skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, not sure how well this applies to Mexico but...

I did the freelance/startup combination for about five years. Its ok once if you can pull it off, but I do not recommend repeating it. I have a lot of friends that do this, and on the whole I think it is a vicious cycle. I don't mean you shouldn't freelance to fund a company. If that seems the way forward, then do it - once. But you shouldn't do this repeatedly. Its an easy cycle to get into. Instead, you should work at startups in between founding startups.

I find that you can get into this pattern:

1) Focus on billing in boring contract work to get spare cycles to work on startup. Learn new skills to apply in new startup on your own time.
2) Startup makes progress, focus on startup, startup doesn't make it (most don't), savings run out.
3) Cling to hope. Debt.
4) Repeat.

Most people I've known do not eject efficiently in stage 3, and bear excessive credit card debt, etc. Whereas if you get a job at a startup, you can enter this pattern, and even if all these companies tank, you're better off:

1) Work a job at a startup where you do very interesting work, get paid to refine your skills, gain highly relevant experience.
2) Repeat 1, increasing in job coolness/responsibility. Save money.
3) Now that you've built a reputation and network of excellence by working at startups, start a company that has a better chance of succeeding using your experience, cutting edge skills, network of potential co-founders and relationships with investors, potential employees and customers.

I was in the first pattern, now I'm going for the second. Looking across many successful founders, this seems to be the most frequent way to arrive at a good outcome. I value the experience from the first pattern, but my life is so much better now that I'm in the second. I wish I'd entered it earlier. Note: I had to move to silicon valley to enter the second pattern.

You might do well with your first company part timing it, but I find that struggling and part timing it is just a less effective way to learn to build companies than participating in a later stage company. Other than the entrepreneurial drive itself, I think that building companies is actually something you learn, and that its something best learned by doing. You can get early stage experience just starting something. You only get that later stage experience in your own company if it makes it that far - but you can get it by joining a startup at any time.

I think a lot of people, especially those outside of silicon valley, miss this completely. We tend to focus on the icons of silicon valley - pairs of young people that hit it big the first time out. But most successful companies actually come from experienced engineers/entrepreneurs that got on the job training at other startups. People work together, then they start companies together. Ever since the Fairchild traitorous 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_Eight
The slogan refers to users' freedom to get information where they like, and that wasn't impaired at all by the acquisition. As far as I know, Conde Nast only once tried to dictate what was on Reddit, and that blew up in their faces.
A library for Event-Driven Web Apps
I've been working on a Python library for web development. Don't worry, it's not another framework :) Instead, it lets you develop a "traditional" server side app with no JavaScript, but lets you do things like attach (server-side) callbacks to links, or track a "call stack" of page locations and the session data associated with each. I've been developing this approach for a few years (first in PHP, now Python), but I haven't run across anything similar. I'm very curious to know (1) if this approach appeals to anyone else, and (2) if there's another library or framework out there that implements something similar.
Damn! Is this one of those moments (like Safari on the iPhone) when you realize what a particular form-factor is for?

In this case, living books...
> In what ways does the VS "bloat" matter?

Basically, it will not run on a small netbook. Not at acceptable speeds.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1260761
Again, I know this is a sarcasm post, but do we really need another one on HN for Apple TOS 3.3.1. I think it's time to move on and until there an instance of Apple rejecting an app that violates 3.3.1. I honestly think Apple wouldn't ban tools like Unity3D, etc but Adobe CS5.
> Unfortunately I don't think there is an easy way to temporarily and completely disable Flash in Safari for sans-Flash testing

Prefs -> Security -> Uncheck "Enable Plugins", refresh.
They must've planned this as a way to placate pissed off app developers.
Link to the AppStore http://itunes.apple.com/uk/app/opera-mini-web-browser/id3637... — It's not as fast as I expected, but still

For now: "un-zommed" content is unreadable, for instance, nytimes.com in Opera http://cl.ly/JIP vs Safari Mobile: http://cl.ly/J9i (which is also unreadable, but well, I can distinct letters)
The Redis Cookbook
I'm not sure this is true. Unfortunately, I highly doubt there will be any backtracking. Especially with the email quotes from Jobs that have popped up in various weblogs.

And steam-rolling ahead, they'll lose a hundred (a couple hundred) apps from the App Store. Compared to the 150,000+ apps available, I don't see how they would perceive it as a big deal to lose so few.
My current strategy for finding side jobs is to wait for them to come to me. I have it easy -- I have widely recognized expertise in several narrow fields.

