skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Has anybody shown him these things? http://www.electronicplus.com/images/products/TN811C.jpg

The article did mention a simple timer. I'm going to guess there is some additional complexity in turning on the water that a multi-mode timer cannot handle. Timer comes on at 2am and shuts off at 3am automatically but what happens when there is a power failure between 2.10am and 2.50am? That happens in India ALL the time. Now you missed 40 minutes of watering. A human might be able to take that into account by turning it off at 3.30am instead remotely.

> For that matter, is it so hard to run a mile of wire across a field?

Not hard, just expensive. The Indian farmers he's aiming to help are the ones making $1-$5/day. They might understand the long-term ROI on such an investment but they might not be able to afford it.
OK, now's the time to learn about debugging. Writing clean code to solve small problems from scratch is easy. Debugging existing code, especially well-written code, is hard. This is where you need to use your problem solving skills.

Pretend that you're the computer and walk through the code in small steps, tediously detailed. Make sure you really understand what the code is doing.

What exactly happens when you execute "char *chPtr = new char;" ?

What exactly happens when you execute "delete chPtr;" ?

And why do I say that debugging well-written code is especially hard? Because the names, clarity and simplicity in well-written code seduce you into the same mindset as produced the code that has the bug.
JAY-Z - YOUNG FOREVER LYRICS
If you're looking for payment/billing solutions, there exist more solutions, i really like these two http://chargify.com/ http://www.zuora.com/
Google's Widening Reach - Infographic
Where's the Meego tablets?
I don't think I'm violating it.
I think http://www.similarsitesearch.com/ is the best search engine for finding similar websites. It's hard to distinguish the differences in search engines for finding similar sites for popular websites like flippa.com. I saw all of them returning the similar results except that similarsitesearch.com gives more results than others. http://www.similarsitesearch.com/ generates the best result for smaller websites like moreofit.com.

BTW I think moreofit.com has very good UI. Better than any other similar ones I have seen.
That's exactly what I felt. Google respects me(no flashing ads), I respect Google.

I was a kid too when I used Altavista, it was a great search tool back in the day... until they fckd it totally.

I had seen it happen with other services like ftpsearch(you know the name of a file, you got it instantly).

When I saw the first Ad blinking on my face(Altavista put suits on place, "monetizing stuff") I discovered reading on searchlores "Google": It was so easy and powerful and NO annoying ads!!

I couldn't believe it, and expected it to surrender to the MBAs forces soon as the other had. But they got money to buy some freedom.
That's curious, because I was just at a talk by Alma Whitten who said that Google didn't use any of the GA data for profiling or ad-related stuff, and simply provided it as a service. Did I misunderstand her, or, possibly, you?
Apple issues fixes for 'drive-by' attacks
Jimmy Wales On The Birth Of Wikipedia
Deolalikar Responds To Issues About His P≠NP Proof
Down that road lies that 'hackerly' finally becomes redefined as 'everything we consider a good thing'. It's OK for Apple to not be 'hackerly', while still being able to develop great products and software.

My girlfriend studies industrial engineering and knows quite a bit about innovation and product development. If I combine everything I've heard from her with everything I've heard about Apple, then I conclude that Apple simply excels at leveraging/executing all the well-known 'best practices'. There's nothing 'hackerly' required to do proper innovation and product development, unless you expand 'hackerly' to include 'doing business the way it should be done'
Ask HN: What do you look for while switching for a job?
1. What are the things do you look for before switching companies? (If you're a developer)

2. For all the things you came up with for the first question, Would you sacrifice them all if the other company offers to pay(salary) you twice as much as the original company?
Sarcasm is most interesting when you don't "wink, change the tone of your voice or just start grinning".

Whoa there, jrockway. Soon you'll be proposing sitcoms without laugh tracks.
Lots of good advice in this thread. My best advice is: when you are "there" with your family, really be there. I have a tendency to focus my attention on things I am working on even when I am not sitting in front of the computer. Often this makes me furrow my brow without realizing it.

Early on, my wife (a pronounced extrovert) wanted adult contact and conversation more than anything. She wasn't all that happy when I was off in the land of ones and zeros when she was talking to me. It was a minor issue before the baby, but it really came into focus when their was a little person vying for our attention all the time. As your child gets older, this advice will apply doubly for the child.

This might sound a little crude, but, here goes: after the first three months, schedule opportunities for intimate time! Your time will be limited, and anything that is not a priority will go by the wayside. You can look up and find that it has been several months since you've been intimate. We didn't have a strict schedule like every Wednesday after she sorted the recycling[1], but we did agree in advance to "take a nap together" later that day or the next day. Spontaneity just didn't really work for us. The trick is keeping the pressure off - if one of you is tired and really just wants to take a nap together, that's got to be OK, otherwise it will drive you apart rather than bring you together.

