skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unannounced YC Company seeking first hire (programmer/jack of all trades)
We're an unannounced YC company, but you may have heard of us (millions have). We're profitable, and we're looking to hire a smart all-around programmer as our first hire. It's a cliche, but we want people who like tackling complicated problems. Not all the problems we face are complicated or hard, certainly, but we like doing weird new things that haven't been tried, and that usually requires some elbow grease.

Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus.

We like pragmatic people who get things done. Those things shouldn't blow up down the road, but they also don't have to be theoretically optimal, especially if it's something experimental that might end up being a waste of time anyway.

And we like people who don't put themselves in a box. You should be comfortable thinking about the product as a whole, and how changes are going to impact the hundreds of thousands of people who use it regularly. You don't have to be world class at everything, but you should be willing to get your hands dirty with everything from database design to javascript to system administration to customer support and customer development. You'll learn a lot.

We're profitable, make the lives of hundreds of thousands of people better every month, have a rapidly expanding user base, and napping is an encouraged part of our corporate culture. Even better, this is a company run by smart programmers, so you'll never have to explain the obvious to a pointy haired boss. The majority of customer emails you answer will mention how much they love the site.

Basically, you'll get to be the first employee of a small successful startup, while getting a paycheck and equity, and feeling good about the impact you're having on the world.

If you're interested in building something great, and you live in Silicon Valley, send email about yourself to recycledthrowaway@gmail.com.
I'm not sure I agree with you here. I think in general, if you're straight up cloning an app, you're probably missing out on what makes people like the app in the first place. Or you just don't care, and you're trying to shove something out the door as fast as possible.

Bottom line, if you cloned Twitteriffic in 160 hours, I'm certain I'd still rather buy and use the original, even if yours is free.
Suggestions:

In a couple of spots, the edit HTML dialog overlaid the items I was trying to edit. I attempted and expected to be able to move the edit dialog around the page and out of the way of what I was editing.

On my own site, I was particularly wanting to play with colors/themes. Not sure what the best way to implement this is, but the only way I could do that through this interface was with style tags.

Awesome product! I will likely use it in the near future.
the video is a great idea. i agree... it's a big problem explaining the site's functionality.
This story repeats every month with a different company. I haven't been following Chargify, but my first thought on seeing this headline was "don't tell me they didn't grandfather their existing customers". Sure enough, wading through a huge mea culpa about not communicating well enough, there it is.
Why do they have to get those information from facebook at all? Why not reform the process of getting citizenship to something much simpler and saner? Just auction off all the slots for new citizenships each year. (Or get rid of those limits completely, and just let anybody in whose richer or better educated than the average, plus some room for political asylum.)
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

Trying to load video. How'd that get missed.
Parsing WikiText using Peg/leg
Old colleagues at AboutUs wrote this parser to avoid using MediaWiki as parser web service.

The URL above is a proof of concept wiki written in Sinatra using yapwtp.
IBM, Oracle and Java: The Q&A
I certainly hope so. Great product idea, well executed.
Assuming my reference to proton exchange fuel cells is in the ballpark, the mechanism is to use the membrane plus pressure to separate the hydrogen into electrons and protons. The electrons are routed through the load, i.e. extracted electrical power, and the protons pass through the membrane. The inactive (non-dissociated) hydrogen molecules are blocked from the "cold" side by the semi-permeable membrane.

The electrons and protons recombine on the cold side to reform hydrogen. That hydrogen has to be compressed sufficiently to move it back to the "hot" side of the system. This is probably a pretty substantial compression and will probably limit the efficiency of the system - it also raises the "perpetual motion machine" red flag in my mind, except the sun is adding lots of thermal energy to make it go for real.

I'm picturing the system working at a molecular level like reverse osmosis of seawater: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis. Reverse osmosis requires a substantial amount of pressure (~1000 psi) to force the water through the semi-permeable membrane while the salt cannot pass through the membrane and thus stays on the salty side.
Maybe that's ok, since it's probably more about meeting people in person, rather than being a formal Q&A event for newbies (I imagine most of the people going found out about it here and already know most of those answers).
NoScript has 74,459,688 downloads so far (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722/). You'd have to do some calculations with this to get closer to a real user number, though ;)

I'd wager that the average NoScript user has at least two machines, so the total number of NoScript users is probably less than 2.7 million.
(http://blog.brandonbloom.name/2010/06/noscript-add-on-instal...)
Another possibility is simply that people are contributing less because both the upfront and long-term cost of making a profit themselves on their code has gone radically down.

