skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN Contractors: Add Yourself
Over the last few months, I've seen a lot of HN members talk about being contractors, and why - designing to bootstrap their business, building an iPhone practice, moving to China to work and live, etc.

I'm often on the other side of that transaction, where I need to hire contractors for one or more projects, and I'd like nothing more than to hire from this group of experts, but I don't remember to bookmark every talented and possibly hungry person. I'm sure there are many other people on both sides.

So here's a Google Spreadsheet for adding yourself and your expertise so that folks who need to hire have a quick way to find HN folks: include your contact info [if you want], etc.

Spreadsheet is at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en, I promise to leave it there and hope that nobody's a jerk about it.

(If someone has already done this, by all means let me know or add to this thread - I just want the list, not the credit.)
It is well established that higher rep workouts better promote hypertrophy, and heavier low rep workouts promote neuromuscular efficiency. However, average trainees get both effects from any workout. The effects really only start to matter for more advanced trainees.

Whatever you do, don't rush out and start doing heavy 5 rep sets of squats without proper coaching. Heavy, low rep exercises must be done with impeccable form because otherwise the risk of injury is high. Developing good form takes time and carefully performed lighter high rep sets to train your body to maintain that form.

Diet, of course is also an essential component.
But apparently, having Adobe dictating the very same thing is fine, then?
There is no contradiction. While some might argue that investing money in the 'market' creates nothing for society, it is fairly clear to me that he believes that investment can create sustained economic growth for the benefit of all.

As for the previous installment, it was clear to me that he had no objection to shuffling paper and money. What he disliked was pandering to people, offering them bad advice that they wanted to hear so you could take their money. He would have been quite happy to charge the same amount or more for offering good advice that left them better off, and was frustrated that he didn't have the ability to do so.

Both positions are perfectly consistent with an idealistic believer in free markets who genuinely wants to what is good for everyone in the long run. Since that is the impression he leaves, I find no dissonance at all within his belief system.
Infamous Design Blog DesignM.ag Being Auctioned on Flippa
Agreed, didn't mean to imply otherwise.
This doesn't make sense. You're saying adding lambdas doesn't help you solve any problems that can't already be solved in C++, but if you want to solve some of those problems you should use a language that supports lambdas?
This seems like a good place to mention that the author of the OP is an investor in twitter.
I like that this article is filed under Daily News.
Nah, it's actually more of a GCC problem than a C++ problem. Intel's compiler produces surprisingly sane error messages.
What is this 1K Hacker_Monthly.vcf file attached to the subscription confirmation email? It looks suspicious.
For that, consider buying the cheapest white plastic MacBook with 4GB RAM. I got off for 1k euro (around Christmas, the local FNAC retailer was selling them preloaded with 4GB instead of 2 - just pick up the box and pay).

I had thought of a MacMini, since I'm using an external 24" screen, keyboard, etc. - but the little extra money buys occasional mobility and 'close-lid-to-suspend' ...

(Ouch for 30 euro mini-DisplayPort to DVI adapter)
My eyes... the goggles, they do nothing!
I think GP meant anthropic bias.
I still don't understand why Apple ever decided to play up the iPad's web browsing experience. I've written on this at length before, but even apart from Flash, the desktop web is simply not compatible as-is with a tablet interface.

The iPad will make a fantastic browser for the tablet web, if and when that web is built, but today it's a poor substitute for a mouse and keyboard when websites expect those.
(Article author here.)

I'd love to use Haskell, but I'm helping out on an exascale DoE project, and C++ is all we're allowed to use. Ugh.

Of course, lambdas don't make C++ more powerful, but that's just reductio ad Turing tar-pit.

You can turn that argument around, too: there's no problem you can solve with C++ that you can't solve with lambdas alone:

http://matt.might.net/articles/church-encodings-demo-in-sche...

If programming languages were about computational power, we would have stopped with Fortran.

Programming languages are about the freedom of expressions.
Unfortunate that this is one part of the C++0x g++ project that has yet to get serious. (At least the last time I checked out the g++ experimental code a few months ago.) C++0x lambdas are the one thing that I've been wanting to try out for years.

Instead, we got a lot of (now somewhat wasted) effort on concepts. I like concepts in principle, but too many C++ people saw concepts as a way to write provable code and unreadable library documentation instead of as a way to simplify compiler error messages.
I recommend I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi.
Though it doesn’t work with the standard algorithms.

