skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At my job, at least (research at a major government contractor) we all have to undergo annual counterintelligence training. And that's for me, the intern who never leaves the country.

Among other things in the training is the assertion that multiple employees are currently being targeted for espionage and at least a few employees are most likely working for foreign governments. They also warn about accepting gifts and give examples of "spooky" things, like random strangers befriending workers on foreign travel only to reveal that they know way too much about that person.

Training is there in big corporations, maybe not in startups.
Patrick, I love you mate.

And I'm with you by the way. Kindle is changing the way I read. I'm not sure if I like it or not - I'm jumping around a lot more, because I don't have to worry about finishing a book to take off the large stack of books I'm traveling with. So I'm reading a little history, a little philosophy, a little fiction, and so on.

Anyways, while we're on the topic, may I recommend Gutenberg.org if you haven't already thoroughly perused it?

Here's a few you might like.

Their top 100:

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/731

Japanese literature including Genji Monogatari:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19264

Complete Sherlock Holmes:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1661

On War:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1946

All of Shakespeare:

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/s#a65

Thus Spake Zarathustra:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1998

Oh my, Gutenberg is just awesome. That's just the beginning of what I got. If you like literature, definitely try out Genji. If you haven't read On War, you simply must check it out - it teaches you how to think. At least read the first 20 pages, it's that valuable. Very incredible even if you don't care about history or military science, it's definitely been more valuable to me than Sun Tzu, and a lot of people like him.

As for Nietzsche... he's an odd duck, isn't he? Anyway, check out Zarathustra, you'll either love it or hate or both. I find myself disagreeing with quite a lot of it, but then occasionally he explains himself so completely perfectly and explains reality so succinctly and accurately. The good parts of Zarathustra are like Individualism Crack, it's a huge high reading and getting excited at.

There's lots more on Gutenberg, too! Almost everything out of print that's well known. I got 53 books from Gutenberg the day I got my Kindle so there's quite a lot I haven't gone through yet. Got copies of a lot of the foundational science texts to skim later for inspiration, etc. Really great stuff, highly recommend you spend some time on Gutenberg if you're the voracious reader.
Indeed this is an issue, perhaps of the "90% of everything is crud" type. But it does suggest what you should look for and try to create, groups and organizations where enough of the people are putting in the effort. We don't expect them to be common---after all success isn't as common as we'd like---but it is something to aspire to.
The question of which is ultimately better for the consumer is non-trivial to my mind. Not to mention that, because publishers tie author royalties to the physical cost of production, the authors stand to lose a lot in this struggle.
Agile: Using Smilies to Reduce Story Cycle Time
The person being interviewed was obviously a non-technical person who was trying to provide information as he/she understood. It's easy to just take every statement literally and proclaim the person an idiot, but it's almost as easy to translate these statements into their (obvious) accurate equivalents and get some value from this interview. I don't understand the point of the former approach.
It's good to point out the negatives to freelancing. I just started freelancing last month after being laid off, and there are definitely positives and negatives. While I do have a much more relaxed schedule and I do make more money, it sucks not having much work/life separation.

For instance, last week I had a few friends over for some beers and I had to work the whole time because the client had an important demo the night before. Because of the rate I was getting, I had to choose between $X/hr and hanging out with my friends. Sadly, the $X/hr won.

It is also hard to convince my Fiancee that I need to carve out 8 hours a day to do work. Yes, I'm at home all the time. Yes, I physically can go visit her mother today. However, I need time to work, and if I'm running errands all day there isn't time to ever get work done. It's hard to strike this balance and to stay hard line on "When my office door is closed, pretend I'm downtown and at work."

Overall, though, I prefer freelancing. After awhile I'm sure the lack of structure, instability and lack of benefits will cause me to jump to another full-time gig. Until then, I'm happy doing what I'm doing.
Fair warning: not my usual software marketing beat, at all. I saw all the Amazon/Macmillan flap today and wanted to chime in in more depth than a HN-friendly comment.
I think it's worth insisting on that too.

I agree, I was largely hoping to avoid the knee-jerk anti-Apple-fanboy reaction a lot of people have. Plus, there's no reason they can't come up with a phenomenal OS... it just looks like they're going about it ass-backwards.
This is a really, really useful app. Helps me bounce back wife's questions when strange "chicks" follow me on Twitter out of nowhere. Of course, they're bots!

I wonder where you got the background.
MacMillan doesn't "need" $12 to $15 to make money

Actually, you'd be surprised.

The author's cut is a royalty based on the suggested retail price, which for a hardback offering would be 10-15% of $24, or for a first ebook at $15 would be 25-30% of $15.

