skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CloudFlare Quick-Review, May Need Work
I haven't seen anywhere else mention any feedback on CloudFlare after actually having used it, so I thought I'd bring it up.
Unfortunately, I have to deal with a much different picture in my case. The web application is often used by either complete computer illiterates or users in large corporate installations (or both).

My IE numbers (looking at the three biggest installations):

IE percentage: 80, 90, 98 - IE6 percentage: 30, 50, 40

No Chrome. No Safari. Rest is Firefox (2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 3.6).

I weep when I consider the amount of development time we waste catering for these IE users refusing to (or unable to) update.
Replace textareas with a Bespin editor thanks to a simple bookmarklet
Well, you definitely might not end up at a wikipedia article, or a wolfram alpha search. Beyond that you can try to get smarter about ordering them. If, for example, there are a lot of "related searches" on google, that might mean google has worse results. Or, if Google or Yahoo's first result is Wikipedia, you should rank Wikipedia first.
In my small subset of the enterprise market, amongst my clients (large financial services firms) IE usage is 100%. Unfortunately I don't see this changing any time soon.
You might have a point there. Although some people on Twitter have 100000 Followers and more.
I thought I agreed with the article until the last paragraph:

There are FAR FAR FAR more jobs out there today for someone with the technical skills to build a SharePoint portal, or light up a CRM instance or build a bioinformatics database than there are for someone who can build the next Python compiler. Let's stop trying to train the mass of high school students to become preservation carpenters, and instead make them very good contractors.

I don't think it's a far comparison to say that compiler-writers are like preservation carpenters, practicing an unnecessary art form, because while there are already tools to make CS easier, part of the nature of technological advancement in CS is in creating better tools. But he's knocking those that...make...the tools.
Dana St. is OK, but I give my money to Red Rock since they support the hackers.
This is extremely cool.
What would qualify as "real" to you? Do you want to turn lights/AC/heat on and off or are you talking about cleaning up the kitchen?

I want to make a MVP for a web developer who wants to start affecting the real world but I am not sure how much would be enough. Please get in touch with me http://gadgeteer.org
That looks very interesting (particularly as it's a desk which is widely available across countries) but 98cm max-height seems a little short for a 6' 2" guy like me? I'm assuming that you elbows should still be at right angles (i.e., that the same rules apply whether sitting or standing)
Grab an Arduino. Make it blink things. Then make it move things. Then make it move itself. Then make it interact with the things around it. Then your creativity's the limit.
"I am being ironical" -- Robin Williams

He killed in a standup routine and had the crowd laughing hard, but then he shrugged it off in the end and said "just kidding, I am being ironical", and the crowd giggled, slightly less enthusiastic (like he broke character.)

I couldn't believe it! The entire audience missed the icing. That was the money. FATALITY. Absolutely amazing, and no one got it.

:-|
Email is not made for finding other people. The same problem exists with Diaspora.

There is no search to find people on other networks.
How would suggest a programmer improve his analysis skills?
We just launched the SpiderOak backup and sync client for Android this morning: https://spideroak.com/blog/20101004214544-finally-here-spide...

We'll be making it open source shortly.
I don't think the problem is with the model-- I've used that model before, succesfully. In fact, the Norwegian government's development fund considers this model to be preferred for projects they finance.

Rather, your problem is one of communication. You even say as much when you write: The small business owner I'm working with keeps expecting each iteration of development to be production ready and tries to go out and use the software right away. He then gets upset when it doesn't do what he expected

It's your job to make sure he understands the process, and what the deliverables are.