Optimizely launched today. Normally A/B testing is simply a framework feature someone (or rather many people, typically independently) implements and puts out there. Instead, with a little more work and very little upfront capital you can turn that feature you would've put out as open source into a revenue generating product. For lots of people it's not worth turning into a product if your servers are going to cost you thousands of dollars a month from day one but if it's just 20-50$/month then the economics change entirely. From the community you lost all the people who would give something away for free simply because it would've been too big a hassle and risk to turn it into something profitable.

Another good example is http://directededge.com . An adaptive recommendation service seems like the ideal fun project to hack on as an open source API/library. But now it's a subscription product too. I'm sure many others can be found.
What's with everyone thinking Objective-C is inefficient (in developer-hours)? I have found it to be very easy to use. Granted, it does have its warts that make coming from a language like Ruby somewhat painful. But I second Craig's comment that "the notion that [the high number of hours burned] is the language's fault is laughable."

That being said, I have worked on 20+ iOS apps now and most of them were finished with a MUCH smaller total number of hours than this. I don't disagree that taking something from "it works" to "it's elegant" takes time, but 1100 hours of dev time does seem a bit high. I, too, would be interested in more info (like total lines of code, whether or not they built a Twitter engine from scratch for the app, etc).

To anyone considering making an app: don't use this as a baseline comparison. You can get a great-looking app done in a lot less time than this.
I'm one of those NoScript users. Most sites get temporary permissions if they actually need them for something I want to do, trusted sites get whitelisted if I visit them often enough.

Pretty much all of the attacks against Mozilla that might have actually affected me have been mitigated to some extent by NoScript, so it's pretty useful.
Yeah, OS X is an enormous, and often underestimated asset of Apple's. Put them on great footing from the very iPhone SDK.

On the NS prefix: Lots of fun to switch between iOS and OS X dev. Wrote my first OS X app a couple months ago and it was weird to stop using the UI prefix for all the view classes.

My big wish for the next major iOS SDK is to get bindings. Those are awesome on the desktop.
if you click "More resutls" you get this:

http://searchstream.co/index.php?search=cats&ss=1

also, if you click your "username" you get this:

http://searchstream.co/profile.php?user_id=450
> Consumer internet companies however are just not bothering with this. They frequently will use software and then slander the author of it claiming it's "crap".

I seem to remember a certain Debian article along those lines.
It's not only about the "Long Beards" in backend programming.

Let's look 10 years back: To become a popular "web company" you've probably had to invest a lot of cash in advertisements. Today strong social networking (blogging, twitter, HN, fb, linkedin) in theory allows the developers/builders/creators/"marketers" direct access to the market without having a middle men and for a few bucks.

So it's all about "full stack self promotion": You've to sell AND deliver awesome quality on a daily basis.

Some good and hard-working will be able to make bigger profits themselves if they learn self marketing skills (=> 37signals, peldi/balsamiq, amyhoy … ) and actually WANT to sell. Many of the old school OSS developers don't want to sell themselves as an "ego brand" on a daily basis. They just want to do cool technical things and get enough money for a living. They are awesome brains but often have autistic-like social/selling skills and a completely different motivation.
Can't edit anymore: this is the plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-website-optimizer...
Not unlike the old saw:

"I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to writer a shorter one."
This is a great suggestion. We try to automatically put the dialog in the right place depending on the action you are trying to perform. For example, if you use drag-and-drop and move something to the right-edge of the window, we move the instructions dialog to the left-hand side of the element.

This certainly isn't perfect and we'll work to improve it. Would you mind sending me the URL you were trying and some steps to repro the frustration you had? Feel free to email us at feedback@optimizely.com

Thanks!
I've been doing the former, and it definitely needs to change. I'm obsessing more about tracking my time to help me with future estimates, for one. I will also try breaking down into finer granularity and hopefully that will help as well. Thanks for the advice!
This website is great. I was able to jump in and mess around with my website's home page within seconds after watching the video. I'm not a developer and being able to help out with A/B testing will be a huge help and one less thing our developers will have to deal with. Looking forward to using it!
Personally, one thing I've found that helps with estimates is to think in terms of days instead of hours, and to assume a fairly low productive amount of hours (5) within each day when converting back. (Yeah, you'd hope to be productive for more than 5 hours in a given work day, but there are a lot of little things that steal your focus and eat a lot of time away from your project without you realizing it. Fail to account for them at your peril).

The original estimate someone put forth for twitterific was 160 hours of development. Ask yourself, could you reasonably expect to sit down today and from scratch, have written something as polished as twitterific, in only 32 days? Knowing full well you will need to spend days banging your head against some problem that should have taken you 10 minutes but somehow cost you 6 hours, testing and fixing bugs, profiling and optimizing slow code paths, polishing interactions, tweaking animations, and going back to the drawing board when some piece of functionality doesn't quite feel right?

