skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple purchasing a developer of Flash, seemed to me, a little bit ironic; just for irony's sake I suppose.

>Tough to deliver a 3D globe in a web page without Flash right now. And the rendering engine is only a small part of compiling and delivering geo data and imagery efficiently.

Agreed - and poly9 does/did so much more than a few maps in flash.
Man I REALLY like this idea. Props! Let us know how it goes please. I might be tempted to do the same thing with J2EE/Enterprise scalability focus, if there's any interest in that.

I wonder if this could be monitized, like pay for 15 minute blocks or something, both to increase the value to the provider and to cut down on potential abuse/time-suck. The value could be very well worth it to the caller I'd think. Like cam girls for tech/startup stuff...

Does Skype have any good collaborative whiteboarding software or can anyone recommend a web service that does that? I think that could be key.
Nice quip but it doesn't answer the question. Dropbox has a good-sized engineering team and this is a feature useful enough that a third-party has implemented it for them. I would be very surprised if this was not a feature that Dropbox has discussed internally. So asking why they didn't do it is a reasonable question, even if the real answer is "they didn't get around to it yet".
+1 for the alternative logins.. for those people who actually did delete their facebook account in the wake of the privacy contraversy a few months ago.
The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. For every protocol that caught on, there was a similar competing protocol proposed at the same time that never caught on.
I've been in production without issue for years in some installations. I probably could have raised the "production-ready" flag in 2008/2009 if I held myself to the same standards as a lot of projects.
The Neverending Drawing Machine
On Reception – The iPhone 4 hysteria – The Real Life/Lab Test Conundrum
Oh don't worry, Monster cable will have you covered there. It'll only be $50 more, but you'll never have to worry about that tab snapping off again...
It's a "fast, scalable database" that isn't focused on large installations? What?

While I haven't used couchdb much personally, its most significant characteristics seem to be that it's a document-oriented database (each record can have its own structure) and that it inherits all of Erlang's infrastructure for fault-tolerance.
Are you female? It could be argued that a male's reaction is completely immaterial.

Additionally, if you are male- I would like to share an observation. I have found a strong correlation between guys who set off massive warning bells and guys that women are attracted to. I'm not sure whether that's because I'm designed to recognize the most dangerous competitors, or because I can see through their crap, but it happens nonetheless.
See also: http://gethabilis.com/
Well the code is of course available and at the project's page I encourage people to test it and give me feedback.
<http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/arachni/>;

However I disagree with your remark.
I doubt that many people would put in the effort of testing a framework that's under development or even make sense of the debugging messages it'll output or to do a thorough test of all it's features.

So I figured it'd be better if I did all the work instead and inform the candidates of any vulnerabilities that Arachni may uncover.
Intro to Google's open source JavaScript rich text / HTML editor
Bessemer Venture Partners' "Anti Portfolio"
This is a bit of what I had in mind for http://EveryMentor.com. Someone to be a "workout" buddy of sorts for pretty much any activity (from being a single founder to being a wedding planner). Needless to say, I like the idea!
The question is this - suppose you had to work with not-so-great developers or, more realistically, young freshers to software development ?

would agile help as compared to not having agile then ? If yes, then what is the simplest methodology (books? blog post?) that is effective ?
Must have been? Like it escaped after being born and is now out in the wild? To me, these sort of papers seem to be exercises in futile epistemology. It's not even wrong.
So when are some hacker news hacker going to make an iPhone app that uses to the gyro to track your movements through the day?
Nice, but sendtodropbox.com one looks more professional (e.g. better design).
Yup, that's what I mean. I would add John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, and Masten Space Systems to the list. They've done a lot with 1 / 50 th the money of a SpaceX.

