skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To cut through some of the BS around this:
A salary that's sufficient and feels fair is essential for letting your talented coder check off that box and get on with life.

At the most basic level, if your developers aren't earning enough money to easily solve the myriad money-related problems of everyday life, those stresses will seriously affect their work. Money doesn't buy happiness, but lack of money can sure make it hard to find.

The pay also needs to be high enough that your developers don't feel worried that they're being ripped off -- that is, if they notice they you pay below the industry standard for the region, but they know their work is above average (in fact it may be way above average), they'll be forced to dedicate time to figure out if they're being taken advantage of. Not because they need the money, but because we all tend to think people who get tricked out of their money are fools, and they don't want to be seen as fools.

Once you get those two things out of the way, then you can focus on building real, non-monetary incentives for creative work -- interesting and diverse projects, sense of purpose, constant learning without forced massive leaps (good flow), allowing & encouraging mastery, etc..

It's absolutely true that just raising the money won't fix hiring problems once it's "high enough", but if you're simply paying too low, you don't have a chance.
Already happened here. I don't take HN half as serious as I did in the beginning. I am still a fan, let's not get overboarsd here, but the whole way these issues are handled is poor.
Evernote CEO Phil Libin's 3 Steps to "Freemium" Success
Channel 4 hit the streets in a "ask the public" bit a month ago when this idea was first floated. They asked a bunch of people what laws they'd want to repeal. No-one came up with any ideas. Lots of shrugging and "hmm, you need laws otherwise there'll be anarchy!" type comments.

The only "idea" someone came up with was (and I paraphrase heavily, since it was a while ago): "You know those hood things the Muslims wear? They should ban those because you can't see who you're talking to." When the reporter noted that this was creating a new law rather than removing an existing one, the response was, "Oh yeah.. you're right!"

This policy is a shriveled vegetarian sausage thrown at a collectively dim, politically unaware and undeserving populace. It'll end up mushed into the ground and forgotten within months.
It's not the first project that I have seen that was cancelled. Building a PSS (RES and/or INV) is not a small thing, given that there is so much complexity in the airline industry which has to be supported. I think it would be very exciting if Google continued these developments. Some of the major players (e.g. 1A) are in a quasi-monopoly and they definitely exploit that. More competition would be good. (But I agree, I don't see why Google would want to compete.)

Btw, many of the PSS vendors already have or are currently in the process of renewing their "expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases".
Can you tell us more about what the site is built on (Language/Framework)? If you've built your site on something standard like Wordpress or Django than it will be much cheaper to implement these features. If it's custom all the way things get a bit trickier.

The biggest problem with this sort of request is that a lot of people out there will say they can do it but won't do it well. Sites like scriptlance will probably get you quotes in the few hundred dollar range but their code will be of poor quality and missing important "behind the scenes" features like error handling. So you really have to be careful (and if you tell us more maybe we can help you with that)
No, but Python can.
I'm working with a web development shop in Vietnam (disclosure: I own about 1/5 of the company). If you already have the mock-ups, then send it my way and I can forward it to the guys. I think if the requirements are not crazy, you can make good use of your $2K. Here's the link to the company's brochure:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/29808412/Quick-Solution-Credential...

Cheers!
Compiling Crystal Space in Ubuntu 10.04
Video games aren't so much.

Actually, they are in some cultures, and the results can be rather horrific: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapelay
IOS devices will and are disrupting the desktop space
surely spammers have javascript-enabled spambots by now. i'm sure some of them embed an actual webkit/mozilla/ie rendering engine and just script the interface.

hell, a regular firefox browser with images disabled (for speed) and the selenium plugin installed could probably accomplish a high rate of automated spamming.
I read somewhere else today that this only works until the topic has less than 10 votes, which does not apply here.
What argument? Posterous has never claimed that Tumblr was dying, so the whole post was based on a false premise. Go read their original post again if you don't believe me (or read my post in the deleted thread, where I quote the relevant parts).
When I was younger and learned about all the bat shit crazy stuff like this the US military was doing with nuclear weapons, I assumed that it would cause long term insidious effects on human health, even if it happened only in indirect ways via the ecosystem and atmosphere. Today, I'm not convinced either way. But when there are reports saying cancer incidence has increased over the last half of this century, and you add to that picture all the crazy nuclear testing that went on plus all the new chemicals put into agricultural soil, food, water, etc. and the rise of plastic containers, all without any valid long term health testing done beforehand, you can't help but think there's going to be a connection.

"Hey lets's have a naked roof party and watch the nuclear bomb explode in the sky because it'll be groovy, baby!!!"
Some funded sbcl work would be good.
My N1 is fine for two days, the third day it becomes risky.
Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather than join a large corporation, even Google.

