skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consider your grandfather's old hammer. The one where the head fly off and you have to wedge it back on as best you can. Yes, it will fly off and hit you and bystanders, but the nails generally get in there when it stays on. It's basically as bad as a hammer can be, but a garage, a covered porch, and countless forts have been built with it.

Now consider a robot that, when properly programmed, can build a house from scratch, all by itself. All you need is a team of 5 engineers on standby to program it, and to keep it humming along. It is very hard to figure out how to use the robot to even drive a single nail, but if you know how to use it effectively, and have the entire house planned out in CAD and in every detail, it will just build a house in an afternoon.

It's easier and cheaper to hire carpenters to build a house than to hire the engineers that it takes to babysit the robot. Plus, no construction crew can plan a building down to the tiniest detail before they start, because the ground ends up being too soft, or it turns out that there is a bolder which must be cracked using explosives, or the windows called for in the plans aren't made anymore and the replacements are 3cm narrower, or the insulation is out of spec and a little too thick.

Don't rent the robot, buy a new hammer that isn't broken.
It would be awesome if there were some sort of Trusting-Trust-style "telomeres" encoded into the resultant binary, so that C and C' and C'' would all work identically, but C'''''''''' would suddenly produce different outputs.
As a former journalist, I can say with some authority that the ability to say no does not come easily. Often, "gifts" are passed off as swag, one of the perks of the business, where companies dole out hardware. At no point do they say that the gifts are being given in exchange for a story. But.

This was a kid, someone who hasn't gone to college yet, or begun to learn to look at things that come too easy with a cynical eye.

On occasion, I've had to explain to reporters starting out in the business that gifts received at press conferences etc. need to be viewed with a jaundiced eye. And that the best companies don't hand out their best product as a gift. If they actually want a review done, they'll send in a product to a publication, not an individual. And it is the publication's responsibility to keep track of all items coming in for reviews.

Even if he asked for something, he deserves a second chance, considering his age. The fact that styleguidance.com decided to publish his name for all to see is their call, and I don't agree with it.

And I certainly don't agree with this submission.
In the full knowledge that this opinion will be unpopular: the crime here is not selling coverage. The crime here is selling coverage obviously while being an intern. The media, including Techcrunch, sells coverage as a matter of routine.

Sure, we'd be happy to cover your new gadget, but we'll need an exclusive on that. The exclusive will be worth, at the margin, 50,000 uniques we won't lose to Endgadget (and the attendant link equity we'll get for being first, and possibly mainstream media attention). The CPM for this blog is $10. But $500 in an envelope on the table, that is totally different. That makes us feel like we're selling coverage.
Ditto on selling products/solutions rather than your ability to use certain tools.

For some clients though, it is about the tools. They need an X programmer to extend their app that's written in X. I think part of your problem is your chosen X; PHP is popular, and it's easy to find work, so everybody's doing it. The supply of programmers is rather large, so it's hard to get anyone to pay more. Sure - you're demonstrably better than the average contractor, which is why they're willing to pay you $65 instead of $45.

Learn some other tools. Find something with a higher barrier to entry, but still some demand. Try to be the guy who never says "that's not possible".
Drama and TechCrunch goes hand in hand.
robot -grandpa's hammer. What a flawed analogy.

But just to stick to it, if you are building a house, use carpenters wielding your grandpa's hammer to drive in the nails.

if you need to explore Mars, your illiterate hammer wielding carpenters won't help and you might want that robot and expensive scientists after all.

The whole metaphor is flawed anyway. You argue by metaphorical extremes. Even within the metaphor (this is a wrong way to argue a point), there are plenty of intermediate positions between Grandpa's crusty hammer and terminator style robots. Would you use a power drill and bulldozers or would you use shovels and hammers? (or cudgels and stone tablets?

See? Metaphors can be twisted to argue any view point, even diametrically oppoiste ones. Arguing by metaphor is a logical fallacy (Equivocation iirc) It breaks down very fast and has no legs.
Just to be clear, Clojure (and most lisps) are also dynamically typed and thus allow just the same experimental approach. Clojure and Common Lisp (I can't speak for other lisps, but I think some schemes too - PLT Scheme perhaps?) also have optional Type Hinting that allow the program to run quickly too.
"I doubt one customer in ten will actually play a network game of Doom Classic, but it was interesting working on it."

That may be true. On the other hand, I, for one, am going to become a customer because of the network game option.
damn 30 points in 15 minutes!
PHP 5.2.9 Released
1) How much is "exclusivity" worth? Could you sell the story of your product launch to anyone?

2) Are you really providing much of anything to TC with your exclusive in terms of traffic? They drive traffic to you, not the other way around.
The only commercial company that I know of, but I don't know much, who has explored using one of his CPUs is BMW.