The production cost of an ebook is non-zero; there's a lot of editing, copy-editing, proofreading, typesetting that goes into it, not to mention commissioning cover art (arguably obsolescent) and other marketing activities. Rule of thumb is $7000-$20,000 for a book, which must be recouped somehow. Typical book sales are much lower than most folks imagine -- midlist hardcover SF novels sell 3000-8000 copies at $24 discounted to $16, paperbacks sell 15-30,000 copies at $8 discounted to $6 (but with a hideous level of wastage such that typically 20-50% of the print run will be pulped due to not selling within 90 days).

Suppose the $15 ebook somehow sells as many copies as the $16 (after discont) hardcover. The iBook cut is 30%, leaving $10. The author's cut is another 30% of $15, leaving $5 for the publisher. They then have to defray $7-20K of production costs before they're into profit; an expensively produced book that sells for $15 but only moves 4K copies is thus a loss.

You want to know the grisly truth? Right now, ebook sales are lucky to make it into three digits. Even Baen, who are Doing It Right, are happy to shift 4000 ebooks at $6 each.

And Amazon isn't taking only 30% of the cover price: they're wanting 30% with a cap of $10, and they get to set the retail price, or 70% of retail price (current books).

Let me say it again: in publishing, about 70% of the revenue stream is soaked up by rent-seeking intermediaries between author/publisher and reader.
Software in dangerous places
Monarch butterflies "see" magnetic fields
Specifically, the big point I thought interesting: at the moment ebooks seem to have a pretty small demand which falls off fast, so they sell more like limited editions than mass-market. This might make it difficult to justify releasing to ebook without higher prices.

(I don't have a strong opinion on who's right or wrong here, as I can argue it from both sides. But I'll admit I generally sympathize more with authors than anyone on this, and they seem to have the least amount of control in the publishing process.)
I had to think about this thread when today I, oddly enough, stumbled over not 1 but 2 blog posts regarding water faucets and taps:
http://mattmorphett.blogspot.com/2009/01/sometimes-there-is-...
http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/usability-taps-lessons-we... (via http://www.uselog.com/2009/05/checklists-and-water-taps-for-...)
Always makes me smile when people apologize for using Microsoft when they (in theory at least) could have used someone else. (this is general, nothing personal intended ximeng)
Get a co-founder
I've seen even the currently-crappy tablets in heavy use in the medical field, I'd bet largely for signatures (I've signed on 5 separate tablet PCs at different locations, over several years). They're also capable of being carried around and used while walking.

That said, they are still crappy, and most require a powered pen (won't anybody learn from Wacom? Or did they somehow gain a ubiquitous patent, which the patent office isn't supposed to allow?). At the end of the day, though, they're just Windows with a couple marginally-intelligent tablet-oriented applications (ie, big buttons). Certainly not optimal.
Isn't the graph itself state? I mean, data structures of data structures....but data is state by definition, right?
surprised to see no mention of books on bingo :-)
So you like non-skippable intros better?
I can't tell how the data is collected. Hell, I would have expected as a visitor to the site:

a) explanation where the rating comes from

b) be able to rate stuff myself.

But there you have it. But maybe I'm just too used to the way the AppStore lets users rate + review apps.
A cited subset "emphasize that the people part of the process is just as important as the technical part", and I'd argue "1. Be a Developer" does as well.

In that case, while in and of itself it's technical, it's the minimum required to work well with developers and is a prerequisite for doing part "10. Proximity breeds understanding" well. It also lets you effectively "3. Ease their pain", since you understand it at some level.

A lot of it comes down to respect and what falls out of that. It's clear the author respects everyone in the process and that goes a long way towards making the disparate functions and people cohere.

I think I'd like to work for this guy: he'd let me hunker down on "engine" work as I prefer most of the time, would welcome the times I want to do HTML/AJAX GUI work, and be very happy about my focus on the big picture, requirements, hand off to QA and production, etc. etc. etc.
My point with the parenthetical note is that Amazon is not acting in a consistent manner. With music, they trumpeted the virtues of going DRM-free and allowing for dynamic pricing, while with books, they're sticking to DRM and not allowing dynamic pricing.

As for price-fixing, if there were multiple vendors for e-books on Kindle readers, then yes, I would agree that Amazon is not at all price-fixing. Since they are, however, the sole provider of e-books for the Kindle (more or less-- you can convert other formats to Mobipocket with mixed results, and the Kindle 2 and DX versions have limited PDF support), their insistence on uniform e-book prices can reasonably be seen as a kind of price fixing. This is part of why I opined over at Chad Orzel's blog (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/the_amazon_kerfuf...) that an upshot of this falling-out should be that in order to keep their platform viable, Amazon should drop DRM and support ePub or some other standard format. If they followed their own example of Amazon MP3, then they really would be consumer advocates by taking issue with Macmillan.
The best way to handle any situation is by laughter. If you can find humor in even the craziest of situations, then you can handle anything.