And: why aren't you getting the payoff (in the form of domain knowledge)?
iPad becomes 'most quickly adopted non-phone electronic product'
I think if you have 1million active followers some kind of push publishing setup could help. But as far as I know there's nothing in the tech of couchdb that prevents replicating to a million other nodes.
OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation
This reminds me of this:
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part4.ph...
Because of a bug in the game, everybody could duplicate items with no cost and everybody became extremely rich in the game.
Green Hosting Plays a Major Role in Online Entrepreneurship
One of the best things PG didn't mention is the Book Buyers (used book store right on Castro in downtown Mountain View) technical books selection. Very impressive.
CareCloud Receives $5 Million In All Angel Funding
Man I wished in Portland sometimes, just to go to some of your guys hack meetups.
LAN Protocols – All You Need to Know
LAN protocols are one of the most frequently used and talked about IT tools. Whether you work for a company that specializes in medical research or a company that is focused on furniture manufacturing, LAN protocols make a big difference
I just went through this. I integrated Chargify, intending to use it with Braintree. Oops. Chargify doesn't yet support Braintree's new API (which I discovered after getting a merchant account with Braintree). So I dropped Chargify and redid everything with Braintree's API.

Braintree's API is pretty darn good. But it's not up to Charigfy's standards. Chargify has some pretty great features that are really simple to implement (like metered billing, and others of similar complexity). Not going with Chargify has slowed down my iteration speed when it comes to billing changes. It's just not as easy to do certain things when you have to write all the code yourself.

That said, you can do a lot with Braintree, and their customer support is fantastic. Their API is continually being improved. I also have a slight sense of relief that I won't be dependent on Chargify. Chargify, as we know, is a startup in search of a long term business model, and there are no guarantees that they'll be able to do what I need 6 months from now. But that security comes at a price - writing my own code.

What I would not do is use Chargify with a gateway with a crappy API. If something happens to Chargify, you could be stuck using something horrid.

In the end, most of what you get with Chargify is increased development speed if your billing gets complicated. But I wouldn't sweat the decision too much. It would be nice if Chargify supported Braintree V2 - as you'd have the best of both worlds.
+1 for Authentic Jobs. The jobs are generally high quality but it can be quite competitive to get selected since so many people are watching this job board very closely.
Are you telling me that if I come up with a way to build a cold fusion reactor, start to finish, that is commercially viable but will cost me $1,000,000,000,000 to build but can power the entire human civilization, my only option is to either build it or forget it? That if I obtain a patent it is somehow my obligation to actually make the damn thing?

I have no idea what he(?) is telling you, but I'm telling you YES. The problem here is that you couch it as coming up wit the whole thing from start to finish. Think instead of how many hundreds or THOUSANDS of patents might cover a commercially viable cold fusion reactor.

Imagine if NONE of the patent holders want to invest a few billion to build it, they each wait around for some other sucker to invest a billion dollars and then try to "extract value" with their patent trolling lawsuits.

Result? No cold fusion for humanity, because nobody wants to invest a billion dollars building something that requires permission from hundreds or thousands of venal "inventors."

It is obvious that we do not need patents to protect the creation of a billion dollar reactor. The billion dollar cost to build one protects it. If you come up with the idea, but you don't have a billion dollars, do what everyone else is doing, go pitch it and raise money. If you don't have a billion dollars and you can't convince anyone else to give you a billion dollars, why should you get rich?

There is no moral imperative to reward inventors for pure thinking, and furthermore there is NO evidence at the moment that patents serve as an incentive to get smart people like you to invent cold fusion instead of making money trading derivatives or playing professional poker.
"...a suitable candidate, prior to using Piranha, is 98% sulphuric acid."
To clarify, I'm not suggesting that you remove the "Brilliant" from the linked post, only from the HN submission title.

The Guinness reference is completely lost on me when seeing the picture, and not much clearer when just seeing the title :) I'm sure I'm not the only one...
How to maintain creativity & productivity working from home
Will this trick work in America?
:D
I don't think Max expected the implementation would get so much attention.
As of now, there aren't (m)any docs.
They have provided a quickstart guide on the site though.
I would say people here probably understand the issues better, but that the greater public if anything cares more. My "greater public" friends do anyway.