.

If you want to try it out you can use their emulator: http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/cf-intro.htm softsim is an instruction level simulator for GreenArrays chips, using code you compile for ROM and/or RAM, and with provision for adding testbeds to simulate I/O.extend softsim to allow you to define and simulate external peripherals to interact with using I/O pins.
I have to agree with a lot of the other comments, start thinking on a project basis vs. hourly.

I have a friend who runs a small dev shop and has spent the past few months selling a simple Facebook app she built.

She charged a company around $10k for the app and got that rate by explaining how it would benefit their company. ie. Another form of interaction with customers, better brand recognition online, lead generation, etc etc. Apparently it took her about 2 weeks to build and she had to outsource some design work for ~$500. Assuming she worked 80 hours over the 2 weeks, she made roughly $120/hr.

Now, that's really good money, but that hourly number keeps increasing over time because she realized she could resell it to other companies by simply changing the branding and some design elements. She continues to sell it for $10k, but her investment each time is significantly less because the bulk of the work is done. It just costs her a few hours and the price of the design work.

In the past few months I think she's rebranded and sold it to 4 other companies. There are a bunch of factors into calculating the hourly rate for the project, but she essentially made $500/hr for that work.

Think about your work differently and what you offer, sell a product or solution - you won't get your rates up if you make your clients think of you as just another employee.
Exercise for the student -- find the contradiction here:

You consider 'sufficiently powerful' and "doesn't offer easy ways of extending the syntax" to be contradictory. Does that mean you consider only Lisps 'sufficiently powerful'?

Insufficient knowledge is probably why you mistook the
sense of the statement you are replying to by 180 degrees.

Do you mean extending the syntax of Python or Java is easy? Otherwise I'm not sure what the knowledge is you think I'm lacking.
This is what happens when you expect people to work for you for free.
You're making it sound like it's some sort of minor slip-up that happened to get publicized. Say you make a habit of accepting expensive dinners from a source who is interested in you writing about them. Or embellishing a story a little. Or say you even take a MacBook Air from a source at their suggestion. Those are lapses in ethical judgment. Running around repeatedly asking for people to give you stuff so you write about them is just being an outright slimeball.
Unfortunately, your interests are never really aligned.

Ask yourself this question? Who is actually the recruiter's customer? As in, who pays the bills?

That's right, it's the employer. You're not their customer. The employer is. A recruiter's goal is to fill the open positions out there with their candidates. There's a lot of competition for most positions, both from other recruiters and employees who apply independently. So they'd much rather short you as an employee on salary then risk having someone else hired for the position entirely.

As a hiring manager, I was on the other end of this practice. I can't tell you the number of times a recruiter emailed me something like "He says he wants 90, but he'll actually take 80".

If you know the companies you want to work for, don't use a recruiter.
"You're making it sound like it's some sort of minor slip-up that happened to get publicized."

I think his point was (EDIT: I am just clarifying what I think his point was, not endorsing it) not that it was a "minor slipup" but that the person who committed this is a kid and not an adult (17 is a bit borderline but still pretty young)and he is asking for some compassion and discretion. At least that is how I read it.

fwiw, I have no position on the matter but I tend to a (purely subjective) viewpoint he has been punished enough.
Giving in to coercion is hardly call for punishment. If I were Techcrunch, I'd reimburse the cost of whatever they paid.
Exclusivity is apparently worth an embargo.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/23/the-last-has-fallen-the...

As the old saying goes, after that we're just dickering about the price.
Except this has been going on for months, has happened a number of times, and occurs in violation of standards, like robots.txt, that were created to prevent it from happening. I'd expect it from an individual or startup, but not a large company that's been doing spidering for a long time.
Forth inventor Chuck Moore announces 144 core CPU capable of 100 billion ops/sec

80 chars on the nose.
Release that delicious, delicious looking courier tablet.
Depends on the instigator, of course.
This is significant news for one reason - this is the first time in the history of the platform that Games are treated as first class citizens. It would be irresponsible to deny the unique and significant impact games have had. They've been a blessing and a curse, causing some people to rabidly check their farm everyday, and causing others to quit Facebook over the piles of spam.

We will see what happens from here.
Really? This is what happens when you pay interns with awesome experience, rather than cash?
Microsoft's sole, yet-painful solution: a hard-reboot across the board resulting in "Winux".
Arthur Rock video interview - S.V. pioneer (rare)
Thank you. That was way too self-referential for me to follow, as well.
You're selling that as if it were so hard to get experience and get paid at the same time. I know this won't be popular, but Microsoft pays interns more than most people get paid hourly.
Jython is closer to Python's speed than Java's.