For example you can’t do stuff like:

std::transform(first, last, lambda<int> (x) --> 2*x);
^^ (someone beat me to it).
Wanted to say : what of the civilizations inside it. Could be billions of years for them.
It's not that hard parsing template compiler errors (though I am looking forward to better errors in C++0x). Are you saying this is a good reason not to use templates at all? With a little practice they start to make sense. I'm sure for novice programmers the first time they see 500+ error messages stemming from a missed semi colon or curly brace (in regular code) it can be pretty bewildering too, but just like with template error messages you just ignore virtually all of it.
Cryptography has failed
> There's even a Godwin point as he gently critiques people who "see a market economy and consumer culture as sterile and false (...) and who defend the world's most repressive cultures". What??? If we're against consumerism we're for Stalin?

There does seem to be correlation. Whether it's coincidence or causation (in either direction) is unclear.

Why should we ignore this?

FWIW, "marxist analysis" does produce a lot of railing against consumer culture which is apparently derived from their first principles. If you want to argue against market economy and consumer culture without invoking marxist principles, have at it.

> However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture!

This "resilent" claim is interesting. The dependent systems haven't had the mass famines that are a staple of the decentralized ones.

Yes, I agree that there are lots of potential failure points in centralized agriculture. However, experience matters too.

Note that there actually isn't "a" centralized agriculture system, there are many, one or more for each common foodstuff.

For example, Kansas grows lots of wheat, but so does Canada, so crop failures in Kansas don't have a huge effect in California, even though CA doesn't grow much wheat. (I'm guessing that CA doesn't produce much wheat, so substitute a state that doesn't produce wheat if CA does.)

There is one counter-example - "gas from corn" in the US had a horrible effect on food prices in Mexico. (We'd be better off importing methanol from Brazil.)
That’s weird. Are you really paying more than $100 per month for cable in the US? I was confused there because I really couldn’t imagine that of all things the cable bill would be a reason to ditch the TV. You get your standard maybe thirty useful and seventy crappy TV stations in Germany for 15€. Probably because pay TV never really caught on in Germany. Except if you are really into soccer. I don’t even know what I could get by paying beyond soccer. No HBO in Germany.

Having public broadcasting doesn’t seem to be too bad, after all :)
These are all excellent points. I really underestimated how much I would use the trackpad. I've got a slightly modified version of Middle Click (here's the original http://github.com/cl3m/MiddleClick) that lets me open links in new tabs with 3 finger tap and do per application expose with 4 finger tap.

Adding to the list:
- Magsafe - has certainly saved my computer at least 3 times now (that's the magnetic power connector)
- Apple Stores: If you live near one you can drop in and get your computer looked at/fixed. If you're in desperate need they can usually turn a machine around very quickly, too...
The Apple Care will expire this summer, I think I'll hold up until the fall to see if they introduce USB3
You mean "cue", but "queue" could work too (in some sense).
Rotation requires acceleration, since your direction is changing, so you can tell by the forces upon you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_force
This quote stuck out at me and I found myself revisiting the article just to find it. Here's the thing in full:

"The executives I met all showed pictures of their youth, reminding me that just a few decades ago, their country was nothing more than sand, tents, and simple stone. Maybe they held on to the pictures to impress upon me the great progress Dubai has made, maybe they held on to them to reassure themselves that life would go on even if they had to return someday to their tents. Personally, I took the pictures as a reminder that the men running Dubai’s gargantuan companies had been given an upbringing that could not prepare them corporate management."

I couldn't help but think that if he had built something comparably substantial in his life, he would know that the executives are showing him the pictures out of pride for their accomplishments.

And what does it mean that their upbringing couldn't prepare them for corporate management? Why shouldn't the people who transformed their country from sand, tents, and stone into skyscrapers be able to manage corporations?
Ruby Fibers may confuse
Clickable: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...
Assume adobe released a hardware platform and it didn't support javascript. If somebody were to suggest that the entire web development community was going to abandon javascript in order to allow adobe's platform to reach the saturation required to make it the "standard", then your argument might make sense.

As it stands, the iPad exists in a state that makes it almost unusable for the overwhelming majority of web users (at least as anything more than a novelty, much like web browsing on the iPhone)
Maybe this inherently explains why startups are more effective at innovation (less people telling eachother what to do) than big giants (more people, more accountability being created, less free thinking).
This reminds me of a chapter from an HTML5 e-book that was recently posted: http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html

If there's any consistent theme to the history of web standards, it's that all the successful standards start as someone's proprietary extension that eventually becomes a de facto standard before being codified by the standards committee. Standards that start in the committee rarely gain traction.
Well put. Well people started making a fuss about Opera Mini getting approved I couldn't understand why. Safari on the iPhone is the best mobile browser out there in terms of both specification conformance and performance.
less of [something]? Wait, no, let's parse that again.
less on/off [something else]? Oops, parse failed again.
lessons off...ered? Aargh...