And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.
It was a content-free rant. It didn't add anything to the comment thread that had already appeared on HN at the time. I would have killed it regardless of who it was about.
There was nothing in it to engage one's intellectual curiosity.
I agree that killing posts can be suspect but isn't asking why something was killed against TOS as well? Maybe allowing this post to get so high is their way of being transparent.

"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."

Edit: post killed shortly after I posted this.
Can you link to the post where they claimed that? In the one I read, they said that Tumblr was a pretty cool site. Not a single word about the size of the user bases.

So which post did you read?
I don't know this space at all; what are the other options?
From Andrew's post:

But I have some beef here Preposterous staff, you call
all your competitors, who are all building products to
serve similar communities, dying?

Incorrect. This is a deliberate misreading of the original post ( http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous ) which states:

You grouched about dying platforms that haven't added
new features in ages, sites that have made it too
complex to perform the most basic tasks and places
that smother your content in ads.

Again from Andrew's post:

Threats of lawsuits are reported, and to me this isn’t
about the tools or privacy, it is about a company being
a dick and the legal response to just that.

There are many possible interpretations of the situation, but companies generally don't bring out the lawyers because another company is "being a dick".

Again from Andrew's post:

Saying switching to your service is fine, but by
discrediting them, both the community behind them
and the staff, you are also attacking the full
history of the site, which, a lot of people care
about.

I don't see him backing this up anywhere in the post. He makes a big leap from Posterous lacking "community" features and saying some of the platforms they're writing exporters for are dying, to "discrediting" the communities behind sites and "attacking" the full history of those sites.

Then, there's the repeated use of the derogatory "Preposterous", which is roughly equivalent to the old "Windoze" or "Crapintosh".

So, again, in my opinion:

- the post was trolling

- the post is misleading

The trolling alone was enough for me to flag the post.
If the slider is a true input, all you need to do is validate that input and reject any submissions with the wrong value.
That is a very optimistic idea.

I wouldn't have mentioned the edge thing except that I've heard that sentiment repeated a lot, and I've asked other people for confirmation.
Ask HN: Why was the "Why was the Posterous thread killed" thread killed?
We'll find other sites, you know.
Or you could've just used that whole sentence as a password. I'd be willing to bet it's significantly more secure than those 11 characters, even if a dictionary-based attacker used ideal grammar rules and a bit of knowledge about you (say, family + pet names, ages, etc; only public knowledge).
Microsoft makes $250 billion/year with 25% net margins. If they were not making some hundred million dollar mistakes, wouldn't THAT be cause for concern?
Weirdly, it was dead, then alive again briefly, and now dead again. I wonder if this is just a caching thing or if there is something more going on behind the scenes.
it's what caused The Day of the Triffids, duh! :)
I second this! Passage is what convinced me of the possibility of Art in games.

Art as defined by Ebert in this post, not beautiful visuals or anything like that - which is kind of the wrong way to seek art in games, IMO.

> that simply can't be experienced in any comparable way in any other medium.

This is the crucial bit.
Really? 100-150/hour?

Would you mind to share your experience? like...

- how old they are

- do they also help you with HTML/CSS?

- do they also help you with graphics, icons, and contents?

- what about unit-tests and quality?

Would be very appreciated if you can answer them. If this is just between you and the developers and both parties prefer to be private and decided not to answer, I would understand.

Thanks!
In the modern West, major studies indicate a prevalence of homosexuality of 2% to 13% of the population[1]. On any given day 4% of the population has sex[2]. That means that in order for same-gender sex to outnumber straight sex, every day between a third and all of the homosexual population would need to have sex[3]. Somehow I doubt this is the case.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality

[2] http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/geographyo...

[3] I know I'm completely ignoring people who aren't reportedly homosexual having same-gender sex, but I assume the studies Wikipedia cites account for people who are in-between to some extent, and that the one-off same-gender experiences are negligible compared to the overall population. It's not perfect math!
I assume that doing these radius searches requires far more computational power than a "simple" single-origin/single-destination search, which surely must translate into a higher cost-per-query for QPX customers. Is this perhaps why very few QPX-powered sites actually offer the option?
Is Dan's talk accessible online somewhere? The YouTube video is marked as private (see e.g. http://www.gawkk.com/lisp-for-high-performance-transaction-p...).
How has Google's history of buying and integrating companies gone? I know about successes like Android or Google Voice, but what about failures? I guess there aren't any epic failures as of yet (we'd know about them), but it's unlikely they've been 100% successful.
I really like what Ranker has going on, and have been keeping my eye on them.

Ranker employs the social ranking within lists, so the crowd decides what goes to the top of each list, while List Central does social rankings on lists compared to other lists. List Central also allows for private lists, so there can be both fun and useful lists.

Another major difference is that List Central is bootstrapped and Ranker has found Angel funding.
Ask HN:  Can we stop flagging down posts?
Now the meta thread about the posterous thread getting flagged down was flagged down.

original thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479028

meta thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479446

and then for good measure, this was flagged down today too:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477734

Can we have downvoting of stories so that they aren't flagged from existence when people don't like them?
Someone's bound to say "But it doesn't support RPC!"

No, it doesn't, and that's a good thing. Use ZeroMQ as your transport with a protobuff payload and do remote message passing* instead of RPC - it'll scale more efficiently than straight RPC and you won't end up having to pool connections or queue requests in your client.

*Give each message request an identifier and have each response identify what message it's answering.
This sort of seemingly naive Disney-like way of dealing with and communicating about nuclear weapons -- esp in material produced for the public by the US defense/energy depts from the 50's to the 70's -- is what directly inspired the style and sense of humor shown in the Wasteland/Fallout games.
Forgive my ignorance, but what are the legal issues with running your own GSM cell? Is there a legal way to operate in the licensed part of the spectrum?
Ah, but programmers don't come with these labels, do they?

And of course the $100K programmers are happy to accept an offer at $150K as well (though they won't be any more productive), in which case you've actually just chopped out a third of your productivity.
Please review the iSound.com beta - (Pandora for new music)
The example that is usually brought up is one guy at Google (Erann Gat) that had one conversation with his manager that ended in a "No".

That's completely different to Google buying an existing business for $700 million whose core tech is written in Lisp.
Why? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8&NR=1
Are you aware that cellulose is just interlinked glucose molecules? A tree is basically a giant hunk of hydrated sugar byproducts with some minor mineral and other components.
Yes, corporate travel is a huge market, but service companies like Christopherson are probably becoming less relevant in light of all this new competition. Wouldn't be surprised if Google took this on..
'custom search feature, social networking/profile features'. These terms are so broad in their scope that it's really not possible for anyone here to estimate with any accuracy the time/cost it would take to implement them.

If you actually do have a detailed spec then I'd recommend that you simply approach a web dev shop/freelancer and see what they say. Explaining the details of what you require is the only way that you're going to get an accurate answer. You may even want to tell them what your budget is up front so that they can be realistic and let you know what's possible for that money. We've all dealt with clients that have very tight budgets, so it's certainly not an unusual request.
Apple PR: Fake

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/01/apple-pr-steve-jobs-i...
Like most of the responses here, it's pretty broad based on what you've described and most importantly 'Be Careful' if you have something custom done.

I do designer work out of the Seattle area: http://consulting.nrml.cc

But I'll tell you up front, most of the work we do is out of the box or ported.

If you're looking for a specifically tailored CMS plugin or custom ground up framework, you might want to ask around for a referral from someone that has first hand experience of what the developer can do.
See also Apache Thrift (from Facebook) and Caucho Hessian
funny, but I bet given the time period the sats were mostly US or Soviet and the folks running the op may not have minded losing some US sats if it meant learning what would happen to the Ruskie sats -- by total accident, of course!
Yeah I should've clarified, Google's CAPTCHAs is one of the best at keeping bots out (and humans too if necessary)
Not if the slider is a swf :)
I'm pretty sure this is how we end up in a Gattaca future. This is the first story I've seen that really has the chance to make genetic screening followed by IVF worthwhile.
I played competitively from 97-2003. Quake, UO, EQ, Halo, WoW, Tekken Tag, Call of Duty, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc.

I dropped it all for a few years and got into DJing.

The whole time I was building software.

For me, I thought it was the competitive spirit. I thought I needed something to be 'better' at. But when I went back to WoW about a year ago, I found that I could play by myself and I just needed something to be 'obsessed with' or 'addicted to.'

As such, I've stopped gaming and focused my 'obsession' on my startup! I still have a life, go out, etc, but my free time is comprised of reading hackernews, building things, or working on launching.

So to answer your question... yes, I gave up gaming. I still play the occasional game but if I can't put 100% of my time into it, it's not fun.

The few things I've found over the years that helped me alot:
1) Find someone else competitive and play a console game for 30 minutes per day... like during lunch. A co-worker and I played Street Fighter 4 and it was great. We kept a strict timeclock on it and it gave me my 'fix.'

2) Get an iPhone, download a new game each week, and play it on the way to/from work. Obviously this works better for me being in NYC and riding the subway, but I'm sure you can find a way to make it work for you.

3) Don't read gaming blogs/websites casually. I find this to be the #1 thing that sucks me back in and instead I choose to read startup stuff.

I suspect that as more and more former 'hardcore' gamers snap out of it and start applying their talents elsewhere (other than counterstrike websites!), you'll see a bunch of quality programmers and designers emerge.

3/4 of my staff played games competitively or 'seriously' and the majority only play 1-2 per month. They are all amazing at what they do. I hope they don't all quit when Starcraft 2 comes out :(

Edited to add: I actually landed my current job because I played video games. A video game tournament company in NYC wanted to hire someone to run their website and I've worked my way up since.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" - it's a lawyer joke
Thanks for mentioning us (Justin.tv)!
Posted right after you and noticed a very interesting similarity. I took a 3 year hiatus ('06 to '09). Wonder why we both waited that long to return?
He could simply deny their contributions, and make them fork it... The license has little to do with who's managing the project and the decisions they make.
Maybe so. The $499 starting price for the iPad is a very important part of its success. Another possibility is the iPad was in the pipeline before the iPhone 4 was designed and it was simply too late to re-design the antenna and integrate a new radio chipset. If you're working with a 12 month release cycle a delay of an additional 3 or 4 months is unacceptable. At some point they had to commit to shipping something
Using Starbucks As Your Office? Here Are Some Tips From Om Malik
By contrast we regularly employ django developers via elance and pay about $15-25 per hour and the quality now we are very efficient at filtering/testing people is very good
Ask HN: Why was the thread about why the Posterous thread was killed killed?
This thread critical of Posterous[1] was killed, which lead to this thread asking why[2]. PG answered, but <10 minutes later, that thread was also killed.

I'm not saying that the initial thread shouldn't have been killed. It did call out Posterous for implying that Tumblr is "dying" when Tumblr is growing, but it was a rant with little substance.

That said, killing threads critical of YC companies is dangerous and should be done more conservatively than killing other threads to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

Even moreso, killing threads questioning the neutrality of Hacker News is extremely dangerous territory. That's getting into dictator territory. No, I don't think that PG is a dictator. But I do think that killing threads questioning the neutrality of Hacker News is only going to make us less confident in the neutrality of Hacker News.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479028

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479446
Find a way to do it for free. Offer partnerships, equity, sales, commission on advertising revenue, etc. Cash is King. Period.
I have to use Firefox 2.x due to a weak PC. I was impressed that the site came up fast and worked without any bugs. The only fix it needs under 2.x is the Next button is obscured by something in the bottom right corner. I tried difficult matches: ABBA, Enya, Morrissey, the Cranberries. I didn't like any of the matches. I'm not really the target audience for this site, though. I don't play music while working. Otherwise, I liked the look of it. Good luck.
Apple: Jobs' "Retire, Relax, Enjoy your family" exchange is fake
Apple PR: Steve Jobs iPhone 4 "it's just a phone" conversation was fake
The iPad, the AmigaOne X1000 and the future of freedom
Additionally, Daniel Eran Dilger* claims the purported recipient of the e-mail tried to sell him the e-mail exchange two days prior, raising the question of whether BGR money changed hands.

*I take everything he writes under his own name and any and all pseudonyms with a large grain of salt, but it's worth noting.
There's a (pretty) good comparison of Thrift to Protobuf on http://wiki.github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/

I think Thrift supports a lot more languages, but based on benchmarks, I believe it does perform (sometimes significantly) slower

I've never used Hessian though, will have to check it out at some point.
Cameron Herold: Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs
"All measurements taken in airplane mode with GPS disabled."

"…the best case overall is about 42% of the original system current, effectively doubling the battery life."

If you don't use most of your actual phone features, that is, but still have the screen turned on. Whereas the regular scenario has those power leeches on, but the screen off. Still, nice experiment.
JSON syntax is Python/Ruby primitive syntax for lists and strings (although the reverse isn't quite true). Why add a library import and additional code on each side just to emit and consume what is effectively the same data? :)
If it is real very simple, show the headers. Solve all of the drama.
They come to the opposite conclusion of what I read several years ago. Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn't Just in Genes. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/health/31age.html

Three pages of the article are behind a paywall, but I recall something it said near the end. It was that when they crunched the numbers, of everything they looked at, longevity was the least correlated with heredity.
Some pretty obvious tips there. Does this really warrant a whole blog post and then to post it as news here? Come on!
A Little Perspective
+1 for this. If you're contracting our work online, don't pay inflated Bay Area wages. Go somewhere like Odesk, you can easily get a very competent overseas developer for no more than $20 an hour.