skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, and a lot of companies, even high-tech are still not comfortable with telecommuting. IBM is probably one of the better ones I have seen for encouraging a telecommuting workforce, but anyways I am getting off on a tangent with who does what.

As a freelancer in Florida and soon the be based in the Florida Keys (which has no tech whatsoever), telecommuting is my lifeblood. I have a strategy that I employ extensively when I really need a gig, my network comes up dry and I cannot find any postings for telecommute freelancing.

What I do is try to get a meeting with the decision maker and sell them on telecommute, this generally revolves around things like a money back guarantee if they try me for 2 weeks and do not like me. They get to walk, no pay no questions asked. the only stipulation I place on it is that they have to give me feedback on what I could have done better should they decide to walk.

I have landed quite a few gigs this way and as of yet have never had to eat 2 weeks. I only do this for 3-6 mo+ gigs that way I don't risk providing 60-70% of the work for them to take and have someone else wrap up. I also try to get them on a Skype teleconference ASAP in which I do a screen share and run them through a presentation, so that they can see for themselves, rather early on, that the technology is there to easily collaborate.

For a few of them, I have changed the entire dynamic of their organization. I remember a call with a hiring manager (now a good friend of mine) in which he said "You have really opened my eyes, I am no longer constrained to the best available in my market, but can find the best available in many markets".

This is only my case, so take it for what it is worth and I caution that while I do take a lot of generalist contracts I also have a specialization that I am know for. That specilization is web Accessibility development for persons with disabilities as well as Javascript / REST based web applications. There are not a lot of people who do Accessibility for JS based web apps, so the phone rings a lot from people looking for me. But I do still have to get out and pound the pavement now and then.

Anyways, some people don't know that an alternative exists and somethings it just takes some confidence for people to give you a chance. It has worked for me.
Hipmunk, Y Combinator, and “The Wedding” - David Andujo's Blog
I always thought the stuff they made for dig was really great looking, but darned if I could ever find any utility in any of them.
(I was on an iPhone, btw, and accidentally hit the shift key instead of "a" a couple times, causing the "S they Re".)
I agree about the PG-worship or whatever you want to call it.

I preferred to absent myself from here for a while after it got real bad (to the point of the first article commonly being a 2-3 year old essay that had bubbled to the top AGAIN), simply because I felt fundamentally outside of the norm here - I rarely agree with anything PG says in its entirety. Paul is a thoughtful enough person that I've never felt that it would upset him if I disagreed here, but I would imagine there would be a lot of people keen to argue with me until I was blue in the face about it.

An opinion is an opinion however, and we're all entitled to our own - I take downvotes not as a personal attack, but simply an expression of disagreement, be it with your opinion OR the way you express it.
Huh? I don't get this at all. IntelliJ is a phenomenally great IDE. I'm sure that is blinding me to the ugliness you're seeing. But thinking about just the visual elements, I still don't see your point. What exactly is the problem?

Now Eclipse -- that's ugly, inside and out.
> we're unable to recruit engineers (despite paying 25%+ above market rates and offering generous benefits, a great team and interesting problems).

If that is actually true, there's something negative that you're not mentioning.

FWIW, I suspect that it isn't actually true. That said, there could be some other factor at work as well.
I view Unity3D with it's web viewer as more of a platform than a 3D engine.

Here's a link to an art project built with Unity3D (it may take a while to load - I used Firebug's Net tab to make sure elements were still loading) which I think shows Unity3D is much more than just a 3D game engine and definitely a challenge to flash:
http://www.everyday3d.com/works/installation/colors/

I have one client for which I built an interactive 3D visualization system. The project used Papervision and after trying numerous techniques to minimize the load it took on slower computers we ended up having to make it a 2D system because flash couldn't display everything we wanted to show effectively (it's also possible my Papervision skills aren't up to par and a Papervision expert could make the project work, I still have a feeling the visualization would still need to be limited). Molehill would probably really help this project out.

After building the above system, I started seeing more and more information about Unity3D. If I was to start the project again today, I'm pretty sure I would look heavily into using Unity3D over Flash for the visualization system.

The blog I mentioned in my first post has an excellent post about Unity3D's potential future:
http://www.everyday3d.com/blog/index.php/2010/03/08/unity3d-...
I dunno man, I think if I had a grand to blow, I'd buy a bottle of Lagavulin and keep the $930 change...
This is a measure of "perception", not necessarily usage. Their FAQ contains some information about what exactly that means:

http://www.brandindex.com/content/faqs.asp
Electric Vehicle Charging Stations by Siemens
How can poetry that doesn't rhyme be so pleasing to the ear?
Right, but what's wrong with a joke? It's not useful, sure, but it wasn't offensive or mean-spirited. Other than "this isn't reddit," what could possibly make it deserving of -20?