Best of luck to my fellow entrepreneurs who are also in the trenches.
Tinkering Forever
Pretty good list but I think the author contradicts the notion and importance of iteration. No design doc and no code base is free from changes and improvements, particularly in startups. If you can't deal with changes, you probably should go work for an enterprise company where you spend half your time blowing hot air across the table. You can't just write once and leave it be, the problem with design mockups and wireframes is that they don't really encapsulate the element of interactivity, and certainly lack customer feedback.

I also think designers and developers are very much alike even though we often bang heads. It's a creative process to write code, and I think a lot of people outside the circle don't appreciate how mentally draining "creation" really is.
China Battles the Information Barbarians
I'm not sure who's making the outlandish claims here.

I haven't programmed Flash in my life, but I can't say I've had Flash crash on me more often than, say, once a few months. Definitely not often enough that I notice it as a major annoyance, on either Mac or Windows.

Now, Flash is annoying for other reasons, but crashing isn't one -- for me.
Nanotube dye makes wearable batteries
The overall point the post you replied to was trying to make, it seems to me, was that it's not about what bad things you can or can't do in a language, it's about whether the language encourages or facilitates bad habits. You can muck about with pointers in Haskell, but it's made very obvious - by the community, by the documentation, by the typesystem - that you're doing something potentially unsafe and risky. Similarly, though perhaps a little less so, with Python etc.

As has been said before, it's not important what a language makes possible, so much as what it makes easy -- and, I'd like to add, what it makes hard.
Amazon allows publishers to make their books DRM free now.

It's the publisher's choice, so blame them, not Amazon.
> I thought that all Amazon was saying was "You know the $10-15 range you wanted to price eBooks at? You can't do that."

What do you mean by "all Amazon was saying"? That's the crux of the issue: whether publishers will allow themselves to be told by Amazon that they cannot sell over a certain price in their market, or whether they will be allowed to sell at whatever prices they choose.

It's a fundamental question about how the online book market, so dominated by Amazon, will work.

Your second paragraph doesn't have a clear question; what exactly do you want to understand? I'll try anyway:

The marginal cost of producing eBooks doesn't really effect the price-fixing problem. The OP's point is that publishers need the flexibility to try out pricing schemes on the Amazon marketplace to discover what works, but Amazon won't let them. Ultimately, he claims, this will lead to worse results for the consumer because Amazon will be an inefficient marketplace due to the inability of the publishers to recoup costs on books with high initial prices which they can then follow with low prices later.
How and why do sites like this one disable zooming on the iPhone? It really grinds my gears!
Facebook's two faces
Actually, as I think about this a little more, the logical conclusion of Amazon's efforts to control publishing is more Google-like than Apple-like, where an author will suddenly find his "self" published book removed from the Amazon store, and no more indication as to why than a vague reference to Terms and Conditions.
The Simplicity Test: A Simple Policy Guide for Job Growth
Meetup this week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088965
It would be interesting to take a poll of ms shareholders to see if a majority want the dividend raised. It would be a great test to tell how broken corporate governemxe really is.
Strictly, both of these are possible. Technically, it's well known that type systems cannot be perfect in the sense of consistency and finding all "good" programs. Therefore, socially, it's known that there are bad neighborhoods like Foreign, Typeable, and System.IO.Unsafe where one has to be extremely careful while playing around.

So, sure, you make a great, fun technical point, but at the same time Haskell as a language and a community has very, very carefully worked to make sure people don't make segfaults — actually, they tried to make sure people don't even write ugly code with polluted namespaces and odd global state.

Perl, C, Java just haven't (as much).
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069629
Intel pays me dividends
Sorry about all the duplicated replies about the meetup this week. For some reason the announcement of the actual meetup never got up-voted and not very many people saw it.
CelebrateHN: 9:39am PST, front page is iPad free
It has taken about 120 hours, but at last the front page does not contain the word "iPad". Life goes on!

(Whatever you do, do not upvote this submission.)
yes, but you don't modify it in this case.
I should add that the client here is a non technical person. He basically has a decent idea, and some money to get it going.
If you can and this continues to be a problem find a small office nearby. Just a single room with a door that you can lock would be enough.

Clarity helps a lot too, setting a simple rule that will not be broken (Monday through Friday, from 8:30 am to 17:30 pm I'm at work, and not available, sorry), goes a long way to forestalling such push-and-pull situations.

Being unclear can be a source of great frustration, to both parties.

edit: one thing you could do that might help to greasing the wheels a bit is to make sure you lunch together on workdays.
I'm a junior/CS major at Wesleyan University looking for a paid internship in the northeast.

My current big project is in Rails, but I'd be happy to be doing pretty much any startup-related development/UI design. (I also know Python/Java well, and I've done work in Haskell, Scala, and a lot of other things.)

samdk.com

mail name: sam, domain: defabbiakane.com
Ask HN: Python Development Environment
I have been programming in python for a few months now in a simple text based interpretor. I want to move to a more robust development environment. The first one that came up in my search is Eclipse.

