skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Today I got laid off, tomorrow I want to hack
hack 4 hire

My goal is to build a fantastic web business. Until I can construct a core concept and refined pitch I want nothing more than to bury myself in the web stack from top to bottom. If you or a friends startup is hiring shoot me an email at messel at gmail dot com. Or contact me if you think you can help me refine my pitch.

If you'd care to see some humble projects I've worked:

My github:http://github.com/victusfate
(I've forked a few repos to learn from)

my first rails app (collaborative project)
http://imagebrowser.heroku.com

same concept ported to sinatra/datamapper http://knowsinatra.heroku.com

our startup homepage
http://victusmedia.com

other skills: 14 years simulations/modeling + algorithm development in c++, walk-a-holic, blog-aria, diehard dreamer.
The mis-use of the title "engineer" is insulting to those in that profession that earned that title. All I see are a bunch of computer programmers or computer scientists. No engineers here.
While I'm by no means an expert, the parent is talking about people actually buying it (e.g. houses up until very recently), not talking about buying it (as, he argues, is now the case with gold).
Intel to Buy McAfee in $7.68 Billion Deal
> I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft?

When they first started out, both were lousier, scrappy, free products.

> In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily.

There is nothing unfair about this comparison. Releasing free products and making money on other things has always been a viable way to compete against bigger, more established players. See: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
Summer IPO Market Proves Interesting
The cast seems awfully young considering how I had always imagined them to be while reading the book. I had pictured this early 20-century group of "captains of industries" to be mid-forties to late-fifties at least.
Hm, small point, but the linker may not actually fold identical templates. Visual C does; gcc sometimes does not.
and purity.
If you do not mind sharing a shop secret, how did you make CNN? Did you use a publicist? Do you know someone? Or did they just call you out of the blue?
I have actual knowledge of it. The product I work on uses it as the production database because we distribute the software as a desktop application (and MySQL has licensing issues).

It COULD do row level locking, but it doesn't. SQLitening is the closest thing to performant SQLite you will get. And it only runs on Windows.
How many phones support HTML5 with all of the features Flash provides for a direct comparison?
Does the author actually mean "Pedal to the Metal" ? The original saying comes from pressing the gas pedal as far as it goes, until it presses against the metal underneath and can go no further.

I've never heard to "Pedal to the Mettle" ...
"But much worse was that, even when these titles loaded, there was no way to control most of the action. Most games required keyboard or mouse actions I simply could not perform on my phone, even with its QWERTY slider. One shooter wanted me to hit the CTRL key to fire; another asked for the left mouse button."

Is this guy serious? He goes to play a game that was clearly built for a computer and blames Flash because it's not playable on his phone that doesn't have a keyboard?
"If you want your thing to work for most people, you are going to have to write in Flash anyway."

Some of the big sites I'm involved with are on track to hit 10% mobile use before the end of the year. And most of that is iOS.

The assumption that "most people" are windows desktop users is becoming less and less valid.
When to use i.e. in a sentence
GNU Social - diaspora already has a clone that's usable and free software
Scrolling is much faster in Firefox 4, especially on pages with a background image.
I'm a big fan of Coda for the actual IDE. Well, more of a text editor, similar to TextWrangler. Not free, but it has the built in SFTP client, so it covers that.

Also suggest balsamiq as an alternative to omnigraffle; both are excellent products. Might want to try balsamiq (free for a month) just so you know what else is out there.
It's funny, as HN is often anti-degree, that this kind of comment is posted here. I don't think someone needs the degree to be called an engineer, especially people who have this much experience in the industry.

Looking at the past experience of the team, and how many positions they've held with "software engineer" in the title, I'd say it's an insult to try to insinuate that they somehow aren't as capable at what they're doing as one with a degree that says they're an engineer.

