skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's how I became a contributor of mootools (a javascript framework).

1. I stumbled upon the project pre 1.0, loved it's ideas, but my javascript wasn't good.

2. I checked out the code and loved the style.

3. I started hanging around in IRC where the core developers chatted about decisions and problems.

4. I read the source code and when I wasn't sure why some code was like it was, I asked in the channel. Either someone of the team explained why it's that way, or committed my minor suggestion.

5. That way I learned more and more about the language and the project. My suggestions became better. I loved to see my suggestions being picked up and used in the wild.

6. Eventually I got commit rights (though that wasn't important to me)

My advice is to just go for it. Join the IRC room, talk with the people. Help with bugs or documentation. It's easier to get involved than you might think, there are never enough people working on such projects.

You will be welcomed by the community!
Put another way, the timeless definition of a programmer is "person who has the most control over computers".
It does use a classifier, currently it's a naive bayes one, as we found that it produced the best results!
Years ago, it used to be that $BIGCORP would look at you very suspiciously if they saw a gap in employment of more than a month or two. In this economy, it's not unusual to see good talent that's been laid off for the past year. It took me four months to get back on my feet when I got the whack in January.

I say quit, but give yourself some buffer. There's the real possibility that if you start looking for work in March, it will be August or September 2011 by the time you find something.
Wow... that's quite a statement.

All the cool apps were not done by Google, but _with_ Google. I can't imagine Apple delegating anything, less of all a main application like maps or youtube.

WebKit was not KHTML. Webcore was KHTML and Webkit, which offered a lot more, was built on top of Webcore. Eventually Apple decided to make Webkit open source (Webcore was already open source since KHTML was).

On the other hand you are very much correct on multitouch, and I would also mention Lala, and their ads company. Also iTunes was acquired. And of course the biggest acquisition of all (for Apple): NeXT. :)
I am doing the same thing. After finding HN a few months ago, I couldn't believe how far off track I was (I was in the M$ dev route). I'm rebooting my career, learning new tools and languages I find interesting on HN. I am so much happier now.
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Sorry, I meant security bug, not crashing in flames bug. :)

Often you hear of some security flaw in this or that program that requires Microsoft or Apple to patch the OS. When those happen, are people demanding a fix from Microsoft/Apple or Mozilla?
Judging by the upvotes, everyone (myself included) want to know how to find early customers but no one has any other suggestions?

I had some success by emailing photographers (my market) who were interviewed in magazines or by interacting with them on Twitter but I'd love to hear other suggestions
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And I’m back from my holiday, most enjoyable stuff and strangely Fever only said I had 200 points to get through so I’m guessing they expire after awhile because I was expecting thousands.
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As programming gets easier

I'm not sure this is something that's actually happening.
Trust me, it was enough that I should have been happy and it still wasn't enough.
Stop the suburbs; I want to get off
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I believe this is from the song "Ships" by Tom Kimmel & Michael Lille, and the last line is (mis-)quoted by Admiral Grace Hopper.
Sorry, just remembered this. I got the app working now, not sure what the problem was... Possibly reception issues. The app is very useful, particularly being able to run rake tasks and interact with the console.
Check out these screencasts (links below). Even if you never work with Rails or Ruby it'll give you an idea of how to contribute to other projects.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/50-contributing-to-rails

http://railscasts.com/episodes/113-contributing-to-rails-wit...
Angel Index Fund Bullshit
The EntitySpaces ORMBattle.NET Performance Numbers
Tech startups are changing the way workers are screened and hired
Razor is a major step in the right direction. Spark view engine still offers enough punch for me not to switch to Razor just yet. The stuff that you can do with bindings and the convention over configuration stuff are still killer features for Spark.
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Bode's law lives
Just use the subreddits. Check out /r/DepthHub and the other subreddits linked off it.
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Then maybe its time to use:

3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

I always wanted to see what would happen if this was ever invoked.
Ask HN: Is there a mediator service for freelance coders?
Hello HN,

I am a freelance coder and really love what I do. My only problem is: I am so horribly bad at selling myself/my skills that it is really hard for me to get gigs. It's not because of lack of skill in coding but my inability to promote myself.

Are there any services that mediate between freelancers and customers and get paid a percentage of the brokered contract? Like: You get me customers and I'll pay you 20% worth the contract.

