skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These change requests are (mostly) from one particular perspective, so it ignores some other problems from the worker's perspective; namely, that the market hasn't quite settled on reasonable rates for work, and that a worker has insufficient protection from exploitive work providers. These are also serious problems that could hinder it as a platform.
I sincerely doubt google is working on their own Python VM, given they've invested some amount of resources in PyPy in the past, and most recently Unladen Swallow (merging into Python 3).
This is my suggestion to anyone looking to have a tech product developed. Find a good developer don't skimp, if you do you will live with it for a very long time and spend multitudes more in maintenance (if the project does not fail outright) than if you had it done right in the first place. If you need to save money, here is how I alway recommend that people do it. Hire that good developer have them build the site and then have them transition the ongoing maintenance of the site to an offshore team. Maintenance cost you far more in the long run. This way, you get the product of a good developer while saving in the long run. As well a good developer is going to do far better than you in identifying a quality offshoring resource. They will be better suited to determine the best person that handle that ongoing maintenance. Most of your good developer are in such high demand that they will relish the fact that they will not be on the hook to maintain the product and you will find the more and more quality developers have existing relationships with an offshore developer that they forward maintenance gigs to.
Completely agree with his sentiment regarding TurkIt and the prospect of making iterative tasks easily accessible to the masses. Read some of the papers that Greg Little has put out from MIT to open up your eyes to some advanced uses of Mechanical Turk.

Using the RTurk gem and my recently released Turkee gem ( http://github.com/aantix/turkee ), I've been able to quickly throw together a demo Rails application that allows Turkers to vote on previous Turker submissions or use other turker's submissions as the basis of their own own submission.

With my experience under this type of interface most Turkers will vote for one of the previous submissions but if you offer a small bonus for the highest voted submission, more turkers will take a chance at submitting something original (even if it's a trivial 50 cents bonus).

The demo's code is available under my github account (aantix/Turkee-Iterator). Here's some of screenshots of my demo; the top image shows my initial parameters for setting up my Turkee task. The second screen shows the responses I received from the Turkers. The third screen shows the form that was presented to the Turkers (either vote or submit a joke).

http://imgur.com/13rCM.png

http://imgur.com/ghveH.png

http://imgur.com/229uc.png

Right now I am writing a game that generates content using a couple iterative approaches to content generation with Mechanical Turk (hence my interest in this area).

Don't hesitate to drop me a line if you have any problems with getting my demo running.
That's an awesome link, thanks. Still a little baffled about what to do with these colors, but that tool is nice.
One of the lucky ones ;)
Fox News vs Media Matters vs NPR
I think the most interesting debate in this thread is the tone of the OP.

I've had some much worse experiences with certain clients, but I wouldn't mention them online with such specificity, let alone in the alcove of fervent followers.
Why not create a new URL handler that takes an app-specific user ID that redirects to the correct profile page only if the logged-in user has permission to view the page?

That way, you would normally only be able to see what the world would see; but if you try to view your or your friend's profile, it's fluid?
I think you covered all my personal fears about starting my own app.

[edit] Wait. You missed having yourself or your family getting sick. Or maybe you live someplace with socialized health care.
if you think you can earn money without the government.
On one hand you have a huge market, ripe for disruption, with high barriers to entry. Seems perfect for a startup.

On the other hand, you have these enormous obstacles: upfront payments, minimum revenue guarantees, arcane and complicated reporting and security requirements, and strange nuances and differences in costs based on how you are using the music. It's a major pain in the ass.

All of this takes time away from building something people want. If you are lucky enough to find your product-market fit, the barrier to entry will keep competitors away and you'll have a huge head-start.
It is sad that Hugunin isn't involved with IronPython any more. But it may be good news for the IronPython and IronRuby community that Microsoft no longer has the reins. Currently it is impossible to contribute back code, which destroys any community. Moving to a fully open model seems like a step forward.

I have two questions though. What is Microsoft's commitment to the DLR and where does the IE9 Chakra Javascript engine fit into the .NET ecosystem. Will non-DLR Javascript be Microsoft's dynamic language of choice or will it say purely in the browser?
"Have a fucking great idea"

Everybody thinks their idea is great. Even you thought your idea was great, right? You might be better off trying to growing your personal brand in addition to launching a company. If you have a name for yourself, it should be easier to get YC's and TC's attention.I'm sure if one of the famous HNers launched something, people would notice (and they have)
The comment on the fabs is not exactly true. If Intel has maxed its fab capacity on higher margin chips, then producing lower margin Atoms is undesirable. If there is fab capacity remaining after producing sufficient quantities of the other chips to meet market demand, then it is advantageous to manufacture the lower margin chips. There is nothing lower margin than an idle fab.
It seems like this would be a reasonable introduction to neural network programming (while PyBrain contains code for other classifiers, the site also suggests that this is mainly for comparative purposes). If you were more concerned about performance, it seems like it might be better to check out libfann.

