skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's my first time with WuFoo :) Should be fixed now.

Thanks for pointing out and thanks for sharing your thoughts on payment options. We will make sure to appeal to both larger and lower volume merchants.
EDOX Replica Watches, Replica EDOX Watches, Fake EDOX Watches
Fair point. I still think it works as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the claims about the cost of so-called piracy, which rest on similarly shaky foundations.
Want to Know What Facebook is Saying About You? Try This Tool
You could get a Basecamp account and manage your milestones that way.

I made an app that let's me post private status updates while I'm working. It's like having an imaginary project manager to keep me motivated. It also makes it a little easier to report updates to clients.
Five years ago zeds document would have treated you like the x you are.
I've used Ruby's ActiveMerchant (based off of Shopify) on several large projects. It is really simple to use, especially for someone that doesn't deal with payments often.

http://www.activemerchant.org/

Using a different gateway is a one-line change. Running test data is easy. It supports every major gateway and payment company. And it's free.

If you're using Ruby, I can't recommend it enough.
Are you familiar with the concept of devolving?
A very precise definition of an engineer? Engineers build tools. Artists build amusements. Scientists build ideas. Programmer = Engineer.
McCarthy - Dijkstra short polemics in 1976
MS execs are usually pretty good about things like that. Bill Gates' last day usually comes to mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lE21kpE3M0
I do indeed prefer menus and toolbars to be close to the information I am manipulating. The one contextual menu bar on the top of the screen made a lot of sense on the early days of the Lisa and the Mac, but unless you get used to keyboard shortcuts, it does not make a lot of sense to move your mouse to monitor 1 when what you want to do is with something in a window on monitor 2 (or 3).

It doesn't bother me too much when I am running a couple terminals and Emacs, or working on a spreadsheet on Google docs, but it would drive me crazy if I had to do it with Word. Specially with two or more 24+ inch screens.

I am curious as to how do you deal with this situation. Keyboard shortcuts or moving the mouse between monitors? How frequent is each situation?
Amazing how groups of "destroyers" and "creators" assemble.

Epilogue: I made a friend then I got disconnected. We were building a fort. :(
In this instance, it looks like it was far more enjoyable to have it documented so that everyone can publicly put a jackass in his place.
And conversely, don't automatically assume engineers can't design!
it seems i can change details of the profile as well... http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/6636/hn3n.jpg
That's pretty much the idea. There will be only one external API that developers can use, but internally, we will make sure to make it work with as many payment gateways as possible. We will then implement other features but that should be our core service. I've had to implement many payment processors for different clients in the past years and it really is a pain. I'm basically building this for myself :)
Programmers at Work (1986)
Go out and meet people. Ask them what they would want in a startup, and see if you can cater to their needs in your own. Ask them what they'd ideally like to be working on. Ask for referrals to others. Try and get everyone doing what they want to be doing and personalities won't matter as much. Better if you can laugh at their jokes.
Hadn't heard of this before, thanks for sharing. I will look into it.
If you apply cleverness to solve problems, you're an engineer. Engineering is the verb form of ingenious.
Am I already, at the tender age of 25, on enough in years that yesterday's bad taste stirs feelings of nostalgia today in my web weary heart?
What the eff has that to do with the fact that you don't understand what it means to teach?
it makes sense for companies that hope to create repeat customers. Many fitness places love Groupon for this reason.

Or for companies that have huge mark up because they can't improve numbers with lower prices.
exactly.
It's not my data that binds me to facebook. It's the fact my friends are all there.
Does Living a Remarkable Life Require Courage or Effort?
He sounds like one of the most valuable kinds of programmer: humble about his own abilities and more interested in solving problems than being precious about the elegance of his code. PHP itself hews to this same pragmatic philosophy, and it's the reason PHP powers a huge swath of the internet.

Personally, I find coding PHP is like chewing on tinfoil. Nevertheless, it has allowed countless developers to solve problems quickly without having to learn a bunch of boilerplate or internalize elaborate data models.
That was the first one I tried, too.
Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship - America.gov
What’s in a name? (C#’s hidden support for structural typing)
C# is well known for its nominative type system. This means that C# identifies types and their relationships based on their names. That is why C# does not allow you to create two types with the same name, even if they have a different public interface – the C# compiler only cares about the name of the type.
Orwell's Warning: An Interview with Erik Blaire
That depends on the program, I suppose. Some programs require more engineering than others. I think you could make a very good argument for the programmers at Google being engineers.
A couple thoughts to improve the home page:

1. There are a few typos you should fix if you want to seem credible. "Don't wory" should be "Don't worry," there's no period in the first sentence of the small text, and there is an extra space before both exclamation points (I know that's a French thing to do, but it's not standard in English).

2. Don't use jpegs for this type of image, a PNG will be much more crisp. Right now there are clarity issues in the blue surrounding text.

