submit a talk)

I'd start with one category to start, most likely tech conferences+keynotes. That alone is enough content to get started.

Next, I'd probably move on to a second category: actual school lectures and focus on a few select topics: CS and entrepreneurship. I'd then use mechanical turk to search through the top 100 universities and see if they have online lectures. If it's a yes, id then create another task to index and categorize that content.

Lastly, I'd then go to a third category: Online Screencasts. I'd once again focus on a lot of tech material. Ruby on Rails alone has ~200 screencasts via railcasts.

You could probably accomplish this for about $1000 or less in mturk+virtual assistant fees, along with a lot of hard work yourself organizing from a higher level perspective. You could certainly launch with the first category alone- tech conference talks, keynotes,etc. I'm pretty certain there is video out there to learn anything you want, and it will only keep growing. What would have cost 100k+ in education fees ten years ago is now 100% freely available. Someone just needs to organize the information.

I have lots of other ideas on the topic. Feel free to comment here or each out: j@jasonlbaptiste.com.
Nothing except being able to downvote comments and change the color of the topbar. And of course the ability look at your username on the leaderboard with narcissistic love if you're that kind of guy :-)
An interesting post, and the first thing that I've read on livejournal in a long while.

As a guy who just finished university, I've played more than my fair share of guitar hero and rock band. I like the games, and rhythm games in general.

To address the author's points:

* Maybe I'm not the typical person, but I would have no problem paying $120 for songs that I don't know. In each guitar hero or rock band game, I estimate that I know fewer than half of each set list, but I still enjoy the games.

* I played the demo in the store. I was too focussed on the controls the first time I played to give half a hoot about whether what I was listening to was any good.

* Finally, and this is the meat of the post - the game is too hard for a mainstream audience. I agree with the sentiment, but disagree with many of the points he makes to get there.