skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, quality of code is a huge concern for me which is why I always have a growth plan: if a certain project takes off, I will quickly hire another proven full-time programmer to recode or completely understand the project.

I also am not a huge fan of working with offshore companies. There is enough friction already in talking remotely. I don't like another layer of management in between developers. Though for bigger projects, you need a project manager of some sort.
Damn, I should have thought of "diff unsaved with what is on disk" a long time ago.
Guitar Hero without a guitar
Chinese economy overtakes Japan
Renminbi set to replace US dollar for trade in Asia Pacific
1) Think outside the box

2) Maximize potential

3) Push the envelop

4) Keep your eye on the ball

5) Always wear a condom
A lot of it is also expectation control. I am always mentally ready for a programmer to bail out on a project. New folks who try outsourcing often give up after their first or second failed attempt. There's no secret - even after years of doing this, I pick the wrong guy every now and then.

Few days ago I made a full-time offer to a php programmer in India after extensive interviewing. Finally, I sent the contract. He went missing since getting the contract. Not a huge surprise - he probably used it to get a better offer at another company. I just went down the list to the next candidates.
worked for me, I got 51 mpg drafting an SUV on a 400 mile trip. In a car that usually gets 24mpg highway.

I wasn't even on their bumper, like 2 car lengths behind.
Put another way, are there situations where you can have boatloads of traffic and not make enough to pay for the bandwidth? Do eyeballs really mean all that much every time?

Bandwidth is really cheap, so even the worst monetization can cover a $10/month shared hosting account. But that still doesn't mean its worth your time.

For example, I used to own FakePosters.com (not affiliated with the current owners). It started as an SEO experiment, but the traffic grew to several million uniques a month with very little work on my end (StumbleUpon can push way more traffic than most people realize).

Sounds great, but unfortunately these type of visitors just don't click on ads. The site easily covered its $10/month shared hosting bill, and made about $150/month at its peak, but 1500 bucks a year is hardly worth the time it took to run, not to mention the dubious legality of posting photos you don't own a clear copyright on. So I closed the site after 1 year and sold the domain off for $1k. I'm happy with the way it worked out, but I don't plan on a repeat performance.

So if I were you, I'd move to cheap shared hosting and move on. 100k hits is nothing your ISP should be complaining about.
I have a directory off the root FS for code I own, a directory off the root for each other IP holder and each person's code goes in their own directory.
Interesting. What exactly do they do under "SMO" umbrella?
Stupid TC post.
Soydebarrio.com
Sounds like a feature I'd pay not to have.
Query DNS via a RESTful HTTP interface
Very cool. It even supports JSONP. Here's a tiny page I threw together to lookup domains: http://tlrobinson.net/misc/domaincheck.html
This is the kind of event that sets your credibility as a business-friendly country back ten, twenty years. How far does the rabbit hole go in Russia? All the way to the other side of the earth, apparently. Disgusting.
Style over substance? Another reason down-voting is a disgrace for this website and should have stayed removed.
Especially after Sousaphone Hero had sluggish sales ( http://www.theonion.com/content/news/activision_reports_slug... )
Best iPhone App
~/gh/ is where I throw all my GitHub clones.

~/svn/ is where I throw my SVN checkouts (sometimes google code stuff, but mainly just python trunk until it gets fully hg'd)

~/scratch/ is where I create subdirectories for my quick-and-dirty scripts, or if I need to `cat` something somewhere real quickly.
as a musician, i would go to your site... take one look at how little you value giving me info about your service and leave.

compare your first page to http://www.tunecore.com/
you need a better designer. too chaotic in the front page; too many different fonts, sizes; and the browsing flow is not smooth.
"I make about $12k a month, which is not very much in the global scale of things, but it's fine."

I'm sorry, what?
I'm paying $30 a month for 50GB. If I understand you, it sounds like I should be shopping around for better hosting.
SpriteMe?
All I'm taking from this is that people often misapply shallow knowledge of logical fallacies.

Look, not all reasoning is equally good, and the fact that no essay is a mathematical proof doesn't mean that we shouldn't point out problems in reasoning. If someone sees mysterious lights in the sky and thinks that it was aliens, that's not entirely invalid -- but because of a false dichotomy and confirmation bias, the assumed probability of the lights being aliens got exaggerated.

tl;dr version: fallacious reasoning should be guarded against not because it automatically destroys any argument containing it, but because it skews our estimates of probability.
>(p.s. i don’t use spell check…deal with it)

PS, I flagged your story about when you decided to "by" some chocolate and then "through" it away...deal with it.
If you believe this could be the future, there seems to be a business in creating the routing/scheduling algorithms for where/when planes should meet up to fly in formation.
"After a while, however, the feeling disappears. Seeing your daily revenue go from $1000 to $2000 starts to mean nothing. It's all just business. That's no longer where the excitement is."