The testing and tweaking alone can last for weeks in high quality projects, and 32 days only gives you 4.5 weeks from start to finish. It's absurdly low.
I actually got excited watching that video, and I don't even have something to use it for right now. Looks fantastic. I also really like how you have the plans setup to record stats from all visitors, but only unlock them if you buy the appropriate plan. I assume that means you can start out with the small plan, then upgrade and see stats that have already been recorded? If so, very cool.

Based on the results in the promo video, looks like you should have your video autoplay! ;-)
Could the argument be made that the minority who surf with Javascript disabled don't necessarily have to be catered to, since they will enable Javascript if they trust the site or find it useful?
My first iPhone app was feature complete in about 20 hours. I've since spent an additional 100 hours on better graphics, better design, performance enhancements, and other polishing.

I haven't added a single new feature yet after the initial 20 hours, but the app is obviously much MUCH better and easier to use.
I didn't notice the more results at first glance and I doubt many other people would have either.

I would suggest expanding the box to show all the users saved results for that search. If you are committed to keeping it limited to 3 results I would suggest moving the "more results" link to a more prominent position under the links and possibly showing a counter next to it so it looks like "$num_links more results".
... it doesn't have cut/paste?
The AK-47: 'The Gun' That Changed The Battlefield
You are right about opportunity costs. But it also makes sense to go to those 1k$ events, if they just have better contacts (e.g. by filtering out those cheapskates).
Neat, this is like a reverse shibboleth.

This sort of stuff has been around for a while. One of the big Supreme Court rulings on the copyrightability of datasets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) concerned a company that got sued for copying 4000 entries from a competitor's phone book. They got busted because they'd unknowingly copied fake entries.
Are you using what people like on FB in your results? I don't see it.
I see you're talking of A/B tests for BIG and medium sites then.

If you only do let's say < 10.000 Unique Visits a month you're probably gonna do 1, 2, heck even 5 A/B tests, not more, so that wouldn't be a big time tax, would it?

Also I'm not sure about other opensource CMSes but this one for wordpress you just have to copy the javascripts on a page and create the test on GWO.
And Yahoo balked at paying $1b for FB.
That's what GAP paid for its new logo.
What David seems to forget is the following:

1) Free customers DO PAY for Chargify, just not to them directly. It cost us several days of development time + testing to integrate with them.

2) You lost trust because you weren't fair. Change the prices and grandfather existing users. If the free customers fail, you will not need to support them for that long.

Your pricing policy is = "you pay X/mo. until we raise it"

This post reaffirms my choice to leave Chargify and investigate the alternatives: http://recurly.com http://spreedly.com, http://cheddargetter.com & http://FreshBooks.com

For the record, I understand why they are raising prices, I cannot understand how anyone could trust them again.
Oakley cashes in on Chile mine rescue
The idea about the number is a good one. i will add that. i will also try to make it more prominent... great idea.
Ask HN: Disrupting elance?
I have an idea for a freelancing site, but I don't want to repeat what's been tried. Eg. I noticed there was a YC company jobpic.com that's no longer around, what happened to it? What else has been tried?
Being the person who ran the contest for 99designs. I have to agree there were a lot of average logos submitted, some very funny ones also. However there were also a hell of a lot of great logos and over 1000 designers participated in the contest. So all in all i think it succeeded in engaging with our community which was the idea behind it. To run a contest for the fun of it and let people work on something topical.
This might be quite a bit off topic.

But are any other coders a little tired of social features? I'm a pretty anti-social person. I always have a relatively small group of friends.

When more social features are added to something I do all it does is make me anxious. Since the anti-social programmer stereotype is played up quite a bit, I would assume my fellow programmers felt similarly. However the growing amount of social web applications is making me think I am alone in these feelings.
The other challenge is developing for all the variants on Android (OS version, different manufacture idiosyncrasies, hardware speeds, screen resolutions, orientation, virtual vs hardware keyboard) all increase the development time and especially the QA time on Android.
They will have to 3D print 360 (for those who pledged $50 or more). I don’t know how fast their 3D printer is but that seems like quite the task.
Fantastic stuff. I was wondering if users are just shown the different pages randomly or is there more granular control involved?
Can someone A/B test a web startup's name with words ending phonetically as "ly" or "er" versus a more "normal" name?

Kidding aside, the product looks really great - congratulations on launching!

For a critique, I'll say that the intro video is very dry. A/B it with something less Ben Stein?

