skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
speaking as someone who didn't go to college, I kindof agree. I mean, I don't know if I agree with the 'more tolerant' bit, but certainly, more liberal and better able to get along with other people who have college degrees, more likely to understand (or at least pretend to understand) modern art, etc...

There are also other, harder to define social changes. The most negative side of this is that I know people who earn 1/5th what I do who won't lower themselves to replacing the brakes on their car. I mean, 'round these parts, mechanics charge $70-$90 an hour. Not many of us make more than that after taxes. This unwillingness to 'break the rules' and accomplish what you need to accomplish can be a pretty big problem.

I don't know if it is what college teaches, or if this is simply what college filters for, but it seems that people who went to school have a narrower view of what they are able/willing to do. (Not as narrow as what one learns in service jobs, but still pretty narrow compared to those of us who do work that 'requires' a degree without having one.)

I mean, that's not always true. I know many English majors turned programmers, some who have become really excellent, and a ridiculous number of physicists turned programmers. But College, in general, seems to come with a diminished respect for industry, especially the trades and working with your hands in general (unless it is 'art') - see discussions here about programming as an art. to some people, it seems, you are somehow insulting programming by comparing it to the work of an electrician, a bricklayer or other tradesman, which to me absolutely sings of arrogance.
Hi, we (IPTEGO) are hiring in Berlin :-) Check out: http://www.iptego.com/jobs/ Feel free to contact me for more details.
> Where is the magical divide between "art" and "science" in the field?

We need to revive the word "artisan" which has connotations both of technical ability and artistic sensibility. Look at it like that, and programmers are no different from thousands of generations of craftsmen from here to the pyramids. It's just that the tools of our trade are usually far more complex than theirs. (Although I still have no idea how to build a pyramid.)

I think this is why some people like to compare programming to painting or writing or whatever their other life's endeavour is. I don't think there is a direct correlation between programming and those other things, but you start using the same parts of the brain for parts of both activities, so it feels as though it's roughly the same.

So here's my comparison between programming and writing: every word must be relevant, there is no redundancy, no unnecessary repetition. Good code and good writing must be tight, clean and comprehensible. I mentioned this to a co-worker once and he said "I'd never thought about it like that. I think it's more to do with mathematics." Which it also is.
What does that have to do with anything? Also not sure if it is true or not. "Conning" says too much, but Apple does promise a lot of things that are not really true. Their computers are not that easy to use and not free of problems.

A lot of people have been led to believe that their computing problems will all go away if they switch to Apple, which simply isn't true.
Try this http://uk.crunchboard.com/ukcrunch.php
Hi,

I'm the cofounder of http://www.submate.com and we are currently looking for a CTO.
Quick pitch: based on your daily commute SubMate introduce you to cool new people and things to do in your areas.

We are based in Paris and the startup is pretty young (only 3months old) but we already have been selected at multiple startup competition: Innovate 100, The Next Web, Plugg and Nonick (we won that one).

SubMate been developed in RoR.

If you want to know more mail me: jonathan-at-submate.com

Good luck with your job search :)
This is only a little nit-picky but I found the image next to "Real time conversations" on your homepage very very distracting. Otherwise looks pretty cool!
This confuses me. What are they supposed to be saying? As a non-native speaker, I have no idea what you mean.

Do you criticize the writing of the article (ie it not being colorful enough)?
We are. Based in London.
From this it looks like there is only "the beginnings" of PostgreSQL support. Is this accurate?
hi. i am currently based in scotland and looking to move to London. would be very interested to start to work for a startup, specially if their founders are hanging on HN :)
iirc, SRWare Iron (http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php) is a Chromium-based browser with an eye for privacy. Might be worth a look if that's your main motivation in browser choice?
Hashtags In Comments On YouTube
What if he'd also recruited a couple of C# programmers to build the next improved version of the same application?

Now he has to either train them too in Obj-C or recruit a new bunch of Obj-C developers.