It saddens me a little when people get 10^7 dollars and then show a complete lack of imagination in how they deploy it.
I work at Ergotron, and we are building solutions to this very problem, affordable sit/stand workstations. There are numerous studies that appear to indicate our bodies are not built to sit for prolonged periods of time. Sitting may in fact be killing us early. Check out http://juststand.org
It's still much cheaper, even if Redis can only use half the available memory. Backups are easy to ship off to S3. If you're on EC2, why not just spin up another instance for Redis at half the price?
It's the creation of the universe. It's pretty much going to violate conservation of energy no matter how you slice it.
Not really. They went big by going orbital -- their expenditure is comparable to dinospace budgets. There are companies doing amazing things with 1 / 10th the budget.
My immediate reaction after using this: "Wow, Dropbox just became even more awesome". Great to have a program which gets such feelings of love from me.
Making an app was trivially easy and aside from the intro text (due to it being a demo) it was nice to see there weren't extra instructions a la "please select from the following options." Of course in testing this I made the old "orange you glad I didn't say banana?" knock knock joke that switches paths on the third time.

I'm not sure if this will work for everyone else since I didn't create an account, but I guess you can try here if you'd like: http://quickfuseapps.com/app/edit?x#a=5WNw04UUdu0,r=1go
(FYI, you can edit/delete comments if it has been less than two hours since you first posted them. Look for the edit and delete links on the right side of the comment's header line.)
How to Build the Ultimate 3D Home Theater PC
Zynga's Corporate Jiu-Jitsu
Right, because since the internet took off, huge, mass-media publicized "artists" have fallen to the wayside and been replaced with a wider variety of niche acts, many of whom weren't signed to labels at all? No. The labels aren't suffering because they have to compete with independent artists, they're suffering because they have to compete with the Pirate Bay and friends.
Well, I guess it depends on how they implement the "database versioning", but if I had a DVCS that would version a sqlite database inside a file (merge support, all the trimmings) in addition to the code surrounding that file, I'd switch away from git/svn in an instant.
Pointless nitpick: reciting a scene from Star Wars isn't exactly improv, is it? They should leave it to Scripted Entertainment Everywhere.
iPhone pedometer apps: http://www.iphoneappsfinder.com/blog/15-best-pedometer-appli...
Script to Find Your Relative Page Rank on Google
I'm rooting for the cyclone engine myself:

http://www.cyclonepower.com/better.html
It sounds like a good idea, and something I might try in future apartment searches because in previous jobs it has always taken quite some time to find a desirable place to live.

However, there are some niggles at the back of my mind - or perhaps a little Stallman on my shoulder. Translated into UK pounds $3 per hour would certainly be below minimum wage. Is it really a good idea to encourage people to lock themselves into poverty wages? If I can satisfy myself that I'm not actually creating more poverty then perhaps this strategy is worth trying.
The Elements of Change
Looks very cool.
Just an idea, instead of sending all queries to all plugins could you do a look up instead? Such as my example above, part of the process of registering a plugin might be specifying a keyword, and a identification function. So during the process of creating your zero click results you could check an index if any of the keywords have plugins associated with them. Once you have a narrow list of plugins then you could run through the list of plugins to see if the results are relevant.
I think there's plenty of opportunity. I've run into engineers (some software, some not) who work on wind turbines, technology in developing countries, or oceanography... I'm sure plenty of folks will mention the military, as well. I think there's absolutely opportunities out there, though most of the ones I can think of will involve lots of travel.. hopefully that's not a problem for you.
Ask HN: How do I find and recruit the talented, ambitious, bright and young?
I am an HR manager for a large west coast firm. I'd like to find a way to effectively recruit those who are talented, ambitious, bright and young and place them in to our executive/manager career tracks. However, even though we post on job boards and our own website, the quality of the candidates is underwhelming.

Moreover, just looking at a resume doesn't tell me the mindset and motivation of the person. While I can usually grasp what kind of skills a person may bring to the job, I have a hard time deducing the soft skills like attitude, communication, and teamwork one has.

Therefore, it is tough to know beforehand whether the person will work out as hoped and if we should invest our time and effort into bringing on a person who we know so little about.

The problem is that the interview process is a highly artificial and IMHO flawed way to assess a candidate from both the POV of the employer and candidate.