One thing I'm always interested in is pricing. How did you go about determining your various plans and rates?
This is 2nd order conventional wisdom. No doubt maintenance of an app takes time and effort. But the numbers thrown around assume high hourly rates for all involved. The only real cost is time and a grad student living on ramen can knock out something pretty decent in a month or so (less if they already know Objective-C).
TBH, both Windows and Mac feel painful these days.

Ubuntu:

1 - Select package(s)

2 - Click Apply

(or use the command line to reduce to 1 step)
Yeah I took on a short Mac project a number of months back and got really messed up with the switch. The ubiquity of Core Animation on the iOS was what spoiled me I think. Don't hold your breath for bindings on iOS though. I'd rather have garbage collection anyway.
I'm a JavaScript newbie. I'm just curious as to how your code (as shown in dpaste.de/pKOi) is better than Douglas Crrockford's module pattern? Please enlighten me,thanks for help.
...Or a condition of establishing state residence?

It's really a stupid argument, likely based on the myth that renting is throwing money away. Most people still believe buying is always financially better (and they're wrong).

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...
Does this work well on https pages?
I think a better explanation for this is the tragedy of the commons. Do companies want open source software contributions to keep up? Yeah. As long as those contributions are made on someone else's time.
Is anything they discover during that chat admissible

Yes. Once a person has stated or otherwise shown that they are not a US citizen, the burden of proof for eligibility to be present in the US switches to them. A false claim to US citizenship is a felony, though of course exceptions exist.

This is quite different from the legal situation of a US person.
I've seen several interviews with the PopCap founders where they've stated that they built the original in less than a year with just the three founders.

Maybe the polish came after the MSN games version?

eg -> http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/21/popcap-games-executive-int...
How about creating a simple site where you simulate a horse race. i.e. give users part of the history data for horses, ask them to select the winners, and then reveal the true outcome. People would be betting for boast points.

A discussion board where people can discuss their heuristics for selecting winners would be great. For the famous horses, you can link to its Wikipedia page, Flickr photos, etc. if they exist to create a more immersive experience.

I, for one, would play with such a site for a while.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R6wWgVp9kA
I've read varying comments regarding this with respect to the Intel CORE CPU models that have it active. Early on, a review comment or two claimed to observe little effect e.g. with TrueCrypt. More recent comments I've seen have claimed to observe a much greater effect; IIRC TrueCrypt 7, recently released, is the first version to use the AES instructions when available.

P.S. Note, if you are interested in this feature, that not all levels of the CORE product line have it. For example, in the current mobile line, I believe it's present/activated only at the 520M level and above (although my knowledge is some months dated, at this point).

Ah, I see this information is echoed in the Wikipedia reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set#CPUs_with_A...
Welcome to HN! Your comment is appropriate.

I agree with bl4k that the current behaviour of opening in the same page is right, and have to add, that this is off-topic.
Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat 10.10 Review
I wouldn't call it getting busted. The court held that they were allowed to copy the data, overturning the sweat of the brow doctrine:

The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable, and that therefore no infringement existed.

Prior to this case, the substance of copyright in United States law followed the sweat of the brow doctrine, which gave copyright to anyone who invested significant amount of time and energy into their work. At trial and appeal level the courts followed this doctrine, siding with Rural.
Just gave it a spin and it's a really cool product - feels a bit buggy at the moment but for the right application this would be a really valuable tool to have. Great job, guys.
That's real customer support: CEO's direct cell phone.
Meetings can most definitely be a huge time-waster, but not always. Sometimes a few minutes of face-to-face will resolve issues faster than an extended email/im/campfire exchange.

They're usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or some interface design)

They have got to be trolling.

In short, this is typical linkbait backed by the faintest smell of truth.
There may be lots of reasons to disable javascript or not have it available at all such as security policies, bandwidth restrictions, limited hardware devices or other things you haven't anticipated.

I think it depends on what content you're providing and which users you want to reach.

I've seen text-only blogs that involve javascript in their visual design and cannot be read without it. I've also seen websites where the site navigation links are rendered by javascript. In both cases the sites are inaccessible to non-javascript users.

In my opinion if you can provide the same content without requiring active scripting, you should. If you're providing an interactive experience that can't be achieved without scripting at least be aware that you're limiting your user base. Even if users have scripting available but disabled by choice, they may decide that your content is not worth enabling scripting for.

I'm also concerned that technical users who disable javascript by choice might not frequent a site like "yahoo" as much as non-technical users. I'm curious if a more neutral but still popular site would have a larger percentage of non-javascript visitors.
Any chance this would work with dynamic content? i.e. a listings page that has similar structure from page to page but different content?