To top it all off, he must stop improving his product and start rewriting it in Obj-C, while his competitor who started off with Obj-C doesn't have to. There was nothing in the previous version of the OS agreement to suggest that cross-compilation would somehow be banned in future versions. All because Steve Jobs, loves Obj-C. Now how isn't that screwing people's livelihood?
Don't people think this is taking it too far?

Since when do we judge frameworks based on love/hate instead of technical merit? This is web development, not American Idol.
Few benchmarks using Cmd+4'd of my working Firefox window.

Tested with:

pngnq -n 256 image.png
optipng -o7 image.png
advpng -z4 image.png
pngout image.png

Results:

312822 test-firefox.png
181394 test-firefox-advpng.png
199005 test-firefox-optipng.png
235635 test-firefox-pngout.png
181394 test-firefox-full.png

79793 test-firefox-nq8.png
74917 test-firefox-nq8-advpng.png
79683 test-firefox-nq8-optipng.png
76017 test-firefox-nq8-pngout.png
74917 test-firefox-nq8-full.png

Samples:

Original http://gridth.s3.amazonaws.com/test-firefox.png
Quantized http://gridth.s3.amazonaws.com/test-firefox-nq8.png

The result file size is impressive, but the image quality is noticeably worse. I'm not sure if I want to use color quantization with PNG though. After all, if I want a lossy compression, I'd use JPEG.
SoundCloud is based in Berlin. Swedish founders, relaxed atmosphere, cool product:
http://soundcloud.com/pages/jobs
The King and Queen of Location-Based Services
Florida Gators Kelly Green I-rish Gameday T-shirt [JLNCAA003]
We're looking for a Scrum Product Owner in Zürich: http://www.liip.ch/de/company/jobs/ - Scrum knowledge optional, but motivation to learn it and experience handling clients required. We're also always on the lookout for (really) talented php devs.
In addition to point #1, I think one of the great things you'll gain by following Peldi's technique (which you absolutely should be doing -- not just Paras, everybody) is the social proof you need to work your way up the ladder.

For example, Avinash Kaushik wrote the book on web analytics. Literally. Twice. I've talked to him -- he's quite a personable guy, and I think it is likely he gets less email than TechCrunch. Write him a personal pitch tailored directly at one of his main interests, such as how to present A/B testing tools in such a way that non-engineers can actually comprehend them. It just so happens that your tool is the answer to his prayers, which is pretty freaking convenient now wouldn't you say. (Less conveniently, he works for the competitor you're busy crushing, so the rest of this is a harmless hypothetical.)

He has 4,500 people subscribed to his blog in Google Reader. That is now 4,500 people to whom you are not just some random guy in India, but rather, the guy who comes with a recommendation from a trusted topical expert.

Then you quote that recommendation in your pitch emails, preferably to people you know read him. Hint: who links to him frequently? Ah, I see he is the go-to guy for SEOMoz when they need an analytics expert. So you write them an email, pitching yourself as a tool for SEOs which has been introduced by their go-to guy for analytics. (You might also mention that folks in their market space already love you. I know you have SEO clients because I referred them to you. Ask them for a quotable recommendation, then quote the snappiest one you get in your pitch email.)

And now maybe you have a recommendation from SEOMoz. Now you widen the net -- who trusts them?
> So, it's no wonder that people want to think that Apple is somehow conning them into giving up their freedom or being locked-down unnecessarily.

As long as Apple products either 1) play with open standards or 2) remain a niche, that's fine, they can lock in and lock down all their loving fans as much as they want. Not my game, but yeah, I buy other stuff and don't worry about it.

The worries start when they get big enough in something to have "positive network externalities" - network effects - that start influencing my life, whether I like it or not. For instance, if their phones managed to really take over the market, it would make it impossible not to deal with their crap for me, and I would at that point face the choice of either having to deal with "Steve's world" or simply not doing mobile phone stuff. I think I'd choose the latter, but it's not a choice I want to be forced into.
Your point is invalid, and is in fact a much better argument for open standards, which don't require a predatory monopoly to benefit the ecosystem.