Do you know of any better way to find and employ the best candidates out there?
Upvoted again!
Yes please to OpenID. It kills me that an idea I was so excited about (single login) is being coopted by a site I hate so very much (Facebook), just because they are a behemoth. Offering both is great, but when I clicked through and saw only Facebook as an option, I immediately bounced.
Getting along.
For a long time, the only two applications I loved this much were vim and Photoshop. Now there are three.
Congrats! But that is by far the most arrogant and obnoxiously self-indulgent website I've seen in a long while.
Does that make you happy or sad?
Acting is definitely not for me and I am not good looking enough for modelling. Personal trainer is actually a very good idea, and sports medicine has always been one of my interests. I am sceptical that this makes sense financially, but it sounds like a job that can be started gradually without needing to make a hard cut from my current job. Interesting, I will think about it more.
Yes, something like that could work, which is essentially what I'm doing here with WA (just in a bit more complicated fashion).
Underwater welding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbaric_welding) and dive engineering are extremely lucrative, physically demanding and exciting jobs. A friend makes 6 figures and gets to travel to exotic places to boot.
As a real data point, the founder of Quora estimated losing 25% of his sign ups when it was a facebook connect only service[1].

[1] http://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Facebook-Connect-limiting-Q...
I've been thinking I'd like to get a standing workstation as it might encourage me to move around more, and I believe that even just to be standing most of the time is supposed to impact positively on heart health. Something like this would be awesome (though I imagine, pricey): http://www.amesystem.com.au/activdesk/
Huh, maybe I should just go into the tour guide business. I'd get lots of walking around here, probably eat better, and spend less time dicking around with bullshit code. I wonder what sort of unpleasant grief annoying tourists might cause... :-)
I'm wondering, as a fairly inexperience programmer with most of my time in PHP: is there any good reference for "How to start web development in ___ with previous experience only in PHP". I would love a tutorial that explained how to accomplish in another language all the things that PHP makes simple for newbies. I'd also be totally willing to help an experience person develop such a tutorial.
This code is hardly rocket science. It's looks more like hard manual labour. But then again, so is also probably lot's of the code at bing and google to.

my %holidays = (
'mlk day' => undef,
'martin luther king day' => undef,
'martin luther kings birthday' => undef,
'presidents day' => undef,
'washingtons birthday' => undef,
'memorial day' => undef,
'independence day' => undef,
'labor day' => undef,
'columbus day' => undef,
'veteranss day' => undef,
'thanksgiving' => undef,
'fathers day' => undef,
'mothers day' => undef,
'inauguration day' => undef,
'ash wednesday' => undef,
'shrove tuesday' => undef,
'groundhog day' => undef,
'saint patricks day' => undef,
'easter' => undef,
'earth day' => undef,
'arbor day' => undef,
'cinco de mayo' => undef,
'st patricks day' => undef,
'flag day' => undef,
'rosh hashanah' => undef,
'yom kippur' => undef,
'halloween' => undef,
'election day' => undef,
'hanukkah' => undef,
);
A Peek at the New Sourceforge.net
Thesis Vs WordPress
Oilfield roughneck. Work the rigs for a few years, then go back home and write software for the oil & gas industry.
@photomatt and @pearsonified fighting over license of popular WordPress theme Thesis.
A Chat About Art, Design, Computers and Education with Milton Glaser
It's looking similar to fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org) to me... Though the description isn't very deep.
As a side note, I'm surprised that that site's FAQ appears to be advocating computer use on the treadmill but makes no mention of static discharge. In the winter, our treadmill becomes a giant Van de Graaff generator, unpleasant to use if you don't constantly ground yourself on a handrail. I gather this has not been a problem for you?
Microsoft Pays Mobile App Developers to Help It Catch Apple
I just had an awesome call with Kent. He knows a ton about technology and people. Helped me with a lot of questions about my startup.

He's doing a pretty cool startup. Check it out - http://viewpointr.com.