3. If you use text in the HTML instead of using an image it will be much more friendly. The small text looks very odd on a Mac and in browsers that have good font rendering and anti-aliasing.

Good luck!
When I read #2 I went "THANK YOU".
My takeaway from this article is don't use bizarre Java web frameworks that force you to configure everything through boilerplate xml files that you end up having to constantly change.

No clear argument is presented against why I shouldn't use a web framework that helps me avoid writing the same bullshit over and over again to deal with:

- user accounts, permissions, password resets
- general admin panels
- form validation, csrf protection
- sessions, 'flash' messages
- pagination
- image uploads, resizing, thumbnailing
- internationalization

One might argue that the downfall of some web frameworks are their lack of flexibility when you need to move beyond the out of the box solutions.

But honestly the only thing I get out of that article is don't write web apps in Java when there are much better tools for the job.
We don't think we will have to compete with them as we offer a different service. They could actually become our customers to offload the pain of implementing different APIs for all of their supported payment gateways.
> I could easily imagine a situation, however, where this is not the
> desired outcome, such as in a company where software is only a
> minor component.

Perceptive point by mmt - I do most of the programming work myself. I don't know if I'd feel the same way if a critical employee doing coding for a major system behaved this way.

I wouldn't knowingly hire someone like that though, and unless someone was truly critical, I'd rather send them on their way than have them create a situation in which their behavior negatively affected office norms, yes. My business is quite small and doesn't have professional managers, so mmt's expectation that there is a level there to deal with this stuff is wrong. Problems are just more work on my plate and distract from the things that people pay us for.
The Joy of Two (pair programming)
OK, maybe it's not fake again: http://twitter.com/WootRoot posted pics. Waiting for better confirmation.
HN for the iPad is a great idea. Its certainly one that has crossed my mind (only to be put aside due to the lack of time - maybe in a few weeks, after the semester ends...). This app leaves a bit to be desired, however. At least, judging by a quick look at the screenshots.. to name a few things that jumped out at me:

- Is that Marker Felt for the Y in the icon?!

- The use of modal views bothers me; it doesn't completely hide the splitview column, but, you can't select anything in it anymore as a result.

- The large emphasis on Instapaper makes it feel like the app is a glorified RSS reader meant to funnel you away from the app itself and consume the content elsewhere.

- When you do view a story in-app, its just a UIWebView that opens the HN page; nothing different than using Safari.

- Using a single line on the UILabel that has to be scrolled (instead of sizing it to fit, or just having multiple lines) seems like a hassle to find out the title of the story.

- Why does the full URL of the story matter? Regular HN does fine without it.

As an aside: Why aren't any of the HN iPhone/iPad/* platform apps open source? Seems like a no brainer to let anyone else submit patches. And from first hand experience, open source in the App Store does sell.
we can only use internet explorer and i don't have admin access
How can I use this structural typing feature?

AOP weavers like postsharp let you do some duck typing like stuff by injecting interfaces as post compile step.
Has the Internet Been a Force for Good?
I used to be able to tell people that, back in the DOS era. Unfortunately, in the Internet era, I'm afraid the people afraid they'll break it if they do something wrong are perfectly correct. One quick download of Bonzi Buddy and You Have Lost, for one instance from my own personal network.
LOL, It even used an evil bill gates img: http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/images/Bill_Gates.gif
I'm building something similar for myself at the moment as well, so when I saw your product on the front page of HN, I thought "wow, great timing." But looks like it's still conceptual (to everyone else.. I'm sure you've got code in the works already) ;)

So how are you going to be testing the payment gateway APIs that you choose to include? Live accounts or maybe you've got someone at each gateway who can set you up with a test account?

Also - a lot of gateways do include load balancing, so some people might be better off just going with their original gateway, instead of adding another layer of complexity (and costs).

But I definitly think you got a viable idea going here... there is money to be made, simply cause your startup is in an area which wouldn't exist if there wasn't any money being moved around.

Good luck.
As long as it's not "rockstar". :) Check out the amusing discussion that happened when a recruiter innocently asked for a ROR "Superstar": http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup/browse_threa...
see edit on my original post.
Regardless, we don't really use them for computation on desktops, right?

[Edit] Besides graphics computing, that is.
The Long-Term Value of Loyalty
No, that's not the same thing at all.
I like it a lot so far - a very nice start to a book that is very different from the typical beginner book (in a good way).
"From what I can tell, nothing is more frustrating to an engineer than a non-engineer asking for something complex, and treating it like it’s trivial."

Yes, yes, and more yes. When programmers say "possible," they mean before the heat death of the universe. That doesn't mean all possible things are automatically trivial, despite their apparent obviousness.
Any employee intent on stealing company IP would likely do so before giving notice.
the highly able strongly underestimate them.