Even if it wasn't funny, is that really the message we want to be sending? Tell a joke and get down-modded into oblivion?
I think it's talking about constant-use as "abuse".

However, I'd have to contest that I've had several flash drives that have become damaged because of pressure being placed across the USB connection and either grounding something or simply snapping the chips. The one that failed because of grounding (i suspect as it was metal casing and the USB connector didn't become loose) was simply because I left it plugged in with the keys on the keyring it was attached to.

I've never heard of mild pressure causing a HDD to fail, but seen it several times with flash disks. However, that said you could throw one off a 20th story balcony and it would work fine after hitting the ground.
Yes, and it doesn't help that some nitwit put the ethernet port right next to the USB ports on the standard ATX layout. DURR. Probably the same guy who made USB symmetrical, thus forcing me to spend what must be a day or two of my total lifespan trying to jam the things in upside-down.
that looks quite nice. Thanks!
I agree, people are even more obedient in the absence of clear rules.
I can only speak of my own personal approach to commenting. I evaluate my own comments by one metric - whether I think my comment will make HN a smarter, more interesting place. I see HN comments less as a forum for chit-chat and more as a venue for a series of short essays on the topic of the original post. I try to avoid making comments of the sort that are satisfying to post but that I would not be interested in reading. If I don't think I'm being reasonably insightful, I don't bother. For every comment I post, there are usually one or two comments on other items that I decided weren't good enough to post.

It seems to me that HN is relatively neutral in terms of your opinion; People here seem to avoid the vice of downvoting based simply on a difference of opinion, at least in my experience. The community generally seems to award karma based on how thoughtful and carefully-constructed your comments are. I have one one occasion been downvoted into oblivion for politely and carefully expressing an opinion that is generally morally unpalatable, but someone came to my defence and I eventually ended up with a small amount of positive karma for the comment.

I think the easiest rule of thumb is to try and be the opposite of cable news. The calmer and more dispassionate your tone, the more detailed and precise you are in your reasoning, the more carefully you reference reliable sources, the better your chances of being strongly upvoted.
Right, if you are using a salary site, it has been my observation that they are not correct whether it is a vast corporate conspiracy or just an anomaly ever time I check them they seem to under represent the reality of the market from 15-20%. Which is weird because you would think that the reporting person would inflate their earning to try to inflate the market. Maybe they are telling the truth and the sites have logic to try to account for an inflation that is not being falsely represented. Anyway, point is check you data source and ensure that it is reliable you may not be as far above the market as you assume you are.
Wow, unbelievable. Gruber appears to be nothing more than an Apple mouthpiece now.
I mostly agree.

I think we need to accept some false positives [such as foul language] in order to preserve a reasonable level of freedom of speech on HN.

Here I mean freedom of speech in the weak form, ie. that you stop posting something you truly believe, because of fear it will attract down-votes.

Useful ideas/opinions that occur in the long tail may offend some people - but I think HN is too uniform and PC without them.
Clang (LLVM C compiler) builds a working Linux kernel
It's just a phrase that doctors tend to say in relation to good sleep habits and avoiding insomnia. I think the point is to do with not conditioning your brain to stay awake and focused once you get into bed (as reading or watching TV might do). Also I don't imagine a doctor is going to tell you not to have sex in a bed.
Notice (as first comment points out) that the #10 conservative brand is trusted more (by conservatives) than the #2 liberal brand.
I have to wonder to what degree this sort of thing mistakes specific people's learned adaptation to specific light patterns rather than innate human traits.

As someone who has been spending time on computers into various hours of the morning since he was in middle school, staring into an LCD just before bed is the most natural thing in the world, and I sleep a solid 8 hours a night.
https for a static content? No, thank you.
There's nothing here that suggests to me that Google is weak in the republican market; all it shows is that they are not in the top ten favored brands for that side. No other Internet companies are listed on the republicans' side either, so we don't have enough data here to draw any useful conclusions about how Google stacks up against their competition (unless Google is worried about losing customers to Fox News and Cheerios).
AppMakr Raises $1 Million To Help You Build Custom iPhone Apps
Growing Communities in New Geographies
I think it's pretty obvious what to do. If you operate your business with respect for the industry and take it seriously you will be good. Otherwise you will not. It's kind of that simple. Recruiting isn't really a tough job on its own, kinda just the amount of effort you bring to the table.
I wrote one for my startup paperhater.com
Just using regexp.
I sleep a solid 8-9 hours a night, but I have a lot of trouble with when that sleep happens. I've been desperately trying to get my schedule on a more normal natural light schedule... without much luck really.

There is at least some evidence that melatonin issues with my 2AM-10AM sleep schedule affect energy and overall health in a pretty significant way.
I think iOS was already on every sysadmin's shitlist for quite a while. I remember some of my friends on the networking side complaining a good deal about the iPad's DHCP lease shenanigans.
This message also needs to be sent to the parents of the witty shadows of bullies. Which is where those of us with kids probably come in.

