skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Offer HN: My experience in iOS app development
My name is Mike, and I run an indie iOS development shop called Pocket Sevens. I have a few small apps I have released on my own, but my main business is freelance and contract work. I run several projects, for a variety of different clients, in a variety of different areas. My most solid areas involve working with web services, animations and custom UI. The only thing I don't really know is OpenGL ES, so games are pretty much out.

I've enjoyed reading HN for a while now, and I'm fond of the intelligent culture that seems to have evolved here. I have been looking for a way to give back a bit, and to expand my technical writing skills as well. This is as much for me as it is for you :) I have at least some expertise in this area, and I'm happy to share.

So if you have a question about anything iOS related, I'm willing to answer to the best of my ability. If you have a piece of code that's troubling you and you'd like another set of eyes on it, let me know. If you have an idea for an app and want some advice or direction, I'm happy to help. (I'm unable to agree to any NDAs in this case, but I would consider any communication private; nor do I have any intention of stealing any ideas. I have plenty of my own that I should be working on instead anyway!)

If you're interested in taking me up on this offer, you can comment here, or if it's more private, sensitive or just easier for you, you can email me at hn@pocketsevens.net. I'll reply as soon as I can.
While I agree with the conclusion that the design of Python will over time make it the more productive language for development I don't agree with the importance given to Django.

I find that more view effort is being placed in browser code (JavaScript) and the back end is becoming less presentation oriented. Therefore the need for a framework like Django is diminishing.
"avid watcher of CNBC" and "pretty well informed" are at odds. Start reading Denninger, Mish and ZeroHedge and you'll see why.
Would love to join in but I'll be going to ConexaFest.
Agreed. The only spot I'm able to find that it mentions this prior to install is on the actual download page, just above the download button. I'd recommend they make that little blurb stand out a bit more. Nevertheless, I'm excited to try this out!
Thats great info? BTW have you tried Windows in a VM on it?
You have to know how many people read the thread, Otherwise there's no functional difference between "I chose not to vote" and "I didn't notice the thread".
I can't take this seriously - blaming an individual, especially a CEO, for destroying a corporate culture is ridiculous. I know essentially nothing about the history of HP, but what I do know is that the board bears ultimate responsibility for big decisions, for example a massive layoff.

There is also the distinct possibility that the 'HP Way' was sacrificed to save the company. Again, I know nothing of the history, but putting out a hit piece like this right before the election is just crude.
I'm pretty sure that there is a limit to the amount of time you can spend in jail for that (only a few months), at least for criminal cases.

I remember reading about a guy who was basically given an indefinite jail sentence in a civil case because the judge didn't believe that he really lost all his money is poor investments.

However I remember that the article highlighted the distinction between criminal and civil cases.
What a bull-shit statement. So Twitter engineers can't take any outside advice because those people aren't working on Twitter's particular system. No one else in the world could possibly know how to make large scale messaging systems work.

I am not saying any of the arm-chair analysts are right but it is pretty presumptuous to dismiss them outright.
I am a first semester grad student seeking an M.S. in computer science. I am interested in NLP and hoping to choose it or a subfield of it as my research topic. Do you have any advice? For instance, is there background knowledge that I should be learning that would be helpful? What about good books or important papers? Other tips for CS/NLP grad students?

I know this is a rather general question, but any advice that you might have would be useful to me and students in similar situations. Thank you!
I'm in Adelaide. Email me if you want to trade notes and talk about ideas on IM, get feedback about things, etc.
Kimberly-Clark rolls out tube-free Scott toilet paper
Of course I don't. But nevertheless, calculate the expected return from Candidate X per year. Work out an expected horizon given that some candidates leave in a few months, some stay a few years, some stay indefinitely...

Work out what you're prepared to invest to lease an asset of this magnificent quality. Now: there is an up front fee associated with leasing this asset. Is a fee on the order of 20% of one year's lease really immaterial?

true or false, does the up front fee change what you
Innovative and disruptive.
Write an open source library.

I still get contacted about a ML library I haven't touched for 5 years.
How I Survived My First Year As An Entrepreneur Without Any Venture Capital
In case you missed it in the other replies: http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless
I'm just going to say that having seen the movie I'm personally impressed with how well Zuckerberg is handling responses to what must be an incredibly surreal experience in the public.

His personal technical abilities and the relative accuracies/inaccuracies of a major Hollywood movie aside.

I can't imagine it being particularly fun. Kudos for laughing at it.
His documentaries (Get Lamp and BBS) are also pretty interesting and well worth watching/purchase.