Thanks for any hints,
Leon
But when it comes to browsers, IE is the default option, so that shouldn't hurt them, really.
Cursing is a good example. Some low level subcultures are using high amount of sex/genital related cursing and word substitutes. (Russian underclass is the most famous example) while other cultures (say, Indian) aren't.

Of course, language usage shapes what you thing and by which chains of associations your mind wanders along.

If you're able to switch your mind's language for at least several minutes (naming and calling things on your second language) you will have a different projection of the same reality and your behavior will also be changed.
In disagreeing with the rule I stated, you're advocating reading tweets which are either (a) uninteresting, or (b) contain only information already widely shared. Are you really advocating that? (And if so, which part?)

I agree with you about the echo chamber. But it's virtually impossible to live inside an echo chamber when you follow people who share mostly information that is not widely held. By definition, that means those people aren't merely echoing the crowd, and this will take you away from people with me-too tweets about iPhone antenna issues (or whatever the news of the hour is).
Then it wasn't enough :p We'll never stop arguing, but consider this: Wouldn't you be happy doing it for a billion dollars? Somewhere between that and what you got is your "happiness threshold", it's just that it's more than what you got now.

Unless you wouldn't have been happy with any amount of money, in which case I assume your client was the third Reich!
Forbes does it and nobody complains about that.
the new Dynamic View and ViewModel properties is a great addition to mvc3
UML, Everywhere
I know there's a lot of software/web development firms in and around Manchester but I've never actually found or heard of anything like the atmosphere that they have in Silicon Valley.

Although, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I'm hoping I'll find some friends at Manchester Uni when I get round to going.
Illustration by a prostitute/economist http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631975 3 days ago http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...
A year ago, when I was developing a retro Pacman for cellphones (J2ME) as a university project, I decided to use a text file to store maps. It was before I knew about emacs picture-mode, and I was working on Windows, so I actually used MS Excel for the job.

You resize the cells to make them square, insert a formula that will rewrite all cells from a given row into a single string (so you could then just copy a column with those strings and paste directly into Notepad, or something), and then you can use convenient navigation with arrows, tab and ENTER to create the map (also filling entire row or column by one mouse drag was handy). Moreover, if you add "conditional formatting", you can make all different tiles appear with different colors and font styles (like walls with dark background or pickups colored in gold, green, etc.). It's a 2-minutes-to-do, poor's man map editor for tileset-based games :).
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There are, but it's very easy to fudge the numbers. For example, New York State is supposedly one of the best-funded state pension plans around, but if you change the predicted annual rate of return for the pension plan's investment from 8% to 5 or 6% IIRC, it's suddenly deep in the red. Small looking obscure change, big difference.
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Also a Gatesion is more than a "Bill"ion.
Here's an example. Draft from 37signals. As soon as they launched there was noise about their pricing, after a week or so, it got quit even though sales were still going up. Not sure what they're up now with the pricing.
It's amusing watching the author use purple prose over a single blinking LED. I bet if Steve Jobs gave him a turd he would describe it as "that which makes the flowers grow, with a heady aroma".
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Getting a processor/ASIC taped out and fabricated, even if you use MOSIS, it not cheap. As I understand it, the cost of the necessary seat licenses for the design and verification tools would be beyond what we think of normal (non-Space X/Tesla) angel investments, even syndicated.

So, again, I ask "what class[es] of hardware companies would angels have enough money to make a difference in"?

Or to repeat a question I've been pounding on, where will the next thing in the class of the FPGA come from? As far as I can tell, the answer for the US is that "the future isn't going to be invented here".
Programming Praxis (http://programmingpraxis.com) provides a collection of etudes, updated weekly, for the education and enjoyment of the savvy programer. Although there is some math content (the current exercise uses the chinese remainder theorem), Programming Praxis is much less math-oriented than Project Euler.
Because he thinks that corporate-speak is not meant to be taken literally, and he is probably right. The sentiment is "don't run these ads," which is what they are rebelling against.
All true, but it's worth adding that they could have still saved their movie business if they had made the timely jump into online movie rental and distribution. This would've been timed well with the rise in the real estate before the bust as they could've unloaded the stores and spaces.

Overpaying for real estate or not, they lost because they failed at keeping up with movie technology trends as well as its competitors. The stores exacerbated the problem, but could've been addressed sooner. Walgreens and Starbucks don't carry products that can be as easily digitized.
> and risk their lives doing it

Lots of people risk their lives. I risk my life every day driving to work.

