skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My guess would be that NASA already uses postgres for other duties and is hesitant to introduce a new database into their infrastructure - especially one with so many known problems.

If I was them then I most certainly wouldn't want a database with silent data truncation/corruption issues to come anywhere near my spaceships. Not even for seemingly unimportant tasks because even those may cost amazing amounts of money to fix if they go wrong a few thousand kilometers above groundlevel...
I don't know, it would generally be nicer to know I'm working with someone who can tell where I'm doing better or worse than the average developer. The offer to work for free doesn't make a ton of sense unless you can get some meaningful feedback.

In that spirit, feel free to drop me a line as well. My actual experience is in shell scripting, Perl, PHP, MySQL, and Coldfusion with MS SQL, but I like Python, C++, and would love to pick up some other stuff. Contact info in profile.
You should leave a way to contact you in your HN profile. Some HNers might be interested in hiring you.
Now we know that even CNBC uses odesk for their illustrations
I like how you included both links. The problem I had with the other twitter feed is that it linked only to the original story and not to Hacker News.
This is exactly the reason why NYC is an awful place for technical founders, and part of the reason why I left. Zed Shaw has blogged about this incessantly - even when someone tries to recruit you as a technical cofounder, the usual treatment you get is "Look, you like making technical decisions? Great! All the technical decisions will be yours. You will be my pet technical-decision-making code monkey, here's 10%". Yuck.
The yacht was confusing. Am I looking at the height of the boat? The height of its deck? Its area as plotted? And where do I get one of these giant yachts that dwarfs an oil tanker?

Made worse by the fact that the pictured oil tanker represents the 11 million gallons spilled by the Exxon Valdez. (Wait, now I come to look at it again, it's a rowboat, not a tiny oil tanker). Anyway, the 11 million gallons the Valdez spilled was a small portion of its actual capacity of 46 million gallons.
boto, libcloud, etc, etc mostly support talking to multiple clouds. The API is far from the hardest part of migration - it's actually pretty simple in most cases, unless that vendor picks something like SOAP.
This Function is Not Tail Recursive
How so? If I get to pick the thickness that I coat it with I can compare it to anything, from a small pool to the entire worlds oceans. So telling you San Francisco Bay tells you nothing at all.

And they are wrong anyway. 184,000,000 gallons / (1/64 inch) = 677.6 mi^2, while the San Francisco Bay is 1600 mi^2

And just for fun: This could cover all the oceans of the world to a depth of .00000008045 inches. (Which is about 39 atoms thick.)
I think this is an awesome, disruptive, and unconventional idea. Sure, you could go to elance or any other board and do any "normal" work, but here at HN you're likely to find some interesting ideas, and by making this free, it's also likely that you'll get the weird, interesting, and just maybe highly-lucrative stuff. Good luck - if I can come up with a cool concept I'll drop you a line.
If they feel you've left them in the lurch, you won't get good references, regardless of what happens.

As much as money doesn't magically make everything better, ask for more. It's mercenary, but you're likely doing much more work to accomodate the 2 who left (whether directly or indirectly). More $ for the short term will make it easier to go write your book at the end of the year.

If you have a short term goal, imo, suck it up and try to make the best of it (which, ime, would include more $ somehow). If you can afford to leave now and just start on your book, it may be better for your sanity and attitude to just do that instead.

You're in a situation with no easy answers.

Alternatively, you could also offer to take over the projects. Go direct to the C-level crew and tell them you're going to be put in charge of the project, you need $x dollars, and authority over the project to get it done. If the project is that important, they may give it to you, or tell you to pound sand. So... go pound sand.

It sounds like you couldn't do any worse than the ball-droppers.

This probably sounds like all pie-in-the-sky fantasy, but if you don't ask, you don't get.
Before giving these students an A, I'm going to have to ask that they replace the cones with their own cars. That's where you draw the line between "I think this will work" and "I have complete confidence that this will work".

It's analogous to if I were a welder working inside a giant propane tank. The guy with the gas meter can swear up and down that it's safe to fire up the torch, but I'm still going to insist he stand in there beside me when I spark up.

Besides, it just makes better video. It's not anywhere near as impressive if there's nothing on the line.
There's no point in looking for another job if you were planning to leave this one for the book anyways.

Why not pull your timeline forward and use the book as the excuse?

Regardless of the reason you end up using, I'm in favor of doing whatever it takes to leave on a good note. Think long term. Always.
Thanks, I added my email.
I waited to jailbreak my original iPhone until I got my new 3GS. I wonder why that is?

Should we automatically believe the author of the post that he didn't try overclocking the CPU while tinkering with it? That the jailbreak didn't exploit a hole in a power management routine which ended up with a nasty side effect?

