skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When Freemium Isn't Free: In Defense of the Bootstrapper in the Chargify Fiasco
Swan Fetus!!!
I love my TrackPoint -- zero-click copy (just select some text), one-click paste (middle-button).
I have a half-joking pet theory that Duke Nukem Forever is the greatest marketing ploy of all time. Their plan was to announce this game, do enough development to release a teaser every 5 years or so, and then wait until 2008 to REALLY start development of it.

Greatest hype machine ever, and never doubt the Duke..
I think this is awful from the standpoint of morale (coming from personal experience). If you start marketing, and start getting positive feedback way too early, you end up cashing in the rewards a bit too early. Early positive feedback from friends killed many personal projects since I got the praise before I did anything and lost motivation to actually finish them.

YMMV, but this is how I react.
The Scunthorpe Problem
Hi, I'm the author of ScienceURLs.

Actually, the whole thing was custom-written in about 2 days. I didn't even know that hackurls.com existed before I read your comment here.
Steve jobs has a tendency to identify technologies which are on the brink of succeeding, and bring them to the mass market.
Examples are pixar, the iPhone, the iPad and early exclusions (apple was the first to exclude floppies from their computers, and optical drive with the MacBook air)

In that sense it is only natural for apple to enter the robotic market. And with apple's secrecy, they may already be in it.

It will be very exciting if they will release a general purpose robot, with an app store, of course. I can just imagine paying $4.99 for the back massage app, and $0.99 for the fart app :)

Another positive effect that would happen if apple enters this market, is that all the tech companies will follow, and the technology will enter a rapid development stage, as the smartphones are in today.
According to the WHO, the US is #1 in the world in terms of health care responsiveness.

http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf
Crowd review a resume
Calculating image entropy with Python, How and Why? — Brainacle
I've often wondered how well an ircd would scale as a twitter clone. Following someone would just joining a channel that only they could write to.

I wonder how many clients are connected and receiving realtime messages during peak usage on say efnet.

edit: sorry I clearly phrased this poorly, I said "an ircd" but in my brain I was thinking of an ircd network like efnet, freenode, etc.
Quit my job and go full time web?
I'm just wondering how many programmers here took the plunge and quit their job to pursue thier dreams.

I have a fine job, corporate, amazing pay, but my life is miserable. I come into work every day unmotivated to write Java, or work on the product we are building. I don't even spend the money because I don't know what I need it for. I even still live with my parents because I have no desire to move out (I'm in my 20s). Meanwhile, at the office, I read sites like HN and see startups left and right and feel completely left out.

In my perfect world I would just quit, and spend my days building ruby/comet/js/etc., all the cool stuff, and leave this Java world behind. I already have a knack for it, and want to just try the startup world, but every time I am about to quit, I realize I will have no reliable source of income, and once you get used to that paycheck you really get used to it.

I'm wondering if anyone has success stories, or motivational tips in general or have made the same plunge and do not regret a second of it. What pushed you over the edge?
This is no argument to be made about the US having great health care. I don't know how a place where a random illness can wipe out your and your family's finances can even be considered first world.

I didn't claim anything and simply wondered aloud. Also, the article was about life expectancy and quality of healthcare and spoke nothing about costs.

Your statement does bring up another question. Would that same hypothetical family prefer to have their finances ruined or have their loved saved from some random illness? Of course the best solution is perfect care at zero cost, but I think we can agree that it is impossible. If the US is actually getting better health outcomes than other systems perhaps the cost is worth it?

And to address your specific claim, I've always thought that the government should provide health related catastrophic fallback insurance similar to the way they do for floods. I don't think the government needs to be involved in the day to day healthcare or insurance matters, but I agree that getting cancer for example should not ruin your families finances.
Beware of the CEO conference addict
True, but:

- You can mix static and dynamic styles as appropriate.

- You can mix low level and high level code as appropriate.

- "Manual memory management" != "Manual ref counting". I'm not saying it's wonderful, but it's a hell of a lot better than malloc and free.

- Categories are a pretty big OO power tool that you don't see in e.g. Java (e.g. Android)

- I would love to be able to efficiently write slick, efficient mobile apps with an REPL right on the device. And I would enjoy a pony.
I answered yes, but "jaxn" is not my legal name. It is however my twitter handle, and I don't know a better online identity than a public twitter account. (Also, my personal site is pretty much the first result for "jaxn" no matter where you search).
No. AFAIK, irobot makes their money primarily from defense contracts, not primarily from roombas.
You realize the statements you've quoted are a 3-sentence tangent that has nothing to do with the point of the article, right? There's another 1500+ words that don't rely on this being true or not.