Come on, let's be nice.
I'm a fan of Reddit, I think working there could be a smart resume / connection building move, but:

a) You work as a contractor, are not guaranteed to be hired as an employee anytime soon, receive no benefits and no stock.

b) The company has already been acquired.

c) Reddit's corporate overlords seem most interested in pumping the asset vs. expanding, may be a stifling environment.

If it was me I'd do the app but send it instead to Hipmunk (Reddit co-founder's new start-up)
Can you clarify? I've always thought of engineers as people who solve problems by applying scientific knowledge. These guys seem to fit the bill, but I'm not an engineer (by any definition) so I don't know the terms first-hand.
> With all this talk about net neutrality, it sometimes gets lost that the cool thing was being able to invent a new service on a new port.

But we can do that just as easily today.

> Would the web have been here if the net port restricted like it does today in the days of gopher?

There are very little port restrictions. The only ones that I am aware of that are routinely enforced are http and mail servers running on end-user lines and mail server other than the ISP ones connected from those lines.

Anything else is fair game.

> f you were going to do this.... I would probably go with something more persistent in a protocol (more X windows than http). Flip the axis (0,0 top left) and ... well a lot of things from display postscript ... might be fun,

Display postscript is a very impressive language, it takes some getting used to though.

But it is a lot more flexible and orthogonal than HTML will every be.
The UI fails on a maximised Safari, with tab bar, bookmarks bar, and tool bar, and a visible dock, on a 13" MacBook Pro, which is 1280 by 800.

This isn't exactly a niche set-up I'm using. Having a fixed height is pretty much useless for anything you want people to use in a meaningful way.

If it's an art piece, then I guess it doesn't matter. I can't tell, because it's not usable.
Can RIM Succeed with a Custom OS for Blackpad? (Hint: No)
A custom OS has no chance in 2010. Their only solution is to go for Android or at the very least Meego.
Thanks for taking the time to write this.

My only worry with flash sales, from the selling software perspective, is that I worry you're probably going to get a metric tonne of pathological tire kickers who take disproportionate support and fail to renew at the real price. If that didn't happen to you, I'm happy for you and everyone else.
How to tell when your boss is lying
Rubbish! Most moderately advanced HTML5 demos run hideously, if at all, on mobile hardware.

The difference will be if HTML5 can replace 80% of Flash uses in a performant manner. The video tag makes up a huge block of that 80%. The other 20% will always run like a dog on mobile hardware, no matter the technology.
I may be wrong, but I think Adobe 10 years ago was pushing for things like html5 video and canvas... because Flash was Macromedia's. It was a case of: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. (They were also one of the first big companies to push SVG from what I remember).
> [It] was a day that rivals only the day that my daughter was born.

I hope you mean "it was a day rivaled only by the day that my daughter was born." The former sounds like your daughter's birthday was your worst day ever, and the success of your toy was just slightly better than that.
I am a patent attorney registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. I will draft a patent application for you and file it in the Patent Office.

kip.werking via gmail.
Let them eat BTUs: Food as repurposed BTUs
The hipmunk is a stroke of brilliance.

In the article it says:

> Hipmunk's flight-goggled chipmunk mascot has the same "awww" factor as Twitter's iconic bluebird. With that, Hipmunk was born.

But I think it goes far beyond the Twitter bird, which to me looks very sterile and artificial. This little guy is cool, like the Scrat character from ice-age.
It could be organized into different points of views. Each section could articulate pros and cons, for example. It's all in how you organize it; don't organize it like a fact-based wikipedia article.
Ask HN: Web Developers - How do you manage your charts?
...or specifically Fusion Charts?
We have tons of fusioncharts embedded in dozens on web apps where I work.

The problem is - everytime you want to display data from the database as a new chart in the web application, you have to "code the middle tier".
We use java so it involves JDBC and rowset iteration and creating Fusion Chart XML for the chart.

How do you manage this better? I am surprised that there is no "middle tier" software that complements Fusion Charts and I am thinking of building one.

