skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had great luck with rentacoder, and have only good things to say about the site itself and the controls and mechanisms it has in place to help ensure the process goes smoothly (ratings, on-site communication so there's a paper trail, escrow, etc.).

However, there are caveats:

1) Best used with very small, very well-defined jobs.

2) You must put in a fair amount of careful work to specify what you want done, in a way that leaves no room for interpretation.

3) Best used with low-risk (experimental / proof-of-concept) type projects.

4) Don't bet your company on getting good quality. You'll usually get something usable, but it often won't be exemplary code.

If "usually get something usable" sounds scary, see point #3.

5) Don't expect to save yourself time. Instead you spend the same amount of time as you would have spent had you already known how to do what needed to be done but you instead spend the time on communication, and you get your job done by someone who knows how to do it.

A corollary to #5 is for some small jobs, you might be able to learn how to do the task and then do it yourself, all in the same amount of time you spent directing the freelancer.

So why do it at all? Because of #6:

6) Using such a service can move an item off your to-do list, because having a person at the other end of a job bid (and having your reputation on the site as a buyer on the line) you get forced to finish the item. So effectively it's an anti-procrastination tool.

This is my experience, which is biased toward small jobs. But then, I wouldn't use one of these sites for a big job.
I'm curious if you have numbers on the relative size of U.S. government loans to dysfunctional industries vs. Japanese loans. Just based on employment, it seems like a large number of realtors/autoworkers/bankers/construction workers are working at firms that economically shouldn't exist.
Why aren't our window managers doing this?! Then it would work for all apps, and it would be redundant for chrome and others to replicate the feature internally.

I used to think that window tabbing and grouping was too complex a UI problem for window managers to support. The implementations I'd seen required lots of keys and buttons to control the window groups, so it wasn't worth their time to implement something hardly anyone would use. But I was wrong, of course! There should be chrome-style tab grouping everywhere.
The same social mores as everybody else? Let's consider amichail a poignant test of groupthink.
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Do you know of any evidence against the deflationary trap off the top of your head?

I don't disagree with your comment. I'd like to read a good article or paper explaining/disproving the deflationary trap.
http://www.reddit.com/r/carlhprogramming/

Carl is seriously awesome.
"Heck, even the Salvation Army is a religious charity."

Yes, and they have been known to use donated funds to support political causes (specifically, prop 8).

I support religious charities (currently a Buddhist one), but absolutely oppose any who will use their influence for political ends. I also oppose any who count proselytization as one of their primary goals.
How to convert email addresses into name, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation
One additional note that I'd also make is that intercompany shareholdings (keiretsu used to promote stability and prevent takeovers) were in essence financed by the government and in turn made the mess even more difficult to ultimately deal with given the incestuous crossholdings and restructure firms.

I agree with you on the obstacles facing China to becoming a superpower which are far greater than others imagine. Working there, you see how inefficiently resource allocation has been for state owned enterprises which in turn have propped up stock prices and real estate. How they're able to deal with any bust politically is what scares me.

The government is already largely hated/strongly disliked in many quarters (there are many who have long memories not to mention the obvious and very visible corruption). It bears mention that that China liberalized not because they wanted to, but because they had no choice given how poor their people were. When the bust happens, the increased civil unrest and the government's overriding resolve to maintain power will be a volatile combination - one that Japan didn't have to deal with.

I also agree that the parallel of Japan seems more relevant to China than the US. China's non performing assets in their banking sector has likely grown quite significantly with the push for lending in the last year. The average Chinese aren't stupid either - which makes it a potential catastrophe if certain world leaders get their wish that the RMB is allowed to float. Capital will rush out of China and its domestic banks causing a financial crisis and ironically potentially a RMB that is worth substantially less than it is today.
Some game-changing plan involving magazines and news publishing seems likely to me. Fixed-format, locked down accounts, etc. Bold interactive ads with audience data potentially tied to specific user info. Whatever Apple does, it will be bold.

I'm not convinced, however, that gaming will be a major part of it.
Here's the thing, I'm a Canadian who's living in the USA. Canada has much lower health care costs - but our dietary patterns are much the same. In fact, I really have not changed my feeding habits at all since coming to the USA.

Yes, unhealthy dietary choices weighs the system down - but it weighs all systems down, and to say it accounts for the majority of the discrepancy is IMHO missing the gorilla in the room, which is that the US health care system is unbelievably broken.