I think that's a lot less generalizable than you suppose. For details, see

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

Both behavioral economics and cognitive psychology show that most people overestimate their abilities most of the time.
They share a common root (L. ingenium) but I'd hesitate to call them forms of the same word.
Hear, hear! I really dread sitting through this, because it makes me cringe and squirm and want to correct them.

On the other hand, it teaches patience. Patience is worth a lot. When I first began tutoring comp sci students, I learned that, even among the technically inclined, you will need to sit through an enormous amount of misunderstandings and mind-numbing attempts to keep the ol' neurons firing just so. Think you have patience? Try teaching.

I picked up tutoring on the side to earn some extra money. As a side-effect, I feel like it's helping my skills in dealing with clients, programming, and teaching.

EDIT: Also, I love pair programming. Don't know about other people, but I feel as though I'm easily twice as productive on my normal days, even though I might be on an absolute roll by myself a couple times a week. It also seems to be easier to avoid design pitfalls or unnecessary debugging with an extra set of eyes on the code (as it's written).
Thanks, I've fixed those issues. Good guess on the French thing, that's actually my mother tongue.
Do you have a beta ready, or are you just seeing if there is an interest for this (ala the lean startup methodology)?

Also, how is this different from chargify, recurly, spreedly, or even braintree?
At many (most?) of the biggest software companies, "engineer" is the term used to divide technical people (including devs) from non-technical people.
Match.com no longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers
I would suggest submitting that to HN as its own thing. It's quite a nice read.
That still doesn't break it. You just reimage and go.

That's the beautiful thing about software - you can't physically destroy anything, such that it can't be moderately easily recreated.

I can't backup my car, so I'm extremely hesitant about messing about with the transmission or exhaust or what have you.

It's trivial to backup my computer and data, and just go for broke. Worst case, I'm out some time, but no real dollar cost.
I went to a career fair once where a company was hiring ROR devs. They gave out guitar picks and drumsticks and everything.
Recursion is fun: http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=3...
I still don't fully grok monads, but I think this is due to not having programmed in Haskell. Thus I conceptualize monads as a hole in an infinite plane. People (Haskell programmers) who deal with this infinite plane understand the hole to be an essential feature to move things from side to side. People who don't live with this plane wonder why the hell people think that a hole is so damn useful.
Usability metrics and studies disagree with you.

It's a pretty basic usability heuristic that states click targets on the edge of the screen are much more usable than floating targets.
I'm 22 and nostalgia was involved. So, yes.
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Nokia N8 Smartphone Coming to India Soon
Not sure what does "how everyone else thinks about the problem space" have to do with a description of an algorithm / data structure. You either implement it correctly, or you don't. It doesn't matter what other people think about it. Many clever algorithms are good, exactly because they don't line up with how you normally think about the problem space.

Why do you have to like the solution to implement it correctly?
So its a saas version of aMember?
Ahhh makes sense now! Thanks much. I knew they shared adsense revenue, but didn't realize they were swapping adsense codes back and forth like that.
I believe it would be good to look at stuff that is considered well-designed, analyze it and try to understand why it's considered to be well-designed before randomly coming up with stuff in Photoshop.
Anybody that doesn't buy weapons built in california?
I had trouble figuring out if they were joking with each other or being serious. Regardless, I must say that they both have a quite peculiar style of writing, and it was cool to see the human side of two people that I've studied so much.

The previous post referenced at the top (http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-dijkstra-bl...) also has a lot of great material.
Actually, Rasmus is one of the smartest people I know.
Reminds me of Tim Sweeney's (yes, he of Unreal fame) ZZT - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZT - but in multiplayer form!

As an aside, there was an awesome interview with Tim Sweeney last year that's worth the read, I think it made HN at the time - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4035/from_the_past_to_...
Google’s CEO on the Enduring Lessons of a Quirky IPO
Big ships are vunerable, the Brits proved that to the Italians at Toranto, then the Japanese copied them at Pearl Harbor.

So the only way you let your expensive $Bn carrier fleet near a tiny little 3rd world enemy is once you have comprehensively bombed the *&%$ out of their defenses.

With this you could have finished bombing all their airfields, sunk their fleet and blown up all their tanks - then just as the USS Obama arrives off shore a 40' container in a parking lot opens it's doors and sinks it.

Unless you are going to destroy every container, and every building that could hold a container in a country before approaching it you have a problem.
Synchronized cardioversion is print media's only chance
Senators ask Facebook to fix privacy issues
Finding just any designer wouldn't be all that hard, but as a founder, you probably don't have 20K to spend on a designer, but allowing them an equity stake in the company and working side by side to develop the product would be an ideal solution.