The biggest hurdle I've faced is US tax paperwork -- companies like to ask for W-8 forms. Fortunately I recently had a client with a tax lawyer on staff, and I now know that being a non-resident working outside of the country means that I'm not subject to US tax withholding and no paperwork is required.

I've never bothered with escrow; if I'm sufficiently uncertain about a potential client that I would even consider escrow, it's a client I don't want. This is in part because of the nature of the work I do -- fly-by-night operations generally can't afford my rates and don't need my expertise anyway.
Did they fix the bug that forces you to restart your app if you edit a function that has an anonymous/lambda/linq statement?

This has been by far and away my #1 complaint for over three years (http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2007/03/complaints-about-visual-stu...). It is a huge deterrent from taking advantage of most of C#'s beauties.
Firefox mobile next?
They don't give a crap about the developers or what the developers think about them.
And the last status update says "Opera Mini for iPhone was officially submitted to the [app store]".

Although I find this hard to believe, signs point to Opera being late in updating the page. The time in Norway is 2:15 AM, but still...
Says "not currently available in the US store".
They would probably sue for defamation or libel. At least in the USA, the merits of a such a suit are beside the point. The point is to intimidate you with the threat of a lengthy and expensive legal process, at the end of which you might only end up with the consolation that a judge thought that you were right, but you are now tens of thousands of dollars in debt due to the legal costs of the trial.

Outside of the USA, it's even easier to win a libel suit, at least in the UK; I'm not 100% sure about elsewhere. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonalds_Restaurants_v_Morris_...)
They should, or else they'll lose developers to a platform run by a company that does.
Open Governance: Keeping tabs on Canada's Parliament
"Faking it" on Freakonomics Radio
Dude they control YouTube... That's huge leverage. Not to mention any video startups would be quick to adopt this.
Adobe is already shipping VP6 as a part of Flash Player, so VP8 should not be a problem. Maybe that is what Google will get for integrating Flash into Chrome, that made news few weeks ago.

MS, Apple and Nokia will be harder nut to crack, because all three of them are patent owners in H.264 portfolio. Nokia may cave when Youtube switches, maybe even MS, but Apple users will have life slightly more difficult for a while.
Just enough time to send in a last minute guess then? :P
I think this is a re-post, but nonetheless:

Has anyone else noticed how beautiful the simple font is that the machine creates for the 1s and 0s? Not that it's any surprise though... The whole thing reeks of amazing attention to detail and the end result looks fantastic!
Lower bandwidth consumption is good for consumers too.
My personal background is mechanical engineering and my idea is a B2C online business. My skills is more on the side of contract negotiations and physical implementation which is relevant to my idea.

Thanks for warning me though, I will definitely try to develop as well as possible
Market definitions are tested in court, and there would be a good case to have a tight definition here.

My definition would be a somewhere along the lines of mobile computer, not necessarily a phone, with a centralised application store. Note that because of the ipod/ipad they are in a different market than a smartphone. I think this is entirely justified. And Apple rules this market.
I think you're absolutely right in saying that Apple has no real competition, but it's interesting to look at the trajectories of the various elements of the smartphone market and consider what things might look like in 5 years (remember, the iPhone was first available 3 years ago). Android doesn't compete at the same level as apple today, but it is far more likely to start progressing exponentially at some point when the conditions are right. At the same time the barriers to entry for building hardware are quickly falling, so we may yet see some new entrants.

Apple's new policy won't cause their developers to leave immediately, the market is just too big. What they have done is sent a clear message to developers that if they don't want to do it "the Apple way" then they should be keeping their eyes open for other opportunities. Apple has essentially made a huge gamble that they can be the smartest guys in the market forever. I think that's unwise.
I think that just like Excel escaped the boundaries of what it was intended for, Powerpoint is doing the same. You'd be surprised at how many enterprise architectures are captured almost in their entirety in Powerpoint.
Think of Opera Mini as an interactive image viewer. They interpret all JavaScript on the server side and sent result back to the client using OBML[1]. Or at least that's how it works on other device.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality
Not addressing Flask directly but the article made me think of something about small web frameworks. It strikes me as easier to come up with a new "big" web framework than it is with a new small one. Because after a certain point, its hard to come up with a framework where a Hello World web app can be expressed with any fewer lines of code. It's always possible to make a more verbose web app, it may be impossible past a certain point to make one more concise.