Or if you mean Jython with the speed-critical bits written in Java...well, there's always C for that.
There are two sides to this story.

Let me ask this question, because it seems it needs asking:

1) has anybody here ever been approached by other 'writers' who will do a write-up in exchange for goodies ?

2) has anybody here been approached by writers to post links under their HN username ?

The second has definitely happened to me, the first was so oblique that it might be my misunderstanding. But I'm fairly surprised, what's your call, should I out the publication ? The person doing the canvassing ?

I've been wondering about what to do with this.

As for the way this 'kid' (I'm putting that in quotes because if you are smart enough to ask for computers worth quite a bit of money you are smart enough to understand there are consequences if you get caught) has behaved, the other side to that story is those companies that did not get written about because they refused to play ball.

We're not talking about an accident or an oversight here, but at a deliberate attempt at fraud, and not a one-off but part of a pattern.

I don't see even being fired and having to return the goods to his employer who will presumably re-imburse the people that 'paid' for it is a punishment, that leaves him at '0'.

TC is handling this as good as they can after the fact, but before you give someone access to the editorial process don't you at least read them the riot act as to what the consequences will be if they do something like this?

Just like the 'real' newspapers companies like TC wield some power and it is important to make sure that everybody that is in on the process knows exactly where the line is.

If TC did make it clear in advance what is permissible I'm sympathetic to naming the guy, if not then probably not.

The key bit in Mikes post is this:

> on at least one other occasion

So, how often did that happen ? Once ? Twice ? More ??

If more then outing the guy looks reasonable, if it is once or twice then again, probably not.

I'm sympathetic with vaksels gut reaction, but slow down a bit and let's get some more data before making that call.

TC has their opinion, that's fine, we're all adults and reasonably smart cookies here, I'd like to be able to trust what I read is not coloured in any way and what Mike is doing is as much damage control on behalf of TC as it is an exercise in ethics after the fact.

Let's hear him out on how he has posted guidelines about how his writers should behave.

No policy -> TC bad, no matter how they spin it now, Yes policy -> kid gets outed, but only if this happened more than the 2 times that we're sure about.

I think that's fairly reasonable.
Well, as you say, he's not really that much of a kid. And I think filing it under "we all make mistakes" is kind of diminishing it. This isn't shoplifting candy from the corner store for kicks. I just don't think this is the sort of 'mistake' we all make or made.
I'd argue that there is an age factor at play- GCC is older, designed under different (ie, much more stringent with regards to resources) constraints.

GCC also has a perennial problem attracting and managing developers, which LLVM seems to have avoided.
You're claiming it's worth in the neighborhood of $500. If it's actually only worth $5 that's a big difference. No reasonable person believes TC can be bought for $5.

My guess is that exclusivity is more of an ego thing than anything else. Competitive people like to win, and in journalism that means scooping the competition. TC might make just as much money, with or without an exclusive (give or take a few dollars). If true, all you're doing by giving an exclusive is feeding their ego. That's hardly the same as handing over a $2k laptop.
If I were GitHub I think I would have mentioned the cause of outage number 3 after I put the rate limiting fixes in place, which is not the impression I got from the article. It is not hard to write a basic HTTP request spoofer and it sounds like they're still vulnerable.
...how does this make sense? what outside firm was promoted on techcrunch through this news breaking?
Apple prohibits App Store devs from using location-based ads
Wait does this mean that LLVM supports C++ well now? Last time I checked at WWDC, it had great C and Objective-C support, but C++ was hardly there. It would be great if Xcode can add support for all of the awesome refactoring and static analysis that Objective-C can currently do in C++ now!
I have to ask, how is this any different from TechCrunch writing glowing posts about companies that spend many thousands of dollars per month on advertising? Or singing the praises of the lame startups that pay thousands of dollars to annoy people in the "Demo Pit" of TechCrunch 50?

TechCrunch isn't a newspaper, it's a blog, and an overly sensational one at that.
"If you want a language that allows you to express your inner emotions by using your personal pet programming style, this isn't it either."

That would be Lisp. ;-)
Useless bridges are of NEGATIVE value. They use resources (which raises the market price of resources for actual, useful projects), take up funding which comes from tax dollars of firms doing useful work, they need to be maintained, and they eventually need to be decommissioned.

So yes, the average unemployed American watching the grass grow is doing something more productive.
Absolutely right. Especially #1 #2.
Does TechCrunch really do this?
'Please don't post something like "just ask for it" because I just can't believe that it's that easy.'

It's certainly not, but keep in mind _not_ asking for it is 100% sure to stop you getting it. You _do_ have to ask for it before anybody will give it to you, but instead of "just asking" you're going to need to ask and have already demonstrated (or at very least be prepared to justify) why you are worth twice as much as some random PHP/MySQL guy off Craigslist.
I'm pretty sure the intern was Daniel Brusilovsky... he tweeted about "writing the hardest email he's ever had to write" and all his posts are 404'ing on TC.