After all, I was the same shadow for a time... and I think many smart kids are, especially after doing a stint in that awkward phase and then realizing that they are, in fact smarter than their tormentors.
My folks are smart and admit to having been bullied and using wit to deflect it, but I was never cautioned against bullying others; it was just assumed that I'd do what it took not to be a mark.

And so I need to admonish my kids not to compromise like I did... because we all know that the 10-year-olds that we parent and influence probably won't figure this out until maybe it's too late for some other kid.
Well, hang on, that's not fair. Your first example cited selling a device to someone vastly interested in obtaining extremely valuable data - imagine this happening to President Obama's iPhone. But now you're saying that the concern is coming from someone who can figure this out by watching a YouTube video.
Find out what the spectral components are. Blue light is the real offender at work.

I suspect CFC's are worse than incandescents though. CFC light is a much harsher white, and I'm pretty sure that's a sign of significant blue components.
Is it impossible to believe the world has become worse in some aspects?
I think Google or anyone else should man up and "invent" something that can compete on a quality level with Facebook.

Facebook is like Hercules, very strong, but not immune to death, still a mortal. In other words Facebook did not max out the capacity in social networking.

Something like Diaspora may be a step forward, I think it's kind of creepy for Facebook to know all my social stuff.(The main reason I don't do much on Facebook).

TL;DR: There is still a chance to do better than Facebook.
Yesterday someone emailed me saying that they downloaded "Like.fm for Firefox" and then proceeded to ask me what the site's address was (it's Like.fm).

However cases like this are still the exception. Bad user experience design usually leads to clueless users. So it's not a matter of intelligence or technical acuity, it's all about how experienced you are with the interfaces and how well it's designed to be familiar to you. Obviously if you are the designer you're going to be more familiar than a new user. But it won't matter if you're using wormholes for your internet backbone if it's well designed even Abraham Lincoln will be able to use it.

That being said not all user interfaces should be dumbed down as much as possible. It just has to be as familiar as possible to your target user base.
Browser War: Firefox 4 Vs Chrome 9 Release
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People basically need to be taught that you can't break computers

This was more or less true until the internet came along. Now computers are full of booby traps and hungry wolves and the things you do on the screen actually affect the real world. It's not so much that you will break the computer, more like the other way around.

Sorry old coots, you had your chance to practice and you wasted it being stubborn. Now the real game is on and there is nothing us nephews can really do for you.
A lot of the paperwork in these kinds of cases is the volume of evidence rather than the complexity of the regulations. Even if the regulations were written extremely simply, it would still be expensive / time-consuming to sift through 100k+ of a company's documents looking for evidence.
The Game Mechanics Of Programming a Web-Based Business
Flash drives use ECC precisely so that they can detect when memory cells are nearing the end of their useful writable lifetime before the data is unreadable.
>I have a vision but I can't code.

We all have a vision or several. Why should folks who can code work on yours?

Seriously - what else do you bring to the table?

Note that we're not looking for a "big project", we're looking for a big payoff for us.
Hybrid Model for Nonprofits Hits Snags
Would the free Amazon EC2 deal for a year be good for this?
You can still think of data as 'rows' with MongoDB - objects belong to a collection, which is analogous to a table - and you can query and select only specific fields.
The advantage is that you aren't nearly as restricted in the kinds of data you can build. SQL often forces you to split logically related data across several tables and wrestle with complicated joins, simply because a row can't contain sub-arrays or hashes.

Of course, there's no silver bullet - some times you DO want to group together logically different data in a same query. But I've found that in general, I'm not fighting the DB as much when building stuff using MongoDB.
Offer HN: Room in Japan
I recently married and moved to Japan. We live in a small city called Tokushima in about 70 square meter apartment. Currently we have a free room that we haven't yet decided what to do with. If you've been wanting to experience Japan, this could be your chance. You would fly to Osaka airport, meet me (I don't mind visiting Osaka every now and then), maybe see Osaka first and then take a bus to Tokushima. You could stay in the room for two or three days and then continue your trip on your own. You can take a boat to Tokyo, for example.

If this sounds like fun, see my email in my profile. I thought this might be an interesting way for me to meet other developers, too.
Of course UPS and Fedex perform well for both groups. Aside from DHL and USPS, they don't have any other significant competition, and I think most people trust UPS/Fedex over the USPS any day of the week.
The New Faces of Social Media
So I could go get a free VPS for a year through Amazon with this?
Sorry to disagree, but saying, "Business plans are always wrong so stop obsessing about them!" is a foolish and cocksure attitude and a good way to suddenly get hit with a dreaded, "oh, I didn't think about that" moment when the fecal matter impacts the turbine as Mr. Murphy pays you a surprise visit.

