skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"People work at Apple to change the world. Seriously." -- or just making Steve Jobs even richer. Unless you get paid really really well, I don't see any real upside for hackers to work at Apple. You are just a cog in their machine (or cult, as fake seteve jobs said).

You can change the world, and try to get fair amount of money out of it by doing something on your own, or working in smaller companies.
Not bad. Is it crazy to think there ever might be an web-based IRC client with support for DCC? Even is OS X the best IRC choice is probably Colloquy that looks good but has no DCC support. Otherwise you have to go with XChat which is really ugly and not updated anymore, but mostly functional.
LinkReferral.com - reviewed.
Surely the most obvious monetization would be in collecting a commission for cable sales. Given the extortionate cost of some of the cables :)
No it doesn't. The techcrunch shills submit and upmod (multiple times) every techcrunch article. Techcrunch's writing style is terrible, and the articles are usually hearsay and completely unresearched.

In the words of a famous kitten: DO NOT WANT.
Yes, that's what Canada has as well. We've got an EHC benefit that is pretty standard that pays for drugs, private hospital beds, etc etc.

Nobody is left out in the cold, but to properly compare it to the US's medical insurance, you need to include the private portion as well to equate equal service.
He's resting.
i would much rather have

* some asterisk

* un-ordered list element

# or pound list options

# numbered list element
well, it could avoid having the larger space between lines
a) that sucks for them
b) they need a better job

Listen, life isn't fair.

You want the benefits of capitalism without the risks? How does that work?
Thanks. Yeah I'm toying with implementing DCC, it'll probably get into Mibbit one day soon :) Probably have a parallel HTTP based file sharing concept as well for when you want to share something with the whole channel.
As others have pointed out, there's no need for this to make me create an account. To make matters worse, the "create account" box appears below the "how it works" sidebar using Firefox 3.0b5 and a minimum font size of 12px. It looks like someone got HTML mixed up with a page description language.
Wirewize!
My new site just launched! Would love the hackernews feedback...
Joel who?
Python and Ruby are not so different that I really see the purpose of this. Compiling Python and/or Ruby to the Java or .NET runtime has clear benefits, but what is the benefit of this?
Quoting myself: "That's not to say you can't build large applications in PHP, just that you need a great deal of discipline to do so."
I would assume you would need to locate the Canadian version of the US 1099 tax form. I would certainly start there I think everything else would then fall into place.
Repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181840
2008: The year the mobile and Web worlds merged
How popular is the app? Does it work nicely now? Depending on your answers to those, do you really need to rewrite?
Every time I feel burned, I read a bit of folklore.org about how the masters of yore did their stuff, and get to work again! Oh and also "The Djinn's Wife" by Ian McDonald:
http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0704/thedjinnswife.shtml

The future is here and screams in our face. Do you dare heed its call?
Apple is a large company, so there's a large range of software development jobs, some more "glamorous" than others.

One interesting thing to note is that the average age of Apple devs is higher than those at say Google or Facebook. Of course that's probably mostly a product of Apple being a much older company. Certainly that must affect the company culture.
New features would be nice. OTOH, some people can be pretty expressive with what we already have...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115925
I use Wikispaces. They were early openid supporters and have good support for scientific content and default Creative Commons licensing, all things that are important to me. I use the regular editor since I am pretty sure the wysiwyg is not too bad.
Guys, thanks for the input. In fact we are looking at the account stuff closely. Keep it coming...
I meant GPS dammit :/
When I was living in Seattle and self-employed, I was paying $155 / mo for Regence Blue Shield's best plan ($500 deductible & 80% coverage) [this was Jan 2007]

After a year, it increased $50. I left the insurance a few months ago, so no clue what will happen next year.

Before Regence, I was paying for COBRA, which was incredibly expensive ($430 / mo) -- this was because I was traveling abroad in places with weird diseases, and I didn't feel like taking a chance. I only did this for 6 months or so.

EDIT: Forgot to mention. I am/was 28, healthy, non-smoker. No kids.
Your personality clash makes you sound like you should work here.
:) I guess we could just use emacs artist-mode

http://www.cinsk.org/emacs/emacs-artist.html

However, what he is asking for is pretty basic stuff that is taken for granted elsewhere.
A more accurate headline would be "one third of Techmeme's headlines come from the upper end of the Long Tail" -- the B and C list blogs which the A listers and MSM outlets sometimes reference. The great unwashed, unloved, and unlinked mass of blogs in the trailing end of the tail will never appear on Techmeme in its current form.
How Yahoo Blew the Microsoft Deal: Part 1
If it's the right tool for the job then use it.

Our app is nearly entirely client side, with a little server side PHP glue. Something like Rails would be overkill.
Not true in the life sciences either. For one you usually pick a group that's working on problems that interest you. I always got to work on my own projects as long as they fit in the broader interests of the group, which interested me in the first place
I'm being nitpicky here, but in the about page, get rid of the "developed the definitive..." Its too alliterative. Also, what is "
the definitive platform?" wirewize? another CEI product?