Consider:
The value of TCP is not in itself, but in the applications that run on it. The greater the market share of TCP, the greater the utility of the applications. The greater the market share of TCP, the greater the incentive for applications to be created for it.

----

The value of Posix is not in itself, but in the applications that run on it. The greater the market share of Posix, the greater the utility of the applications. The greater the market share of Posix, the greater the incentive for applications to be created for it.
Because thats what appointment means. How would a customer feel if the service provider books say 5 customers at the same time and provide services to only one.

When you book an appointment with a service provider, service provider cannot book anyone else, EVEN if some other customer is interested to obtain their services at the same time.
If you look through, that is quite connstructive messages. Above all, do not pay attention to the childrens.
My company iPlatform is looking for great devs to join us in Soho, London - we're building products to help companies manage conversations online, funded by a service side building Facebook apps for big brands. http://theiplatform.com/jobs/ - we code in Python. Come say hello!
The entire concept of art is relatively recent (from the Renaissance on), the ancient Greeks considered a sculptor to be a craftsman just like a smith or carpenter.

And the Renaissance artists had to make a living somehow, much of their art we know today was made to order for Church, State or rich merchants.

We may consider "pure art" to be "form without function" and "pure utility" to be "function without form". But fields like industrial design, architecture and engineering (ex. bridges) has room for both: Aesthetically pleasing form that merges well with their function.

If programming is art, it's the form+function sort of art. And just like with bridge building, the form part is optional - if the program works and the bridge does not collapse they are doing their job.

I don't consider the code for my day job to be art either. But I still think art can arise under such conditions, generally because someone with the power to do so goes beyond the call of duty and decides to make their bridge or code not only functional but beautiful as well.

There are plenty of constraints that can stop considerations of form dead in their tracks; like whether the client is willing to pay extra or wait longer for a more aesthetically pleasing result, or how much control you have over the final result - there are limits to how creative you can be if you are a subcontractor for a bridge pillar, or if you are designing an ad that needs to fit within the company's design guidelines and an existing ad series.

Still, I think art can arise in the most unexpected places, it's mostly a matter of spotting the opportunities and deciding that it is worth the bother.
I love the format he uses for his videos. It's the same format as CBT Nuggets; voice narration over a whiteboard/blackboard/drawing pad program. I think that format is much more compelling and "sticky" than traditional classroom instruction or even video taped lectures. I've used video modules like this to study for software certifications and I find it extremely effective. When I found out that the internet classes at my community college were just assigned reading and forum discussion I was actually kind of disappointed, I've been thinking about showing them khan academy and telling them to copy his format for their online classes, after all how expensive is it to create this kind of content if you already have instructors; 30 bucks for a copy of fraps and a microphone?
It's not a cache because memcache is already all the cache we need. Not sure why you mention messaging server unless you're expecting listeners to poll the server instead of get told about events. So I think it's a noSQL DB.

For my practical uses I'm most interested in Redis as a backing store for distributed persistent redundant key-value stores like:

http://kumofs.sourceforge.net/
http://opensource.plurk.com/LightCloud/

And my requirements are:
1. Speed. Gobs of it. Ridiculous amounts of speed.
2. Data must get written to disk periodically and I don't care if you lose a few minutes worth when I lose a disk. I'd like some control over how much data I'm prepared to lose vs speed.
3. O(log N) scalability.
4. More interesting ways to sort, extract, modify and delete data stored in a key or multiple keys without impacting performance.

Thanks Salvatore for your hard work!!
We're recruiting in London, not quite a startup but a Research & Development lab for Yell with a startup vibe.