Good luck. It's an awesome adventure!

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGOohBytKTU
Javascript Inception
You need to put a business person in place, who also has a technical background(look at Steve Jobs, although he is not a techie, he worked from day one with technical people and understand them).
Just don't forget to take care of yourself too.
"but once you get let go as an employee it’s harder to find your next job because you aren’t always in that job-seeking mode like a contractor is"

From an employee's point of view, the solution is simple. Always be in that job-seeking mode.
All I know is that everyone I personally know that had worked at Yahoo had left by a year or two ago. For me, personally, that doesn't exactly leave a very positive impression.
The problem with the German version is that "Sie" also means "she" and "they". Usted at least does not mean "she."

So, are you talking about your sister… or are you talking to your superior? (My 2nd most hated thing about German.)
Gartner: Android Became more popular than iPhone in US
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html
Anyone remember this article in Wired from way back in 2007? It goes into the details of the technology company vs a media enterprise dilemma of Yahoo as identified by Paul Graham in his piece and how then CEO Terry Semel messed it all up.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1597059
Does this relate at all to linguistic relativity?
Control your PC with your mind
5 red flags about the Google Net Neutrality plan
And it's definitely not specific to Melbourne. Sydney has great coffee.
I get that message too.
Here it is: http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/tudu.us
Change your sleep schedule now, while you still have things under control. You're really going to need to adjust this, because that little human you're adding to your life is not going to have much control, themselves, over the issue .. for some time.

So, get it under control now. Get to bed early, get out of bed early. Add another 2 hours of time to your 'sleep allocation' if possible.

Get a schedule going. You're going to really need to rely on this when things get crazy. You'll have to reduce your "up all night hacking" time and allocate that to "relaxing with the baby, playing" time .. Babies really need a lot of play time. The more you play, the better things get. Babies get bored, real easy. You don't want a bored baby when you're trying to get some code written.

I've got another one on the way soon, too, along with my 3 year old boy, who has been an amazing bundle of joy, every single day. I can't emphasize enough that you really do get amazing returns on your investment into your kids, and if you start to adjust your hacker life now to become more of a parent, you'll reap the rewards later. You don't have to stop hacking, by the way .. but you do need to make some changes to make sure that both hats (father/hacker) are covered.

Also, don't forget to take time for you and your significant other to just be together. Its really, really important. Date nights are just as special and just as necessary, so please prepare your friends and family to help out with this (babysitting) as soon as possible. It helps a great deal when things get stressed that you and your partner are still greatly in love with each other ..
I have three kids under 5. Does it get easier to find spare time to code once your kids start school?
> The sad part is that “Vinay Deolalikar is
> standing by his P!=NP claim and proof.”

Why is this sad? He is effectively saying that as things stand, he, who has worked on this proof for years, knows and understands it better than the people who've had a day or two to look at it. Further, it's plausible, even likely, that most of the early objections are simple misunderstandings, or finding things that haven't been explained fully.

There's nothing wrong with standing by the proof at this stage - it's entirely appropriate. What have been found so far are a few holes and a meta-concern over the potentially overly broad applicability to known false results.

It's all normal.

Part of the problem of this process happening in the full glare of publicity like this is that entirely normal things are mis-interpreted and then blown out of proportion. No wonder Wiles spent so long hiding, and then only confided in exactly one person to start with, without writing it all down in a widely disseminatable form.
What are your sleep hours and work times?
Infosec Island Security News Digest for 8-12-2010
Its a really good idea, and I applaud you making the change. The 5th day for you will probably get filled with tasks from your SO, but if you organize in advance - with a real schedule and TODO lists and so on - you can manage. Nothing can help you more than having a little prediction/planning ahead of time, and if you've got a day for yourself each week this will help immensely.
Previous submissions of relevance:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595995

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595526

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1592416
Well, here's what I mean--pg's essay criticized Yahoo for putting product managers in charge of dictating specs to programmers, instead of the programmers being able to think for themselves. I don't get the impression that's the case at Apple.
Doesn't seem much of a "backstab" ... Apple's Easter Egg policy is shit.
$500k Selling Camera+ politely pulled from AppStore with explanation, over deliberate attempt to circumvent ban on functionality that had been explicitly denied. An easter egg is putting a flight simulator in a spreadsheet program, this was just hiding a feature that had previously got the app rejected and then bragging about it.

That they did so after talking about how other apps tried to sneak things past and it was a stupid idea boggles the mind.

