skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
bmelton,

Thanks for your comment!

Five billion people on earth have no internet access. Many are living in complete poverty, without any infrastructure, and/or under an oppressive government.

The benefit is to give these people a way to communicate with, learn from, and contribute to, the rest of the world - we hope to give a voice to the voiceless.

I picked Twitter b/c messages can be moved efficiently via satellite, and there is an existing global network of contributors to answer questions and to help.
My citation shows women have less variance in intellect than men (but very similar mean). Sorry for the paywall, but unfortunately that is where academic research lives.

Here is a newspaper summary: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121691806472381521.html

As for your post, my mistake. I missed the "she is a one issue writer, therefore mysoginist" bit probably because I assumed your post had some sort of logic to it.
There are two sides to the abuse issue as well, though. There's definitely that mindset among a lot of people, more than enough in policing positions to make it true, and it's disgusting.

There is, however, a massive selection bias in the stats for abuse in particular. Where men are abused, they're either congratulated (if sexually) or told to "man up" (not selected specifically because you used it, but because it's the phrase). There's a lot of evidence (and growing) that it's far more common than is admitted, though I'm not at all implying it's as much as women get abused.

It's another of those situations where, instead of support, men live with it or are ridiculed where women are protected (lies by should-be-protectors aside). If you look at it with a bit of history in mind, it's pretty obvious why this exists: men were the only ones with any real power and wouldn't allow abuse, and they were more unchecked in their own abusing.
jeb,

Thanks for the (sort of harsh) comment.

The use of Twitter in what I'm doing is not for idle fun - it's to give people a way to communicate to the outside world that doesn't depend on anyone else.

A farmer will be able to ask a question about crop rotation; a college student can ask about what it's like to attend a Western institution - a tribal leader can tell the world about how aid workers are raping women in their remote village. Right now, it simple isn't possible to expose the world to what's happening. Five billion people on earth do not have internet access, and communication is not the same via cell phone.
Curious to know the backgrounds of the founders. What were they doing before this? Students/graduates?
rameshnid,

Thanks for the comment.

We're working out all of those issues, including the possibility of providing a hieroglyphics based communication mechanism for bi-directional picture story telling via Twitter.
The high price makes the car less impressive and impractical. Create an affordable electric car and then I'm be impressed.
zmmz,

Thank you very much!
It's been a while since I used Bluehost (2-3 years), but think I remember seeing my password in plain text somewhere, so they did store it in plain text back then.
While it's hard to argue that Kin is an awful product, the saddest part of the story is that many of the people responsible for it knew it was -- they were largely victims of political circumstance, forced to release a phone that was practically raw in the middle.

Oh god, how much infighting could Microsoft chuck if Microsoft could chuck products? A lot apparently.
I've seen plenty of companies with as large as you describe and they just have their projects fail even bigger. I know of one that went on for 2 years with a team of who knows how many (for a very large, very well known company) that got canceled completely last year. Many more examples where that came from.

I also don't see how the argument is specific to India. I realize that you're only stating what you know, but it sounds awfully similar to the US in terms of reasoning. The best and the brightest all want to make the most money, so they go work for the biggest companies, right? Except it doesn't actually pan out that way in real life. Actually, money is a surprisingly bad motivator for behavior.

Unfortunately, I don't think this post explains WHY outsourcing fails again and again and again, whether big or small.
Gist confirming that issue http://gist.github.com/461930
The so called TOP companies like TCS, infosys do not hire programmers they hire people
who can be "trained" to code. These people can be called zombie coders who have no purpose
and passion for coding. Their ultimate aim is to stay a programmer for five years and then move to management. And as very obvious these people will produce poor quality code

and as for the smaller companies, these are were the talent lies, because these are usually
startups and looking for additional revenue to fund their projects
narkee,

Thanks for the comment.

I suppose the same thing will happen that happens in the US...
They already have thousands customers? How come if they only launched today? Thousands?
Starbucks Free Wifi: Auto-login  Greasemonkey Script
You should see the hassle he went through to get out of being in the National Academy of Sciences. Feynman thought the academy was sort of ridiculous, with physicists wanting to limit the number of chemists and arguing about whether to let in the sociologists. There was a series of back-and-forth letters that were published in a book of collected letters, "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations".
Yeah I would normally never mix the templating/html w/ the data processing but I was trying to stick to the example but w/ one line hah. Right now it is part of my new web framework which is very much a work in progress but available on http://voltron.googlecode.com the relevant code for the Array dsl is under Model/Type/Array.php and FluentLambda.php and the constant declarations are in bootstrap.php - again total work in progress so things are not as clean as they should be just yet.

Also http://commonphp.blogspot.com is where I write about it.
Link directly to the slideshow, rather than his blog:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/200083/inside_the_amiga_1000....
With Wesabe announcing they're shutting down a couple days ago, this could be good timing. I'd been using Wesabe for our business accounts (Mint wouldn't work with one of our accounts, and Wesabe's downloader thingy did work, so it won by default). And, if it happens to address business needs a bit better than Mint or Wesabe, that's even better.

It's a huge market, but I think you've got an uphill battle. Quickbooks is so entrenched...I tried really hard to avoid it, but it does damned near everything, every accountant knows it, every tax preparer knows it, every bank exports for it, and it's cheap compared to all of the existing online double-entry products ($100 per year vs. insanely expensive monthly rates for everything I could find; I'm still using the 2009 edition so technically it's getting cheaper by the day). In the past, I didn't have a Windows box handy (Linux is my primary desktop/laptop OS and has been for a dozen years), and so I went to great lengths to deal with alternatives, like running my own SQL Ledger installation. But, now that I have a Windows partition on both machines, Quickbooks isn't a hardship.

But, given that Quickbooks requires me to babysit the transaction imports, and I only do that once every couple of months, having an automatic snapshot of all of our accounts would be awesome.
Requires me to register ... I'm not that interested ...
>any product development company worth a damn hires as much for business acumen as it does for technical acumen. Otherwise, what would be the point?

Oh most definitely.
OTOH, if you have 20,000 "friends" maybe Diaspora should force you to buy a more powerful server. Social networking is one thing and social marketing is another.
Show HN: Created a Job Board for Remote Programming Jobs
Based on the multiple "Who's hiring remotely?" and similar posts on HN, I thought it might be useful to have a site that aggregates remote programming jobs. There is way too much spam out and an inconsistent way to say "work from home" so traditional searching doesn't work (or rather, takes a long time per person). I've worked in a few remote programming positions so I figured I might know of some companies or searching tricks to find them.

Let me know if you'd find this type of thing useful. If we can get some traffic going, then maybe we can start attracting companies to actually list their jobs with us.

http://workfromhomeprogrammingjobs.com/
Click click: http://workfromhomeprogrammingjobs.com/
Maybe your app developer should seek other ways of getting money out of his app. Not for this specific case but "in app purchase" and ads in apps are two great ways of earning money.
You seem to have framed it well, and tried to do it when age-appropriate. Those probably mitigate most if not all of the misinforming and destruction of trust issues.

Still, there are empirical studies on how people, when presented with information of the form "not X", "X is a myth", etc, will forget the "not" and "is a myth" parts of the information first and thus be left more ill-informed than had they never been presented the information (I'm in the middle of packing, so no link, sorry; but I seem to recall something about a "Myths about the Flu" pamphlet in one such study). Other studies address people's fallibility when it comes to usefully remembering where they learned particular facts. So if you are going to keep doing such lessons it might be helpful to look into such research and perhaps try to assess later just how your lessons had done, aging-well or breaking-down over time, in memory.
That is a rocking deal. You're right, pretty irresistible. Only reason I haven't already pulled the trigger is I get the feeling a new model will be released soon.

Unfortunately, navigating from page to page on the Kindles is slow. With my Kindle 2, it's like 'click... page load... page refresh.. done', takes about 2-3 seconds. That's a long time when you are flipping through pages. I can't speak for PDF's specifically, but the real limitation is the screen, so I imagine they are about the same.
There's also Outright.com, I believe they have Yodlee integration as well too. They're also free for any size account :-)

I also believe they have a rest-based oauth 2.0 api in there as well.
For any programmatic way of checking to see if the user is a human, without them interacting with the system, there's a programmatic way of faking it.
Big companies, means lot of zombie coders which means lots of meetings which means lots of hierarchy, which again means less of coding . Smaller teams lead to better quality code and faster delivery times. Which is what i have experienced and if you want to get into the theory of this.Read " The Mythical Man-Month"
>But, in my experience running a domestic product development firm, the single best way to acquire repeat business is to exit completely and gracefully.

Very much so the truth. Additionally, giving great business advice to go with your software works well too. The business of software is unfamiliar to most of the people hiring software developers.
One of the things I like about virtualmin and usermin is that they do very little in terms of non-standard config file manipulation (relative to, say, plesk). Agreed that resolving problems from usermin can sometimes be problematic, it is convenient for a lot of things too.

Being able to use the proper tool (control panel or straight command line) is best. I'd found that using a tool to do X would let me then go look at the config files before and after X to see what/how the tool was doing - that was a great learning exercise for me. Might not be for others though.
"Maybe your app developer should seek other ways of getting money out of his app. Not for this specific case but "in app purchase" and ads in apps are two great ways of earning money."

So instead of dealing with the actual problem (people pirating). He should just give it away for free with ads?
I don't disagree about the underrepresentation. I know in prison populations it is relatively common. And while its underrepresented in day to day life, I don't think it budges the needle much. While I saw some domestic abuse by men, it wasn't common (I saw about twice as many calls from a male partner in a gay relationship than men in straight relationships... both were really rare).

But I think this argument is symbolic of the debate. You think men don't get the support they need by society for sexual abuse and that women are protected. Whereas I think women are abused more frequently, and the protection mechanisms are controlled by men.

My sympathies rest with all victims, but I just have trouble sympathizing with men as a group.
I would love to see an actual business modeled after The Black Danube, in Robin Sloan's novella Annabel Scheme: http://robinsloan.com/annabel-scheme (Read the whole thing, it's an awesome story)

Directly from the book (don't worry, it's CC):

-----

They showed me a coffee shop stretched out to warehouse scale. There was a long, foreshortened espresso counter up front. The rest of the concrete floor was dotted with wooden tables, dozens of them, all different shapes, spaced evenly through the field of gray. Every single one was occupied. Men in shiny suits and long coats—one in white New Fleet livery—milled from table to table like customers at a flea market.

[...]

All of the tables at this coffee shop were reserved for new internet companies. The price was a nine percent stake in your new venture, but you’d happily give nineteen or ninety-nine. With a table, you got, in addition to the simple, precious space: a thick, luxurious fiber-optic connection to the internet; a server or two or sixteen in the data center next door; and, most important by far, the attention of Octav Erdos.

I saw him at a table near the front. He was tall and wide, bald, wearing gray overalls. He could have been an auto mechanic. He was blustering at the semicircle of skinny faces around the table, tracing his fingers in little spirals, drawing something in the air. Everyone was nodding.

Octav was more than an espresso impresario. He was also the director of Black Danube Ventures, and he spent every waking hour of every day here in his camouflaged incubator, migrating from table to table, advising, cajoling, berating. Sometimes even coding. When you got a table, you held on to it. You crowded as many people around it as you could. You took shifts in sleeping bags. And you subsisted on Octav’s pitch-black brew.

When a company got sold, or graduated into an office of its own, Octav ceremonially smashed an espresso cup across its table. The dinged-up, dark-brown tables were the lucky ones.

-----

The story is set, of course, in San Francisco.
python: win

helping people rip off a business: fail
I second this! I wrote a post ( http://goosey.posterous.com/the-good-news-is-you-dont-have-t... ) recently about this development strategy. It has many advantages beyond the "you don't have to worry about hosing your laptop" one, for sure!
Why Is the Gulf Cleanup So Slow?
That sliding solution is great if you don't care about accessibility, but then I suppose visual-only captchas don't really work very well for the blind, either.

Wonder how it works if you have javascript disabled, or are using a text-only browser, or have NoScript installed.
>you can't outsource IP creation and survive.

Software companies that are primarily software companies can't.

Companies that are primarily not software companies can and thrive on it. Content companies using tools, factories creating tools, etc.

Businesses are also their relationships. You can have plenty of those with very little ongoing development to support what you have already

The types of businesses YOU'VE been in, the IP creation is that important, however the types of companies that often hire out aren't software companies, they're other companies adding a piece of software to their process/infrastructure/product line
By engineer, they mean programmer or developer, of course.
"We apply this standard to manufacturers of lock picks, crowbars, physical key-loggers, books detailing the security of computers, etc. I'm curious why you feel a different standard should apply to someone who provides hosting for torrent files. The onus is on the criminal, not those who provide tools which may or may not be used in a crime."

If I had a website setup exclusively for sharing valid credit card numbers (and yours was on my site), would you want my site taken down?

After all, the credit card number itself is just data (nothing is actually taken from the original owner when it is shared) and my site isn't actually doing charging anything to the cards.
Lisp in Ruby
You are only ripping off the business if you didn't pay for the first ticket or if you are sneaking into a sold-out show.
It's absolutely possible to make a decent living freelancing on job sites, even if you live somewhere with a high cost of living. I put myself through college (in Colorado) freelancing on Rent-a-Coder(now vWorker) and Scriptlance, doing web development and system administration. I started at $25/hr, and worked up to $75/hr by the time I called it quits (got a job at Google).

The key to doing well on these sites is to spend the time to prove to potential clients why you're worth paying a higher rate. The best way I found to do this was to ask lots of questions about what people wanted, describe in detail how I'd go about solving their problem, and do my best to show that I really cared about building them what they needed, not just what they thought they needed. I did all this before I would quote them a price.

It's also key to be choosy about what jobs you bid on - you'll need to spend at least an hour per job you bid on, so you'll want to make sure to choose ones that are going to be worth your time.

Lastly, view jobs that you get through these sites as interviews. I found that once I'd done a project or two with people through the site, we usually were able to work out an arrangement where they just paid me directly by the hour for further work. The money I made outside of the sites with established clients was by far the majority of the money I made.
Webscrapers
This article really brings back memories.

The first computer I ever owned.

Hayes 1200 baud external modem -- about the size of a paperback book, lots of flashing lights, and five-hundred bucks. I even had the sidecar, which as I remember was a little box that carried it's own PC. The whole thing was over $2K
Multirow toolbar addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6937/
Hashrocket execs (not Obie) charged in $425 million mail fraud case
Wow... that can't be good.
> I still can't imagine a situation where outsourcing is cheaper, which is why most respected software companies don't do it.

IBM and AT&T both hire outside resources....

>the concept that you WANT them to go away afterwards

I was making a riff off a joke about prostitutes which is why I chose that exact phrasing...you don't want them to go away, but you don't want to pay them except for a very occasional upgrade.

>I wont need to support this in a month so fuck it I'll just finish it the quick hacky way now.

On quality: Some places would rather get a hack for 1/3 the price than a stable piece of software. Not that should be the baseline, but people are (unfortunately) highly tolerant of crappy software if it fixes budgetary problems. Does that mean you should offer the hack? Sometimes. I have done it, but I offer the better thing too when possible, and explain you're going to pay a lot more for V2-4 if you buy the really cheap V1.
Hey Joe,

Yup, Quickbooks is the 500lb gorilla we're going up against. Ends up that accountants we've been talking to want to get their clients onto inDinero, then export that data into QuickBooks. Especially bookkeepers, since they don't have to do as much bookkeeping and data entry anymore.

Uphill battle, here we come.
This reads like a press release.
Ha. Scalien is a great name.

How does a startup that develops database software plan to make money? Selling support?
The reality that I saw, when I was an on-site coordinator for one of the big three companies of India: When the project starts, you have 1-2 experienced people on the team who are really good - these are the ones that are sent initially to interface with the customer, get requirements and set the tone of the project. After the project is on its way, when additional members are needed, the team is staffed with rookies - actually I have actually encountered that "We'll give you 2 for the cost of 1". No need to say, that employees on-site are forbidden to code as it is "too expensive". Thus most of the code that ends up being written is done by poor 6-month or less experienced beginners. No wonder the code sucks. The insane amount of cost cutting shortcuts that these companies employ may be the main reason why most of the out-sourced projects fail. Just my 2c
RAM being cheap is a relative thing.

It's cheap and easy to upgrade your laptop from 2GB to 4GB.

It can be expensive to upgrade your laptop from 4GB to 8GB, no matter how cheap the RAM itself is, because you might have to buy a new laptop to accomodate.

It's a much more expensive (and logistically difficult) task to roll out that kind of upgrade across a large hosting environment with hardware purchased over multiple deployments.
Site is down for me at the moment so I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "hidden blank field" but I have a niche social network with around 150k pageviews/month and a simple css hidden input field on the signup form has been enough to keep all the spam away.
You do know that when you quote a post, you have to quote something the poster actually said, right? Where did I say "she is a one issue writer, therefore a mysoginist"?
> The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print.

Wait a minute here... 6.2% slower is proven statistical significance, yet 4.2% slower is almost certainly random noise?

Are all article writers mathematically and statistically illiterate?
Do you have an iPhone app on the way? Currently I keep a Mint account for my business which I check frequently on my iPhone. That being said, Mint is just a toy for me; the real work gets done in Quickbooks.

Your pricing seems oddly segmented. Intuitively, I don't know how many transactions I run each month. I'm not even sure how I'd count them. I'm pretty sure it isn't more than 500, but who knows. At the 'enterprise' level (and I'm certainly not enterprise) I would have a tough time justifying a price nearly equivalent to buying a copy of Quickbooks Pro every single month. Especially when my accountant is still going to want a Quickbooks file to prepare my taxes.
Although this could technically be called a "distributed" key-value store, I think based on many people's assumptions of what "distributed" means, they might misunderstand what this offers. According to the FAQ, "Keyspace is a replicated system, meaning all nodes store the same data", so it's distributed in the same way as MySQL is a distributed SQL database. That is, reads scale horizontally but writes do not.

That said, it appears this might be an interesting project. It appears it uses Paxos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_algorithm) to achieve high availability. This is a good deal more sophisticated than naive replication like MySQL. Also, reads can be specified as "dirty" or not, meaning they are more performant and tolerant of failure or network partition, but also possibly inconsistent. It appears to largely sacrifice the "partition-tolerant" part of the CAP triangle.

Also interesting are ranged get, atomic increment, and compare-and-swap operations.