Did you know that policemen don't even make the top 10 list of most dangerous jobs? http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/

Garbage men, BTW, perform a very important service and risk their lives (#5) doing it, and are paid much much less.. They deserve every cent IMO.
What have you tried? What do you know?

Rearrange 2.log(a)=3.log(b)+5 to find b in terms of a.

Answering that will give us some idea of your current status the better to answer your questions.
So you mean that toughness is NOT a partial order.
requesting a blog post about your experiences with the medical device
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You might have a hard time getting into an equivalent government job, and many government jobs have mandatory retirement ages (which I think are not as common in the private sector); so if you tried that, you could find yourself shut out with not enough years at the high ranks to make the pension worthwhile. Read about cop salaries and notice how much of their pensions are based on their final years out of 20 or 30. ('spiking' and vacation-time etc.)
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Command line OpenID client as a Ruby gem [ bonus points for helping me :) ]
I think this is a (full-sized computer-) WebKit feature, also available on Safari, for example.
In the 8-bit age, you turned on your micro and had instant access to BASIC which you could easily edit line by line. Today, you have to install your SDK, maybe an IDE and learn a language a lot more complicated and deal with enormous APIs.
You often say this "point out a sentence that is false", but it's not that simple. Even though no sentence is mathematically false taken on its own, the combination can be or strongly imply complete and utter bullshit. (I'm not saying that that's the case here)
It's often a mistake to think that a human can describe his requirements.

People don't really know what they want.

No one could have gone to Steve Jobs and said, hey, I want a phone that can read mail, play music, download apps, and has a touch screen.

No one thinks in these terms.

At best, people would say: I want a device that I can carry around with me that can act as a small computer.

There's a wide and huge gap between "creating great products" and "gathering user requirements".
What's the service that delivers meals and are you based around NY by any chance?
Originally from Bosnia, spent a large part of my life in the US, now in Bosnia for the next 8 months.
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cough http://www.hackernewsers.com/pages/map.html
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I don't know, personally I think those Forbes lists are a menace. What if you get rich but don't want the bullshit that comes from everyone knowing you're loaded?
Another reason to exercise
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Native Americans sold Manhattan for $24 in 1626. It may seem a low amount, but invested at an annual 6% that would be over $125 billion today.
Why? In particular Dynamic view models? What is the benefit of adding this third way of expressing your view model objects?
> Unless you wouldn't have been happy with any amount of money, in which case I assume your client was the third Reich!

Not quite, but close :)
Some background info from a /. comment: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1768970&cid=3340...

This is amusing. Here's some history on the company. Interval Research was an R&D outfit that Paul Allen founded back in the 1990's. You've never heard of it, because they were incredibly secretive. So hush-hush that when they went belly-up no one outside of the company knew about it. Literally. It took months before the Press finally got wind of it.

The place was a great place to be if you were doing research. Literally "let a thousand roses bloom". Unfortunately, they were horribly mismanaged. Allen blew hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly over budget, before he finally realized that he wasn't getting anything out it. They wanted to be the next version of SRI. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out.

Top management was, at best, incompetent. At worse, downright crooks. They hired some people on certain terms, and then shortly afterwards said "Opps - we really meant to hire you at a lower level". Truly a boneheaded move. Fortunately it didn't happen to me, but the look on people's faces when they found out was unforgettable.

Interval did some really amazing stuff; years ahead of its time. But they could never get the products out to market (though they tried), mostly due to amazing incompetence on the part of the lead engineers. You know the type. Big egos and no talent. Perhaps there was an exception to that rule, but I don't recall it.

I'm not surprised that Paul Allen has turned into a Patent Troll; it will be the only way he can get his money back. The only thing surprising is that it took him so long. But he never impressed me as being the sharpest knife in the drawer. As for other history, they had a number of big names there, from many fields. In tech, you may have heard of Lee Felsenstein if you're familiar with history. Their office was in the Research area of Palo Alto. Near Stanford, down the street from the Wall Street Journal, between Page Mill and Hillview

Despite that unfortunate ending, I still look back fondly on Interval. They paid well, too. I made lots of money off of Paul Allen. Thanks, Paul!
"can I emerge from the other side of this and find great people to work with and cool stuff to work on?"