Secondly, I didn't say technical expertise is worth "nothing." Of course it's worth something. But as developers, we need to realize that, except in rare exceptions, our code is worth a lot less than we think it is.
Right now I'm using symfony php framework that deploys the code to whatever server I want(uses rsync and you must have access to ssh on that server). All the projects are kept in svn repo's.

I can imagine writing a script that just runs every so often to sync the staging server to the production server, however I don't really care for this method because I want more control. I may change my mind in the future.

For some internal applications that I work on at work, we deploy them using the good ol' "svn up". I really don't like this method for a ton of reasons. The first reason being I can just goto http://www.example.com/.svn and see all the svn files.

I think the best by far is using rsync. Some things that I have done with rsync is configure the database settings in a config file, then just have rsync ignore that file so I can set different database settings for dev/staging servers.

For personal projects I usually have them on a private space on Assembla, which one of the options is they allow you to FTP your code to a server. I haven't used it myself, but I can see where this would be useful.
That extremely true, which is why I recommend not learning by Google as a default. Knowing what question to ask implies knowing things that relate to the issue.

The best way in my view to learn those related things is usually in a good book about the subject. I fail to see blogs/stack overflow/google ever beating a good book about a subject.
How to make your YC application stand out
Exit strategy is an element of startups designed to scale rather than those intended as hobbies or lifestyle businesses.

Startups which scale is what Ycombinator is looking for and therefore of interest to many HN readers.
I do, mostly because I believe that if I were ashamed of what I had to say here, it probably wouldn't be worth saying in the first place.

Some here mentioned not wanting to be attached too much to a site that has "hackers" in its name, but I'm thinking I probably don't have any interest in dealing with somebody/a company that thinks it's a bad thing.

And I also try to get 'timothee' as username whenever I can.
No, but I wish I did. Hacker News is closer to the "real me" than to the "jokermatt999" me. Plus, have my old AIM handle on here feels weird, considering it's generally a place of more sophisticated discussion than most places I use it.
Isn't that like saying "Don't try to find any potential customers for your idea because they may not like it and you may give up?"
You're anthropomorphizing here horribly. There's no entity called "The Sweatshop business" that sits around with an evil expression on his face plotting on how to make more sweatshops and taking my money, the system in only an abstraction for the wide variety of people, workers and capitalists, each with their own goals and desires that when taken together produce the things that we call sweatshops. This is important because if you are lazy and rely on anthropological reasoning ("I'm the sweatshop system, of course I want more sweatshops") you won't be able to make correct predictions about how the world will change in response to your actions.

Yes my money goes to a person. I hand off my money to the clerk at the store and then it travels around and eventually some of it goes to the suppliers of raw materials, some of it goes into the pockets of the capitalists who provided the funding, and some of it goes to pay the wages of yonder sweatshops workers.
Now, I have insurance and paid a bit here and there out of pocket, but waiting for care is one thing I didn't do.

I think that may be key. I had insurance and appendicitis, and waited around 12 hours before surgery, but my brother was in a car accident without insurance, and was almost sent home. Luckily, a family member who is a nurse caused enough of a storm that he received the proper care.

Not having insurance is what really skews the statistics in the U.S. Cook County hospital is an example of a hospital which provides care for the uninsured, and the wait times are significant.

I haven't seen it, but I'd be interested to see the statistics on health care in the United States for the uninsured versus the insured: Wait times, costs, quality of care, quality of life, and life span.
An important distinction, though, is that with software, particularly server-side software, it's fine to get it wrong several times, as you can fix it quickly and all in one place.

The difficulty increases as you move to desktop software and it increases a LOT more as you move to hardware, obviously.
I primarily use them with c++ containers as doing so allows you to switch from a vector to a map without changing a lot of other things.
This author doesn't know Apple or the type of companies they acquire. If they wanted to make autonomous vacuums, they could do it 10x better in house within a year, iRobot is not a talent acquisition, and more importantly, they are not going in the cleaning business under Steve Jobs.

List of Apple aquisitions - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition... if you don't have novel software or silicon design capability, Steve Jobs very likely doesn't need/want you.
Jacques, thanks for the ideas. I had thought of building something similar to (5) AdProfs, but left it on the backburner. You reminded me. I have a need for something like this myself right now, and so I'll be working on prototyping today. My intended scope is pretty small, but we'll see where it leads.

I'll update you if this goes anywhere at all ;).
From my experience, reading code is a super important skill that just isn't taught in colleges. Just as reading and writing English (Or any other language) are separate but related skills, so too reading and writing code are separate but related skills. If you have a hard time reading other people's code, go practice. Learning to read code was one of the more enlightening experiences I've had as a programmer.
It's hard to sell a portability argument when you are tied to a dongle, even if it is small. That's a workaround for the network, not the consumer.
I agree that Sculley is a class act but I think your history is a little off.