I'm sorry people, but I have to agree with Apple/Motorola and the corporate types on this. Software can impact the hardware, so yes indeed tinkering with the software can void the warranty of the hardware.
It really depends on the people involved and who would be doing the reference, and when the reference would come. Asking a direct manager for a reference three weeks after leaving them in the middle of a death march will likely not result in glowing praise.
No, no, no, no. This is exactly the kind of thing a business guy would use to make what should be an exercise in research and negotiation into seeming like it's "scientific". Bullshit. Research and negotiate for what you're worth. This is the biggest mistake I see technical people make with businesspeople - ask for more, don't be meek and buy the business-guy "this is how it is" BS with unnecessary totally subjective fancy charts. And I say this all as a business guy, by the way.

Edit: Here's how I'd reply: "That's a great chart, it makes total sense to me, I can see how you'd come up with the 20% number... just from the research I've done on how much exits are usually worth, I'd be looking for something around 30% to come onboard, and I'd expect to work my ass off to be worth that. I'm making pretty good salary right now, but I am really excited about this project - how can we make this work? What would you expect out of me for me to be worth 30% vesting over XYZ timeline?"

In other words, don't argue, indicate you've done some research, don't trip the other guy's ego defense mechanism, state what you want simply without grandstanding, focus on delivering value, and then ask what you'd have to do to be worth that. It'll work. Really, unless they were offering something overly fair to begin with to be cool, a businessperson will respect you more if you negotiate with them a bit. Makes you seem like you've got a spine.
After what seems like 10 clicks I finally found the source:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/green-tech/advanced-cars/...
Nightly Benchmarks: Tracking Results with Codespeed
Here, let me help you out since a "gallon milk jug" is apparently a little too big of a concept for your mind to hold. Picture this: a Quart container of milk, and now just imagine 736 million of them. Doesn't that make it easier to relate to on an intuitive level? I thought so.
Courtesy of the CNBC Visualization Graphics Help Desk.
Clever but how about a real RSS feed of those so I don't have to go to an RSS feed, then twitter, then bitly, then the original link?

Especially since with the shortened URL I don't really know where I am going.
We can certainly consider it and I'm sure you're not the only person who would find it useful - what sort of data would you like to display on the dashboard?

The problem with many API requests is that, unless you're a real user, it's hard to figure out what the important metrics are.
Well done!

Any idea how difficult it would be to support an arbitrary user customizable point threshold?
Ten Ruby Conferences (and Three Camps) in Eight Weeks
How To Sell
I would expect Michael Phelps to perform differently compared to the sixteen volunteers in that experiment. Michael Phelps has spent his entire life optimising his stroke for maximum speed in water. Give him a different liquid and he'll be sub-optimal.
Yes - someone mentioned this in our feature request forum. I can see how it would be quite useful, should by fairly easy to add too.
So close to the action!
This would be a great feature. I have some projects floating around in various places that I haven't worked on in years, some of them very stupid looking back at them, and all of them not incredibly high in code-quality.

I still get support requests or requests for advice once in a while from people trying to use them, or thinking of hacking on them -- and these aren't even close to being popular projects.

I'm doing most of my open development on github these days, and this would mesh extremely well with the way that git hub, and more generally DVCS works.

Another possible nicety would be the ability to mark a repo as the "canonical" repo for a project. Right now that kinda happens with forks on github, but if a project is abandoned, and another person picks up maintenance on it, it would be nice to be able to say "this isn't the current repo anymore, look here instead" in a manner that isn't just putting a notice somewhere.
I'm sure streaming is more profitable for them than dealing with physical discs. I'm stoked, if the selection is as good as I hear it is in the US I'll be dropping a lot of my cable channels.
Is it powerful imagery? To me it just comes across as "incomprehensibly large".

On the other hand, the San Francisco Bay one comes across as "Oh, well that's not so bad then".
This article made me realise - no matter how much money you are making or how cool your company is - to get featured in such big magazines, your idea has to be simple and it has to be interesting. There has to be some interesting hook, either in your idea or in you.

Most reporters are not going to do days of research to find the companies - they will just go for the low hanging fruit. They will think of the companies they remember, look through some lists and that's basically it. If you have a clear hook, then they will remember you and will feature you.

So for example, the Visual Website Optimizer (that A/B testing guy), he lacks a hook. Where is the user interest - he won't appear in such a list. But if he creates a hook, writes his own story, and makes sure the relevant reporters see it somewhere, such that they can remember it when they are writing an article, then it will be featured sooner or later.

Your business has basically years to get featured. You can build your human-interest angle somewhere within that time.
And the conclusion is that he should offer his labor for minimum or some other small wage, and that conclusion is false.
Perhaps showing something like one of the old World Trade center towers as a container with a thermometer-style guage on the side would work better. Show more than one building if it is more than that.