Word split fail for me. Picking the right domain name is so hard. And yet it seems so obvious once you've integrated it in global word reading zone...
An Acer Aspire One, the one with the hard-disk. I got it upgraded to 1.5 gigs.
I'd second the recommendation that you have a look at the commonjs stuff that olegp mentions above ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262380 ) and seeing if there's an opportunity there to be a prototype / working platform for such an endeavour. (Assuming that there's a good degree of fit between your platform ideas and commonjs)
It says Intel plans to port all mobile operating systems to Atom. Somehow I doubt Apple is in on that plan...
Desktops are less expensive, upgradeable, more powerful, and quieter. And you can setup a more ergonomic work area than with a laptop (unless you like a lot of peripherals hanging off your laptop, which kind of defeats the purpose).

If you must work from a coffee shop, just bring your $300 netbook and ssh into your desktop. Why bring a noisy and hot laptop that only lasts for 4 hours when you can have a silent machine that lasts for 14?

Desktops are great for power. Netbooks are great for portability. Laptops are bad at both.
The regular MacBook is also unibody now and seems to be pretty close to the MBP in terms of build quality.
That the iPad is consistently classified as a media consumption device seems an attempt to trivialize its significance by people who consider themselves power users. I agree that currently the use cases of most applications fall into this category, that it is expensive and I doubt you will ever do application development on a device of its form factor, but it is clearly not just a media consumption device. A few example applications are the two very nice musical instruments the Korg iElectribe http://www.korg.co.uk/products/software_controllers/iPad_iEl..., which sells for $10 while its HW equivqlent is around $450, and the MiniSynth Pro http://www.yonac.com/ a fully functional FM synthesizer. Neither of these applications would have been possible prior to the iPad. Others are the drawing applications Brushes http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id363590649?mt=8 and SketchBook Pro http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sketchbook-pro/id364253478?mt.... I also like the touch and hand drawing interface to OmniGraffle a diagramming application http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omnigraffle/id363225984?mt=8.

I think the majority of creative or power user applications will be for those with a complex control surface, such as the examples above. The large touch interface of the iPad is much simpler to use than a traditional mouse keyboard. Also when compared to Wacom drawing tablets http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ... it is competitive, at the iPad low end the iPad is about $200 more, though not quite as functional, the iPad does not have pressure or stylus tilt sensitivity but it is portable. If you are interested in developing these types of applications you have to have one. If you do not have one you will never see were the deficiencies are or know which problems to solve. The device as only been available for 10 days. I would expect it will take a year or two before the application space has been adequately sampled.

Another obvious short coming, or opportunity, is with file synchronization and management. I am currently using dropbox, https://www.dropbox.com/ with ReaddleDocs http://readdle.com/products/readdledocs, which works for reading. If documents are generated on the IPad you have to use iTunes, eMail or an application specific server for document synchronization. Neither of these is adequate.

The typing problem you mentioned can be solved by a case that holds it an an angle, such as http://www.goincase.com/products/detail/CL57512. The number of viewing and use positions for the device is greater than that for a laptop. Also heavy duty typing can be handled with a bluetooth attached keyboard though for my needs the the onscreen keyboard has been adequate.
$50 for basic cable here, another $50 for extras (discovery channel and comedy network)
HD and movies get a lot more expensive. Then sport - ouch.

There is only one cable provider and it has a monopoly. I just watched TV on the net after the companies intro $10/month offer ran out.
This animation and that video always make me pause and contemplate the significance of the little websites I work on and their role in the universe.
Top Geeky Spokespeople For Brands and Causes
Getting Firefox running on the Palm Pre (mostly)
As another datapoint, I had a laptop with a first-gen SSD and no TRIM or GC support. The performance hit a literal cliff; writes were fast one day, and the next day they were literally 300KiB/s. Download speeds were limited by disk write bandwidth, not network bandwidth! New SSD, writes are back up to 50MiB/s.

(The divide might not be at the capacity of the disk; this was a 16GiB SSD with probably 20x that in writes.)
I have a family to support, and as I pass 30 years old..trust me.. money motivates me.
What does this mean for Android developers? Instead of using the Google-provided emulator, will one be able to run Android inside, say, VMWare? I haven't tried the emulator in about two years, but I recall it being quite slow.
After spending the better part of a year dealing with these men and seeing first hand how poorly they were doing corporate management, I'd take his observations (if not conclusions) seriously.

Note that he goes on to make it clear that he doubts he would do any better if he had their background. And one of his suggestions is that they invest in education. Which says that he did not think they were lacking in innate ability, and does not come off to me as a slight against their race. Only their circumstances.

Rather than racism, I would fault him for having too much confidence in the value of his formal education. But he redeemed himself in the following paragraph, which I think is an insightful description of the dangers of giving people great wealth and responsibility with little regard to ability and competence. Perhaps he will see things as I do once he is old enough to have seen people succeed despite having little formal education, and rich brats fail despite having had access to every educational advantage.
counterpoint: monthly is exactly the right pace for geek news. Much of what we read and comment on here is ephemeral crap, and due to the pace of HN there are many repeats of well-known information.

There are only a few good, innovative, really interesting articles on HN per month.
Oh boy, does the first paragraph ever press one of my hot button issues. The US Treasury FBAR (foreign bank account reporting) rules represent very bad law. The rule requires that all foreign accounts be disclosed. The penalty for non-compliance is $100,000 per year or 20% of the amount of undisclosed funds, whichever is greater. It was intended to catch people who have large off-shore tax shelters. That's a good idea in principle, but they severely botched the implementation of this law.

The threshold for reporting is $10K. This means that if someone is not aware of the requirement as has $11K overseas, they can be hit with a $100,000 fine. The penalty is grossly inappropriate. Worse, the definition of "account" is so vague that it is very easy to accidentally be in non-compliance.

I inadvertently ran into this problem myself and now I need to find a tax lawyer to help me, even though the cost of the lawyer will probably be at least half the almost-nominal value of the assets involved.

PS: Can anyone recommend a good tax lawyer experienced in handling FBAR issues?
The best strategy with Apple is to skimp on everything and upgrade it yourself. The price difference will cover a second laptop if you fuck the first one up.
I already have, and I suspect that a lot of people my age are going to follow suit. I realized during a recent move that my TV was still at the old house, and that it wasn't really bothering me not having it. I haven't even plugged it in since I finally got it to the new place.

I'm either going to trade my television for a road bicycle or a keg-refrigerator.

If you're a cable company trying to mount a closed "you will watch what we want you to watch when we want you to watch it!" platform against a "Here are a bunch of things you can watch...whenever you want. Like them? Share the link with your friends!", you're in trouble.

The model of "sit down at 7:00pm CST on Thursday evening to watch The Office" is dead and the writing has been on the wall since the 1990s.
I might receive an offer for a reasonably interesting job soon, and have been wondering how to justify going "employed".

So far my impression is that the bitterest pill for me to swallow would be having no chances. If I come up with a great idea, I won't benefit. I assume here that the usual corporate "bonuses" are not even worth talking about. Salary raises tend to be < 10%, which hardly makes up for inflation. Boni of a couple of 1000 bucks are also not interesting. A flat costs 200000€ where I live, so 3000€ here or there don't make an essential difference (being able to buy a flat as one example of relevant income metrics).

Therefore I wonder if employees are even the best choice for corporations, as likely they will never give the company their best effort.

Sure, in an ideal world, I would only be motivated by doing interesting things. The corporation would take care of the rest of my life (enough money for rent, health insurance, family etc), so that I could focus on my job without another worry in the world.

First flaw: what if I lose my job? Corporations don't pay enough for me to build a safety cushion of money. So I'll have to live in permanent fear of losing my job. Living in permanent fear is neither healthy nor fun.

Second flaw: my idea of being motivated by doing interesting things died pretty soon in my first job, during the dot.com area. That is when they brought in the consultants, a ka people who where paid three times what I was paid, got assigned the interesting tasks, despite often being less skilled. Now my tasks back then weren't that interesting, either, but I am pretty sure the experience would have demotivated me, no matter how cool my tasks would have been.

Doing interesting work can factor into my earnings estimate (ie instead of having to invest two weeks of my private time, I can learn technology X on the job. Fine - so that is maybe worth one quarter of my monthly salary, as a one time payment). So if you offer me interesting things to do, I might consider working for you for slightly less money.
Twitter supposedly using private API's in BB client
See the comment by Paul McDonald, author of ÜberTwitter in the comments.

http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2010/04/of-course-were-hole-fillers-and-why-no-one-should-depend-on-only-one-platform.html#
Thank you, I'll check it. Even if it doesn't fit into the basic Akshell library, nothing prevents from creating an alternative basic library.
For another direction in which speculation has gone see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle.
He's right. You can do anything in {C++, Python, a Turing machine}, but you might want to choose a language that's well suited for your task at hand even though any of them can do it in principle.