skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1: Lack of Trust 2: Lack of infrastructure (Legal, Human resources, Power, e.t.c)

When you redefine the issue as creating a startup like Rapportive, saying that Rapportive could be launched from anywhere, it happens you answer your own question as to why not: "an identifiable problem breeds opportunity".

To invent a Rapportive, you need cultural immersion in the "problems" a culture virtually without problems faces. You can get education, and you can get resources. But as the poster from South Africa wrote, you also have objectivity and see "real problems" all around you. With your objectivity, looking up someone's email across social sites doesn't feel like an important problem, so it's less likely to get solved from the third world.

That said, Africa also gives rise to an incredibly positive cultural acclimation--fixing things with whatever's on hand. That's an extraordinary talent if applied philosophically and pragmatically, allowing one to invent and solve around the barriers you mention. That's "hacking".
Demand pushing Mobile to think Vicariously
I think it's worth trying for a couple of weeks. If it doesn't start to click, then come back after a few years of imperative programming, at which time it won't be as easy as you'd expect (or so it is reported) since you have to learn the very different functional paradigm, but you'll appreciate it all the more having accumulated plenty of scars from side effect caused bugs.

That said, if you have something you want to build starting with a project and an appropriate language and ecosystem (including instructional material) is very good. I myself started out in a high school punched card IBN 1130 FORTRAN "IV" course, but soon started a project that really got me going.

I didn't try SICP until half a decade later; by then I was an experienced imperative language programmer (mostly C by that point) and fairly experienced in Maclisp and Lisp Machine Lisp. At which point it really made sense, both in terms of being able to understand the material and why it was really important.
And you questioned his analogy?!

(Not questioning the point, just suggesting that we all go back to metaphor school this afternoon for a little brush up).
This has been discussed in many places but ok, here goes my take. I hardly, ever, ever program at home unless it is something I can make money of. I like programming as much as the next guy, but between my family and my hobbies (which are many), I see programming for 9-5.

Working 8 hours a day and being good at it doesn't qualify as passionate? What do you want? 10? 16? 22 hours a day?

You want people that are passionate and want to learn? Give them chances to do so while on the job. Let them use Ruby on Rails, or Erlang on the next project. Don't expect them to do it at home for free so you them reap the rewards.

If you don't want to hire me, fine, heck you can even not hiring me because I'm bald and you don't like bald people, but this "Has to program at home/Has to contribute to Open Source" crap is nothing more than that, crap!
> What they do outside of that time is completely up to them

I completely agree but I think the argument is that, all things being equal, someone that will do things related to their job in their free time will be better at the job and more likely to get better and better.

I can certainly see why someone would want to use it as a hiring factor but, like you said, once employed, it's none of their business.
With a design like this -- Iceland, you must construct additional pylons.
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With search engine optimization (SEO), you get natural placement in Google, Bing and Yahoo! According to the recent announcement of search engines, everyone needs to be optimized to improve its rankings.
I have the C version, and I personally found it easier going than the Dragon Book. As with the other books in the series, the beginning chapters dealing with the lexer an the parser are very mathematical - but the parts actually dealing with emitting bytecode are quite practical in nature. I ended up using the lexx/yacc tutorials to give me a grounding in parsing, without worrying too much about the mathematical basis for it, and then used the Appel book for everything after having derived an AST.
I concur. I got a friend who went into entrepreneur on the side ended up with a broken relationship, estrangement with family members and no life beyond computer.
Sorry, I wasn't commenting about the inventory, I was thinking more along the the lines of creating simple maintenance plans for each arrangement. Keep in mind that the average utility field service worker is often kept most efficient by minimizing the number of variations of any given task.
Airfare statistics between any two airports
What Oracle vs Google, Google on Net neutrality, iPhone 4 antenna teach us?
Well, my point was that other governments weren't designed that way and do fine. I think it's safe to say that people in e.g. Sweden trust their government more since (a) there are so many government services and (b) Sweden is supposed to be the most democratic place on earth.

> And of the government getting caught up in "popular passions" and overreacting to things that people briefly got very fired up about.

Well, the US government still does this to devastating effect (e.g. "war on terror", patriot act, etc.).
You mean copywriters?
Any employer worth working for has learning and development programs. At big companies, there's probably dozens of people managing training programs. At small companies, there are tons of opportunities to organize interest groups or show and tell. I know firms with lots of licensed employees (accounting, insurance, and education come to mind) generally have no problem granting their employees time to keep current on their continuing education. So what's the problem with technology? Why can't we act as humanely as other professions?
> graffiti and vandalism on bus stops by sandblasting motifs into the glass: http://trimet.org/publicart/busshelters.htm

That addresses the consequences of a problem and not the root causes. It is important to stop the cause of petty vandalism.