Addendum: There is one thing where the US is very different from Canada. You guys eat the same stuff we do... but you eat much more of it. I'm pretty convinced that the average American can eat half, if not one quarter what they currently do and be just fine. Serving sizes in the US are so big that nowadays I often pack up lunch leftovers and have more than enough for dinner.
Even if IE9 supports it, there will be people unable to upgrade.

You can ignore them though, as their numbers continue to dwindle.
Android has what linux lacked -- Marketing.

Linux didn't have the name of a company like Google associated with it, a name many of us trust (or at least know). Linux didn't succeed because there was no PR,no marketing and it was hard to set up. Android will not have to be setup.

Also there is the case of compatibilities. Although linux was developed by 1991 but it didn't enter the mainstream market then.Android, on the other hand,is not entering a market which is already dominated by some other incompatible format. So standards can be built and dealt with.
Generally it means type-safe and memory-safe, at least by default; is not usually precompiled (in practice precompilation is avoided for linking flexibility); and has a runtime which is at least nominally independent of the programs that run on it, e.g. that would need separate installation if not packaged as part of a larger environment.

The combination of type and memory safety usually requires a garbage collector, though it's not strictly necessary.
I have been using RentaCoder for about 2 years now and find it pretty good. Once you establish a reputation, its upto you to pick up projects that are interesting and there are many prototype projects. Gives you an opportunity to try out new technologies that you may never do otherwise.

But as I get more experience on the site, I stopped bidding for low bid projects as the back and forth between buyer and seller takes a lot of time (for e.g. some sellers expect that you do a prototype before accepting the bid) and it does not work out for the amount bid for.

As for payment, Ive never had an issue with RentaCoder, Ive tried both snail mail and PayPal and they both have been fantastic.

My experience has been this: I only work for 2 or 3 clients now on Rentacoder because that takes all the time I have. They have been repeat buyers for me and keep giving more projects as I finish the current ones.
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Look outside the US, and you will find that your solution (primary care done by nurses) isn't unlikely to be the right one.

In France, going to the doctor (general practitioner) costs €22, before insurance (it's €5 or €1 after insurance, the co-pay as you'd call it). It's much cheaper because:

- he didn't have to spend 200k to go to med school, it's free

- he doesn't need 5 employees to fill insurance forms, or waste 2h a day calling insurers -- it's all automagic, no paper involved.
Note the names: This isn't a pitch from Mint.com, but a project from a group of students (as pointed out in the previous, now-dead, post concerning this from earlier today)
That aside, I haven't ever seen anything even resembling of well-constructed argument that religious people do less net good/more net harm to the world more than secular people.

The stereotypical example is wars in the names of deities.

However, there's also a burden of proof for the inverse of that on the religious people, specifically the anti-atheists, who claim that without God, we'd all be amoral and unethical, which they don't have arguments, well-constructed or not, for.
inefficient resource allocation is an intrinsic property of central planning and is the main balancing force to economies of scale that drive organizations to become larger. this eventually results in the "smaller companies eating their lunch" phenomenon that we love so much.

of course with government customers couldn't traditionally just "go elsewhere". this is showing signs of changing (lichtenstein, switzerland, hong kong, singapore, etc.).
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continual mild deflation during much of the 19th century in america for one.
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This is just one of many reasons to not startup/move to the US. Don't buy the hype.
Great, a page full of random youtube videos.
The world has been waiting for this.
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A broadband forum as tool for broadband improvement
A broadband forum would contain discussions on how the internet has become accessible to most people because it has already become limitless and reasonably priced.
There's some technical inaccuracies too - eg, FreeBSD has ACLs, implying that Linux doesn't in Linux-based OSs. RHEL/CentOS and Fedora have had ACLs by default for years now and they're easily enabled on Ubuntu/Debian if you need them.

'Since both the kernel and the provided utilities are under the control of the same release engineering team, there is less likelihood of library incompatibilities. ' is just as true of Linux OSs too.
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In dissecting his statement I presume he is having conflicting issues with his religion and masculinity. Presumably being challenged socially or in an introspective way based on how he "feels" about himself. Possibly soon to be herself.
Hi HN,
I coded this site up over the Christmas brake and I would like to know what you think of it.

I was greatly impressed with Moritz Stefaner's Nobel Prize winners list when I first saw it and since then I was inspired to build something similar. I finally got around to building a site that allows you to browse information on Movies and Actors in a manner similar to that of the original.

It certainly is not as refined as my original inspiration, but, it is a starting point for me. I hope you like it and find it useful when you need information on an Actor or Movie.

Also, if you are interested in adding/updating the Movie/Actor info, please let me know here. I will e-mail you the admin access details.