Perhaps Flash's angle could be not to shrink the minimum LOC needed, but to deliver more features per app LOC.
Is the ipod touch a smartphone?
Should come in handy when you start your career in sales, too.
I have to wonder how this would have turned out if Apple wasn't already taking a lot of heat for the new developer agreement. Perhaps they are tempering their stance.
It's really a beautiful piece of work.
For what it is worth, if your builds are more CPU-bound than you thought then either your solution is very small overall (which I somewhat doubt) or you have it broken up across too many projects. For a good nine years now almost all .net and vs.net -related build slowness has been due primarily to high project count. A bit of solution restructuring should do the trick nicely for you. Merge some projects and/or shift off some less-frequently-modified projects into separate solutions, cook up some official builds of them, and then bring them back in as binary dependencies.
Because editing google doc spreadsheets isn't sharded.
Both of your screenshots appear to be of Opera.
The app is Opera Mini, not Opera Mobile, so no, it does not. Opera Mini is a proxy browser: all the heavy lifting, including JavaScript and most rendering, happens on one of Opera's proxy servers. The Opera Mini app receives a heavily pre-processed and compressed version of the webpage, in some custom data format. The app itself only does rendering, not processing or interpreting.
Essential Advice
No, the Opera app does not run JavaScript itself. The app communicates to Opera's server, and it's the server that does HTTP with the website, runs the JavaScript, and compresses the HTML and sends it down to the app.

The restriction on downloading and executing code has been in the developer agreement since the beginning. It's not a recent thing.
Ask HN: Books on how to "influence" people?
For most entrepreneurs, influencing others is an important skill.

Knowing the correct people, increasing the opportunities to meet them etc are also a part, but what I'd like to know is on a lower level:

What do you do to:

* Influence decisions

* Persuade

* Instill "confidence"

etc...

Would you know of any good books on the topic?

Clarification edit:

I totally agree with comments below, its not about manipulating others, but becoming better.

What I intended to ask is more about how to present yourself to more business focus people who might be less forgiving on how typical hackers behave/look like.

For instance, trying to make a deal with a complete non-techy, they are much more conservative on business ideas and expect a more "traditional" take on doing business.

Is enthusiasm and genuineness enough?
I guess that Max guy is just in there, because he's famous. The real hero of the piece is Roissy.
CL-Growl client library released
Interesting. The section on JavaScript support is not encouraging actually. Can anyone report on attempting to use a js-heavy web-app through Opera Mini, e.g. Gmail?
April 12, 1961: First man in space
If I were apple I would do exactly the same thing :)
I was alluding to Literate Programming. See e.g. http://www.literateprogramming.com/
Exoskeletons & Other Technology to Mitigate Elder Frailty
Just make loads of money.
How is this relevant to HN?
congratufuckinglations
It's akin to marking everyone as a criminal so that you can selectively enforce the law whenever someone upsets you...
Fixed that :-O
World's first ever web conference for magicians
From my experience with Opera Mini in Windows Mobile (since it's still not available in App Store), Gmail just fallback to the Basic HTML mode. It's safe to assume most JavaScript-heavy web apps won't going to work at all.
Looks cool. I'm a ruby dev on osx, but ill be installing the demo and playing around with this thing for sure. I really like the innovations in .net 4.0 for dynamic languages.

Anyone know the status of ironruby within this release?
Tips and gotchas when designing sites for the iPad
That sounds great and I like the idea of isolating a work computer from the net. However, a lot of my work involves checking sites, FTPing here and there and so on.

Would still be useful for very specific days of intensive offline work.

Wondered about a net-jar (like a swear jar). Clock my non-work traffic at some outrageous rate, and my wife gets to spend the proceeds on shoes (well, more shoes)...
He didn't say an example was necessary, he said it could have made the quote clearer.
If you get knowledge like this from books beware of coming across as a fake. If your knowledge is good and you're a genuine (as opposed to fake) person then over time you will gain influence, based on your track record and your personality.

Fast tracking it by reading a book is not really a solution here.

The classic book that literally is called 'how to win friends and influence people' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influenc... ), in spite of being an all time best seller is a book whose readers you can spot from about a mile away but it has a dedicated following.

Excel at what you do and be genuine and nice to people and you'll go very far without needing any books that turn you in to just another glib talker.
Angela’s World Lite Released for iPhone and iPod Touch for Free
If you are going to read 'how to win friends and influence people', be sure to get one of the earlier non-political correct versions. It's a book worth reading, but of course you should apply your mind and not follow it slavishly.

By the way, the parent post's advise is more than compatible with that book.
I'm shocked.