If I could have a skype conversation like this every now and then, it would help me a great deal to get through the lows of running a startup alone.

Thanks Kent!
Congrats to the team! My favorite language just keeps getting better.
If you're looking for really great minds, you ought to expect the quality of _most_ of the candidates you run into to be underwhelming. The trick is getting past that.

I kind of agree with your comment on resumes, but I'd twist it... If a resume doesn't tell me the mindset and motivation of the person, it's a 'No'. In specific, I tend to look for two things on a resume for someone early in their career:

1. Passion & Personality, _somewhere_. The last great resume I got had the following objective: "I want to work with smart people on a great team making awesome software." Perfect. Any resume that uses the words great, awesome, love, or even hate gets my attention. I need someone who cares.

2. Demonstrated interest. It's unbelievable how many people will tell me they love writing software, but they've never written any that wasn't for an assignment or a work project. Especially when it comes to young people, they better have written something. I don't care what it was, or how well it went.. I want to see that they're interested enough to have materialized passion and enthusiasm as a project. If you're not hiring in the software field, I'm sure there are other facets.. evidence of attempts at entrepreneurship, demonstrated leadership in community activities, etc.

Suuuper fast litmus tests that can be done at the resume, or 10-minute-phone-screen level.. and they'll weed out a depressingly large number of candidates.

Beyond that, I'd suggest that interview processes vary wildly and it's possible (no offense) that yours is highly artificial.. doesn't mean they all are. Change your process. Specifically, find ways to get candidates to demonstrate Doing The Job in their interview. It's hard, but it sounds like it's your full time job, so sweet! You ought to have the time :)

For the record, the resume I mentioned was someone that we hope to hire.. and we found him via one of the HN: Who's Hiring threads - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438505

Cheers.
On radio in the Twin Cities, you continually hear advertising for companies to move to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Tax Foundation rates SD #1 and MN #43 in their State Business Tax Climate Index.

Texas is rated #11, and I am pretty sure it is not hyperbole that if all their MN staff moved to TX they could hire another developer.
"In such situations, a few early key individuals end up having a disproportionately large effect, such that small differences in initial conditions create large differences later in the cascade. We see such effects in fields ranging from consumer fads (think Atkins—everyone knows a meat-and-cheese diet isn’t healthy for you!), science (like global warming), and technology (VHS beat BETA in the video market, though BETA was a superior machine)."

You can still start huge flamewars by expressing an opinion either way about global warming or even Atkins, but VHS is a bad example--Beta had better video quality, but VHS had longer duration and people hate getting up to change cassettes in the middle of a movie.

As for global warming, no matter which side of the argument you agree with there's no comparison here either--the opinions of scientists studying the issue of global warming formed throughout the past three or four decades, and the opinions of the general public are a result of political pressure both ways--neither was a response to early opinion makers.
Read up on Ross Emanait. He has a steady gig training athletes in strength and conditioning. Boxing, and stuff like that. Seems to work as if he was a consultant.
Try sitting on an exercise ball. That gets you plenty of muscle contractions just balancing on it.
Exclusive Interview with Relations Manager of DesignFloat
The offline replication is the one thing no other database touches. (Maybe Lotus Notes but that thing is long in the tooth.)
alternative link: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23thesiswp

Catch @pearsonfied live http://mixergy.com/live/
It's not--want to see my excel sheets?
C'mon, (condp = ...) was not that bad :)
Isn’t it illegal for civilians to photograph Imperial Stormtroopers on duty?
This almost made me stop reading:

"We see such effects in fields ranging from consumer fads (think Atkins—everyone knows a meat-and-cheese diet isn’t healthy for you!), science (like global warming), and technology (VHS beat BETA in the video market, though BETA was a superior machine)."