I am looking for something with module and library management, code auto correction, debugging tools,; moving toward continuous deployment and automated build testing. Any recommendations/reviews from the HN network?
As Cory Doctrow points out, Amazon has not revealed exactly what they mean by DRM-free. Moreover, the difference is not labelled on the Kindle store for consumers to see. Thus, while it is absolutely true that the publishers deserve blame in this case, my point is that Amazon is not helping to kill DRM and make their platform open to non-Amazon sellers. Of course, the big difference between this and the Amazon MP3 store cases is that with the Kindle, Amazon makes the device.
Lojban - a logical (human) language
JQuery tools, The missing UI library for the Web
How to Get Free Xbox Live Gift Cards
Yes. I also like intros that resize the window, fire off two or three Orbitz pop-unders, and launch a fake Windows 7 antivirus checker on my OSX Safari browser when I try to close it.
Amen. (Although this will never happen).

I have a simple S Corporation setup in Washington. I have to deal with:

- City government (license & tax)

- County government (property tax)

- State government (license, 3 different taxes)

- Federal government (payroll, etc)

This is for a one-man corporation in a state without state taxes. The amount of paperwork and agencies is a total time-sink. Outsourcing it cheap for a small business either (need more volume to amortize the cost).

Sadly, I don't see simplification happening in politics anytime soon. Not only does it require cooperation between different levels of government, it would create fewer loopholes for businesses.

It's the same reason we'll never see a simple flat tax for personal taxes. Makes it too difficult to hide all the political favors.
Take a look at Parsec sometime.

Sure, you can do parsers in any language, but the monadic/combinator structure is a little bit eccentric and a lot amazing.
Another brilliant idea that makes you cry with the impossibility of anyone ever doing it.
iPad = iBad? Have they been getting slogan advice from PETA or something?
I think many people are missing the fact that Apple saying Google's "Don't be evil" is bullshit does not imply that Apple claims they aren't being evil.

That is a fallacy.
Web Development Tutorials You Should Have Read in January 2010
intellij or eclipse.

Intellij has a free trial for 30 days, that way you can see if going for 'closed source' vs open source is worth it.
Fully agreed. I just shut down my S-Corporation because the tax savings weren't worth the extra hassle of all the paperwork and complexity.
I love your books, but "rent-seeking intermediaries" is a pretty insulting way to refer to the people that bring your words to me, isn't it? You've written enough economic reality into your work that I know you realize those truck drivers and store clerks are performing necessary work, and the "rent-seeking" is necessary so that those people get paid for their work.

And I know you must know this fact too- Ebook prices are going to come down, dramatically. It's going to happen, due to market forces. Publishers are going to have to adapt. There's not going to be a choice. They can lament. They can complain. That's understandable. I would too.

It's still going to happen.

Whether or not it's fair, or affordable, or even desirable.

So what's the plan to deal with that?
The article mentions Price Fixing in relation to gas prices, and how fixing the prices caused gas prices to go up due to hoarding.

The gas price fix caused shortages at the pump, not higher prices. Because most rational sellers won't sell something for less than they have to pay for it unless they make it up elsewhere, which most gas stations don't.

And this author is saying the same thing may happen for eBooks. He doesn't think he can make enough money on eBooks to make a living, so many people in his situation may not write as many books, which may lead to the there being less new books in the world.
I can vouch for Twitter-Async.
This is so true.

When I was a teen I started an LLC in MA. It was simple and cost $100.

3 years ago I started another and the price had gone up to $500. For adding a row to a database, $500.

>Like the administration before it, the current administration seems to have no concept of what it takes to start, run and grow a small business. None.

Mitt Romney was governor during this increase in MA. I couldn't believe he would allow such a thing. But then I realized he had no experience starting a small business without millions of dollars in capital from the get go.
You can't distribute any scripting language interpreter (and thus no apps written in a scripting language) via the app store. However there is no reason why you cannot install a scripting language and use it on your own phone if you have the dev tools.
Amen. While I don't always agree with what he says, Cuban is good at making points. Especially from the perspective of making things easier on entrepreneurs, since he started out and just happened to make that big deal to turn him into a billionaire.
Read up on OfBiz, its a very powerful apache project and you might find it useful.
I'm all for simplifying the overhead on companies, but to translate that into creating jobs is a bit of a stretch. If you cut all of the taxes on an existing company they would not simply add jobs to their company. The only way jobs are added is if they're necessary. This usually means an increase in sales/revenue and the need for more resources.

To take a modern example, the recent recession caused companies to go on a spree of job cutting. This wasn't because of any change in tax or overhead. It was the result of lost revenue. Increased revenue causes job increases. Not the efficiencies of overhead.