Basically a UI where you enter your query, map it, save the config and reference it in your web UI via ID. Will also help "centralize" and manage all the chart configurations across webapps.

Thoughts? (This is my first post but feel free to beat me.)
The article ends on a bit of a depressing note:

The real winners will be public-relations firms, which now know to coach the boss to hesitate more, swear less and avoid excessive expressions of positive emotion.
I'm the author and no, not opening any. My developer who built the site posted to Hacker News so yes, I am completely new here.
Do you understand HTTP Caching?
You don't have to check out the repo (I didn't). It takes five minutes or so to solve, so it's not that time-consuming if you are at least a bit technical.
"Mettle" means willingness to succeed or endure; standfastness. I'm assuming the title is just a pun.
Rand certainly regarded intelligence as important but I don't think she regarded it as volitional. Of course one can volitionally act unintelligently, but for instance Eddie Willers in Atlas did not have Dagny's intelligence and efficacy, but he was a moral character and would have to be listed among the novel's heroes. Mike the construction worker in The Fountainhead would be a similar example.
> Server: HipmunkServer/0.1

what's a hipmunkserver? Is that a changed server id or is it really something custom?
I think Joel has a real good point. 37s has been slow to make improvements on Highrise. We have nearly 10000 deals and there is no pagination, so I have to wait for the entire 10000 deals to load. I can't even archive them. When you call /deals.xml, we also get all of our won/lost deals.

Someone who can step in and add merely add pagination to /deals.xml will already be doing wonders for us.

Simple software is good. Simple, stagnating software is frustrating because it has a good UI but sometimes the inability for 37s to even add the most basic features breaks a deal.
Is there a reason to delete the branch? I don't think I've ever tried to delete a branch in subversion. I imagine it's possible, and can be reversed if necessary, but goes against my thinking of the repository as a canonical log of all development.
You can sort of work around it by minimizing it using ctrl+-. But, yeah. I sorta screwed up by not getting it to work on smaller screens and mobile. Sincere apologies!
If they had known just one thing, it'd be that Typekit's iPad support only works when one weight of each typeface is used, otherwise it crashes MobileSafari.
"Too many outside interests to write high quality code"?

You need to get the chip off your shoulder and distinguish between genuine passion for hacking, and escapist basement dwelling. Outside interests refresh your mind and body and give you new inspiration.
Confirmed. This is what I got back directly from CrazyEgg:

"Custom Lifetime plan with 1000 visitors/month and 1 page tracking (per month)."
a) his phone has a keyboard... it just doesn't have a full keyboard with CTRL key and everything;

b) _that_ is exactly his point. That most games, and most content was built on Flash with the "PC" as the target system. Quote: "Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers." Hence even though Flash may have been ported to mobile phones now, most of its apps won't, because the developers were always thinking of Flash as running on a PC ('cause that's what it did).
heh not the first time I have made that mistake, when I say "they" I mean macromedia / whoever happened to be in charge of flash at the time of whatever incidence we are talking about.
Load distribution on a cluster
Hi,

A computer cluster is composed of nodes that execute jobs on files stored in that node (data locality optimization). Certain files have more jobs assigned to them than others.

Let's say we have:
- file A with load X
- file B with load X
- file C with load 2X
- two nodes in the cluster

So the best distribution is: file A and file B in one node and file C in the other node.

How can I distribute the files in the nodes? Does a greedy algorithm solve my problem?
Ah. I was aware of the meaning of mettle, I was just unsure if it was deliberate. It's a nice theory that it's a deliberate pun, but I'm not sure it works. It feels the same as "The proof is in the pudding" and other, similarly meaningless distortions of old adages that made sense in the original.

But still, nice idea - thanks.
AngelConf was run in 2010 too. http://angelconf.com/
Sadly, no. There are definitely entrepreneurial/startup-minded people in the Midwest, but they are scattered and not organized, there's nothing approaching the concentration of talent and events that exists in the Bay Area.

That's one of the main reasons why I'm dropping everything and moving to San Francisco in about a week to work on my startup. As much as I like Chicago, the connections and resources just aren't there yet.
A good place to start would be "Why I Am Not an Objectivist," by Michael Huemer:

http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand.htm
The software equivalent of the Streisand effect.
We're talking about Google, a company who wrote their own cleanroom Java implementation and reverse-engineered ActiveX to create a ChromeFrame implementation still compatible with anything that ever worked in IE. I think they could speed things up a bit.

ActionScript is just JS plus some extra sugar. JS implementations have gotten hundreds of times faster in the last three years, while Flash has gotten slower. Slap a modern JIT on there and we should get some improvement.
The list is definitely incomplete judging by the number of speakers at earlier Startup Schools.
Spam is not a Marketing Strategy: Fast Company and the Cost of Online Pollution
Haha. I wish I had known that one thing!
Why wouldn't this question be on StackOverflow?
This is all true. reddit is a great place to work if you want to learn a lot, get some great experience, and have a really strong influence on the product. But it is not a startup -- there is no big upside.

And I don't think Hipmunk is hiring yet. :)
Interesting collection. Unfortunately, as per my experience, these aren't that useful -- they pretty much come down to understanding how hadoop works, making sure mappers and reducers have reasonable work and jobs are balanced, etc. Essentially things you would easily see from the jobtracker page. Others stem from defects in hadoop design -- why should users have to care about file compression? Why should multiple output files from reducers be a problem? What idiot decided to make the bloody jobtracker keep all counters and statistics IN RAM (I've heard of these things called databases that are useful for offline storage of structured data)... For the interested, we actually bounce the jobtrackers on bigger lanes daily to increase reliability and avoid long gc times with tons of accumulated in-ram stats.

More interesting would be how to solve hard problems -- one that took me quite a while was how to do a distributed balanced exact rank, particularly when the field being ranked is not uniformly distributed so you can't simply partition it.
Speak for yourself. I use std::string frequently and there isn't anything awkward about it.
That's like saying that after the java run time has been ported to your mobile phone that you can't run open office on it because it was designed for a desktop. Of course it won't work, it never was meant to. But now that it is available the authors of the software will start to receive feedback from their users and will be able to fix those issues. It starts with platform availability, up to that point you can't do much.
You might earn the title of Engineer in Training or Professional Engineer or Chartered Engineer or Incorporated Engineer, but "engineer" on its own is generic and applies to anyone who uses "scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to design and develop solutions for technological systems problems." [1] Programmers can indeed be engineers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer
Can anyone who has attended a past Startup School share their experience? What's the general atmosphere of the event? Is it similar to other conferences you've attended? Does it offer value on its own merits, or is it simply a day-long sales pitch for YC?
The question and answers are all missing the key "glue" between the C mkdir() function and the Linux syscall - glibc.
Agreed. Some of the cities shown that had low black percentages also had higher-than-average percentages of asians or hispanics. Overall, I'd say it's a combination of wealth factors, education/intelligence factors, and behavioral/cultural factors -- not any single one thing.
A Magical ride for a magical experience at the Apple store
He was the third King of Prussia with that name, but the first Emperor of Germany. So both numbers are correct in their context.
That sounds great. As a tech founder that's the thing I'm working through. There's a few good sources but very little that says, for tech with std tech structures you probably want to do it this way.
Arguably, types are a form of verification, and they already lead to better optimizations.
I'm not sure what's sadder, people that want to make lists and pretend they're playing a video game or people that play a video game that resembles real life in terms of having to complete a list of menial tasks...
Yammer (SOMA/SF) is hiring for all engineering positions FREE BEER (for real)
Yammer (a place that gives free beer and works on hard problems), a well funded, SOMA based startup focusing on the Corporate Social Network is attempting to blur the line between consumer and enterprise software. We start with our office culture. We offer catered lunch, free beer, drinks, snacks, catered lunches, and an incredible team of very smart engineers.

Check our other jobs list from the link above.

Data/Analytics Engineer
Developer Advocate
Distributed Computing Software
Front End Designer
Graphic Designer
IT Master
Sales Engineer
Senior .NET/C# Dev
Senior JS Engineer
Senior Front End Engineer
Senior Ruby Developer
Senior Systems Engineer
Senior Ruby Developer
Senior Systems Engineer

DID I SAY FREE BEER?
With an interesting alternative title.
$3.5b is a big number, but it's only 3% of their market cap.

http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:INTC

Several other companies in that market went down a similar amount, so it doesn't seem to be extraordinary. I would expect a lot of tech investors to move their money to McAffe after that announcement hoping to get something out of it.

What matters is what happens after now. If it continues to go down for a long time, it might be a problem.
I know its trolling to say "Eww, PHP", but every time these days I see yet another project that runs on it, a little part of me dies inside. :(
I've been working with MAMP and Coda for about 8 months now and I love it. I'm just working on personal projects so I don't have a need for a whole suite of tools
If you want a longer vesting cliff you should negotiate one.

Also I'm personally completely against vesting cliffs, much more in favor of a gradually growing stake so that there is no sharp transition like this.
C++ isn't without it's age spots, but articles like this do nothing to give a balanced view of its usefulness vs. issues. Many languages have boasted to topple C++ and it hasn't happened it, mostly because C++ does its job well enough and other languages aren't better enough so that migrating large code bases is cost effective.
Yes, you can just use the alternative clue for that.
ies4osx and macports are handy.
I saw this today and wished I'd heard about it sooner. I learned to program way back when I was 4, using PET BASIC. Why did great work in the community, really encouraging people to learn and get over their fears about programming. I first ran into him while hanging out on Invisible IRC, chatting (and doing things here and there with) Freenet. Later, he got famous after his (Poignant) Guide. That only cemented my impression of him as an incredible hacker.

If there's one person I'd absolutely have to meet (and probably never will) in the programming community, it's Why. I'm sure you're out there somewhere doing great things. Good luck!
Shelving the question of Adobe's strategy or competence for a moment, I think this review is indicative of Apple's competitive advantage.

Assuming Adobe had infinite time and resources, could they make Flash run well for all content on every mobile device? Of course not, they are hamstrung from legacy support as well as variances in hardware and software stacks they have to deal with. But just like Microsoft they are beholden to their legacy software and deploy base.

Meanwhile when Apple decides to go mobile they start from scratch. They design the hardware, the software, using open technologies where appropriate, but rolling their own closed-source secret sauce. Then they play hardball with Adobe and any other potential heavyweight partners because they own the entire product stack from design to retail. If some low-level tester finds a choppy video on a prototype iPhone, it takes about 5 minutes to escalate the issue to the people who can fix it directly. Meanwhile, if there are hardware problems with Flash, Adobe has to go talk to whoknowswhat podunk handset manufacturer and hope that they listen.

Looking at this way it's basically impossible for Adobe to craft a consumer experience like Apple. Microsoft has a similar problem. Pure SaaS helps with the legacy problem, thus making it possible for pure software companies like Google and Facebook to at least iterate quickly.
Oracle bought Sun for $7B. Sun sold out way too early.
The basics of control theory
Someone's got a chip on their shoulder!
Ah yes, I'd forgotten about that - I have installed Macports, but find ies4osx a little slow/crappy (compared to Parallels), but it was definitely handy before I splashed out on parallels.
Always is. Details will follow, I'm sure.
Since branches are supposed to be mutated all the time, and don't keep any history about where they were earlier, it's quite reasonable to delete branches.

Commits are what's fixed. Branches are basically just mutable pointers to commits.
So its an API that exposes a store/restaurant/location to a central repository of places (your application)?
If it quacks like a RDBMS…