The app is still somewhat crippled though, all links from other Apps can only be opened in Safari. So, not the same as switching a browser on your desktop or laptop. Nonetheless it seems like a step in the right direction.
Who pays for the lawyers should the journalist get sued for libel?
Now its time for Chrome!
It's usually not the big dating sites, it's those sites you get ads for if you use OkCupid or PoF.

Affiliate marketers are familiar with these as they usually offer the best payouts. The majority are matchmaking services, or market themselves that way, and $800 is on the low end. They typically start around $1500 and can go into the tens of thousands (ie. matchmaking for corporate executives)
Great post Armando, and anything I can help you with let me know.
Mary Meeker's Internet Trends: Mobile to surpass desktop within 5 years
I'm not sure it's surprising, I suspect Opera-mini's nature of preprocessing and compression might have helped it get approved because of the bandwidth saving promise for AT&T.
Work on yourself. Influence has to come from something genuine: real competence, real respect for other people, etc. All that other stuff is merely manipulation and manipulation tends to come back to bite you at some point.

You might start with a book like "The 7 habits of highly effective people", which isn't at all about influencing others but is, instead, about getting things done.

For negotiation skills, which is entirely different from "persuasion" but can give you real power to influence outcomes, the only two I know of which are research-based are "Getting to Yes" and "The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator". Both of these were required texts for my class on "Negotiation and Conflict Management".
I've heard of the Dale Carnegie book and other similar ones like them. Its not exactly what I'm looking for.

I like to think I'm an OK guy and I am usually genuinely interested in people... however, I'm quite the geek and sometimes lack empathy.

For my current company, I'm going out and meeting a lot of non-tech people, and to tell you the truth, I think the approach needs to be different.

For instance, I think my usual geek garb of a witty t-shit and jeans does not cut it with the people I'm going to have to meet very soon.

I feel like I'm going to jump in a sea of sharks and I need to learn some sea kung fu
It's not great at AJAX. My brother has a Blackberry and mainly uses Opera, and the fact that Sporcle(.com) worked on my iPhone shocked him. Apparently Opera can't do onchange.

Gmail just gives the normal HTML mobile version, like it did in the bad old days before iPhone.
That makes sense, but I still have trouble believing the article's conclusion.

In my experience, people with advanced education work more hours. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, programmers, accountants,... the list of professions that require a lot of 40+ hour work week goes on. Most lower wage jobs, by contrast, work straight 40 hour work weeks

Also, is the data adjusted for cost of living? Why are they using average wages instead of median wages?

Overall, it just looks like a crappy study that doesn't lead to tangible insights.
Apple and Nokia refused to support Theora, because they have vested interest in H.264 - they both are on the licensors side. Why would they support free codec, when they get cut from every license fee paid for the encumbered one?

The argument used by both of them is just convenient excuse. What do you expect of them? To tell you what is in the above paragraph?
I wonder if Apple keeps ambiguous apps like this on hold for when they really need a PR win. Maybe we'll see Google Voice next?
No one will remove H.264 - it's a great codec with wide support. It's more likely that we'll be in a world with two good video codecs, not just one. VP8 will hopefully become the HTML5 video standard, and H.264 will remain in Flash (which will still be useful for a long time), most browsers, many mobile devices, and on the desktop.

Incidentally, this has been the state of audio for a long time - mp3 and aac are both good codecs, and both are really widely supported. (Vorbis is reasonably good too, though not as widely supported. Maybe that will change with HTML5.)
Robert Cialdini's "Influence: Science and Practice." is great. I heard him speak in person once and it was amazing material, and he presented it very well. Unfortunately, some find his book to be a bit dry and a bit of a tough slog, but again, the material is great.

I can't emphasize enough how much his work has helped me. Here is a link to a quiz based on his material, which is very telling as to how good you are with respect to influencing others: http://www.influenceatwork.com/CialdiniQuiz.html

I actually read his book and heard him speak before taking the quiz and so I did much better on it than I would have otherwise.
Influencing others can be a big challenge for hackers. How good are you?
Check out Roissy's "Dating Market Value" tests. I wish someone could convince me that this stuff is a big lie. Of course, it's exaggerated to make a point..but then again, his exaggerations aren't that big either. He's not close to approaching irony or sarcasm.
Apple's a big backer of H.264, and they're invested in the codec. Hopefully they'll support VP8 in Safari, but I wouldn't look for the iPhone to change to VP8.
Thanks for the negotiation book references, these look along the lines of what I want to know.

I think I should edit the post to add more context... right now it looks like I want to manipulate people, this is not what I intended to convey