Thanks,
K7.
Simple strategy .. but so borderline ethical.
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This is a very depressing post because the fatalistic premise rings true. The high school hotbox can be very hard for some people. It's a good thing status starts depending on other things (expertise, success) later.

When it comes helping a kid fake 'coolness' I think there's merit. There ARE real advantages to not being pigeon holed as a nerd and getting a head start on those social skills.
sure, everyone knows that companies will spin things however they can (although i don't understand why some people - particularly americans - seem so fond of pointing this out; it's hardly the most positive aspect of capitalism).

but the review could have been a little more questioning. why not compare it to writing compressed data on an existing drive?

(and i'm sure i don't need to point out, to a connoisseur of free markets like yourself, that although they make a living convincing people to buy the latest product, and so work hand in glove with the manufacturers, they also have to compete for readers by reputation, which requires some level of integrity)
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I've been thinking about this since I discovered it - is it not facebook being unethical here? They give full access to the personal info of a person given their email address. Their new 'privacy' terms is basically about nobody having any privacy.

Small and agile business like mine will capitalise quickly on this info, but sooner or later, big companies like coca-cola will also see nothing wrong with storing public information that a user has 'chosen' to make public.
"Yes Java can be faster than C in some situations."

Unless the person writing the C implementation is grossly incompetent, I would like to see even one example for that.
If only I found this yesterday! I was looking for a parser generator that output JavaScript last night. I settled on:

http://jscc.jmksf.com/

And started writing a small Lisp programming language this morning. I like this Jison grammar syntax a lot better so I think I'll have to start porting it.

Thanks for posting this!
Sorry Fred
I made two comments on Fred Wilson's Investment Themes for 2010 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027345

Firstly I called on Fred to talk about Scamville, and second I made an accusation based on numbers I thought were good (they were based on info from an ex-Zynga employee).

The numbers I gave here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027698 were wrong and based on the ravings of an angry ex-Zynga guy.

Sorry Fred.
Your church may or may not be a great example, I'm not sure.

In part, the issue revolves around if people know what their tithes are going for and why they tithe. E.g. if they know the money is going to help starving kids (or whatever charity) and they give for that reason, then it makes sense to count tithes (or a percent of tithes?). If they would give tithes no matter what because they are supposed to, then it probably doesn't make sense to count them (at least if you are trying to analyze who is the most giving based on money spent or percentage of income, whatever).
Apart from the utter brokenness of the US system, which needs no further proof I guess, this chart says that health care spending isn't very effective at increasing life expectancy. There are other factors, maybe food, that influence life expectancy much more than health care.
I don't know whether it helps, but a few friends of mine do kickboxing. They don't seem to think it hurts - and even when it does, it doesn't hurt for long.

Also, once you start working out, your tolerance for pain is much higher.
I apologize http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028422
"Linux did not succeed on the desktop because Linux as a desktop OS did not have corporate backing behind it"

Not true. I cite Sun's OpenOffice effort as one example. Cast your mind back further and there was Caldera Network Desktop backed by Novell (who were a powerful corporation back then). Even today there's Umbuntu. So we can clearly see that many people have tried to make Linux successful on the desktop, and all have failed.
Max, I thought you would have given it a lot of thought and so did I, that is why I called it borderline. I am with you when you say that these persons have opted to allow their information to go public and that Facebook effectively has let its users down. Anyway running a business is tough and marketing at some point in time was compared with guerilla warfare:) (now is JavaScript!)
Pretty impressive for any company, let alone a bootstrapped one. I'm really glad Peldi still makes these sorts of posts, a lot of times the openness disappears when the money starts coming in.
> I could easily see them demanding access to all Google Docs containing certain keywords.

IANAL but I have experience in this rough area. That is pure scare mongering and I don't think there is even the remotest possibility they would get away with it. If they even tried Google would wrap them in counter-defence so fast it would be funny.

Also, for the record, your search history may be criminally suggestive but it is not something they could use to actually prosecute you (this is something I do know about). They still need a subpeona on your personal machine :)

Fishing is expensive; forces tend not to do it too much (despite what the politico's want to suggest otherwise). :)
In what sense was Obama "new"? His political career began in '96 (state legislator) whereas Hillary Clinton's began in 2000 (New York). Both had elements of the Democrats political machine behind them, which are as old as the two-party system.

When an independent wins the Presidency on the strength of his or her Internet campaign, then that'll be news.
This is making me feel really inadequate -- Tarsnap launched publicly only 5 months after Balsamiq, but it's nowhere near Balsamiq in revenues. (Possibly Tarsnap pricing starts at 300 picodollars/month rather than at $79.)