I couldn't easily find comparative benchmarks, so this opinion is just based on the documentation of the two libraries and what they say about themselves. If I have some free time this week (hah!) I'll throw together a quick and dirty performance comparison.
PagerDuty has been acting as my alarm clock for the last few weeks and has performed admirably. Good for them, bad for me and my servers.
This is a good guide, but note that he said zero downtime deployment

That imposes an additional constraint - the new code needs to be backwards compatible (while any data migration scripts are running), and - in a clustered environment - it needs to be able to deal with the case where old and new code bases and databases are available and running simultaneously.
Piracy does lead the British to dominate the American literacy market when there was no foreign copyright recognized. Some even get paid. Charles Dicken doesn't like it though.

American writers were the one freaked out by all those competition.
Calling it error handling was actually a deliberate choice: since defer/panic/recover isn't an exception mechanism, it wouldn't have made sense to call it one.

What I've read about it so far is the original "Proposal for an exception-like mechanism" thread on the golang-nuts group [1]; and the "Panic, defer and recover" article referenced in the Go FAQ [2]. If any of the stuff below is misinformed, or just plain wrong, I'd love to hear: Go is a language that I want to like.

So now the things I object to:

With Go's model, as I understand it, you can call panic with an arbitrary value. To handle that reliably, your deferred block has to check the type and dispatch to appropriate handler code yourself. That's something you get for free with exceptions, where you can generally provide separate catch blocks for different types of exception.

When you recover from a panic, the execution of your function is over. So if you have two operations which can panic and you want to be sure both are attempted, you have to wrap each one in a separate function. It also means the only way to tell if a function panicked (in case you need to do further cleanup, say) is by checking the return code - and you'd better hope that everyone is following sensible conventions for what they return there.

That leads to another point: Go encourages checking return codes to see if a function failed, whether or not there was a panic. One of the big advances from exceptions, to my mind, was that you no longer had to mingle control flow information with application data. Keeping the two separate makes it easier to write reliable software because it's more self-documenting.

On a more subjective note, I find the syntax really clunky. The examples I've seen all seem to wrap the handler code in an anonymous function:
defer func() { ... }()
I imagine it would get pretty noisy if you were registering several handlers that way (much like event handlers in Java were).

I don't necessarily think exceptions are perfect either, just that Go's alternative seems like a step backward. But I'd actually quite like to be shown that I'm wrong about this.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr...;
[2] http://blog.golang.org/2010/08/defer-panic-and-recover.html
Not the whole of Australia; NSW is fine, it's Queensland that needs to be made more habitable. Start by removing the Maroons; some toxic rocks found there.
It’s not just manufacturing, either. Automated call centers are replacing customer-service agents. Automated checkout stations are replacing grocery-store clerks. When the science of computer vision advances sufficiently, we’ll have algorithms, not humans, evaluating X-rays at airport security checkpoints and screening user-generated content for sites like Facebook.

Of course, call center operator and grocery clerk and X-ray screener were never middle-class jobs anyway (and screening user-generated content on facebook was never a job at all).

There is a genuine problem here, though. As technology advances there is less and less that non-smart people can usefully do. Ten thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, one hundred years ago, there were plenty of useful occupations that could be usefully done with an IQ of 80. But with these increasingly automated, what are the millions of people born with an IQ of 80 supposed to do?

My solution, involving attempting to cut down on the number of such people who are born, is unfortunately rather politically unpopular.
For some reason it always astonishes me how incredibly reactionary geeks are. We're supposed to be the neophiles.

Listen: for the first time in history, ordinary people are actually using computers, every day, in their real lives, and we're kicking and screaming as hard as we can against the systems that have made that the case.

The future is different from the past. The coders who are empowering creativity on iOS (and similar devices) aren't the ones whining about how hard it is. Get over your ridiculous nostalgia, stop bitching, and write BASIC for the 21st century.
This is a sad attempt to reconcile with the community.

It's hardly a proposal when they already seem intent on following through with this plan. It's not exactly an RFC.