When Apple finds out about these incidents, they tend to crack down pretty hard on them, sometimes going so far as completely banning the developers from the App Store. So this is definitely not the smart way to go.
- http://taptaptap.com/blog/cameraplus-volumesnap-rejected/
Lisp is Sin (2006)
I hope some day you make it to Barcelona, I'm pretty sure I never had a bad cup there, even from random street vendors. I missed the coffee I had there long after I left.
Definitely. Those who write for the web don't need TeX. Those who write for print must not do the job of their editor. Manuscript standards are technically minimalist. They must look like they were written on a typewriter. LaTeX is for self-published authors and scientific papers (only because TeX was the first solution with a decent way to write equations).
It's simple if you think about it: the company has its own servers, and as far as I understand, what presented as a "plugin" is a browser extension.

So yes, I'm very sure it's not something that runs only on your machine and only communicates with google.

Call me paranoid, but I wouldn't give one more company the access to my e-mail. However it seems quite common today, that's what a lot of "social" sites prompt people and they gladly enter the login data.
Seth Godin: Exploration and the risk of failure
Nutrition Tips to Help With Weight Loss
was this post written in a sarcacstic tone or did they really call it "backstabbing"?

that is almost creepy
If you've read too many success stories that go through a phase of extreme hardship, you might be self-selecting to only remember such stories.

Not to detract from his achievement, but Ostwal could have come up with the plan to use standard cellphones to communicate sooner than he did. He would have saved the time and money he lost fighting the insane Department of Telecommunication (or whatever other Ministry it was). Now there's no guaranteed method to always think of a shortcut like that, but it is plausible and would probably have gotten him at the same place with less hardship.
Does agile really suck?
Xmonad cheatsheet in the style of the viemu vim cheatsheets
Not sure why I'm being downvoted for voicing my opinion, I wasn't criticizing anyone.
One thing that came to my mind (and bear in mind that I don't live in the US, so I might not know all the facts):

IMHO wired network neutrality is in fact more important than wireless because, I have a feeling that while you are free to chose a wireless carrier that doesn't do the kind of filtering you don't want, that's plain impossible in many wired cases.

One thing is sure: If your wireless provider begins to, say, block YouTube because they want to push their own video service, then there will for sure be another wireless provider that lists not blocking youtube as a distinct feature, trying to get all these youtube users as customers.

In the majority of areas, there's more than one provider that provides wireless connectivity.

But the landline is different.

Sure you have analog phone everywhere, but that's not really "internet". Is it? If you want broadband, you have one or at most two carriers to chose from, both usually with a very hight business interest to cripple various services on the internet (Youtube for example) and knowing full well that they would get away with that because there are no options (and building them is prohibitively expensive or even impossible depending on the country - if you wanted to lay yet another cable through rural areas here in Switzerland, you'd be blocked for ages by various legal issues).

From this perspective I can understand Google's motivation there: Promise neutrality where there is no competition and allow the wireless carriers to provide the quality of service they need and even allow them to do selective blocking of services because in the wireless space there at least is some competition.
Let me turn that around: What is a better course for an employer, say an internet startup or a small software / webdesign company? To hire contractors or employees?

My first thought would since software/web is the core activity, employ them (bind them closer).

What do you think?
Websockets question: will this allow direct p2p (browser to browser) communication?
This just goes to show how user-unfriendly Apple is. I understand why they have their HIG, and why they reject apps for breaking it. However, when a user goes to the trouble of entering in a secret URL they obviously want the secret feature very badly and are not going to get "confused" by it.
"so hard to run a mile of wire across a field?"

It's hard to keep that mile of wire from being pinched.

I remember how the highway authority here in Punjab had embedded blinking lights into the road's surface, over some stretches of road, to help drivers during our foggy winters. A few days after the lights went in, they were dug out and stolen. So new ones were put in. Gone again. New lights. Gone again. Finally the highway authority gave up and left the citizenry to its fate.
Maybe it is shit, but it's also documented and the punishments for ignoring the policy are clearly laid out.

As much as you or I may think it's a bit dumb that Apple won't allow the easter egg, we can't be surprised by their reaction to it once they knew about it.
something that is totally brain-dead (filling out forms, reciting orientation spiels every few weeks, looking up answers about insurance and forwarding them on)

Sounds a bit like writing FooInterface and FooInterfaceImpls all day, to me.
Nobody at Facebook told you that Facebook was the best way to discuss the most personal aspects of your life with the people who are closest to you--though it includes private messaging, which may be good enough if you can't see them in person.