Looks like the buildings were 87x135 feet, if I got the math right, a pair could be filled to just over 1000 feet
I'm hooked on snap-to window edges; I'm always doing 2 or 3 things and being able to see both at the same time in an efficient manner is huge for me.

It also makes me want to get a 30" monitor, which is sort of a double edged sort :)
Most of the pictures sucked, but the text is not that bad. It's reasonable to compare the spill to Gallons per person in the US, but the graphic shows nothing of the sort.

EX: http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=9 there is no indication on the picture as to what it represents, but read the text and it's ok.
Interesting story! But of course, I hope my experience will not be quite the same. I've tried this once, and it went well. Perhaps I was just lucky.

I feel like HN is a different crowd that might understand my motivations for doing this, given my explanation, unlike all the people who were skeptics to your free giveaway. People on Craigslist are probably right to be suspicious of someone giving away stuff there for free, and to not want to go visit them.

I think this crowd also understands the value of web development, and I hope I've made it very clear that the job should be limited in scope. I'll fill HN in on how this goes later.
Maybe it's just that I can see San Francisco Bay out my window.

But I can't visualise the whole of the world's oceans, nor can I visualise a swimming pool coated with half a mile of oil. But a thin layer of oil all across the Bay, that I can easily imagine.
I'm hoping to launch an online comic one day soon and could sure use some automation software to build each new page for me and make sure the links aren't broke. I'd also like to have a forum with voting similar to HN or Reddit.
I still don't get that this means 'lower the barrier' though. Doesn't it mean raise one impenetrable barrier, i.e. XY? If the same number of XXs exist then the number will still be the same but fewer people will apply. If more women apply as a result of good PR about it being woman-friendly then they still may not get accepted on the same grounds as any other.
"And the conclusion is that he should offer his labor for minimum or some other small wage, and that conclusion is false."

no, it's not false. If someone told me they would work on my website for free, I wouldn't want to give them any serious jobs. The reason is because there is no reason for them to continue working on my project if something better comes up or they lose interest.
I'll be dropping my megavideo subscription
No, that wasn't what I meant at all. The value of this printer was very little since it was old so instead of offering it for free, I offered it for it's value.
Your big problem seems to be moving the 20TB of data. Why not just have the data get copied over to your alternative provider as you create it. That way all you need to do is spin up your images on the alternative provider. You might still lose a few transactions, though maybe having a message queue to handle that on both providers would be a good idea.
http://img.skitch.com/20100719-ckjke8bssjpmxxtgnfngnbbsr.png

Weird. But still: it needs to load a Flash file in order to display some HTML? WTF? That's actually even worse in my opinion.
Thanks, reading it now.

Many of these sites have certain restrictions which make it difficult or impossible for me in particular to work through them and get paid, otherwise I'd use them.
If I chip my car to increase boost until the engine grenades itself, I'm not sure I'd be headed to the dealer for a warranty replacement.
One of the biggest productivity boosts I've found working with something like Rails (I use Python but any web development system that involves starting up a local app server would be the same) is having an easy way to start up the entire application stack. For example, I have to start around 10 different services to run the app I work on. In Emacs, I've created small functions to start them up within some shells (all within emacs) and that lets me not only get started quickly, but quickly go to any of the services I'm focusing on for checking logs, viewing exceptions, copying output, etc.

On a more personal preference, my Emacs usage lead to use StumpWM and Conkeror (web browser) which help to keep all my keybindings very cohesive. A tiling window manager is really helpful b/c you never have to slightly move or resize windows. It sounds like Divvy does a similar thing.

That said, I bet if you take some time to commit to something like Vim (or Emacs!) it might eventually be more productive than TextMate. Emacs helps to keep everything within the editor (email, IRC, shells, etc.) while Vim helps to keep you in a terminal and to use standard *nix tools. Both tactics are very helpful IMO.
Well, they say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Maybe it's true. Even if not, I think there are certain cataclysmic events that could provoke a reaction (Greece recently showed that).

I think developing a theory of change is useful, but then again - wouldn't it involve creating an instrument of power to control the masses? Rather than moderating the power networks we have, the public would be pushed from pillar to post.

I think it would be more useful to society in general, if we were able to define limits to the amount of power a single entry has.
Accelerate: a Haskell DSL for multi-dimensional array computations on the GPU
A technical cofounder should get as much equity as he or she is able to negotiate.

Technical cofounders end up feeling burnt - or walking away from opportunities feeling like non-technical cofounders are completely delusional jerks - because they don't have as much experience negotiating. When that non-technical cofounder puts an offer of 10% or 20% on the table, he might just be an idiot, but he might be expecting you to press back hard with a counterproposal because that's what he would do in this situation.