I can take a bet that if most countries had corporal punishment and applied it readily and liberally to vandalism cases, both vandalism and other offenses would be stopped.

In the west people continue to do crimes (and let off) until they do a major crime (when it is too late to change entrenched behaviour).
as far as I know, not only am I allowed to discriminate based on experience, it's common practice. If I've got two people of the same age, one who has been programming only at work, and didn't start until college, vs. another person, who started (hobby) programming at 15, and does open-source projects on the weekend, well, the second person clearly has a whole lot more experience.

As an employer, the bonus is that usually salary is based on /paid/ experience... so even though the two people in the example above have a /huge/ difference in actual time spent programming, as an employer, their starting wage is going to be pretty similar.

So, twice as much experience, for the same money? hell yes I'll choose the hobbyist. and as far as I can tell, there is no law against that. (though, I'm on pretty shaky ground if I require extra work after I hire you. See the semi-annual Electronic Arts lawsuits.)
Visual C# Express Edition
Write testable code even if you don't write tests
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Have you ever used jQuery?

$(".someclass").onClick(function() {
$(this).doSomething();
});

Notice you're passing in a function to a function and `this` is a free variable.

Spend a week programming in a functional language (like Haskell or Clojure) and then go program in Java. You basically feel castrated because a) generics were added to the type system as an afterthought and b) functions are not first class citizens and c) higher order functions are simply not used in Java (they can be somewhat imitated with anonymous inner classes but it's a pain).
/every/ company I've worked for buys it's technical people books. Hell, I do that for my contractors. And most larger places have tuition assistance if you want to take actual classes.
and you called yourself potatolicious?
To continue on the CPA example. My dad is a CA in Canada (the equivalent) he rarely has free time. And when he does, he usually goes meet with clients at restaurants and such. He also takes courses every 6 months. You might call him a workaholic, but his job requires a lot of customer relation and preparation.
According to Erdos, Gauss was very discouraging to his students, because when they came and told him that they'd proven something, he would tell them he'd proven it years before.

from "The man who loved only numbers.' by Paul Hoffman.
Well said. The maintenance costs will be large enough over the lifetime of the pylons so that different/complex designs will be a net loss.
The modern assumption of retirement is a bi-product of the industrial revolution. Retirement was a brass ring that was held up for workers to see as a way to keep them productive and loyal for a long period of time. Just think of how many times you've heard the phrase "You don't want to jeopardize your pension do you?" said in a movie.

Unfortunately, greed, escalation, and bloat caught hold at lots of these companies. And the concept of company retirement became much more of a well organized ponzi scheme.

As one example, both of my parents were taught from an early age that they should grow up to work at one company for their entire life. And that's what they did. My mother, went to work for the local school system. And my father went to work for the local chemical production plant. When they started work they both expected a retirement package, payed into and provided solely by their employer.

Neither one got that. My mothers retirement plan converted. Into a 401k with a fractional matching contribution from the school district. So she went from 100% contribution from her employer, to 90% coming out of her paycheck. If she was to retire "on time".

My father had a much worse fate. He had a pension from his company and a company managed 401k. Both of which were gutted when the company was spun off in debt reallocation. He still has the company letters that shows him having over 1 Million dollars on paper as his retirement package. He retired with little more than a gold watch for 40 years on the job. I had to support him in the gap between his "retirement" and when his social security kicked in.

But the silver lining is that we can all learn from the fallacy of our predecessors. We can take responsibility for our own lives, happiness, and "retirement". That's a big reason why I work for myself.

And most of the people I know are into the "mini-retirement" concept that has been more recently popularized by Tim Ferris. Live now. Don't work your whole life to live later.

If you truly love the work that you do...who'd want to retire anyway?
DNS Hijack - How to Avoid Being a Victim
Technology firms gain instant recognition with poor grammar and bad spelling
I know for a fact that you have at least one employee, yourself. I'm in a rural area and the local paper loves to do stories on any small business happenings. A single-person startup is still economic news in a small town.
I know the requirements for nursing are related to practicing safety, and work out to about 1 hour per month in most US states, I'm not sure if that time is provided by the employer or has to be taken out of 'free' time, having a license for the job is a pre-requisite, so it would be logical to take it out of 'free' time.

Just as a cab driver would be expected to have a valid driving license.