I for one will make this one torrent that I will perpetually seed until my ISP tries to stop me.
> Hey, you're part of the Secret Cabalistic Society of HN Worship now, you're not allowed to disagree anymore!

Man, I submitted my application to the Secret Cabal a while ago, and I keep getting held in probationary/review period. I really gotta knock off yelling at people to make more money and advocating imperialism as a good foreign policy, I'd like my SCSHNW card.

> More seriously - call me a cynic if you will, but when I see people offering help with the Twitter API or with SEO or tax advice or even help with RoR, well, I don't know, something smells fishy to me.

Alright, seriously on my end - maybe some people have mixed intentions, but that's fine with me if they're doing good deeds. Like, is part of why Bill Gates is doing his anti-malaria work to better his legacy? My answer to that is "Who cares? Not me" - if someone's doing a good thing and also benefiting in reputation, contacts, etc, that's great. Now if someone doesn't deliver the goods and then tries to pitch people who email them, that'd be really lame. But if they're legitimately good deeds, I don't really care about their intentions.

Also - to shed some light on it, I tend to write all over the place, "Drop me a line if I can give you a hand" - pretty much anywhere. My reasoning? Out of 100 people, 90 will be ungrateful after you do something for hem, 9 will say thanks and nothing more will come of it, and 1 out of 100 you'll become great friends with, or become colleagues, or otherwise do amazing stuff together. I try to spend a lot of my entertainment time connecting with strangers, figuring for every 100 times I do it, I'm going to make 1 pretty amazing connection. Also I figure, what else am I going to do with my entertainment time? Watch TV? I like solving problems. Heck, I don't have anything to sell. I just try to do right by people when they ask for someone, cause why not? I always find it cool when I drop someone a line and they get back to me, so I try to do the same.

I'm digging the Offer HN trend and hope it continues - I wouldn't even mind if a quarter of the entries on the front page at any time were Offer HN. I figure I'd read the interesting ones, skip the boring ones, and I could always click "Next Page" to see other entries if I want more general stories.
If the data was sharded by user ids and some ranges of user ids were more active than other user ids, why not shard by a hash of the user id. In that case all the data for a given user id would live in a single shard, but active ranges of users would be broken up across shards. If any single user is creating too much data for a single shard, you've got other problems.
Drive by download & execute vulnerabilities exist in Java for many browsers.

So yes, it is possible for the "trojan" to work as described.
I don't have kids, but here's my observation. (1) My father had no interest in kids except to yell and beat us fairly often. (2) A friend is a 40yo single playboy who finally slipped up and had a son, whom he sees every weekend. He adores the kid and "can't imagine life without him." (3) Every time a friend has a kid, he disappears forever. The only clue they're alive are the updated pics of their kids on facebook.
I liked this line: "Though Ruby/Rails would likely have been fine too, there’s something about it that I just found unnatural. If I had a dog, the dog would bark at the Ruby code."

That's how I felt when I started learning Ruby after years and years of Python. Ruby has method names with question marks in them...my dog would bark at that.
PadMapper (http://www.padmapper.com/?lat=37.788038738186344&lng=-12...) is great for comparing apartments/rooms and they have a sublet filter.

Two months is short enough that AirBnB might be usable and they have reviews that prevent sketchiness.
The writers I know have a pile of unsold or uncompleted scripts and stories. They were experiments, or drafts, or betas (if you like). Often they're working on several things at once, sometimes just with friends for kicks.

They're driven to create also (characters, plots).

I'd say one difference is, it's easy to hold a steady job as a programmer, but as a writer you have to really work the business side. It does change the emphasis sometimes from creating to selling.
I have to disagree, I would think that the CEO would be the single most important individual in defining, creating and driving a corporate culture.
If your total bandwidth is 1000mbps, it is far from "unlimited". I ran a somewhat popular site that req'd 200mbps. Your offer seems ideal and could save me lots of money. Until I consider that longterm your model is very unsustainable and you'd probably hate sites like mine...which brings me to my point...you might as well think more about what segment of users you want to target and have an offer that addresses their needs and concerns.

Do you want to be most like hostgator or softlayer or amazon S3? They all serve very different profile of customers and have different paths to longterm sustainability.
thanks a lot.. i found something with jQuery..
http://jpageflipper.codeplex.com/
I'm catching up on my HN 100 feed, and want to thank you for recommending that work...it's amazing!

In case anyone else is as skeptical as I am ("another Harry Potter fan fic? Why is it special?), I want to point out that this work is by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a major contributor to Less Wrong (lesswrong.com).

He has a remarkable ability to define and express rational ideas. He takes concepts and terms that I've only encountered in a classroom, and puts them in the middle of a sentence like they're ordinary ideas, and it makes sense. I know I'm not doing a very good job of expressing why I like his writing so much, but I do.
Well...I earned a degree at Harvard via the extension program. Despite the Ivy-League douche-bag opinion of the program, it's been a big win for me socially and career-wise.

I ended up writing off school after leaving a different Ivy-League program to go chase my millions during the Internet boom. When that plan didn't pan out, I found that most of the programs offered during the times I had available were just flat...out...bad.

At least at Harvard Extension I could take a ton of classes from actual Harvard professors (not just moonlighting professionals looking to pick up some teaching cred) without all of the drama of trying to game the admissions process. At 35, I really didn't see myself living in a dorm with the other Harvard undergraduates.

You might make the case that it's not really a "Harvard" degree, but I'm willing to bet that my record of accomplishment since then would say otherwise.
What antivirus/security software do other HNers use on their Macs, if anything?
Sent you an email as well! Thanks!
If Walgreens are distributing (ie selling) a product containing GPL licensed software, my understanding is that they are legally responsible for GPL compliance.

Of course, in practice, it's really the Maylon Group or whoever that will have to provide the source.

However, to the best of my knowledge, the customer's only legal contract is with Walgreens, and its up to Walgreens to deal with Maylon Group (or whoever their supplier is) and ensure compliance - the end customer can't make any claim on Maylon directly.
IvanAnywhere telepresence robot
It's more of a tradeoff or limit than a flaw. Flaw implies, in some sense, that flawless and perfection is possible.
Well - that's true, actually. There are lots and lots of little payoffs along the way. Just having people who literally think you're indestructible and all-capable will do wonders for your ego even if you know they're wrong. (My son is still a little shocked when he finds something I didn't know.)

I have to say, though, leaving the hospital with our first one, honestly - my first thought was: "Holy crap, they're actually letting us leave? Without a license or something? I don't know the first thing about parenting!!"

And I sure didn't. But I learned.

One thing I can't recommend enough, though, to anybody with kids - take all the time off everything else you possibly can. Spend that quality time with them. You get one chance to get their entire life right, and it's really pretty easy - just ignore everything else, even if just a little while every week. (That's a joke - it's never easy. You just had a baby. Suddenly there are all kinds of expenses you never even imagined, and you know that sooner or later, they're going to need braces and a college education.... You've never needed money so bad!)

But seriously - establish a good personal relationship while they still think you're omnipotent, and you will thank your past self a million times about fifteen years down the road.
I've been doing that for the last 12 months, and the collection is significantly larger than that.

http://www.reocities.com/
That's why I didn't become a doctor. I thought, if everyone else became a doctor, there'd be no-one left to fix my car or grow food for us to eat.
Ask HN: Web-based Accounting System w/ API?
I'm looking to upgrade my accounting from the Excel and hand-build web-based system that I have been using.

I think its time to get a good, professional solution.

However, my business mostly makes sales online with Clickbank and PayPal and I don't want to have to manually input all of those sales.

Is there a web-based accounting system that has an API I can integrate with? That way I can have a script that automatically ads all my online sales into the system when they happen.

Thanks for any suggestions!
Oh yeah - and a couple of years from now at day care, you're now "Vivienne's dad". You probably also have a name, but ... nobody knows it. Ha.
While luigi's statement is a little extreme, I think the gist is right. Yes outsiders can offer advice on a system, but it's really difficult to offer sound advice without specific details of the system. Perhaps outsider advice shouldn't be dismissed outright, but it ought be taken with a grain of salt.
Right now, common sense.

I'll move to Arch if I need to install anything else that remotely resembles bloat.
This app is certainly controversial, but can be helpful to people in relationships where this type of monitoring can be useful.”

WTF does this say about our society? What an awful person.
See xkcd: http://xkcd.com/810/

"But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?"

"Mission Fucking Accomplished."
I believe that reverse DNS still leaks even if this is set in Firefox.

As long as DNS isn't blocked on the network you're on, you could change to a more neutral DNS provider (4.2.2.1 or Google)
The thing about performance tuning is you don't often know what your bottlenecks will be until the system is under load, what to patch until you dig deeper, and what the magnitude of improvement will actually be.
Tell HN: Don't forget to actually post
Offers are great (thanks, really), and sometimes it's more appropriate to explain with examples, or privately.

In many fields though you could get a much greater impact if you just wrote a post or even an ebook about what you know well and care about.

Application UX guidelines.

Rules for great newsletter copy.

How to create interactive visualizations with RaphaelJS.

Tools and frameworks for iOS game development.

etc.