And we know nothing about you. Maybe some more depth and please avoid marketslick nonspeak, it tends to turn people off.
i guess ... but that sounds silly to me. i guess i shouldn't lurk here anymore.
As the 'third party' that wrote this, I have to ask:

(a) What else do you want it to do? I'm bored and willing to add to it.

(b) Is it so mission critical you need official support? I'll gladly sell you a support contract for $100/yr. That will buy you piece of mind that if PG ever changes the html structure of the page, I'll update my GM script accordingly.

(c) Don't install scripts without looking at the source first. I posted mine for all to see.

PS. I'm serious about (a) ... I'll gladly work on it for fun.
You're absolutely correct. They have a maximum and minimum averages, but I don't know how they work them out, so I'm not going to post them.

Number of salaries quoted for the past 3 months:
PHP: 5283

RoR: 454

Django: 46

Thanks for pointing that out.
> How does that work?

See Canada, Europe and other countries.
Given recent moves towards enterprise offerings, that's almost certainly going to happen (or they'll just partner with Sun or Platform)
Just get high deductible health care with an HSA, I pay about $80/mo and then however much I want to put in my account(which I keep!). Plus this does not keep me chained to a particular employer and I am free to change jobs without
fear of losing health care coverage
Right. That is a different question all together. I'm really more curious about Djangos ability to tap into an existing database. I've heard that RoR has a very difficult time doing this.

But to answer your question, there probably wouldn't be any need to rewrite my application. PHP is very adaptable and scalable and will probably continue to suit my needs.
I agree. Hacker News acts as a good filter, and the comments here are generally higher quality than what one sometimes finds on TechCrunch. No point in banning it -- some of their stories are worth reading.
The article suggests that geniuses may just be more efficient discoverers than the "average" researcher. The example is that Kelvin had 32 multiple discoveries, so the implication is that Kelvin is equal to the sum of those 32 people.

Maybe there's something to this. But I have to wonder if certain discoveries really do require a genius, and not just someone who is good. That is, is a genius more than just the sum of his lessers?

What pops into mind is special and general relativity. In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a physicist says that special relativity was an idea whose time had come. If Einstein hadn't discovered and published it, someone else would have. But he followed that up with if Einstein hadn't come up with general relativity, we'd still be waiting for it.

Going back to Newton, calculus was a multiple, but as far as I know, his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation are not.
Ask YC: Becoming a Hardware Retailer
I've recently rekindled an idea to open up a computer repair and sales shop near the local college and I'd like to be able to retail networking gear. Routers, hubs and other low to mid range accessories college students would need, but can't get at the book store.

How would I go about obtaining stock quantities of such hardware from vendors to resell in stores? I've managed to find the Linksys partner page and their application, but other than that is there any other process I should expect?
The most popular messaging systems are all centralized, too.
other applications like instant messaging clients swelled in popularity, most people forgot about their old friend IRC.

It's interesting how other people see the world. I forgot that there was something other than IRC. Everyone I know is on IRC, and IRC is about 85% of my communication. (E-mail is the rest.)
You're right - the original post may have been a bit biased. Thanks for bringing this into the conversation.
In South Africa I'm paying R850, which is roughly $100. This is only for what is called a "hospital plan," which means that if I'm in an accident that requires hospitalisation that I'll be taken to a private hospital and not exposed to the national health care system. Which is rather scary.
I guess this would be more of an "Ask HN" than "Ask YC"... Missed that in the editing process.
Yes, if you manage to convert a critical mass of Twitter API users into Twitter-shadow API users. A similar "technique" converts all AIM users into AIM-shadow users.
Echo the account sentiment of others. You need to kill it.

The myPro bit is interesting, although I'm not sure how you go from getting the right cables to needing someone on the phone walk you through set up. If I need that much assistance, I'll call the geek quad or whatever and have them do it for me. (Hell, I bought the TV from them after all, they even ask me in the store.)

I'd strongly suggest talking to best buy or someone similar as a potential buyer, or talking to monster cables to get them to pay your bills like axod suggests. Nobody in their right mind is going to pay for this service alone.
> I'm bored and willing to add to it

Kind of unrelated request:

Can you write a GM script that displays a red envelope like in Reddit, if someone replies to any of my comments?

Thanks for the blacklist btw. Very useful. And your cross site GET via image request is interesting. How about multiple requests when the data doesn't fit (with an end-of-requests marker)
We got our health insurance through the National Association of Self-Employed http://nase.org/ - paying approx $300/month for my wife and myself.
+1 for Markdown. Someone at the Arc forum started adding some more support:

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=970
I don't mean to troll, but why, as a student, would I want to pay more to get hardware from you instead of ordering from newegg or amazon for that matter or going down to best buy?