I think the hardest part is just finding someone who is good and willing to apply themselves to a project, with the risk of a founder.
Along with "don't pretend to be more technical than you are", I would add "Trust the engineer/dev/ux guy/programmer to do what you hired them to do".

I had the experience (that I imagine a lot of people share) of being hired by a non-technical founder in a start-up, who then wanted to micro-manage and give input on every minute decision that went into the building of the UI, even to the detrement of the user experience.
thank you for the kind words :-) . ActiveMerchant turned out to be one of those quick things I put together while making Shopify that took on a life of it's own. Amazing success. At one point Cody took a 2 week vacation after we shipped Shopify and while he was gone we got 3 new gateways contributed that all immediately became available in Shopify. Even if he would have stayed back and coded all day he couldn't have created so many production ready gateway backends.
I would love a good HN app for my iPad.

This one is nit very good though (I am using it right now).

It doesn't feel very well thought out. Instead of having articles always stay in the list I would rather them disappear after I read them unless I mark it as a favorite or comment on it.

Also, what is this weird back button?
I am using 1password http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password to keep track of my passwords. It does a lot of magic making it feel integrated into the web experience, although it doesn't tell my browser whether I'm logged in or not, although I didn't quite feel a need for that before. It syncs the passwords to my iPhone as well.
I alos enjoy the developer's blog. Earnest.

http://notch.tumblr.com/
That should actually be #7, I think - I'll add it if I get the chance. I started off like the person you describe, and I have since moved pretty far in the opposite direction.
Tell me what you think when it airs ... :-P
I honestly think most of the apps in the app store would have been better off as highly optimized web apps. When you look at the quality of gmail.com on the iPad, for instance, it makes you wonder why anyone bothers with apps. Not to mention, there is no approval process for websites. Someone just needs to make an iPad optimized version of HN
You convinced me, but:

- how often do you change seats?

- don't you feel extra tired at the end of the day because of all the constant input and discussion?
> an intelligent mind would not allow such a stunningly ignorant belief...

I'm not sure about that. Maybe a scientific (ie. exploratory) mind would do that. However you're assuming that ignorance is any axioms except science axioms (which at their time are facts that will time they may change, ie. the more recent Global Warming). Same applies to the evidence reexamining.

An analogy: if you know by experience (a lot of trial-error) that if you touch the red button, you will seriously hurt yourself, would you push it again to re-examine your previous knowledge? I think the same dogma applies to (blind) beliefs if you were not allowed to explore in the "exploratory age".

EDIT: Trial-error of beliefs cannot be based on factual experience, since they can't exist (eg. is there a God? Does the Heaven exist?).
I suspect he wouldn't have published the exchanges if Calacanis hadn't blown up so severely.

For that matter, if Calacanis had been nice and professional about it no one would care about the employee posting it on the web (it would, after all, show him being nice and professional...).
> Big ships are vunerable, the Brits proved that to the Italians at Toranto

If I have my facts correct, the Japanese also reminded the Limeys of it when the sunk the Prince of Wales and the Repulse after Sir Tom Phillips overruled suggestions that the fleet not move out of Singapore without air cover.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_Prince_of_Wales_and_...

(While Wikipedia says nothing other than reporting that he was killed, I read elsewhere that Sir Phillips declined to join the sailors abandoning ship.)
Works particularly well for Daring Fireball. It's like looking at the website of Gruber's tasteless, comic-sans using, evil twin.
To expand on this. It is illegal in Canada for anyone without a proper engineering degree to call themselves an engineer. For example a computer scientist cannot call themselves an engineer while a computer or software engineer could.
Building an Internet of Things (video)
Ironically, your 3-column blog design is not very friendly, IMO. I had to scroll up and down to read that post.
I don't understand this. Why is it so hard to give someone the benefit of the doubt?

The whole piece boils down to that. And it's very useful advice for arrogant computer dweebs. You can't just write people off like that successfully.

And you certainly can't do it because 100 out of N misdirected users of one of the most popular sites on the internet don't have the correct mental model for what's going on or complete confidence in that model.
I wonder how many younger HN'ers even really know what Frontpage is these days.
I've not yet been in the management position, but I definitely don't think it's an easy thing to do. It requires the loss of some control, and putting your neck out on the line, but when you've hired the person equipped for the job, it's ultimately best.
Thank you for that. Getting linked to a Cosma Shalizi article is always good for an hour of brain stretching, and that one is particularly wonderful.
Revealing the information that he's a jerk is not quite what is normally meant by "revealing information" and I'm sure many will say the employee did a public service.

As for what you find in those searches, if you're not a jerk what do you have to fear?
I feel the same, but couldn't manage to articulate it. Nicely done. I agree... humility is very important.
Also, what is this weird back button?

Likely an attempt at copying Instapaper's pagination; see "Pagination tap zones" on http://blog.instapaper.com/post/545408126