Not true at all. It never gets old watching the average daily profit rise.
I'm one of the people to blame. I came here less than a year ago after someone recommended this site as a smarter alternative to reddit. I haven't mentioned it on reddit because I don't want it to be dumbed down, but inevitably, non-programmers like me will shift the content away from hacking, because we're only going to upvote links that we understand... which will make the site more attractive to non-hackers, and so on.
~/code
~/code/${company_or_topical}
~/code/${company_or_topical}/${project}

Where company or topical are things like 'cloudkick', 'asf' or 'personal'. (I guess you could say, its "who owns the IP").

Some of these subdirectories are actually symlinks to encrypted DMGs, again depending on who owns the IP.

Project is the top level checkout of the projects.. My 'asf' (aka Apache Software Foundation) directory contains 84 project level checkouts.

I also keep a ~/work/temp directory full of random source tarballs if I need to look at how something works. Currently contains glibc, python 2.6 & 3.1, dojo, and about 30 other open source projects, normally ones I'm not normally involved in patching, but often run into... difficulties with. Nothing resolves bad documentation quicker than looking at the source code...

I tend to nuke temp once every 6 months.
It's (relatively) easy to write a GUI that puts all the information in the machine "at your finger tips".

What hard and requires GUI designers as well as programmers, is writing a GUI that puts the relevant information at the users finger tips in a way that's understandable, that users can easily take-in.

Relevant, relevant, relevant! Understandable, understandable, understandable!

These are just two words but implementing them is a hard, cross-discipline problem. What's telling is these consideration often don't even enter programmer's discussions about GUIs.
I am a blind cave fish (evolution vs. intelligent design)
Ask HN: How to setup scaled-down Craigslist for my struggling rural area?
My hometown is a small city in north Georgia; less than 15,000 people or so. There isn't even a section of Craigslist for the surrounding area. I'm in town from Boston for a month or so, and while I'm here, it was recommended to me ( http://ask.metafilter.com/141621/How-to-help-rural-hometown-friends-survive-in-this-economy ) I setup a local version of Craigslist.

Do any HNers know of a white-label platform suited for this kind of purpose? I'd like to keep it simple; especially for getting a community started, there won't be enough volume of posts to fill up all the sub-sections Craigslist has, and thus make it worth checking them out. Community events, jobs, and a marketplace of some sort would probably be the basic sections needed.
You can turn the LED off.
Certainly being a web entrepreneur is considered "not following the herd", but within the "not following the herd" there is also two paths, and one is indeed another herd. I love his philosophy, do not follow the herd. Do your own thing.
because it skews our estimates of probability is based on a group understanding of the situation applied through many filters and not by some appeal to universal tenets of logic. Each of these fallacies carry subjective and conditional baggage not understood by many commenters.

If you got that, then you don't need the article. I'm just not sure from your reply if you got it.
Some of these are so unusual.. rush2112?
"Q: Who created SpriteMe? A: SpriteMe was created by Steve Souders" - http://spriteme.org/faq.php

Passes the @google.com test, though as with other projects, not clear the level of Google affiliation.
Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" is worth reading. I used to laugh at it, but I could have used it before going to college.

Of course, there is the irony of having to read it. Plop down at a local Barnes and Noble or Borders and read the introduction. If they don't have a copy have them order it for you. There's no requirement to buy.
While I agree about your points I still maintain that a couple of courses in data structures and algorithms is a very good investment of your time.

In data structures you learn how to properly use a data-type. You learn how to implement a hash and a list. That is knowledge that is very valuable when programing high level stuff later on.

In algorithms you learn how to construct loops and programs that run faster than they would otherwise. For instance, think about how much faster it is to search for something in a sorted list than in a unsorted list (its log vs exp if its a nested search).

Processor architecture because you want to know where those bits go, if you dont, how are you ever to truly understand pointers, variables and data structures?

Your life will be soo much easier with these fundamentals in Computer Science in regards of scalability, performance and even user design. It's not for everyone and you can certainly do without it. But what you're advocating is basically "luck". Not everyone will write plentyoffish or twitter.
Agree. OOP is great for packaging libraries, but when it comes to software architecture it's way too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

One common mistake, which I don't think is emphasized enough, is that modeling the problem and modeling the software are not the same thing. The problem can have a "User" actor, but this doesn't mean at all that the software should also have a User class. And yet you see User classes far too often.
"...mess with tons of copying and pasting."

I call this "ransom note programming." http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note Nasty stuff, not even enough pride in their work to run an autoindent program on it.
Weather the Star Wars way...
In all seriousness, I'm surprised 'jesus' isn't on the list. I've known a ton of people who use it (or some form) as their password.
I'm sure this will be the victim of takedown request shortly, so enjoy it while you can!
"this is Techcrunch"

There's your answer!
Hmm i see. A quick search on google tells me that you need 100 points to downvote. I only have 11 :(

Something to aspire too I guess.

I wish there were more search/filter functionality. It would be interesting to filter submissions by posters who meet certain criteria (points, trending info, etc.)
What is his business? I can't find a link anywhere...
You have a fair point... however I never regretted that my early programming was mostly algorithms and data structures. I think that's a ceiling most self-taught programmers find hard to pass. Everything else can be learned with a google... but if you don't have an algorithmic mind relatively simple problem are show stoppers. Stuff like implementing a cache or understanding why sql subqueries suck so much cpu time are pretty straightforward - but I don't want to think how I would approach them without those first years of sorting and graphs.
I dont want to start a flamewar regarding PHP/OO but I must say that I disagree. There are some things that isnt very well implemented in PHP but in the OO aspect of the language it has most of the needed constructs and if you stay away from the obvious pitfalls its "good enough".

If you value time / fun over code/data integrity at all time PHP is a excellent choice for producing web services. If you are writing a control system for a airplane I would not recommend it.
That's about what one can make doing contract work, assuming you're good and reliable and get a bit of referral and repeat business happening.

But, the point of starting a company is usually to do better than contracting, eventually. You trade current comfort for a steadily rising income that, hopefully, some day far surpasses what you could make doing contract work, or working for a major corporation, and most importantly does not scale based on the number of hours you can work, but instead scales on how effectively you build your organization.

With taxes, health insurance, retirement savings, having a place big enough to work out of, etc. $12k/month is comfortable, but not particularly wealthy. It's a modest goal by most startup founders ("entrepreneurs") standards, I would think. I think most tech startup founders are at least looking for "fuck you" money, which is somewhere in the millions for most people. It'd take ~10 years at $12k/month to reach multiple millions.

So, yes, $12k/month isn't very much for the audience he's speaking to, though it's certainly respectable.
Well... it was a disaster in the sense that it caused a row and meant they had to switch versioning systems.
Ask HN: New Year resolutions and programming/coding projects
It's New Year again. I'm trying to come up with a list of programming-related projects for the next year as a part of my list of things-to-do-for-next-year. Do you have any programming/hacking ideas (even something like "Learn Haskell") that you want to pursue for next year? Please share!
Wow. In my experience LHR security is among the worst (as in most annoying) I've experienced Europe. If they are far above the people at US airports I feel sorry for anyone having to fly in the US. For what it's worth I've found the Swiss and Dutch to be the best, followed by the Germans.
Semyon Dukach: Non-profit Profiteering
Since nobody mentioned yet... lisp is a great language to learn just to expand your horizons. Don't expect to actually develop websites in it (though clojure might be a good bet for more complex web apps), but it _will_ make you a better programmer.
I completely agree with him. I'm a bemani fan in general and like Beatmania IIDX quite a bit. A friend of mine bought DJ Hero and was eager to show it to me. I was confused playing it for the first 10 minutes or so. Awkward playing it for the first hour or so. I figured it out, but the disconnect is certainly there.

Beatmania (especially IIDX) offers all the flair and style of DJ'ing without that disconnect. It's a really simple game conceptually (in fact, Guitar Hero is almost the exact same game). IIDX has been massively successful (granted, in Japan only). Had Konami tried to make Beatmania like actual DJ'ing, it would have flopped too (and since it was literally the first ever music game, that would have been an interesting alternate history).
Folks are different.

I find I have to make myself care about those numbers. I tend to fall into a comfort zone, where my brain has decided, "Yes, we have enough money coming in to keep us in food and houses, so we're OK. Think about more important things, now." I've made myself stop dealing directly with our technology lately, and begun to focus more on the money side of things. I've only recently started doing regular bookkeeping and monthly revenue reports and such. And, it is satisfying to watch the numbers increase, but it's not as satisfying as building something new, to me.
I think Accordion Hero did okay, though: http://www.phobe.com/sfi/accordion.html
The Arrogant VC: Why VCs are disliked by entrepreneurs
There is a few Wordpress plugins that turn it into a simple classified site that work well.

http://classifiedstheme.com/
http://wpclassipress.com/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-classified/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/another-wordpress-classi...
Dynamic pricing for digital goods
Ning.com (YC alumnus) offers templates for this kind of thing - you can start with a CL lookalike and remove a bunch of sections to simplify. You could consult local businesses and ask them to participate (free), maybe print up some window stickers or do a press release for your local paper, if you have one.

I don't think it's too hard to set up your own domain and transfer it, there's a 'powered by ning' option or similar if you want to host offsite, as I recall.
He ended by implying he still has his day job. If I read that correctly, that means $12K above his salary and benefits, and with only part time effort.
Right...that does make a difference, doesn't it?