How are you going to keep the margins to stay in business? Are you planning on hiring employees or run a sole proprietorship? How much a square for lease? What do you do about the leach customers that want everything for free that suck up your time? There are a ton of questions to answer if you are going to brick and mortar. I had a friend do it. I've experienced it first hand. I will never do it. But good luck to you if that is your dream.
Code samples: http://www.aspvphp.com/
Zak, thanks for feedback. We don't see what your seeing, if you would be so kind as the send a screenshot to us at info@wirewize.com that would be awesome!
There's a well-known process for creating paintings. It's practiced by Thomas Kinkaid, a well-known, highly successful artist. For some definition of success...
So I'm going to piss off more people, but "see the list of places I don't want to live."

And I have lived outside the US so this isn't myopia.

Listen, running a business and being successful is significantly harder in those places vs. the US.

I want to live in a place where the limit to my future is me. Not what the government says is my limit.

I don't want to have to pay employees to not work, to work 30 hours weeks (and complain about it), 5-6-7 weeks of vacation. I have no idea how small businesses make it in the EU. It's silly how much they have to pay their workers between salary and benefits.

For all the drones out there, the EU is a great place. For people with aspirations it's a death spiral.
I'm working on reintroducing pricing information into medical decisions, but so far my chosen method of posting screeds on relevant sections of the internet seems to not be effective.
Moving to Unicode 5.1
well said they definitely scratch YC's back and are a key media outlet for startups. I get a bit annoyed seeing every TC article on YC but oh well
You likely don't go right to the manufacturer. You'll likely have to go through a reseller (think Ingram Micro).

With margins at like 1-2%, there is little money in hardware retail sales. The money will be in the service side of it. And college kids are the worst. Cheap, bouncing checks, and most of them know someone that can do it for them.

You want to know where the money is for a computer repair biz that does in home service? Suburbia. Place I live (suburb of Dallas) there are constantly people talking about their computer problems (there is a big forum for the area) and most of them end up at either the big box retailer or one of the two small places here.
The first thing I'd try is to reverse engineer the model from the database (this is something that django can do).

As long as your database design is somewhat decent you'll likely be ok. if not... well you might want to build a new model and migrate your data :)
"would I want to pay more to get hardware from you instead of ordering from newegg or amazon"

Well one thing I'm noticing for sure (in my area at least), a lot of people here who unless they actually work in the tech industry, don't know the first thing about sites like NewEgg or TigerDirect. It kind of saddens me too, because when I had an idea that involved using the Internet in a more ad-hoc fashion, there was almost zero interest. When I tried the same experiment involving Facebook everyone jumped on.

So keeping folks locally shouldn't be TOO hard.

"...or going down to best buy"

Good question. On that regard, I want to make a fight for cheaper prices. That's cliche and will consider it.

"How are you going to keep the margins to stay in business? Are you planning on hiring employees or run a sole proprietorship?"

I don't plan on having more than 2 other folks around the shop.

You've asked some very good questions and completely blew my mind. I'll take some time to figure these out first.

Thanks!
There are many processes. Some of them call themselves software development methodologies, some don't. Some step-ones:

* Make a list of use cases

* Grab a stack of 3x5 cards and start writing nouns on them

* Check to see if someone else has partly or completely solved the same problem already

* Write down the basic data structures associated with the problem

* Identify a minimal command-line program you could write to investigate the hardest problem(s)

* from __future__ import solution (or: M-x solve-problem)
Careful Development: Good Optimization
From the article, I recognize that the author is differentiating programming, that is to me "coding" from all the other activities in the software development lifecycle, as he mentions in his third paragraph. I assume that many of you also recognize this, but that some might not. I bring this up because in replying back to the point of the article and whether or not we "know how we program" it is important to define what we mean by programming and what boundaries we place in the activity "programming" which is different than the activity "design" or the activity "testing."
Mirai Inc: A Startup in Tokyo, Japan
I do write a blog. As tx observed earlier 99.9% of blogs are crap, including mine. Nonetheless I think it has been a worthwhile use of time, and I'll continue doing it for a while. Written communication skills are very important, an "essay" style of blog can exercise those skills whether anyone reads what I write or not.

The discipline of having to write it all down does certainly sharpen ones thoughts, and comments often supply links to other material on the topic. In my case commenters also point out ghastly errors I've made, but thats probably just me.
Feel free to continue lurking. I can enjoy Steve Jobs' plenty as a customer without having to work for him.
I would have thought it was the systems/hardware focus. The kids nowadays just assume the hardware is magic and try to ignore it as much as possible while writing their billion dollar websites.
If you like Code Igniter but want PHP5, check out Kohana - http://kohanaphp.com
Python seems to have a slightly bigger following in the sciences, at least in my limited experience. That could be pulling salaries up a bit.
You consider Facebook and Digg to be more relevant in regard to the pros and cons of scaling PHP than Yahoo? That's... wrong.
But look at the difference between Rails and Merb.