First, Sculley and Jobs were never really rivals and while Sculley did force Jobs out of Apple it was only after literally begging him to make changes (at the time the Mac was failing and just about every Apple manager was being driven crazy by Jobs). Sculley tried to bring Jobs in-line and Jobs tried to turn everyone against Sculley. At least that’s the story I’ve read from several accounts (some of which actually depict Jobs drawing an imaginary line on the floor and saying “you’re with me or you’re with him”).

Also Sculley’s run wasn’t really a failure at Apple. Even Jobs admits the original 1984 ad was more Sculley than anyone else (Sculley’s claim to fame before that was creating the “Pepsi Challenge” marketing push). After Jobs left Sculley put Jean Louise-Gassee in charge of the Mac and that’s when it really took off. Sculley’s rein did have some lows but he always managed to pull it back out (and in fact was in the middle of a plan to do so again when the board fired him). I don’t dispute the fact that Jobs is MORE successful than Sculley was but Sculley wasn’t a failure. Apple really entered a death spiral during Spindler’s rein.
Often the "CGI" background is a combination of "true" CGI, manipulated photos/footage, and digital "hand" painting (at least for the deep backgrounds). It's much more flexible than physical painting. For one thing, there's undo, and versioning, not having to wait for paint to dry, etc etc.

For example, if you want a castle in the mountains in the background, the mountains might be a composite of a photo, and some extra CG. A castle is then rendered "in the rough" ontop of the mountain, and then details hand painted in. And then the whole thing gets another CG/painting treatment to make sure everything fits in and to create more atmosphere. Every matte painting is different.

If you're interested, you can poke around cgsociety's (sorry it's blocked at work) forums in the digital matte painting section. It's really just a huge grab bag of techniques.
If you're looking to release it quickly, I suggest you use screen-capture software such as Fraps or Camtasia. You could record some footage of your product working, then annotate it using voice or text. You could use this as a base/temp demo video until you have enough time to create a professional style video.

Alex95
Not that I was terribly likely to use Bing before, but this actually makes me want to use it less.
For those who don't click the link... it's from Theo:

Log message:
the_t world_t would_t be_t a_t better_t place_t if_t some_t people_t did_t
not_t feel_t the_t need_t to_t typedef_t everything_t
Lack of MRU tab order for Control Tab behavior is just one way in which I've been becoming increasingly unhappy with UI developments in Chrome. In looking into it, I found a developer's blog entry explaining that it is a design decision; they don't see how MRU fits into their conception of work flow or how to achieve a "perfect" implementation (sorry, I don't have the URL for that entry at hand).

With... v6, I think, of Chrome, they changed the padlock / SSL-TLS designation appearance, to my eye making it less clear when a site is secure. Such UI paradigms take a long time to establish themselves in (non-technical) users' minds, so particularly for security-focused ones, you shouldn't go changing them willy-nilly -- it defeats their primary purpose.

(Separately, their own properties break their secure channel at times by including non-secured resources.)

Rightly or wrongly, in the lack of a more thorough analysis, this has my intuition tweaking. I'm starting to feel jerked around by decisions such as these. (And a corresponding one-way nature of communication, or outright lack of communication, on the matters.)

I know, "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Keeping engineers busy engineering as opposed to "'splaining". And this is a feeling, not an analysis. So I won't claim the high ground, here.

OTOH: Chrome has keep a family member's older laptop functional, where otherwise it probably would have been retired (Opera's recent speed improvements might now also compensate, but a number of sites they use fail in Opera while working in Chrome.)
Sounds like that concern was a direct response to Zuckerberg compiling everyones photos for facemash. Even if the administration did complete their facebook project, I don't think it would have become what Facebook is today because it would have likely been kept Harvard only and then someone else (perhaps Zuckerberg) would have gone and created a version for other schools.
You don't have to understand the library, the author's coding style, or even much of the language in order to answer a question like this. You grep the codebase for '302' to find the constant that represents a redirect, and then you grep for that constant. 90% of the time, that should take you right to the chunk of code you're interested in.
Hipmunk should integrate with this (or buy them or write their own) as soon as possible
I will check into that. It's just a stock Tumblr theme, and my screen is usually dirty, so I didn't even notice!

EDIT: just plain white now. Thanks! For anyone who is curious what he's talking about, the theme I'm using had this set as a fixed background: http://static.tumblr.com/nfoxfxu/r5fl3h6w1/bg.jpg
Yes, I do basically this, but with Git.
You can now import your own ssh key.
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineR...
We have a bash script which grabs the latest Phing config/property files and then Phing handles the rest...