Lots of people here respect Facebook's success, while the greater public resents it. Lots of people here regard monetization as the primary arbiter of value, while the general public likes the idea of "philanthropic" projects.

I'm not actually sure if "caring" is particularly relevant though. Nobody "cared" about Facebook a few years ago. People joined Facebook because the people they wanted to hang out with were there, and the people they didn't want to hang out with weren't.
Do you make it up through volume? What is the tweet to dollar conversion ratio currently?
I've been using the SleepTracker Pro for about two years now and I love it. Just last week I started to have some issues with it - when I would press the light button it would short and everything would be reset. The CEO called me the next day and said that it didn't matter how old the watch was. Send it in and we'll get you a new one. Pretty cool. So I would highly recommend them.

The other part to this is that these types of alarms will only "go off" at the most optimal time. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is any easier to get out of bed. It took me a few months to get used to this fact. You have to get a mentality that when the alarm goes off, you get up. For instance, if I went to bed at 1am, I would set the alarm for 7:15. I would set my "wake window" for about 1.5 hours beforehand. For the first few months, if my alarm went off at 5:45, I would wake up, feel great, look at my clock and realize that I still had over an hour that I could still sleep. So I'd go back to bed and wake up feeling horrible.

Then, I got some great advice from a friend of mine who said, "Sleep like a dog." In other words, sleep when you are tired. Play when you are awake. This broke the mindset I had had since I was a child where I woke up with my alarm to now, as soon as I start to wake up (whether from my SleepTracker or just naturally), I think 'Am I rested? Did I sleep well?' If I had, then I don't even look at the clock, I just get up. Otherwise, I'll stick to my safety alarm clock that always goes off at 7:15.
Great Idea, just one thing: consider adding a favicon, I don't use titles in my bookmarks so I have no way to identify your website in my bookmarks bar.
Young Boy Becomes First Human to Live With a Permanent "Robot Heart"
Interesting stat tidbit:

Browser stats for Mac users only:

Safari: 75%, Firefox: 20.2%, Chrome: 4.5%
Sorry if this isn't helpful, but the direct approach has always worked for me (and job boards not so much). I try to contact people I'd like to work with on IRC, Skype, or just through email.

I include a few links and that has worked alright for me.
I would definitely prefer it if they did... I often visit the linked article and end up clicking around a bit on the site, which prevents a 1-click back button to return to HN to comment on the link here.
Funny you mention that "rule". It's not very accurate, and becomes less accurate the higher the inflation/interest rate goes.

I just worked it out; at 80% inflation it would take 1.18 months to double, not 0.9 like the rule of 72 would suggest. That's a fair difference, and certainly more in line with intuitive expectation.

Not that the OP isn't being overly finicky. Both round to 1, and only one significant digit was given anyway. But still.
I can see where the author of both the article and the /editorialized/ article are coming from, however I don't agree with either one of them.

As someone who's learned from the trenches, you need to know how to program on some level. Even if you're just a lowly IT Dude, knowing some batch, a little shell and at least a little SQL can make your life * magnitudes* easier. Take for example Cisco's networking packages: IOS and CBOS

CBOS and IOS are similar, but different. they have the same syntax but different connotations for them... but because I know one, I know the other. I can solve problems on one machine with basic knowledge of the overall design.

Same with Linux. Or Unix. Or BSD. Or (insert *nix here). I can solve problems by thinking and using some shell to solve my problem in an elegant and useful way that I can then write down and keep in my Little Bag 'o tricks.

I know how to solve problems in the IT world because I know how to program and how to think. Does this mean I have no concept of business and such? No, in fact the university I'm currently attending requires FOUR different business classes to get an IT degree. I'm not kidding you.

High school doesn't teach you how to think. It's designed to push out factory workers to go into industries and do slave labor. That's been the case now for nearly 200 years, if not more.