The tweet of his: http://twitter.com/danielbru/status/8523812779
That's an interesting point. Their OSes, while fairly widely used, are weird relative to just about every other OS in existence.

The sole supplier of anything even close to it is a commercial entity. Getting software that wasn't written for it to run there is a pain. Moving software away from it is also a pain (but it's at least to their advantage).
I guess I should start filtering Facebook related posts for a while to avoid all the user revolt that is going to happen.

Although, the facebook platform is being treated like a first class citizen with this new design which is good for developers and "facebook startups." Also, seems like they are gearing up for an agressive play in "real-time search" with the search bar so front and center.
http://www.techcrunch.com/author/danielbru/

vs.

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:x9DbW8_sb1sJ:www.techcru...
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Looks like there's still a lot of work to be done:
http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html
References and referrals.

People in business have friends who could always use an upgrade or need it themselves. Offer superior service, make it feel like you are taking care of them, on top of everything else.

What are they paying you for? Now charge a flat rate. Your total value isn't variable to them because you do a good job consistently.
That's like saying that abstraction expresses the essence of well-designed functional programs. True, but so broad a statement as to be nearly meaningless. There's nothing about regexps that makes them closer to well-designed functional programs than well-designed OO programs or structured programs.
As a U.S. startup or small business, when you hire your first employee, among other things: (1) you start having to pay employer-related payroll taxes to federal, state and possibly local governments; (2) you need to hire a payroll service to handle the myriad reports to be filed with the taxing authorities; (3) you can get dinged for unemployment insurance claims (the point of this piece); (4) you need to take out a workers' comp insurance policy; (5) you are at risk for claims of wrongful discharge; (6) ditto for claims of sexual harassment; (7) ditto for claims of illegal discrimination; (8) you can face waiting-time penalties if you are slow to meet payroll; (9) you can face the so-called 100% penalty if you fail to remit withheld payroll taxes to the government; (10) you must pay at least a minimum wage for services rendered; (11) you must pay overtime for work in excess of 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week; (12) you must post some bureaucratic notices of workplace rights about your premises; (13) you may have to fund your employee's retirement along with your own; (14) you may have to pay for your employee's rehab if it is deemed a disability; (15) you can be vicariously liable for the acts of your employee that damage others (e.g., if he runs someone over while driving on company business); and (16) add here any of many other possible oddball consequences, such as possibly increasing your business license tax, requiring you to register as a foreign corporation (if you are such) in a state other than your state of domicile, etc.

No doubt you can others. While there may good and valid reasons for each of these requirements under law, is it a wonder (when you consider their cumulative impact) that startups will typically have x reasons of their own "not to hire," at least early in the company's history?
I really, really want to like these guys - I have been following Forth, Charles Moore, and colorforth since first reading up on Forth in 1996 or so.

However, the site is a dog's breakfast, and despite clicking around I cannot seem to locate an actual binary to download and run colorforth on Windows. Where / when can I buy an eval board? How do I connect it to ethernet, or USB?

Further, it seems to be a company where you have a lot of smart guys who are retired, and they are just putzing around without a burning desire to really take over the market they are targeting.

BTW it seems each core only has a very limited amount of RAM on it, 64 "words" which means 32 bits on PCs and 18 bits (???) on the g18 core CPUs.
In re to Java -- GOOD. I've never used a Java app I've particularly liked. Heck, is it even possible to code a decent GUI'd, non-sluggishly-responsive Java app?
Further thinking leads me to the conclusion that multiple partners in a legal union (i.e. marriage) would be unmanageable in our current system. If you had two wives, and they each had two husbands, then how would things like insurance coverage for partners work? How would insurance for children work (i.e. if your wife has a child with her other husband, then whose insurance would cover it)?
"There are two sides to this story."

I completely agree. There's probably many (more than two) sides to the story. I was just clarifying what I thought to be a misunderstanding of a comment. (I did say "I think his point was not X but Y"). I wasn't endorsing his position.

I personally have no interest in wasting time, neurons and keystrokes passing judgment on what level of "punishment" (including naming/outing) for this person would be appropriate, especially here on HN. (Nothing wrong in wanting to, just saying I don't want to).

Most penal codes I know (IANAL) do take age and frequency of crime into account before deciding what punishment is appropriate. I suspect, if taken to court, he would get away with a slap on the wrist.

Frankly I could care less. As I said, I am neutral on this with a very slight bias to "he's been punished enough".
The difference is that an exclusive actually does have more news value. By definition, it's news.
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