Without a doubt. It might take a bit longer for you to find a new groove (or refind your old one) but you'll have no problem eventually getting back in the game.

Obviously a broad statement. you might, perhaps. My experience, though, has been people I've known who had this level of self-awareness and drive for improvement were never held back for very long at anything they set their mind to.
I prefer Google Reader for this stuff, the ability to have a threaded technical discussion is useful and not available with Twitter. Of course you can follow Twitter feeds with Reader, but these days I just follow Reader feeds of a few people that tend to satisfy (a) and (b). Note that @rjlipton hasn't made any Twitter updates in months, all the activity was on his blog, which would be in your news feed if you're at all interested in the problem.
It's exactly the same problem we are facing. When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end. I am looking for talented kernel engineers. If I go for employing someone high caliber, the costs would be in the 100K >= range. Not a smooth option for a startup. Also it's still hard to attract them even if you pay well. If I go for contractors, there is the problem of IP disclosure. Contractors are probably worse; you disclose IP, pay more, and they disappear after certain level of training investment. You are back to square one.

If you get someone with lesser talent, (done twice, and parted ways after several months) it's also terrible. In this case you usually pay for nothing. E.g. a month of struggle with code, reaching nowhere, dumping their code. This happened a few times.

The hiring is also key. If you have 8 high-caliber engineers, it means you get many times more done. What you could do in one year is done in, say 3 months. A huge difference for a startup.

I have been thinking about hiring talented grad students like they did, maybe that's the best way to go. So its really a tough problem with no straightforward solution.

From the article: We try to ask about the difference between cooperative and preemptive multitasking.

I ask what is kernel preemption. Silence. A blocking mutex and a spinlock? Silence. I think a good candidate should know what event-based and threaded programming means, and even go further to explain the implications and best scenarios for both. Its not easy to get that far.
Hi Michael, I could be advocating not following anybody at all, I could be advocating the avoidance of micro-blogging services in the first place :) At least though if you are going to follow somebody then you are indeed right, you should follow somebody like Stephen Fry for instance who is nice erudite chap or the people you mention also sound cool. Or if Wittgenstein was still around, I'd totally follow him (not that he'd be seen dead "tweeting" I'd imagine).

The same goes for me though. I get my political info from a handful of blogs that all share the same bias. I have to remind myself to check out the opposition from time to time to get some well-needed perspective. I guess you could say the same for cable news except that somebody is preselecting the bias for you.

Maybe I'm weird but I have never felt the urge to "follow" someone on Identi.ca or Twitter or whatever's the flavo(u)r of the day ... :)
Reminds me of the classic paper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet from Fred Brooks where he argues that programming will always be complex because the real-world problems we're solving are complex. No programming technique or system will magically make that go away.
So do you consider it a plus if a founder is a marathon runner?
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This hits the nail on the head. It's not that people don't understand the syntax or even the semantics of programming languages (well, some people can't write a for loop, but they're just hopeless). It's that they can't see how to use the language to get from point A ("I want a program that does x") to point B (an actual program that does x). For instance, when I first began programming, I struggled mightily with deciding how to represent real-world data. Other people might be able to decide how to represent data, but become hopelessly stuck when it comes to turning their verbal descriptions of tasks into actual algorithms. I think that this is why so many people go on programming interviews and then can't actually solve simple programming problems: they do fine when they're taking exercises from books, but they can't concretely conceptualize the solution to an even slightly ambiguous problem.
In short, you're leveraging your product and your business credibility on your beta and your plans and your customer engagement.

High-risk, but it can pay.

Miss large on product or roadmap or customer requirements, and you're in deep sneakers. Few places have the revenue stream to manage to maintain a rubbish-n-roadmaps strategy sustainable after a sufficiently large miss.
Great tip. I just watched it, awesome movie. It's full of advice for entrepreneurs.
And since you missed it - about a month ago Old Spice did a great internet level promotion with this ad - answering questions from facebook / reddit / youtube / twitter. And cleverly targeted videos at people like Kevin Rose. It was really impressive.
HN had the post about how they did it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1516195
And the key discussion about the campaign was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512225

You can see the full list (that does get rather repetitive -- although keep in mind they were coming out about every 20 minutes for 2 days straight) here: http://www.youtube.com/user/OldSpice#p/u
Building complex things will get easier with more powerful tools.

Not building this:

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/%22The_Homer%22

with those tools will stay just as hard.
Nicole John