That's nothing to do with 'passion' outside of the job though, where a nurse would only be hired (or fired if she/he didn't) practice nursing in their free time, it's everything to do with the company being liable if they employed people that were not in the possession of a valid license to perform their jobs.
The rise of the automotive App Store
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what isn't scaring millions of Americans? But having said that, I know a couple of folks who've fought through infestations in the last few years in Washington, DC.
On hiring (developers)
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)
Not sure about this new edition but AoE does bring back some great memories. The second was awesome. Made me feel like trogdor burninating the peasants.
Something I keep thinking about is that if everyone is going to be poor, then that's relatively the same as everyone being rich. If anything these stories are good news as if you're lucky then whatever you can scrape together will make you relatively wealthy compared with others, much like if you'd retired to a developing nation.
I can take a bet that if most countries had corporal punishment and applied it readily and liberally to vandalism cases, both vandalism and other offenses would be stopped.
[citation needed]
Talk about throw the baby out with the bath water. "We weren't allowed to have our service sent mostly illegal data without being blocked, so net neutrality was obviously a myth!". Does the author think that Google's "courageous attempt at net neutrality" would be favorable to torrents on wired networks?

Google betrayed the trust of everyone who believed "Don't do evil". Full stop. How ISPs dealt with illegal traffic on their networks has nothing to do with any of this.
As long as Oracle doesn't decide to scrap the set of promises that Sun had made for Java 7, that release will resolve many complaints and bring the language forward a bit, at least. It's not going to make Java the most powerful language around by any means, but it will help, and I think we'll start to see much tighter Java code coming out, at least from the people that know what they're doing.

For one thing, it will finally add automatic resource management blocks, which by my understanding do exactly what is being complained about here - they let objects deterministically clean up after themselves without relying on finalization.

What I'm still skeptical about is whether closures will actually make it in or not...it's much harder to add them on after the fact (while still maintaining backwards compatibility) than it is to design a language around them from the start, and I'm not really convinced that Oracle will care enough to see the efforts through to the end; at the very least, I don't see it as likely that it will happen without a serious schedule slip.
> Even the most troubling part of Google’s proposal – that wireless networks
> would be excluded for the time being – is not much different from
> what the FCC suggested.

That doesn't make it right. I'm sure P2P voice providers like Skype are very upset about this agreement. And customers should be, too. If my 3G/4G provider selectively blocks my voice calls they should state it very clearly on the marketing material. Something like "X GB per month for everything but voice, peer-to-peer, and any other service that competes with our own services." Of course they will never say that because they don't want the public to be aware they are being deceived.

Even for the rest of the corporations the wireless situation is very bad. They won't be able to have inexpensive communications over IP if it goes through wireless, like conference calls. They'll be forced to use oligopolistic and overpriced services for something already paid for.

This isn't bad just for end users and I think Torrentfreak missed the point. This proposal initiates a terrible false dichotomy of wired vs. wireless. It helps current use of peer-to-peer (the bait) crippling wireless (the real deal in the very near future.) Google doesn't care, or even worse, is against P2P services (private or commercial) because their core business is at odds with it. In som ways Google CEO want it to be the new IBM, the new central mainframe.

[Don't get me wrong, I love the technical people behind Google including its founders, but their higher management is out of control, and IMHO, "evil".]
Implementing full duplex  and  in WebKit (browserphone)
There was a movie fairly recently called Sleep Dealer which incorporated virtual labor as a plot element.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804529/
> I'm on pretty shaky ground if I require extra work after I hire you.

That was the exact question the OP posted, the title is 'No, I Wouldn't Hire a Programmer That Has No Interest in Programming Outside of Business Hours', and framed like that it is illegal.

The way you frame it it is legal, relevant work experience, whether gathered inside or outside of work time before the employment commences is a good thing to pick up on that passion.

But given two applicants, one that has 20 years of experience during work time and none that he cares to report about during the interview outside of work time and one that has 10, 5 years working in his spare time and 5 years during employment which one would you pick ?

The latter has 'passion' according to the OP, the former is a clockwatcher.
The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014
They might melt from all the heat those lines put off though.
Is he a partner or just an employee ?
From the article: "Chimei Innolux will supply 7-inch LCD screens, which use the same IPS (in-plane switching) technology found in the original iPad, which improves viewing angles and color on LCD screens." I was hoping for a retina-like display, can these techs be combined?
Unfortunately, they have insufficient resources after the bankruptcy.
oh man. It's probably less fun than it sounds? but it sounds pretty fun. I'm currently trying to think of a justification. A whirlwind tour of USian data centres, perhaps?
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
Do I mean under MinGW? I forget. Maybe I never got that to work and that's why I use Wine under Lin.
This is really a question for your underwriter. As it varies greatly depending on who holds your merchant account. You are right, most credit cards are going to default to the unqualified rate anyway.