If you want to know how to get kids into a better position and get them /mentally/ into the top point, require in high school a Cognitive Problem-Solving class which requires group work to solve interesting problems like "A meteorite is going to hit us in 3 days you have these at your disposal what do you do? 2.4 million lives are at stake." and you are graded on your thought process. Maybe not the outcome, but the thought process.

FWIW, I'm a C#/Shell programmer. /bin/zsh is my shell.
How is this any different than a company posting a 50% off coupon in their local newspaper? Groupon is just a different advertising route. I'm not sure why Groupon is being blamed for what follows after customers get the coupon in their hands.
Wow, Google runs ads on Television? I consume all of my video media from the Internet these days so I guess I just didn't know, but that's surprising to me. Do they run the same type of promotional videos that you find on YouTube about Chrome, or are they totally different adverts?
It's great. I just miss two features to be an everyday use service:

- Time periods: Shares in a week, month, year
- Being able to add the sites each user like

Great work!
Great post!

Another benefit, I find, of micro opportunities is that they provide momentum or "small wins", which can help to alleviate the frustration that often sets in when building critical path features, which almost always take longer than you think and can sap excitement.
Smartpen Gadget lets you write & record audio at the same time
Most people's main computer won't be a computer, it'll be a games console and a Tivo-niche filler

How long before that's just running on the TV, with the TV acting as a thin client?

For what most people do, why doesn't a HD TV, a smartphone, and a bluetooth keyboard suffice hardware-wise? Just put the PC in the TV and make it capable of nice 3D graphics.
I'm working on the "Finding cool apps in the Android Market is hard" problem.

Right now I am basically taking the crowd sourcing approach by asking people what their top N Favorite apps are. Once I get some more data, I intend to employ some "amazon-style" collective intelligence and create a recommendation engine.

I realize that there are other people working on this problem but to my knowledge no one has solved it yet;)
Their rewards systems is one of the most generous around as well. Four points for a business class upgrade, and lots of easy ways to ear points. If you don't have the points, business class upgrades are far more reasonable than other airlines. Between that and the WiFi on all flights, I'm going to be really sad to see them go.
Amazon RDS Announces Read Replicas, Price Drop for High Memory DB Instances
You shouldn't use this JPEG-transparency hack if you're dealing with images where PNGs are a better fit. (Which is why the example demonstrated an image where PNGs aren't a good fit).

"The right tool for the job" and all that jazz.
Pretty neat idea, it kind of fits with a thought I had. I type faster on my keyboard than my phone. I'd like to be able to respond and compose SMS in my IM program when I'm sitting at my computer.

As far as a device to test on, I've been looking at pay as you go services and craigslist. There are some decent deals out there.
Yes, just in case I break my mouse-wheel, right mouse button and control key all on the same day.
It doesn't have the killer feature I'm interested in: flirting with cute girls.
The issues aren't success or philanthropy. It's about privacy, control over your own data, etc. This audience cares a lot about that, normal people don't ever think about it. It would never occur to my dad that Facebook having his private info might be a bad thing.
No. If I want to open in a new window/tab, I'll use the appropriate modifier.
Are you near a college with a decent CS department? Go there. Seriously. In no other place is there such a high concentration of talented individuals who are willing to work for bargin rates. Put up some flyers, get an announcement in the departmental newsletter, and buy candidates a cup of coffee once you get a good set of potentials. Of course, there is an upper bound on the talent/quality you are going to find. But depending on the type of work you need done it could work out great.
Wow, somebody reinvented the snowball system except for that in this model actually only one person is going to profit.
Does it work with google apps? Or just standalone gmail etc?
Hmmm, you have the wrong "partner" to begin with...

> I don't have the domain knowledge of what the software needs to do

This is critical. If you don't know this, you will not succeed and your projects will take forever to see the day light...
If your small business will not provide you with the necessary info, you can't expect it to work and go sell it to others in the same niche.