If you want, you can treat Merb as better Rails (e.g., multi-threaded, less magic) and use AR + erb. All very familiar.

Or you can see it as a pluggable framework, and use Haml instead of erb and Sequel in place of AR.
Hello, World: Meet Xobni
Innovation and ground breaking features in web design have no relation to the language being used.
Until PG puts an actual search here, it's not really your fault.

In the meantime, I'd recommend bookmarking http://searchyc.com/
Stick with PHP, Noel. :-)
The 960px grid system
Yeah, which is why you should be able to downmod.
I agree with goofygrin; this thread reminds me of this: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-orourke4-2008may04...
Sorry it took me almost a month to write my reply:

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/what-kind-of-softw...
We're using simplecdn to distribute 20 training videos on out site in HD... so far so good, no complaints, videos are real long which is why we went with them.
Buying Resources, Process And Values
No, not a throwaway comment: the entire last paragraph summarizes his rant against MS and Google spending money on salaries and perks "because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week."

Those companies are profitable cancers and Splotsky is annoyed because he can't complete.
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php

PHP's standard library is not object oriented

75 array functions

47 of them start with array_

28 do not

Out of the 28 that do not, you have such greats as: usort, sort, rsort, asort, arsort, krsort, uksort, uasort

Nuf said.
I pay around $700-800/month for health/vision/dental. My employer takes care of around $400 of it, so out of pocket I pay around $300-400. BTW this is for me and my wife.
Y! handles more traffic than Facebook and Digg combined and it uses primarily PHP.

Why compare Y!'s stock performance to their underlying technology? Makes no sense.
You're giving capitalism a bad name by calling the American health care system capitalist ( especially the system in Massachusetts). American healthcare is just as regulated as Europe. The difference is that while most European systems run on a system of price ceilings for care, America has a system of price floors. Since there are pretty steep diminishing returns to health care spending, price floors have the neat effect of making health care super expensive without increasing quality.

American capitalism has many advantages. Health care is not one of them.
If you add in the ability to downmod submissions this place will rapidly turn into Digg. i.e. An environment where a handful of people control the majority of the information.

As far as excluding TC content goes, while I could live without it, think about the number of AWESOME discussions that would have killed in the past, then ask yourself if that's what you want for the future.
Ask YC: How do you build a company with no or little politics
During my entire career so far I hated politics; so much that I had jumped from one company to another and avoid as much as I could big companies. I have to say I was never really a victim but heated the fact that others suffered from it. I’m currently a consultant and really enjoying it.

My goal is to create a startup/company with no politics or as little as possible. How do you do that?
Don't do it. You can't operate on a large enough scale to be competitive. I assure you, it is not a good business to be entering today. You will spend more than you can imagine, make less than you ever thought possible in your most pessimistic estimates, and work longer hours than is sustainable (while losing money every day for the privilege of working those hours).
The highest impact way to affect the politics or lack thereof of an organization is through hiring.

Interview wisely. If there are any questions about character or personality, axe them immediately. Even if they are amazing engineers or fill an immediate need -- if there is a whiff of a doubt, do not hire.

Always optimize to avoid false positives, and accept the fact that you will end up with false negatives through the process.
Get to know about some Indian hackers
How about few posts on Indian Hackers for a change?
The main benefit, aside from that it's sort of cool, is that you would be able to write for Google App Engine in Ruby. Personally, I think that the similarities between Python and Ruby (particularly their bytecode similarities) makes Ruby the most obvious language to be added to GAE next; but there isn't anything quite as easy as GAE for getting your Ruby app off the ground right now.
Don't hire many people, and when you do, don't hire people prone to politics.
Keep politics on the agenda. I mean talk about it, make it a part of normal conversation for positive reenforcement.
Politics will creep in, but keeping it positive and light should help (but won't prevent) to keep bad feelings from taking dominance. You're a team, play for the team.

EDIT: On some more reflection: Try to honestly assess yourself and how YOU interact with other people. Are you a positive influence? Do you facilitate cooperation and openness? You, as a founder, are a significant (if not the primary) role model in your company.
There is definitely some merit to this approach, however one shouldn't forget the wisdom in Aesop's fable, "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

If you make enough audacious claims, and fail to live up to them, you lose credibility. People don't just doubt you, they think you're full of it.
>I have no idea how small businesses make it in the EU.

The governments outlaw the sort of things that large businesses do to drive small businesses out of business. Wal-Mart just pulled out of Germany because the government wouldn't let them abuse their employees. There's a downside though - try buying groceries after 8PM in Germany.
Oil-Rich Abu Dhabi Builds Renewable-Energy City
How do you recognize people prone to politics?