Such over-simplification made me question the rest of the article as well.
Eating and having shelter was a motivator before, not money. Once you don't have to worry about those anymore (i.e. don't need a paycheck, feasibly never needing another paycheck).
Ask scipy, a QA site for scientific python
Nice contribution!
Developing DRM is the cheap part. You have to deal with the reduced sales and bad press afterward.
Crab fishing in alaska. fatality rate is 90 times the fatality rate of the average worker though.
Solace, another FOSS QA site enters the competition
Monadologie: Talk at NY Scala Meetup on Monads & Delimited Continuations
The next big thing - humans editing news
Agreed. That little aside nearly ruined the article for me, as I mentioned in a comment of my own.
OpenVBX seems pretty limited in terms of features. The drag-and-drop functionality only extends to simple call routing functionality like a phone system/PBX.
What? I take everything seriously.
But on the other hand, you spent much more time skating around than eating, versus time on the couch is 100% available for mindless snacking.
Seems to me stronger user accounts could be bolted onto an existing DVCS quite easily. The hard part would be working out the PKI, but adding digital signatures to commit objects would be easy.

PKI probably would need to be pluggable to meet the variety of project needs out there. I'd imagine enterprise projects would use a corporate CA, some small startups or open source might be comfortable with a quick-start "ring-of-trust" distributed scheme, etc. Github and other hosting providers could offer CA services. Interesting way to prove code ownership in any case.
That sounds very cool, but probably requires multiple years of training (with little income).
Actually the guy who Chris ended up using was based in a middle eastern country. The average wage there is $15/day, so $3 per hour is a significant upgrade.
Welcome to Austin! Not only taxes are lower here, but the city has a real downtown, tons of interesting and educated people, great outdoor activities and a nice dating scene. I can't think of a more balanced place to start a company.

The only drawback is lack of VCs in the area. Austin Ventures are the only girl in town and they tend to favor "seasonal CEOs" over young engineers and are extremely conservative with their investments.
Tracking prey a hundred yards away is different from tracking source code 3 feet away.
Rules to Actionable Metrics
How does this not apply to every project looking for kickstart funding?
Ask HN: Can you recommend an accountant or CPA?
We're a growing startup based in SF. Its probably about the time we started getting serious about keeping our books in order as well as some other general tax related questions.

FYI, we are not funded. Profitable SaaS based business with low overhead. Need someone for a few hours a month at the moment to tidy everything up.

As for the full blown CPA. We have some issues in setting up profit-sharing, vesting ownership in the company, etc.

We are ONLY looking for someone in SF Bay Area. If we can't meet face-to-face then its not going work.

Thank you!
Since the browser behavior existed before Facebook implemented this feature, the responsibility is Facebook's.
Some good points/ideas from this MS talk:

- cone of uncertainty - estimates early on suck, but slowly converge on accurate

- ample use of probabilities and confidence intervals in estimates is a must

- stand up for your estimates
Seems to me as if Facebook used PHP for the small thing running yesterday aspect - since they've gotten big they've had to switch to different tools.
This sounds a bit like fossil, what with storing stuff in a DB and syncing between databases.
Showing a bar graph more than twice as tall for a 6% difference in price denied them my trust.
People are moving their startups from Minnesota to the Dakotas? Does your startup need hundreds of square miles of empty land?
I may be mistaken, but I don't think that he's talking about database schema migration, but that the VCS itself has a versioned database for any extra meta data that isn't really code, but should go along with it. Mercurial 1.6 added something very similar in a key-value store, although I haven't tried it out yet.
PR... sucks :(
It helped through the learning curve and cut through red tape with connections. I mean, you can�t just walk up to a guy like Paul Buchheit or Joshua Schachter and have them take you seriously.

When I was reading it I thought "sure you can!" (I was thinking about me talking to Paul Bucheit at startup school in 08) but then I realized "oh, that event was actually organized by YC too! ) :)
Are there specific JavaScript frameworks for creating these node-based interfaces in the browser?

I notice that it's a mish-mash of div and canvas tags.
There was a service several years back where you could post a rate and a profile, and if people called they would pay to talk to you. It seems to have gone under as I can't find any references to it.