My advice is look for a competitor and show them what you've got. Interact and improve the software.
_Thinking Forth_ - discusses a bunch of ideas that didn't become popular until Fowler et. al invented them. (Incremental development, (re)"factoring", etc.)

A lot of those ideas came from cross-pollination between the Forth and Smalltalk communities, didn't they? Just like many others came from Lisp.
Avoid them all, you will only find pain in that strategy, kind of like 6 pool. Focus on building your network of contacts, they will be the source of most of your work, mainly through word of mouth and referrals.
Documentation Done Right
Good point. I feel like I'm making myself clear about the process, but maybe I'm missing something. I think in the future I need to write out some sort of business relationship agreement that states my intents as a company and lets the small business know what they should expect from me and what I expect from them.

I don't think that's too much to ask since the business is actually getting immediate value from this agreement, mine doesn't come until later.

I definitely get payoff with domain-knowledge (instead of money at this point) which, I don't mind. I just didn't want to keep trying to make this business model work if I was going to continually sacrifice cash for domain knowledge. I want to make money eventually :P

It's nice to hear that this model can (and frequently does) work. I really like the idea and I think there is a lot of potential to create useful products. This is my first attempt and I knew that there were going to be bumps along the way, I just didn't want to keep trying something that doesn't work.

Thanks for your advice. I really appreciate it.
It's not like pg has neglected to write about the subject:

http://www.paulgraham.com/kate.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
I wouldn't say I was excited, but that we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out. If a year or two from now it's abandoned and there are still no good open source Facebook competitors then I'll be disappointed.
Heh,

You know Linux has been getting soft and Gooey around the edges when there are Unix manuals for Linux users :-)

When I went from Slackware to FreeBSD in 1998, the only document you needed was INSTALL and the hardware compatibility list. In fact, FreeBSD was more posh than slack, it had a curses install and came with a luxurious handbook.

Speaking of which, I absolutely don't miss the days of taking a list of supported devices to the computer shop, and reading the fine print on boxes looking for chipset specs and firmware versions.
A night out with the Canters at Sammy's Roumanian Steak House
The Decline of reddit Self Serve Ads
While I agree these are all concerns, I am skeptical that this is a modern phenomenon. Were people a generation or two ago really less emotional, or less prone to black-and-white thinking?
"A large proportion of CS majors never learn to program."

My first reaction was deep scepticism, but in college I did some tutoring of English and CS (no, not together).

I had one CS student who just could not grasp arrays. I tried as many different ways to convey the essential concepts as I could, but I never got through to her.

Maybe I was a bad tutor, but I'm usually pretty good at explaining things, and did well with my other students. (Note to current students: If you can, try to do some tutoring. It helps you develop communication skills, and the feeling you get when you see another student's eyes light up with understanding after you've explained something they were stumbling over is priceless.)

In this case I really felt this poor woman had just picked the wrong major. I finally asked to have someone else take over as her tutor because I clearly wasn't helping her, but maybe she should have been changing majors instead.
I am helping a serial entrepreneur who has the exact same problem of "turning his brain off". The best thing we have found is the pranayama iPhone app by saagara.com.

Try it for 15 minutes, everyday, either in the morning, or before bed.
No one is paying attention anymore, but I'll try to state my reasoning one more time as clearly as possible.

Divide people into two groups, X and Y.

Group X: people with no quantitative skills. Career choices are [herstory prof, barista, teacher, HR drone].

Group Y: people with quantitative skills. Career choices are [math prof, hedge fund quant, big bank analyst, actuary, RoR Ninja].

People in category X don't make a choice between herstory prof and math prof. Math prof and quant are already excluded since person X failed Calc 2. Women in category X may choose herstory prof relatively frequently since it's not much worse than HR drone.

People in category Y do make a choice between math prof and quant. Women in category Y choose actuary relatively often, since actuary is actually a plausible career choice.

To evaluate Greenspun's argument (the argument you think I am undermining), you need to restrict consideration to category Y.