But the bigger problem is this.

If you get bare minimum information from your customers, and then for some reason you start getting more than a few charge-backs, they might close your merchant account. Which is a fun exercise in thinking on your feet =)

The best bet is to get a merchant account with an account representative that is familiar with your business model and talk to him about how you plan to proceed. You are much less likely to run into problems if they verbally signed off on your actions.

As to fees. This is really cart before the horse. You have no sales yet. Trust me, when you have a whole gang of sales, people will start tripping over themselves to process your transactions at a happier rate.
My company paid for my grad school and let me build my work schedule around classes and big assignments.
I think you are right with just collecting minimal information. Systems we have built in the past where people want to collect all the billing information tend to cause more issues with transactions being declined because someone adds apt 7 or some thing else into the address field that doesn't match up. Unless you are selling a product where fraud would be a concern I could see collecting more information. I would think that fraud using SasS is pretty low compared to buying consumer electronics and such.
Travel to Finland
document! It's the best thing you can do for the company you are leaving, and at least for me, it's the easiest thing to focus on in those times... mostly because even half-finished, incomplete documentation is way better than no documentation at all.
Gosh, when using Skype with a decent headset with a good mike (e.g., a higher-end Shure), the audio is crystal clear--just like being in the same room.
For the first 3 years that I was a professional programmer, I didn't code at all at home. Previously, I had coded as a hobby and it was my skills from that that I was hired on. But suddenly going from 2 hours of programming a day to 8 was too much.

Around the 3 year mark, something changed. I suddenly wasn't doing enough programming at work and started playing around at home.

Now recently (the 5 year mark is quickly approaching) I have started to hunger for it even more, and have started watching less TV and playing fewer video games in favor of doing more fun coding at home and researching new ideas/languages/etc.

I think if the developer has years of experience and doesn't code at home, he doesn't have the fever needed to become better on his own time.

While I don't think that should immediately disqualify someone, I think it should be part of the hiring decision.
Define 'rich'.

If you're healthy and you have people to love and that love you in return and you get to write your own ticket in life then you are rich beyond belief.

If you crave money for its own sake you will never be rich.
That, and more and more browsing is done using easily zoomable browsers like Mobile Safari. It's becoming less likely that users will experience your site at its "native" resolution, so anything that moves away from poorly-scalable images is a good thing.
Oyster card moves to single supplier
If a shop plays a radio the radio station pays to play the song so why should the shop pay to hear the song? It's free advertising for the music after all. The collections agencies do a poor job. They try to maximise revenue to justify their existence but hamper exposure for artists.

If you want to move the industry on they are a keystone holding the old business model together. Remove them and the large labels that monopolise shell space, distribution and negotiations with new technology companies and we might get somewhere where more artists and fans are happy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Singapore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
It's a complete non-sequitur to charge more money for tiered service and claim it's because of piracy.

Most of the people on the highway on my way to work are speeding. That doesn't mean the government should allow different cars to go different speeds depending how much the manufacturer pays.
It's easier to make money than to love and be loved for some.
I read the "early" as pre-release and thought someone was trying to re-implement clojure in CL. I'm relieved.

What's the backstory on this, fogus? I've not read about a CL Clojure pre-dating the JVM implementation. Was this just a prototype or was there a plan to platform on CL at some point?
Also, http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Definitive-Guide-Activate-P...

6th edition of Flanagan's Definitive Guide coming out.
I wonder if you could make airports your startup 'office' for 30 days like this. I always seem to be more productive on trains or planes.
I'm not real because my facebook profile is private
Ask HN: Good service provider for running CPU intensive algorithms
We have an algorithm which we need to run for couple of months. This is a very CPU intensive task. You might ask what kind of algorithm it is. Let us assume that we want to index the whole internet. It's something like that.

Suggest me some service provider who can provide us the infrastructure to run this. IS cloud based infrastructure a good option ?
Who is down-voting this comment? lowenskind didn't break HNs rules and disagreement shouldn't be expressed by down-voting. This site's etiquette would be a reply with a counter-argument.

If you join any community, try to learn its rules first. And don't hide behind the anonymity of down-voting.

Edit 1: rephrasing.

Edit 2: lowenskind comment was in the negative side when I wrote this, requiring at least 2 down-voting accounts.
I believe (caveat emptor) that this was an early prototype.
Shutting down MFS was the best thing that ever could have happened to X-Plane. If I remember correctly, until MFS went away, X-Plane was pretty much free.
Weird then that he regularly uses an iPhone and iPad which presumably don't offer this functionality.