So, yeah, I reckon $12k/month for part-time effort is awesome.
"niche sites" according to his twitter.
The publishers are going to lose this one, and probably disappear as an industry. They truly have no leverage. What can they offer to authors? Editors? "I'll hire one", says the author. Advertising? "You make me pay for that anyway", says the author, "and there's the web, and without paper and the associated payola, advertising will be much cheaper." The sensual experience of a physical book? "That doesn't put food on my table", says the author.
> The economy then proceeded to have the longest expansion in American history thus disproving all Republican tax-cut theories, though no one seems to have told them.
reply

You use "disprove" in a very odd way.

No one has said that tax increases necessarily kill economic growth. The claim is that tax increases hurt economic growth.

A dollar taxed (or borrowed) and spent by govt accomplishes something. A dollar left in the private sector accomplishes something else. Do you really think that the average govt spending is more valuable than the average private spending?
2112 is the name of a Rush album.
The minimum password length is 6 characters, so "jesus" would be too short.
> Look, I used to literally sit around in my office at MIT years ago and
fuss at people who said Lisp Machines were everything. (I used and liked
Lisp Machines but I myself didn't think they were what they were because
of the hardware--they were what they were because of the software and
the ideas behind them.) I used to ask people "What's an impossible thing
to do? I'm looking for something to do this afternoon in Teco that people
say can only do on Lisp Machines." People said Zmail. I wrote the
approximate equivalent in Teco--filters, and all that. They wanted a
filter menu. I wrote that in Teco. They wanted mouse handling. (That
was tough because PDP10's didn't have mice, but I used my imagination a
little and arranged a mouse protocol from Lisp Machines so you could telnet to the teco-based Emacs and click on my filter menus.) They wanted Zmail init files. I wrote a Lisp compiler in Teco so that I could use
people's Zmail init files unmodified. It was about 20K words of Teco
code, btw. Code was smaller back then... sigh.

He wrote all that in TECO? What is wrong with this man?
I'm not an aerospace expert, but it seems to me that higher speeds would allow for larger draft envelopes. Since this would be pivotally necessary to study I'm sure the scientists spearheading this opinion have.

Personal experience suggests that you don't need to be so close to semis and while I love the Mythbusters' attitude to just go ahead and test things they are a far cry from scientific data.
Very nice. Someone who outsources all his work to poorer parts of the world boasting about judging people by the country they come from. Sounds just a little bit like picking your new "employees" at a slave market.
Everything I'm currently working on:

~/Projects

Older stuff, or projects on hold:

~/Projects/ARCHIVE
Of course, in order for this to work, your HTTP client starts by doing a DNS lookup for dig.jsondns.org...
The guy wants to build complicated websites, not be a hacker snob, so I'm giving him the honest truth and getting modded down for it.

"While I agree about your points I still maintain that a couple of courses in data structures and algorithms is a very good investment of your time."

Maybe a good investment of your time, but not if you are going to just be building websites, that would not be a good investment, the returns on that investment would be small.

"In algorithms you learn how to construct loops and programs that run faster than they would otherwise. For instance, think about how much faster it is to search for something in a sorted list than in a unsorted list (its log vs exp if its a nested search)."

Do you even do any practical web programming? Unless you are hitting a amazing load on your server this would never come up. Also, if you are digging into these details you better have a good reason because there a good chance of creating bugs or overloading your web box. However if you keep it basic, and just scale horizontally, which you don't seem to understand web hosts can do, its a much better use of resources.

"Processor architecture because you want to know where those bits go, if you dont, how are you ever to truly understand pointers, variables and data structures?"

I've been in web development and scripting for 15 years, can you show me where these "bits" are, I must have misplaced them.
Hi, I also live in Romania.

> relatively big web company in Romania

Little quiz ... what should set your alarm on? The "big" size of that "web company" or its location?

For me it's a no-brainer ... simply because for a consulting company to scale to that "big" factor ... you need to hire a lot of third-rate, cheap code-monkeys ... that's business 101 ;)

Second of all ... your company should've asked for a portfolio of the actual developers that ended up working for you, simply because the quality of the employees varies greatly even in well-respected organizations.

Or was there some kind of manager acting as a proxy between you and those doing the actual work?

And out of curiosity, in your country there aren't any "big software companies" that are doing consulting work of dubious quality?

This seems to me that it was more a problem with your management. Blaming it on "outsourcing" is not really accurate.

BTW ... in my small company that does consulting work, we aren't taking outsourced projects very often. We don't do it simply because those kind of clients that would outsource to us are of very poor quality, leading to poor communications, unmet deadlines, unmet payments and generally disastrous results.
Does your hometown have a local newspaper with a classified section? That might be a good place to see where the needs are and what sections will be most useful for your community specifically.

Get something up and running fast... a modified blog as simonk suggested might be a good way to get it up quickly. Craigslist started as a mailing list of sorts among friends.