It looks like we might soon be heavy on great front-end people and that our hiring of back-end people is lagging, so we're becoming desperate for innovative people who know JVM related tech forwards and backwards (J2EE, Spring, Groovy, Clojure, etc) and who can use that to green-field from scratch as well as integrate with brown-field (a lot of data we need is still in legacy systems, though we have a roadmap to move it somewhere sane).

We are still looking for a few more people on the front-end. Aside from people who know JavaScript intimately (you'll have a tough quiz to pass during interview), we're also looking for someone who has been inside Android for a while and can untap the potential there. If you have C/C++ knowledge too then all the better as we're keeping our eye on Google's NaCl. Any OpenGL experience would be nice too but certainly isn't high on our current priorities.

Finally we need a designer, one who really understands the limitations of the different devices and yet can turn around flawless and highly communicative work quicker than we can bring it to life with tech.

For all of these roles whilst experience is necessary what we're really looking for is a deep passion for what you do and a real lust for learning and applying what you learn.

Drop me a line at david.kitchen@yelllabs.com and I'll ensure we get back in touch.
XMPP: How to make the web work in real-time
Sofa is always looking for great obj-c/obj-j/python/js/support/ui-designer people to work fulltime in Amsterdam.

http://www.madebysofa.com/jobs
Thanks Patrick! As you suggest, specifically, regarding Avinash I had mailed him long back. He replied that VWO is very cool and I like how easy it is, but since I work for Google there may be a conflict of interest. Perfectly understandable.

Though there are lots of other bloggers in web analytics, SEO and online marketing industry. I have made a list (from Alltop and Technorati) and plan to start writing to them soon. Your strategy is interesting. I am using it already, pitching people using your and others' reviews.
http://www.criticalpath.net/ has an office in Berlin and always needs good people.
It's really hard to rebuild a plane while in flight

Obviously these people didn't know that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2zqTYgcpfg

[Disclaimer - I used to work for them]
youDevise is a growing 50-person agile financial software company with a couple of very successful financial web applications. We're hiring in London (sorry, not Berlin). Read about jobs at http://www.youdevise.com/careers and learn more about us on our blog at https://dev.youdevise.com .

I'm the CTO and handle all the hiring. Would be very happy to hear from anyone interested in working in Europe (whether or not you have the right to work here - we do immigration if the fit is right).
Senior Rails Dev needed in Amsterdam/Utrecht. They are building a web app, predicting future energy scenarios based on your assumptions - like how co2 emission, electricity and heating cost, dependence on foreign countries will change. I'm leaving this great team and project for my own venture. http://www.workingwithrails.com/opportunity/2450
Technologies: Rails 2.3, Ruby 1.9, Haml/Sass, Rspec, Git, jQuery
I doubt that proprietary software will ever really go away, but I think that its importance will diminish over time as the heap of free software grows ever larger.

Over time the issue of freedom in the digital domain has become increasingly important. Today perhaps more than ever there are an array of forces who are trying to snatch away people's control over their own computing and put it into the hands of highly centralised technocrats, usually by dangling the carrot of convenience. The personal computer is in danger of no longer being personal.
Good, cheap, fast. Pick two.
Innovation is an externality; by definition that means consumers do not consider innovation when selecting a product to purchase and will buy products that actually harm innovation. Apple is stifling innovation, just because it's not pissing off it's user base (only it's developers) does not mean it isn't doing damage.
Max is obviously a great person to talk to. However if that doesn't work out, please consider youDevise (http://www.youdevise.com/careers) - we like moving great people to London!
Nice video
Klaut

There is a strong start-up scene in Scotland...

http://techmeetup.co.uk/blog/

We even have companies that actually use FP in products (Erlang) and some Haskell hackers...

The scene here sent half a dozen people to StartUp School and a couple of teams got interviews at YCombinator - and we've had three teams at Seedcamp (including 1 winner) so you don't need to move to London...