If you want privacy, don't share private information on Facebook. If you want to remain ignorant of your favorite sports team's latest scores or the most disgusting new genre of porn or how some movie you haven't seen yet ends, don't look them up on Google. The "next big thing" that Facebook is going to miss is not something people can already get by simply restricting their usage of Facebook, it'll be on a different axis entirely.
I agree. I keep it on because I worry that the auto-correct is going to substitute a really unfortunate word for what I intend and I won't catch it when proofreading.
Roundabouts are the New Big Thing here in Sweden, they're building them everywhere. On average it seems to be an improvement, and I have a local anecdote where a very busy intersection was rebuilt and improved vastly (while "everyone" said that it was a bad idea before it was completed).
The comment from Anandshree seems to answer that:

I am making a comment based on the irrigation needs of an Indian farmer in Indian scenario. I think, the mobile based solution is best for the Indian farmers who want to monitor and switch on off their pumpset from wherever they are, maybe in the farms, residence, market or on travel. In the timers, there is no monitoring of whether a pump is on or off, whether a power is available or not at the pump.But, the mobile connectivity makes it is possible to check the status. Plus , in the agriculture, there might be needs of so many times of on/off of the pumps in the irrigation processes depending on the actual physical status in the farms activities. Hence, it needs a perfect engineering solution based on closed loop system rather than an open loop systems like timers.A perfect engineering solves the problems in an emerging market very much effectively, but for that someone must undestand the needs of an emerging market and for which there is only a way - to be among them and to understand their needs. No question of blaming anybody's situation or no question of contraversy about Indian or Non Indian should arise, but a real attitude to help a human being in the problems is a must.
They should make it available also for mobile browsers. I read a lot on my trusty Android while on trains/subways/taxis/etc.
But wait, can't the hackers do the same thing?
http://www.eeggs.com/items/43501.html

What's good for the goose...

Apple really goes out of their way to tell developers that they can be penalized for circumventing their restrictions, but if both developers and end users want to circumvent the restrictions you really have to wonder as a company if you are on the right path.

The bad press that Apple has gotten because of stuff like this in the last year is really starting to add up, and I think this is one of the best examples to date of why such control is wrong.

Strictly speaking this is not an 'easter egg' but a user interface policy violation, presenting it as an easter egg including a very difficult activation sequence should prove beyond doubt to Apple that these users are going to be perfectly happy with their volume control not working in the Apple dictated way. It is their volume control button after all (the users', not Apples).
10 years? I'd say it will happen in less than half that time. Personally, I think the cycles (like everything else) are getting faster.
Thanks for the great feedback and comments everyone, I didn't expect to get so much great feedback! I will definitely take up a number of the suggestions and hopefully meet some of you at the various meet-ups and events (in Melbourne at least). And I've touched base with Pollenizer and hope to be at a Bootcamp soon.

To answer some questions such as to why can't I go to the USA. I've got a 7 month old son these days, so the international thing is a bit impractical at the moment. Plus I think there are some great opportunities to be exploited domestically, which obviously isn't taking on the world but I see a lot of opportunity to build good local businesses in Australia.

Jamessg, I agree it's not so much the money, but the access to people that have experience and have done it all before to provide that important guidance and save $ from being wasted on the learning curve.

Anyway thanks again to everyone, really appreciate your help, and hope to meet up with some of you in person soon.
For those of you in Australia who like good coffee at home, I have to recommend 5 Senses http://www.fivesensescoffee.com.au/ (good example of how to make a great website without Flash, too)

Place your order, and they'll roast your coffee the next morning, ready for you to pick up after lunch. It's some of the best coffee I've ever had, and is all FairTrade too.

[I have no affiliation, just a regular customer]
This ban has nothing to do with the user.

This is the developer circumventing the AppStore reviewers, including functionality that they know for a fact isn't permitted.
Freeware
Find the software you're searching at free2u.org, the best source of freeware in the internet. You can download free software like Games, Windows, Drivers, Linux, Scripts and Mac. Checkout for more details!
I would say their products and technology are very close to the same thing. I think the biggest difference with Apple, which also yields a more useful way to evaluate other companies, is that Apple is not a software company.

Google's products are mostly software running on servers in datacenters. Facebooks products are the same way. Yahoo's products were mostly software.

Apple's products are not mostly software. Apple sells consumer devices run by software. It's an important distinction, and looking at it that way lets you compare with different sorts of companies, like the technology startup Emotiv Systems[1][2]. They're developing consumer devices that read brain activity like an EEG. They likely spend a lot of time developing their SDK and other software, but they also have to focus on the physical product, like Apple does.

Sometimes people forget or don't realize that "hacker culture" has always had a contingent of hardware guys building solar-cars and robots[3] and kites with cameras.

[1] http://www.emotiv.com/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotiv_Systems

[3] http://www.irobot.com
Schmidt has a technical background though. Among other things he was the co-author of lex.