Instead of working out formulas which will allow you to justify why your equity is what it is, learn to negotiate. The best book I've read is Roger Dawson's 'Secrets of Power Negotiation'. Then, practice.
Rotten to the (Open) Core?
If you really like it, please have a look at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2009/12/hadza/finkel.... This has taught me more about hacking and life than most books I ever read. I believe pg was on the right track with the "Hackers & Painters" thing, but we are not only makers, we are actually the descendants of the original pre-historical hunters.
Thanks for catching that. I've changed the code to use square brackets instead of close parens.
Twitter clone + 15,000 users = Cool Young Entrepreneur?
The point is that the "assumption that they've done significant work on the business" is simply not valid. Before you have a product, all the "significant work done on the business" (usually listed as 'doing market research, incorporating, and having an email from an investor that says 'I am interested in talking more when you have a product' which is investor-speak for 'please go away') is just as much of a risk and a liability as software that will inevitably be rewritten.

When you launch and all those business assumptions change later on and you need to pivot, rendering null all the business work you did previously, it's not like you would go back to your technical cofounder and say "I was wrong about that market, all the work I previously did is now worthless except for the 'lessons learned' part, so here's the extra 20% I subtracted from your equity originally".
I like it....
I'd have to create multiple twitter feeds for different point thresholds. If there's a particular one you have in mind, let me know.
Why not create an application that you can monetize? You're lucky to have free time to work on a project that can earn you some residual income, just find a need that hasn't been filled (in your community, for friends, for family, etc). It will be useful to others as well once it's built. You can link your project updates on here as you progress, and I'm sure you'll gather some solid feedback.
Actually, if you wanted continued work, you'd pay for it. You get only one free job, which should be limited in scope. If you want more work, you won't get it for free, and that's reason enough for any freelancer to keep working with you.
I've heard an interview on the planet money podcast some time ago where they had a teacher on. The teacher said, that she uses one dollar bills which she hands over to a student one bill at a time to give them a sense of larger numbers. She explains to them that it would take about 11 days to give them 1 million, but about 31 years to give them 1 billion. I thought this was a nifty way to 'visualize' these abstract numbers.
I've seen mostly favorable opinions. Gizmodo's preview was about the same as Engadget.
What reality? Even if that were the case, I think it's worth questioning why only 2-5% of applicants are women.
You're right; it is.

According to the Standard: "Between the previous and next sequence point an object shall have its stored value modified at most once by the evaluation of an expression. Furthermore, the prior value shall be accessed only to determine the value to be stored."

What the second sentence says, is this: if an object is written to within a full expression, any and all accesses to it within the same expression must be directly involved in the computation of the value to be written. This rule effectively constrains legal expressions to those in which the accesses demonstrably precede the modification. For example, the old standby i = i + 1 is allowed, because the access of i is used to determine i's final value. The example

*(fp++) = *fp >> 4; /* redundant parentheses */

is disallowed because one of the accesses of fp (the one in *fp) has nothing to do with the value which ends up being stored in fp (which happens over in fp++), and so there's no good way to define - either for our understanding or the compiler's - whether the access should take place before or after the modified value is stored.

Hence, the quoted statement does invoke undefined behaviour.
It was deserving of a good chuckle.

I bet Tiwan thinks that americans walk around dueling lightsabers on a daily basis. Sure everyone's missing a limb and steve jobs/bill gates go around strangling people, but thats alright, eh?
Same here. Redirect to: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/map/[o...
Have you read this?

"After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC"

http://www.amazon.com/After-Ice-Global-History-000-5000/dp/0...
Watch out for this nasty zero-day exploit
Wouldn't this fall under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act? Isn't it then on Apple to prove the software didn't cause the hardware malfunction?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_...
You definitely can hit different sweet spots with plugs vs Minis. That's one reason I was playing with the Eee Box. They cost just under $300 with a decent amount of RAM and disk, plus HD DVI out. If you don't need a display then even that's overkill.
A short intro to writing a lexer with Ragel.
Character is important! In Plants vs. Zombies there's that crazy guy named Dave who sells upgrades and says ridiculous things. Each plant and zombie has a distinct personality you can read about that's fun and goofy. There's visual jokes as well. And the end-game music video is an awesomely silly reward for all your time spent playing. All of this adds up to an experience people feel connected to.
Reminds me of the quote "Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one."
This is really a good and potentially very disruptive idea. It would be interesting to how far he can take this and monetize this.

I am going to take him up on his offer. I have specific requirements and i have a working prototype of the same , it would be interesting to see what he makes of it (provided of course he takes me up on it.)
You can get to the full text of the first article "A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control" here:

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articl...

It paints the national security apparatus as the expensive, bureaucratic clusterfuck one would expect it to be.
Sometimes I just get this feeling.. (a manager's thought process explained)
Is this something that's prevalent in the NYC startup landscape, more so than anywhere else? If so, that's unfortunate.
Wi-Fi Direct - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia