skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How did this even end up on HN? It says nothing. Save your two minutes.
I had a macbook with an 80gb HD, and a music collection that was about 400gb. I suppose I could have configured ~/Music/iTunes as an NFS mountpoint. But why bother with this when iTunes won't play my ogg or flac files?
I think another factor Om didn't mention, which is also at play, is that an increasing number of talented engineers and designers are striking off on their own and building their own startups. It's not so much they're being poached by other companies as they are poaching themselves. There's so much cheap infrastructure, frameworks and open source packages today that I think the balance of power in software startups is shifting more towards talent inputs, and away from mere cash inputs.
http://linkup.com/ lets you find jobs on company websites from a single, dedicated search engine.
Excited About Chrome OS, Or Is It Hype?
Also may I suggest restricting early members to only those with @Harvard.edu email addresses?
I need someone to build my website. My budget is $200 and I need it ASAP. 
How many times have you been asked this by friends, colleagues, and referrals. The person generally continues to say...

"I really don't need anything too advanced. Just a simple ecommerce/wiki/forum/community website. With a blog. It shouldn't take you more than a few hours. I actually could even do it myself no problem, but its just not worth my time. You know, I used to be the #1 COBOL programmer in the 70s."

At this point, I sarcastically interrupt "Would you like me to program your website in COBOL so you can maintain it?" They never get the satire...

"Oh, and really important. I like this website (shows random crappy website) that my friend has. Can you make it like this? You know, but different? We're ready to launch, all we need is the website, and we need it done ASAP. If you say its going to take 8 hours, I expect that you could get it done by tomorrow."

I usually respond to this with "Sure thing, if you pay in full now, I'll have it ready tomorrow morning." I'm never serious, but no one ever pulls out their checkbook either. Usually this ends the conversation, as if the website were so trivial, it doesn't warrant compensation.

My Analysis:

This happens to me almost weekly. I never accept these jobs obviously, but I find the apparent, almost desperate, need fascinating. Despite the plethora of "do-it-yourself" website builders (weebly, SquareSpace, Clover, heck even WordPress.com) these "small business" minded people aren't having their needs met. In fact, they are generally so technology inept (despite their COBOL tenure) that they wouldn't be able to navigate the "3 easy steps of building a website" on any hosted CMS if their lives depending on it.

I think this is where the hosted CMS market is failing. These companies are trying to make a CMS so easy, it's like making a Facebook fan page. The problem is, these small business people can't even make those! They usually hire a student to do that as well. What they really need is someone to hold their hand through the entire process. They demand the service of a $10k+ project budget with a top design firm, but have a $200 "I can do it myself if I wanted to" budget.

If someone could figure this out, they'd be siphoning up a billion dollar market easily. I don't think technology is the sole answer. I think it's a combination of extremely lean business processes with technology. Get cheap labor to do the hand holding while using the 3rd party CMS solutions. The small business wants to send an email describing what they want the homepage to say. They don't want to use a website builder to edit text. They don't want to do anything but talk to someone. The cheap labor can do the transition, and margins can be high.

I'd REALLY love to hear your thoughts on this. I never leave a problem as big as this just complaining. I always race to come up with a solution, and this one is a toughy.
They could turn evil some day and betray us all.

If an Appleseed node turns evil, they'll probably take the data of, maybe, 100,000 or a million users with them. When Facebook turns evil (some would say saying "when" isn't necessary), 500 million people's data goes down.

One of the things that's kept Facebook free of social pressure in terms of acting evil, is that the walled garden approach means that people can't leave without losing their social network. Appleseed (and distributed social networking) at least provides a certain competition, because if a node acts up, users can leave that node, go to another node, and reconnect with their friends. It won't be totally painless (at first anyways), but that's pressure that Facebook simply does not feel at this point, and that has a very negative effect on it's behavior.

The question is: how many people would prefer this more email-like system?

I'll be the first to admit that a centralized system holds advantages over a decentralized one (and vice versa). A lot of these issues, we may not even know the full extent of until we see heavy use. This is pretty new territory, and I'm open to any suggestions.

It's the big reason why I rewrote Appleseed to be extremely flexible, to use pervasive hooks and an MVC model, and to be protocol agnostic. Also, why Appleseed has one-click server upgrades and other ease-of-administration features.

There's some really solid work being done on protocol development, but I think we all need to be honest that the first steps out of the gate are gonna be rocky. Hopefully Appleseed can adapt quickly enough until distributed social networking matures.
I think I figured out why good Java developers are so hard to find
There is a lighting talk of some of the reasons at PyCon 2009. http://pycon.blip.tv/file/1947231/

The talk starts at 3:45.
To address the money issue further, the $1,000 minimum donation means the donor receives consulting services setting up and administering a node. Anyone with experience with LAMP is able to set up their own node without paying a dime.

And as for funding, I've been working on Appleseed almost full time for quite a while now (started in 2004). I've been working a full time job as well most of the time I've been doing this, so at some point, I'd like to be able to focus on this exclusively, and funding can help make that happen, which means the software will improve faster as a result.
As a grad student just now learning Objective-C, I disagree. I barely have time to hack for myself with all of my school work.
Recruiting Great Developers, Part 1: Tuning the Environment, Writing the Ad
There's still a lot of burnout, though, because it's very hard to get into a position with significant creative control, even once you get established. You can get a job, but not the job the aspiring designers want. Among well-regarded developers I can think of off the top of my head, Borut Pfeiffer, Chris Hecker, Damian Isla, and Chaim Gingold have all left the AAA-title part of the industry in the past year or two, either to try their hand at indie development, or start a consulting firm.
Yes, because a distributed protocol means that it will effectively be the last social network.
I also prefer dashed zeroes. And the curly lowercase 'l' in Menlo really bothers me (the creator of Mensch got it right, IMO, by straightening it out.) Obviously this isn't a poll, but if it were, I'd vote for Inconsolata-dz. :)
Try increasing your rate. I bet you'll get more business.
I've myself been doing an awful lot of multi-core programming recently so I can appreciate the effort that goes into building these kinds of systems/applications/games. One things for sure, asynchronous and multicore programming is the biggest new challenge facing us as programmers and the programming tools are just starting to realize it.
Any plans for a tutorial down the road?
Microsoft’s Bing Gets a Social Lift From Facebook
I'm not an expert, but I have spent the last 5 years trying to help a friend get an H1B. He was able to get a student visa and earn his undergrand and master's engineering degrees in the U.S. But he graduated as the economy fell and couldn't get a job for the life of him. From what he's told me, it's near impossible unless you have an inside connection with someone at a very big company such as Intel. The cost is roughly 30-40k to get an H1B and the competition is so tough, you better have your PhD and a 4.0 GPA to be competitive.

One caveat is that a company has to show that they couldn't simply hire someone from the U.S. and that in order to get the skillset they need from someone, they needed to get it overseas. This is tough, especially for a startup.

Again, I'm not expert, but from close experience with a good friend (who is now stuck back in Venezula btw) it's tough as hell :(
My definition is that once there is no longer beer in the fridge, it isn't a startup anymore.
Command+Tab?
I thought testing a bunch of browsers for my web apps sucked.

If seeing that doesn't scare you...you obviously don't care much about testing or user experience.
yes, it is a joke. and a teeny-tiny bite of prophecy.

and, by the way, the tweet is correct, i had said it before. http://twitter.com/mhinze/status/2485789965 - months before this brouhaha.
Are You Good Enough Being Great?
I asked this question when I worked at Google, and the answer was that our legal department thought it was a bad idea for two reasons.

Reason one is insider trading. The information Google has is aggregated from many sources, including insiders. If Google trades on that information they risk violating insider trading laws.

Reason two is privacy. The laws here vary a lot from country to country and Europe is generally the strictest. But the summary is that there are privacy laws which say it is okay to use some types of personal information as long as it is only used to improve a service being provided. Trading wouldn't fall into the category of allowable use.
No you're coyly leaving out one of the elements of the compound set of factors: that he was Egyptian+Muslim in addition to having those other factors. It wasn't just that he was an immigrant or traveller.
Wow! A lot of great stuff here.

Yeah, I need a better design. That's for sure. The scaled icons are going to have to stay, for now, because I don't have the time or resources to go through and custom design about 60 different favicons. It's "good enough" to have them automatically generated. I can't re-use favicons? Are you sure?

How could I fix the Google category? I could add a line break before each textbox, which would align all the textboxes, but then it would cause more vertical space to be taken up. Any suggestions?

You can bookmark the current page! It's in the main menu, the first item. Just click it, or drag and drop it anywhere into your Toolbar.

I will absolutely make dashler.com be all about the toolbar.

I'm working on a new frontpage right now. I think I may ditch the video, and start off with something you're describing, that gets users more involved and impressed straight-away. One problem I'm encountering is that there is so much stuff this toolbar does, I don't know where to start.

The green vs. red square on the windows could use icons. And the browser detect idea is absoutely awesome! Though, that might actually cause some confusion...

Clicking an icon on the toolbar "locks" the menu, so that you can highlight text or drag and drop something into the menu.

In terms of real estate, that's a good suggestion. However, I think if it takes up too much space it could end up getting in the way. Per your UD problem, everything in the toolbar can be moved. Go to reference -> urban dictionary -> and drag the shortcut by it's icon. You can place it outside of the subfolder if you want.

The bookmarklet did originally toggle the toolbar... however there's one use case which made me want to change it to reloading the toolbar: You can log in via the main menu, but then you need to reload the toolbar in order to see your personal toolbar. There is a menu item in the main menu that says "reload toolbar" but I figured most people would just press the Dashler button again. It turns out nobody is using this thing anyway, so I suppose anything I do won't matter much anyway.

I'll get rid of the page timer.

Thanks for the spelling heads-up.

To sum things up... I'm finding it incredibly difficult to come up with a way to explain what the toolbar can do to people in a sensible way. It's starting to bother me quite a bit. How do I explain an abstract concept like "a toolbar that goes on top of anyway webpage you are viewing, which connects highlighted content with other webpages. Oh, and the thing that connects highlighted content with other webpages is called a shortcut. You can add more shortcuts, and drag and drop them to customize your toolbar. Also, you can access your customized toolbar from any computer! And by the way, you can bookmark pages and it automatically fills in tags from delicious so that later on you can instantly search your bookmarks. Oh yeah, and there are "tools" which can modify the page you're viewing, like greasemonkey"

Thank you so much for your feedback! I appreciate it. Also, thanks for the "great work". I'm about ready to give up on this idea. It's just too complicated. Le sigh.
Nope, nor does it need one. Source comments are weakly correlated with code quality :)

Moreoever, you have to be careful about numbers of lines-based statistics for numpy and scipy, because a lot of code is generated or 3rd party libraries (that are integrated because no distribution has them packaged, not even debian). Also, cloc gives me vastly different numbers, with a lot of comments and all (but again, not very meaningful because of generated/integrated code). ohlo stats are not very reliable in my experience, at least for the packages I am involved with.
Another possibility for pricing would be to simply buy a one time number of visitors for a test. I think that would be a much easier first time sell in my organization.

One test, 30k visitors, x statistical significance - $100.

Perhaps with the option of only deleting variations on the fly that don't work.
So, which one of these depends on the stability and goodwill of nic.ly ?
What's a web browser
Canadian here as well.

If you're in any of the big cities and your rate is significantly under $100/hour, you're probably under-charging if you've got decent experience and rep and are doing something heavily in demand, like mobile work.

$150/hour for devs as well known and with as good a reputation as the twitterific guys is pretty much par for course.
Whoever made that post on Reddit was unwise, but he was not incorrect. I'm also of the belief that if there truly were a very large organized effort to terrorize the US there would have been at least 10x more events that have occurred. Therefore, while there may be an effort, it seems to be a fairly small or pathetically weak one, in relative terms. Can't believe the hundreds of billions they're spending in the name of fighting it. Though at least UAV/robotics is getting lots of funding and advancing steadily -- the one bright spot in the CS industry that has been positively impacted by it all.
The $25,000 Hearst Data Mining Challenge has just launched
You could if using SSI (say, with nginx or varnish).

<html>
<cached comments here>
<!ssi include="/load-json" />
</html>
2010 Copiapó mining accident
>> # non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non)

Are the labels flipped? When AcceptedAnswerId is NULL, wouldn't that indicate a non-answered question?
You may find the following useful:

#define A(obj, objs...) [NSArray arrayWithObjects:obj, ## objs , nil]
#define D(val, key, vals...) [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:val, key, ## vals , nil]

I put these two macros in the prefix header for every Objective-C project I do. Say what you will about single character macros, these save me time and improve readability (for me, anyway... I'm not sure how others reading my code down the road fare, but so far there haven't been many of those).
Honestly, for the areas I'm heavily interested in, Notion Ink, or some type of Cradle-2-Cradle focused design/manufacturing company.
I think this is good advice that is appropriate for the times. It's actually good timing because I've been toying with this idea myself. It's a tough/fine line. Good work
So next time - please design it for single-core.

On a 3GHz core2quad it fails to work smoothly in the endgame. The graphics are nice, but how can 640MB video memory be not enough to hold tiles at medium quality?

Physics? Particles? On a separate CPU core? It's Civilization, those things should only appear as researchable-items in the game. It seems that while pursuing parallelization someone forgot to check how it works alltogether.
Video of Ning Everywhere API launch + AppMakr
I think there are two things driving any perceived slowdown in OSS. One is the economy, and the other is platform changes.

A down economy has unusual effects on free time: the less-competent are first to go and most likely to stay unemployed, while the best and brightest will be retained and overworked. This would deprive OSS of much of its premier talent.

We are also seeing a major platform shift on lots of fronts; from traditional desktop computing to alternate form factors(phone, tablet), from big iron to commodity computing, and from C, C++ or Java console or WIMP-style apps towards modernized browser apps, which have an increasingly rich set of options for UX. All of this causes a huge upset in the very gradual process of open-source development and encourages a gold rush of low-tech apps that exploit the new platforms.

I don't think this leads to a "Long Beard's Revenge" scenario, though, as the next thing that's going to hit the browser, now that it's getting more capable, is to make webapps that are client-heavy and cheap on the back-end. Open-source stacks will correspondingly start building up more heavily on the JS end of things. After some time, we'll see more open-source JS apps. And then who knows what will happen?

OSS is perpetually underfunded and overexploited; it's a commons good, after all. And when OSS authors "put themselves out of business" by writing excellent software, they've essentially fulfilled their economic destiny.

But I don't think industry is to blame for the particular bias Zed discusses. It goes back to the state of the economy: Income inequality locks people out of open source, as fully participating in it is a luxury of self-actualization, one which takes lots of time and effort. At the same time, if most of the money in the world is sitting on a few rich people, the best way to get their attention as consumers is to make slick toy apps.

That is, if things were right with the world, our apps would be extremely boring-looking, very useful and functional, and mostly open-source, because that would mean nobody is feeling pressured to monetize their software.
Depends on the stage of your startup, your team, your traction, etc... Btw, usually no startup goes from startup to VC, unless you are Quora. You usually start with YC, Techstars and then raise a seed/angel round. If you hit your milestones you can then go and see VC's (they will probably come see you).
Priyanka Chopra Got New Nose | Bollywood Masala
I either take 50% upfront or ask for Odesk. (Odesk will guarantee payments for hourly work).

I already figured out that I either get to the top (+$50/hour) from the first time or I stay low balled to $10-15. So right now, I'm improving my skills and building a portfolio.
Eh, even as a student, when your price range is putting you on par with lawn-mowing services, you're going to run into a lot of time-wasters and fools who think you ought to do it for a six-pack and the opportunity to wash their car. Hence the aforementioned "guy who wants a custom web application and thinks $1500 isn't a steal of a deal".

Raising your rates will winnow out the chaff and get you doing more serious projects that will look better on your resume.
This is purely made-up dreaming, but I hope your last point comes in the form of a Dashboard-like thing that lets you easily launch iOS apps. Pop it up and launch when needed, hide it when you don't.
For how many of those phones did TweetDeck have to make special accommodations? That there are many OS identification strings is not itself a problem. Fragmentation ought to be measured by differences on non-fundamental axes. Screen resolution differences are a good thing for users who want a choice of form factors, and developers at least know that they have to deal with both big and small screens. Axes like "strange combinations of API calls required to make the GPS provide a current position" (I'm making that one up) have no associated user benefit. The issue of dealing with multiple releases from Google isn't helped by the handset manufacturers/carriers being slow to provide upgrades, but I'd sure rather deal with multiple, known API levels than worry about platform stagnation killing my business.

With that said, I have yet to write a mobile app, so I don't have real-world experience. It's the lack of definition around "fragmentation" that is bothersome to me. What are some real issues faced by those here who have targeted a wide range of Android devices?
initial link/discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581095

From the last link I liked the idea, installed the app and mapped my happiness a few times, only to find out it was UK only :(
Was Marissa Mayer Just Demoted?
The user interface elements in MacOS are supplied by AppKit, in iOS it's UIKit. What I expect to see is a marriage of the two with AppKit perhaps reimplemented with UIKit classes.

Fracturing UIKit isn't unprecedented, it's already done on iOS with the iPad having widgets and features not available on iPhone.

UIKit is cleaner having been redesigned after so many years and with so many other technologies baked (CGLayer & CoreAnimation for example).

AppKit would continue to exist for some time with developers having the option of mixing the two (as not all features will be available at the UIKit layer to start.)

A good example of where UIKit bests AppKit is the seemingly simple "Put an animated progress meter in a table row". This is easy in UIKit because table cells are UIViews. However, in AppKit, a table cell is a NSCell which is -not- a view.

On MacOS nearly everything has a NSView and a NSCell component (i.e. NSButton, NSButtonCell)
On iOS there are no cells. (UIButton, no UIButtonCell.)

Other AppKit classes will be implemented using their UIKit counterparts (NSView to UIView, NSWindow to UIWindow).

The result will be a much cleaner development environment for applications that favors animation, multi-touch, and code reuse with the iOS platform.
> because there are no good portable extension mechanisms for browsers.

...which is why JS is filling that gap. :)
Not quite.

I read it as a strategy for firewalling off a section of the organisation from the useless people, which enables you do enjoy your work.
Well, one solution is to point them to that freelancers site. There's always people there who are willing to put together some sort of solution for the bottom dollar. I went digging around there the other day and was completely appalled at all of the budgets I was seeing. Some of them wouldn't even cover the cost of writing a proposal for the solution.

In one sense, yes, they deserve a solution to their problems, but one can always hope they learn a bitter lesson by going with the lowest possible bidder on that site.