Oh well, humility is good for the soul, right? :-)
I consistently average about 150... and it goes up when i'm coding...
> I started the year sitting alone in a secluded corner of the cafeteria but eventually found a group of 3 other complete social outcasts to sit with.

We're thinking about whether to stay in Italy or go to the US, and this is definitely a big plus for Italy: sure, people have groups and cliques and things, but nowhere near like they do in the states. Or at least that's been my experience, and is somewhat confirmed by most of my friends here. I don't know any 'geeks' here who are as socially out of place as many in the US - everyone has friends, most all of them have girlfriends, social lives, and hobbies and activities outside of computers.
this explains on eof the major annoyances of windows. between the taskbar and the window header, the GUI of any program is deprived of all four corners and two edges. edges and corners are your most effective places for important functions.
Pretty much every service pretty much indexes you by email address. If you can get someones primary email you can track them down on all these sites; sure Facebook does a particularly bad job of keeping certain personal data private but it's not alone :)
Ok, we just found a sponsor for the Italy Hacker News Meetup ;-)
Wow, just fooled around with the mockups tool. VERY impressive and responsive -- like an internet version of Omnigraffle. Well deserved success.

Check it out:

http://www.balsamiq.com/#

My only feature request would be for more keyboard shortcuts. My fingers know Omnigraffle like they know Emacs.

(Also: from a technical perspective, looks like this is a Flex app. Very different approach than the 280north guys with their ObjectiveJ approach.)
The Cynic: ask for picodollars and you shall receive picodollars.

Joking aside though, I think that I see something of myself in your marketing. Your web page, for instance, is very plain, which to someone like me is great. But people seem to not like that, for whatever reason. Maybe you should do some A/B testing with a "flashier" (but no flash, please!) version? I would be curious to hear about the results. This is one of those things that irritates me about the world at times: people ought to be looking at your product and its price, rather than fades, drop shadows and the like... but they don't.

Also: he's targeting people used to paying for stuff, whereas lots of Linux and BSD people are, well, kind of stingy. Maybe a bigger push towards Mac would be another idea?
> The industrial designers let loose on the Mac have screwed up most of the keyboards by cutting their function keys in half so the total depth of the keyboard was reduced by half a key. Why was this incredibly stupid?

It wasn't; Macs don't use function keys for anything (or, at least, anything touch-type-y.) They're there for compatibility with the few non-HIG apps that demand them (and now for Bootcamp), but mostly they've been repurposed into controls for very deliberate system actions (like summoning Expose or advancing a track on your music player) that you wish to trigger far less often than you want to type an @ symbol.
Really? Why?

Most churches take care of homeless and the helpless and help members of their congregation (in whatever situation, including bereavement).

In the USA, a lot of the top tier universities were started by churches. Surely this isn’t a bad thing? AFAIK, almost 30% of hospitals in the USA are owned by the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church (which receives most of its money from abroad) basically built the education and healthcare system of Lesotho (as an example).

Saying that they aren’t charities just because you have an irrational hatred towards churches isn’t a reason. If you want an echo chamber for religion bashing, you should maybe try www.reddit.com/r/atheism.
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Hi there. Just FYI, I'm reading this if you have any questions. Peldi
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Hi ramanujan, thanks for the kind words.

Try the Desktop version for more keyboard shortcut support: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download

Browsers "eat" so many key combinations :(
because the people working there are smart and ambitious? come now, it takes a lot more than that to make a google.
> The stereotypical example is wars in the names of deities.

Another stereotypical example is oppression and murder in the name of state atheism.

> specifically the anti-atheists

I've never met an anti-atheist. Yet social sites such as this or reddit.com seems filled with militant foaming-around-the-mouth atheists.
I sincerely hope that the reddit trend doesn’t spread to ycnews.
The other service that does something like this is rapleaf.com:

http://www.rapleaf.com/downloads/sample_free_screening_repor...

I'm not very trusting of them after that scam email thing they did a while back (basically linked all your social accounts together with your email, and then emailed you and told you someone was checking up on you, and of course you were alarmed that the account for Friendster was linked to Flickr and all your other services).

I'd be loath to give rapleaf a bulk upload of data, as I wouldn't trust them not to resell the email addresses. Still, I could see how the information could be useful (e.g. for advertising buys) even if only presented in aggregate.
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In the UK, I'm sure the Data Protection Act will kick in. It doesn't prohibit you from storing personally identifying data, but it puts restrictions on what you can do with it and how to interact with it.

IANAL, so take this comment as a simple "be careful with the law" that applies to where you operate.