* calls YUI Compressor to minify css/js
* calls a custom script to upload images to the CDN
* calls dbdeploy to update our staging database
* symlinks the "built" revision to our staging site

When we push a build from staging to production, we run a small bash script that calls Phing which symlinks the desired revision to the production site.
No matter how much you agree with the author's opinion, Googling has the strong benefit of being a fast sufficiency condition. If you see a google result about your feature, you can be 99% sure the feature exists.

(Unless it's a feature request, I suppose)

The only thing to keep in note is that google isn't a necessary condition. Not seeing a google result means you might want to try investigating further, not that you want to get yelled at by this dude.
The bookmarklet wasn't reachable from the frontpage so I edited the link to one with the bookmarklet. I use it all the time, but the zoom would be better.
Not that many, even the big IRC networks only run at around 65-85k simultaneous users.

The netsplit website has been doing IRC analytics since '98:
http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
Why not a talent acquisition? iRobot has the best roboticists MIT has to offer, and a growing trove of patents.

Apple isn't in the cleaning business now. But they weren't in the music business 10 years ago.
There are back-compat features in Word to render files using old rules, so work has been done to help preserve your visual layout across versions.

That said, there's a ton of churn between different versions of Word, so there's no guarantee a bug-fix (or sadly, a regression) won't cause your document to display differently anyway.

FWIW, Word has PDF/XPS export built in as well. (I believe Word 2010 has it in the box, and Word 2007 has some silly downloadable component to enable this).
I've done that! It was a lot of fun.

I enjoy doing many different things, and wearing multiple hats at a startup is a must. It was fun to do the job of 4 different people every day... For a while.

I'm rather happy that I'm doing (usually) just 1 job now, though.
Shortly after this:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submitted it

ZUCK: i don't know why

ZUCK: they "trust me"

ZUCK: dumb fucks

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/14/damning-zuckerberg-i.ht...
It's about 50-50, with slightly more revenue ($200 million plus this year alone) from home robots.
fascinating. no one ever explained to me in the thread about why wesabe failed, how the freaking name is pronounced.

how much $ did wesabe raise? (I'm too lazy to go to crunchbase)
Good point. This recent HN item speaks to that. http://www.stevestreeting.com/2010/09/04/work-2-0/
The interruptible programmer
I think Steve founded a hack in telling people it is not good enough.

It's highly unlikely that these guys were giving him crappy work. I think they were giving him good industry standard work, but given the type of people he selected he knew they have better stuff to give. So, he probably pre-decided that whatever was shown to him was not good enough.

It really depends on the people you hire. For some, they might get depress and want to quit[encouragement might work better for them], but for others they would take it as a challenge to do better.

Even if he thought it was brilliant on first go, I suspect he would say redo it because he figured the person could do a better job[he probably wouldn't do it all time less people caught on].
Actually, around the time of the 'decline' lots of projects started switching to DVCSs like git. So I guess many enlistments are still pointing to the old CVS or SVN repos where obviously nothing is happening.
Robotics certainly needs somebody to kickstart it. It's hard to do when the biggest consumer robotics company is worth about $500 million. You need real scale. The kind of scale that Apple could instantly provide.
We-Saab-E

Not sure about how much they raised. I know O'Reilly alphatech (sp?) backed them among others.
But the most interesting things are identifiable anyway, e.g. some story from the inside of a company that no on knows. I have no hesitation to give an opinion or fact that isn't violating some non-confidentiality agreement, and no one here should either.
I use git with a remote repository to which you can push (and pull) stuff easily.
Subversion -- the website is a working copy of the production branch and I just do an svn update when changes need to be deployed.

The whole thing is wrapped up in a script that makes it possible to one-click deploy changes.

The biggest thing is the application is directory independent and auto-senses the host for database selection. This means that no changes are required to the application to run it in development, staging, or production.

Edit: Apache is setup so that no .svn directories are served. Given that most web applications go through a front-controller now, I'm hoping this isn't as much of a concern anymore.
Thanks for the post, and I completely agree. However, there is one thing about Ruby that could have been better, considering Ruby as a didactic language: TMTOWTDI (more than one way to do stuff) concept which Ruby borrowed from Perl: although it arguably helps with "the principle of the least surprise", I find it confusing when it comes to learning: multiple names for the same methods, {/} and begin/end block syntax, completely superfluous for keyword first come to mind, and even optional parantheses for method calls could be confusing, especially when they collide with operator priority.

Slightly unusual syntax, comparing to the mainstream languages, shouldn't worry anyone, since 1) it's really not that different (we're a bit spoiled there, as languages are lately crafted to mimick each other as much as possible - to facilitate "brain drain" from rivaling camps) 2) the aim is not to "learn to make money by programming", but to learn to code 3) opinions here are highly biased, because we already learnt programming our way.