Come along or ping me on gordon AT hypernumbers DOT com
Apple are hiring in Ireland. But not the hacker-type roles like so many of the others here. I'm hoping to get my leg in the door and move into a developer role asap.
www.kodu.co.uk we're based in London and are always looking to hire good obj-c/ruby/rails devs to help develop and launch new products. (feel free to a mail to nc@kodu.co.uk if you would like to know more)
Interestingly, I think if you tweaked it to be "Randomly sample three keys and blow away the LRU among them" it would be pretty close to a fully LRU implementation for a lot of typical workloads.

Consider a website where 10% of the cache is hot: you'd discard a single hot entry only once every thousand cache evictions. I think for a lot of sites that is likely to be Good Enough, depending on the impact of a cache miss.

Bonus: you can trivially tweak how sensitive that is by increasing the number of items to randomly sample.
Agile makes me SMART
Those of us who have been around in the software industry for a while usually have some experience of being shafted, or left high and dry, by a particular software product or company. The most pernicious activity that I've seen is the "pay us for this upgrade which you don't really want or need or else we disable your software" business model. It's not explicitly expressed in those terms of course, but that's what it amounts to. Another problem which I've come across is the situation where a software company disappears and there are outstanding bugs which can't be fixed by anyone. Sometimes the ownership rights mean that even ex-developers from a defunct software company can't independently continue to support software which they wrote.
In practice the great firewall is still not blocking vpn, even a weak pptp is ok.
Many very well known vpn services are still not blocked, and not because of ignorance from govt. Just search for vpn on taobao (chinese ebay), and you'll find plenty of options.
I think terms like 'engineering' and 'craft' point more towards what we want to describe. Programming is obviously not purely art or pure science in most cases, but a mix.
We, the company compuccino based in Berlin, are looking for developers pushing our products forward.

We develop interconnected platform strategies & cross-platform applications. Our Apps, Tools and APIs allow customers to create, publish and spread content within specialized use cases and in individual formats.

Technologies: PHP, Python, MongoDB, memcached, Lighttpd, MySQL, jQuery, Redis, HAProxy, Nginx, etc.

Have a look at our website http://compuccino.com (Jobs page on the top right)
MX Telecom are looking for developers in London. Mobile messaging and applications for folk like 118118/KGB_ BBC and Twitter
We like great software and the colour blue
http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/softdev
Soccer Bashi – less soccer, extra Bashi
Berkshire Hathaway has $9 billion or more in derivatives. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/business/30views.html

Would have been interesting to ask how to determine whether "gambling" is going on or not, given that Goldman, JP Morgan, and BH all have derivatives.
I think this has to do with an optimization by proxy http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_... error by the card issuers and the actuarial tables for fraud risk.
Yahoo is hiring in London - engineers (both backend and frontend) for Yahoo answers and Eurosports. We are also looking for geo engineers with good C++ skills for the GeoPlanet team. Drop us a CV at cheil@yahoo-inc.com.
I didn't bother, since estimating market size is witchcraft.

The American Massage Therapy association has 57,000 members. Massage therapists are a small portion of the overall personal/professional services industry. 57k / small number = big number. Does it matter if it is 400k or 4 million or 40 million? Not to me. (If I was going for VC, yeah, there are 40 million -- you can see it right here on this chart in the up and to the right portion.)
did you read your designer spec? it simply says "inspirational, loves photoshop and already using CS5" as a designer thats 0% content
Ask HN: Co-Founder commitment
We've started a small start-up project some weeks ago, initiated by me.

We've decided to split work and equity by 50% but after some weeks it tends to be very unfair: All work is done by me, not only programming but also sales, customer service and general organization stuff.

Co-Founder seems to be "fine" with only doing one or two small tasks a week...

Are there any best practices before giving up? I'm not really big fan of time accounting but this could probably show the lack of interest and productivity of my co-founder and maybe motivate him one last time?

Or is this naive and should quit the project asap?
Theres some real quality here and I daresay some kind of business model because theres so much value in his videos.
Also no designer in their right mind uses a first release for production software.