A great (not yet another) post on any of these (example) topics will help a lot of people here on HN and elsewhere on the internet.
Even if you eliminate the typing difficulties (and they are quite severe) of the platform, you still haven't replaced the mouse. On the PS3 it's tedious maneuvering of a pointer with a joystick (second order control system == frustration), on the Wii it's an arm-killing posture that is also aggravatingly imprecise.

But taking all of that out of the equation - assuming that magically the Wii and the PS3 are both capable of interacting with USB mice and keyboards... how many people do you know who have an (extension cord required) USB connection to a keyboard and mouse combo on their couch? I can count these people on one hand. In fact I can count them on 3 fingers, and all are pretty hardcore tech geeks to boot.
I don't like her because she split off HP's test equipment division into Agilent. I think The HP Way left the building when this division was no longer the heart of the company.

It would be like Disney spinning off the animated movie business to focus on running TV stations or GM spinning off the car business to focus on financing. It might make sense on a spreadsheet but it has to hurt morale of all employees who give more than the minimum because they are proud to be associated with an iconic company
Along the lines of the baby peeing one - my mom told me the trick (at least with boys) is to open the diaper and then immediately close it. Something about the air hitting them does it.

I'll find out if that works in three months :)
This is sort of why I think it may come down to your choice of algorithms. For example, let's say I buy a hypothetical external hard drive. This external drive has built in encryption, and I have to enter a password using a keypad on the drive before I can mount it. Should I be legally compelled to enter the combination?
The movie implies that one of his motivations was to impress an ex-girlfriend.
FWIW, the PS3 does support mice and keyboards. Works decently in the web browser.
I reckon that most people notice most threads but only read the ones they're interested in. So in this instance it is probable that those who don't care to read the thread also don't care to vote either way and therefore implicitly tick the '"I don't really care" option'.
Glee Pushes Too Far – Will Apple Have To Pull?
Wow, that's an interesting point of view (as enshrined in law). For example, I own some DVDs or say Blu-Ray discs. Shouldn't the company provide me the key to decrypt them in case the police want to decrypt them? I suspect those companies wouldn't appreciate that.

Also, since encrypted data, if done properly is very hard to distinguish between random noise, and people often use writes with random noise as a secure erasure technique, it could also be that you erased that data? That is a thorny issue as well.

Is "I erased the data on that drive securely using random bits" a valid defense?
Ask HN: Does anyone have any resources for turning a pastry shop around?
I have a friend that has been running a 'seemingly' successful business. On the outside, their brand holds cachet, and their customers love their products.

They are running a pastry store.

However, for the longest while they have been barely breaking even or running a loss some years. A good deal of it is because they have taken on loan financing in years past to fuel expansion, but things have changed and haven't always panned out like they anticipated.

Bakeries/pastry shops tend to have high overhead because of the many hands it takes to do the actual baking every day.

It's a small shop, with no distribution partners.

Does anyone have any advice/resources that I can use to help them turn their situation around? Perhaps case studies of other turn arounds? Regular resources about how to establish distribution partnerships, etc.

Btw, the founder has a good marketing/product eye, but not so much for the business side of it.

The business is not based in the US.

Look forward to your feedback.
Review App: Tinkerbilly - Amateur music video sharing game
Offer HN: Performance and scalability design for non-cloud environments
Do you have performance and scalability problems you can't 'throw enough hardware' at ?

If you still keep control over all your application's parts -- operating system, web server/app server, run-time and database -- and simply can't solve performance bottlenecks by acquiring more dynamos, EC2 instances or other cloud-type services. I can help you.

I'm in the middle of writing an on-line book covering performance and scalability topics on web applications and I'm looking to add issues and solutions to multiple problems. I have over 10 years of experience in this area.

So if you have these type of issues, send them over. I can help you solve them and it can aid me in creating more thorough content.

In particular, I'll field questions on:

* Slow queries or Object Relation Mapping to RDBMS.
* Web servers, reverse proxies, file systems and operating system level tuning
* Caching topics for an application's multiple tiers.
* Slow application code (e.g. sorts, search, parsing)

You can send your questions to the email: performanceqa@webforefront.com

The online book is published at http://www.webforefront.com/performance/ in case you want to read what's already published.
It's certainly a Harvard degree. My comment was aimed at pointing out that phrase is pretty malleable at most schools. I have friends who went to other programs there. You all have "Harvard degrees." Each of you had very, very different experiences and learned different things. It's an interesting hack that to the average person, that distinction doesn't mean much.

Congrats on your success!
In terms of the law, you don't own those blueray movies so it isn't the same.

The law is fuzzy on the issue of someone emailing you an encrypted archive you didnt have the password to.