Sure you may not need detailed 3 year financial projections or spreadsheets coming out your ears, but if you don't have at least a basic plan then you run the risk of having to handle issues you should have seen coming if only you had a basic plan. Writing a plan is as much for the Founder as it is for any investors and only fairly experienced businessfolk can really get away with skipping it.
Thanks for your comment Patrick! I know from your comments here that you wouldn't take any product and recommend it lightly so I took your word for it and just installed it.

Well, this is a weird transition for now! My screen is all yellow-ish and it doesn't feel quite right. I'll get used to it but at first, this is surprising.

edit: I should add that, though it does look and feel odd for now, it looks softer on the eyes already. It also seems to accentuate the difference of brightness depending on the angle of the screen on my MacBook. So if I type on my lap, my laptop bounces a bit and the variation in brightness is more noticeable.
I wouldn't worry about it, it's just how Ruby and most other languages handle floats. Do a search on Google for "ruby float precision".
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1. Initial reaction: Quick, upgrade Adobe from “Sell” to “Don’t Buy”! (This is an Arrested Development reference, but I mean it literally.) They seem to be finally realizing that, hey, Flash really isn’t going to be everywhere anymore.

2. The demo is in Flash, so I haven’t seen it. (EDIT: This assumption is wrong, but the observation holds:) But looking at everything else Adobe has done with “HTML5” so far, I’m going to assume it’s basically exporting Flash to <canvas>. Which is, yes, HTML5, but <canvas> is no more a replacement for real HTML — you know, tags and semantic markup — than Flash is; you miss out on accessibility (often), SEO, graceful degradation, etc., and it sucks CPU cycles almost as much as Flash, because you’re drawing individual pixels in JavaScript.
Please.

How many lottery winners are there in this world? not many. Does the lottery winner deserve it? Yes. They gambled with their money and won. This is an example of pure luck.

Does a Rich man's kid deserve it? Yes. Because someone in his family (grandfather, father, etc) put the hard work into starting or continuing a business.

"and those laws are currently skewing wealth distribution in a way that has nothing to do with merit."

I see. So, instead of providing for your own future generations with your wealth, it's better to "redistribute" it to complete strangers who really don't deserve it. This is even worse than any of our current systems because it's not based on anything. Money is just taken from the wealthy and given to the poor. It's out right theft.

"There is nothing wrong with adjusting those laws to distribute wealth more widely and give more skilled people an opportunity to build on what we as a society have achieved."

How are the current laws preventing any skilled worker an opportunity for success? The only laws I see preventing success are the restrictions and taxes imposed on new businesses. As an example, in Michigan (and a few other states), businesses are taxes on their gross rather than their net income.

"Hard work will make you a decent living, but beyond that you need a significant amount of luck."

I hate this line of thinking the most. It's used as an excuse for laziness and a way to cut down successful people.

There are opportunities all around us (the luck). Without skill, most people won't have any idea what do or how to capitalize on them. Most people also aren't willing to put the amount of work it actually takes to be successful. Success takes sacrifice.
I literally cannot tell it is running anymore, particularly for days where I am on the computer continuously. Sometimes if I turn on the machine for the first time late the flash of yellow reminds me this was not the way it always worked, but that is about it.
Was [Hitler|Jesus|Muhammad]...

http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=was+X&...
There is no cost in a system that has no meaningful value.
Compared to me, most people ARE dumb, in my area of expertise.

What's that you say? Step out of my area of expertise?

No.
Best of breed flow based/pipeline programming in Python
For a more complete opt-out than the NAI tool (and a bookmark to remember and update them) try http://www.privacychoice.org
> You take away signs entirely the novelty wears off and people go back to driving like assholes.

[citation needed]
You will get used to it and if you're ever up before dawn and see it change to blue again you'll be even more weirded out. The hardest part is explaining to other people, but even they've stopped noticing.

PS And yes, it lets me get tired at night easier. I physically notice if I disable it for a game or movie.
Your rebuttal appears to be unsubstantiated. I did some brief googling to see if I could find evidence one way or the other and came up with the article mentioned but little else in terms of studies or stats. Interesting theory though.
All the information they supposedly gathered about me was wrong. They think I'm a decade older than I am, that I live in a city I've never lived in and it lists my interests as electronics, charity, and current events, which is laughably general.
Yeah. I'm in the middle of the woods, helpless, surrounded by a bunch of naked men and women. Obviously my first instinct is to laugh at the only people that can keep me alive. :)
I am constantly negative and I have 22,000 karma points. It must be something else.
I'm doing a project in which I live in a different neighborhood in New York City with different people every week. I guess I'd rather see this go to the Africa nutrition society but I'd love to improve the site and do some cool things with maps / linking to specific posts.

The site is on tumblr right now at http://thenycnomad.tumblr.com.

Thanks!