Not to mention the flaws present pointed out by the other commenters...
This looks like a great tool for corporate IT departments too. From their website (http://www.pagerduty.com), I like how it works with any monitoring system as long as the tool can send email. That would make it easy to integrate.
Hey man, that sucks. But you picked a great place to rant -- most of us have been in this boat before :-)

FWIW, word-of-mouth marketing usually feels like a total crapshoot. Topical, often trivial ideas seem to do the best. And honestly Techcrunch doesn't help as much as you may think. They're good for a spike of 5-10k users, but much more important is your willingness to support an unpopular product for another 6-12 months. Because it will be unpopular. :-p

You might not feel comfortable linking to your company here but I'd love to see what you're working on. I put my email address in my profile, maybe I can offer some feedback.
I couldn't agree more. A thought I've had in my head for years but never articulated it quite this well.
As I once said, "Originality is the art of concealing your sources."
The pager duty guys are great.
I had the pleasure of meeting them at the reception last week.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but an engineer is a legal designation. Would you call Dr. Dre a doctor?
Rapleaf is selling your identity
Prices shouldn't follow Moore's law, they should follow demand.
Google is a combination of qualitative user research for the initial design backed by quantitative analysis upon release.
I think the relative supply and demand are going to determine prices here, just like any other market. A price floor could be imposed, but this would likely price some work out of the market or lead to other work-arounds as trading partners try to avoid constraints.

As far as protecting workers, in a survey I ran last year, there wasn't any evidence that workers on MTurk feel more exploited by their online bosses compared to their offline bosses:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24646/

Though obviously those that feel particularly mistreated could be selecting out of the market.
However, if x86 has neither a process or a compatibility advantage, then even a tiny technical disadvantage turns into a tiny extra cost, which can be important for high volume chips.

Not true.

The marginal cost of pretty much anything on a chip itself is close to zero. For example, most 3 core chips are actually 4 core chips with one disabled. Putting the extra silicon on the chip is effectively free.

The money goes in the investment in the factory and the R&D, NOT the raw materials or production costs.
Assuming that this is due to additional anticipated load and worries about agreements with cable/satellite providers.
"Oh, about scalas, clojures and rubies - they really, really don't matter."

This is the only thing here I agree with.

TC is rather useless in the grand scheme of things. If not being able to get on TC is your marketing strategy then you need to rethink it.

Much of PR is about having the right connections. This doesn't mean you must have grabbed a beer with Arrington before but just having met and chatted briefly with a writer irl is helpful in getting PR
No wonder nobody noticed you...if your native language is not English, if your name sounds strange and if you are not living in US (read Silicon Valley) then good luck! Because you need a ton to get PR, investors and all that stuff.

Unfortunately, that's how it works and if somebody says it's not true they are not belonging in your category.
Interesting, I thought pg had said the unicode support came after the underlying scheme system started supporting it, which came later. I guess I'm mistaken about that.
[..] just start a blog. Nope, that's also not for you. Because blogging is a nearly full-time occupation, so don't expect to gain readership with that little precious time you have left from coding your product and working your day job. Successful blogs are written by well-funded competitors who don't have to code 18 hours a day and have capital to keep staff on payroll to blog/tweet/whatever and make as much attention-grabbing noise as possible.

True for you and many others but not a universal truth by a long shot. Blogging is far from a time consuming activity if you're both a reasonable writer and neck deep in the subject matter. Let's just take an example that sat on the front page of HN for most of today:

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2010/10/21/why-we-dont-sch...

232 words. And as my own blog was on the front page a similar length of time today, I'm confident they got at least 2000 pageviews from that (I got 5000) and I know I've seen several posts of theirs do well here. Yet if you check their blog, they have several posts per month at most, none are very long or technical.

Other startups like SeatGeek and MailChimp nail the blogging in a similar way. There's no way they're not getting some serious exposure with them, yet it seems in most cases it's regular techs updating the blog and not some team of "noise" generating PR flacks.
It doesn't cost $50 to buy the tools you need to open any hardware:

http://www.ecrater.com/p/6143994/security-bits-set-tamper-pr...
What the UID conceals
"so after about a year of coding we still managed to pull off a nice and usable MVP"

"In just 8 months without any funding we went from zero to a beautiful system, signed up a couple of early customers by attending local meetups and events, and prepared for a Big Day."

That is your first and foremost problem. You cannot go into a cave and develop your product with no significant marketing or at least a soft launch. You're going to end up building the wrong thing (or even worse, find out the idea was crap all along).

You need to launch an MVP ASAP. And a lot of times, that MVP is only just a landing page (with no other functionality)! If you don't get any signups or excitement, that is reason to pause.
I've spent about $6,000,000 on adwords in 2010 six to eight cents at a time, and you're better than you think at it.
I suppose so, but mobile games and games on Facebook are a different breed, the distribution mechanisms are very different.
Thanks! My app was in that datacenter too. I mean, it had replicated mongodb instances, and well balanced app servers, and nodes going away have no discernable affect on users. Turns out tho, that with all that distributed engineering, I didn't find out that the hosting company doesn't put your nodes in various data-centers. That tornado would have taken down my service during peak hours.

I know you will try to write that off as a "you get what you diserve" but I challenge you to go ask people if their apps would survive a tornado to the data-center. Many of them will say "sure its in the cloud!" Then drop the killer question on them... "How many different data centers are your nodes running on right now". Most will say "i dont know". Some will say "My host has many data centers" (note this doesn't answer the question). A few will actually have done the footwork.

Also, the scenario you describe is as easily mitigated with hot failovers and offsite backups. This probably qualifies as distributed engineering, but only is only the same as the above discussions in the most pedantic senses.
Incoming Governors Shifting State focus to Small Business and Startups
That's the Silicon Valley bias. You hear about the successes but rarely the failures (which comprise the majority). The problem is that you can "keep trying" to the grave.

My best advice to everyone is start as early as you can to buy time :)
You can love Apple products and hate Apple policies.
Ideakick: a startup event to pitch ideas for new companies
Yeah, even if a client didn't pay I don't think I would go this route... but since he did pay, this is just plain dumb. I've seen a company spend 3+ million on switching to an ERP system only to switch back. Things change and that is just how it is.
From my experience in running Debian on ARM, I can say that the software difference is really non-existence. Any of the normal Debian OSS software works fine.. I did not run into any problems with software not working except for the closed source programs that didn't have ARM packages. I really can't imagine the architecture shift being that big of a problem, as I'm assuming the bulk of the work for ARM with Debian was just recompiling packages.. I had a working XFCE desktop with common packages like Iceweasel (Firefox), OpenOffice.org, GIMP, and so on that was just as easy to set up as x86.
Data-Driven, Recursive Interfaces for Graph Data
He's a perstent one :)
The music industry is rife with opportunity, in particular doing everything you can to kill the traditional label system. New ticketing methods, new distribution methods, new marketing methods, new ways to discover music. Dealing with label controlled music is the nasty bit (unless you are Pandora).
Given the tone of your post I can't tell whether you're genuine or just trolling, but see my reply to papaf (it was just below, at time of writing) for more details about what I think is broken in it, if you're interested.

Of course if you are trolling, then congratulations on getting a response from me.
In addition: Extend Rosetta to translate x86 to ARM.
Thanks for info, I really had no idea. Ustream just, well, seemed like they are BIG (good marketing then). I have posted this ~17 days ago, but I had no response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755458

I even emailed you guys, but got no response whatsoever. Ustream and Livestream both responded.
Plastics are good for certain products
I like to have a web app launch the upgrade script. That way I can log in from my fone and start the upgrade right before I get on the plane. Whats the point in having minions if they can't finish the details for you?
np, and thanks - since I don't really know how to use google trends properly.
My main issue with Mturk is not being able to sign up as a non-US company.

It's not that I'm angry at Amazon or anything, I just wish that they would come to the conclusion that our money is just as green as everyone elses.
http://xkcd.com/591/

Randall always seems to have a comic to fit the occasion.
Chromeless: Build your own browser
As far as clients go, Notch still paid them for work they are not going to use. That's still pretty good. Notch could have communicated better, but nonetheless that doesn't excuse the unprofessional tone of the OP. I don't feel there was any need for them to go public like this unless they were specifically asked.
This is exactly correct. We shouldn't pigeonhole music startups in general, it's the ones that require direct contact with the dinosaurs of the industry or are right in the crosshairs of litigation that could be in trouble. Investments in SoundCloud and The Echo Nest are a signal that there's a lot of room for innovation yet to come.
It may be frustrating to lose a cool project/client like this but in the end it was just a job and they got paid to do it. Not a big deal IMO.
Yeah it doesn't set a good precedent for future customers.

"Oh that is the team that ragged on the Minecraft guy when he payed them off but didn't use their code"

Certainly would make me think twice about working with them.
From the "completely random advice" category: you should share how you're feeling with your wife. Optimism is good and healthy, but that's one of those partnerships that can be really helpful... if you let it.

I recently benefited from just that - I was debating applying to YC, decided not to due to our family situation (just bought a house, adopting one kid, fostering 2 others, own an annoying poodle) and my wife said "hey, you know what, give it a shot. We'll make it work".
HD Video Converter
As MongoDB did not exist at the time, it seems unlikely. Such things happen more than we might like, of course!

"Also, the scenario you describe is as easily mitigated with hot failovers and offsite backups."

This is a sadly wrong, though common, belief. There is exactly one way to know that a component in your infrastructure is working: you are using it. There is no such thing as a "hot failover": there are powered on machines you hope will work when you need them. Off-site backups? Definitely a good idea. Ever tested restore of a petabyte?

Here's a simple test. If you believe either of the following are true, with extremely high probability you have never done large-scale operations:

1) There exists a simple solution to a distributed systems problem.

2) "Failover", "standby", etc. infrastructure can be relied upon to work as expected.

Extreme suffering for extended periods burns away any trust one might ever have had in either of those two notions.