skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can I see a functional implementation just for educational purposes here? I don't understand really because I have casted things in C like that before (not in lieu of atoi() with (int) char as shown, but other datatypes) and because in my experience, when I have a read out a string, I have not gotten an ASCII keycode, but the inputted character. Most of my C experience has been on existing open-source projects, so maybe they'd already implemented stuff that glossed over all this.

That said, I don't really understand why this should be a consideration for the programmer at all. C's type system seems to get in the way and slow things down almost as much as it helps (again, limited C experience here) and I don't think that's how these things should work.
Twitter via e-mail
I've been looking for a client that can access Twitter via e-mail -- in a convenient way. I didn't want too many emails, so it would have to be summarised. And I wanted the ability to reply.

Couldn't find one, so I wrote one at http://www.mixamail.com/

My reason was that I have e-mail but no Internet access on my BlackBerry.

Just wondering: is this a problem anyone else faces? What workarounds have you used?
I wish they provided an option for the datastore to be even less of an RDBMS, but much faster. I suspect a lot of the current write latency is due to the transactional guarantees they provide. Just give us access to the raw bigtable, please! :)
This is off-topic for programming, not exactly HN-fodder, but I guarantee these books will help you in your career [and are easy reading to boot]:

The Goal - by Eliyahu Goldratt

Never Eat Alone - by Keith Ferrazzi
I see, thanks c1sc0.
I will note though that New Zealand is part of the tax planning strategy that Google uses to save. They've recently been destroyed by the PR machine for doing this, but its honestly pretty common. I'm constantly hearing and learning about new ways to leverage laws between federal, state and international tax rules to do the same.
Go Patriots!

But .. are you sure you found it difficult going from Java to Objective-C?

You also mention a flash-light app as one of your projects .. why is that significant?

Then you mention working with "multiple views" .. are you sure you're comfortable programming? I can't think of a situation where that might be topical or worth mentioning.

This is not about work or income, it's about basic skill. I think you should take a month off an learn more programming.

I am saying this because nobody should "get more comfortable" with Objective-C over 2 years. 2-weeks, at most.

Sorry if I sound rude or mean, I don't intend to. But everything you said above screams non-programmer. You might be a CS major, but certainly not a coder.
Arrington. I don't think he is sharing it though.
Speaking of offers of assistance, if any (US citizen, non-felon, responsible, fairly competent, preferably either prior service or at least compatible with the military in terms of putting up with bureaucracy) wants help getting into DoD contracting (sysadmin or development), I'd be happy to provide advice. I'm no longer actively contracting, but working on a tech company which will have DoD clients, but I still know a lot of people. Deployed or stateside. ryan.lackey@gmail.com.
IPhone,so cheap??
I want to buy a phone, a friend recommended me this phone:
Looks good, it's style, like iPhone 4,
However, its price is so cheap,
I doubt it.
It is the real iPhone 4?
That's honestly more of a semantics question. The IRS doesn't appreciate it but, they're not going to kill you for it. Whatever you spend on coffee is only going to be 50% deductible under meals and entertainment, so don't worry about it.
I went to the site, and I had to watch the video twice before I got it.

Ok, it's a not really a social network like Facebook (that's what I immediately think when I hear social network). It's more like Reddit or Digg, but with the comments embedded in whatever page you're looking at. Am I right?

A few comments:

1. That video isn't really helping your cause. The fact that it's the only source of information about Weblerr combined with the fact that I had to watch it twice to have any idea what it was is a problem. The video goes for 1:17, and there's literally only 5 seconds of it that tells me anything.

2. With so little information about it, I'm not going to hand over my details. I have questions - do I have to download anything? What browsers does it work with? Does it tie into any other social networks? Do sites have to support it before I can comment on them? What does the UI really look like? etc.

3. You have the very serious disadvantage that you're competing against established competitors (Reddit/Digg/Twitter) that have thousands or millions of users.

In general, probably a nice idea, but you're really just embedding Reddit/Digg/Twitter into the original page. I'm sure there are plugins that'll do that for Firefox and Chrome already.
How about Burst.net?

http://www.nocster.net/sale.shtml

You can get a quad-core, with 8GB of RAM and 1TB of disk for less than $100.
Grab the tarball from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pylibpcap/pylibpcap... and then "pip install pylibpcap-0.6.2.tar.gz"

You'll need the Apple Developer tools / XCode first.
Yes, that is what I was complaining about. An alternative, consistent with 'at', could be 'every':

*every 2s ls*

*echo "ls" | every 5m

For readability, I would then drop the default for the time interval; the command without the time interval (every ls) reads awfully.

And yes, that first way of specifying what to repeat is different from the way at does it. I am not sure I would want to follow 'at' in that respect.
Still cheaper than a single license for a single developer for a single platform for QT.

hmm, Lisp or C++.
> Nobody walks past a vacant block in a prime real estate location and goes "bastards, if they weren't squatting that land, I could snap it up".

For me the annoyance comes from the fact that most of the parcels of land that are owned are actively being used for something, while it seems most of the domains in existence are owned by these squatter bastards.
YouTube - RepInteractiveLLC's Channel
Repinteractive.com is an online marketing company that specializes in the production of New Media Commercials™. It creates and assists in developing marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns. It’s also provides an array of marketing and advertising services including digital marketing, traditional public relations and social media consulting.
For more please visit: - http://www.youtube.com/user/RepInteractiveLLC/
This is a Sony-Ericsson product, not a Sony product. I don't know if Sony-Ericsson has ever used Memory Sticks in their products. Certainly non of them have for quite a while.
One thing that I always go back to Firebug is for the 'Persist' mode on the Network tab. In case your server side code is redirecting to some other page or site (payments etc) you need to see what was passed to the server and what redirection loops is it going through etc.

Another thing that I haven't found Chrome to be able to do is show me events in the DOM tree (I admit I need FireQuery to do that). That really helps you figure out what events are associated with a particular DOM element.
It's most certainly not the approach I take to learning. It is, however, the approach I take towards the conical "I disagree with Paul Graham" blog posts. Why? Because everyone's a critic. If the critic in question doesn't demonstrate a general understanding of the subject matter I do not invest my time. In this case, it was a misreading of an essay, but it really could be anything. I apply this approach to critics of all kinds. Do I apply this approach to published essayists or programmers with well known software? Not usually, because getting published or becoming well known is a sort of vetting in itself. But a vetting process is certainly necessary for blog posts on criticism or some random repository on Github. There just isn't enough time in the day to dive into things that don't have a solid foundation. Why would I read a 5000 line Ruby program whose initial functions are written poorly? At best I'll end with one or two nice tricks and a large headache.
Try 100tb (formerly known as 10tb) http://www.100tb.com/

I was with them for a while and they are rock solid. Servers are hosted at Softlayer datacenters.
Some really amazing ideas in there, it's still quite young and the API may change, but it's already helpful!
I have a basic proof-of-concept workaround to prevent Firesheep and other HTTP Sniffers from seeing data sent from Client -> Server and Server -> Client. I will announce it here when I get enough time to get it to properly work.

Since the concept is so ridiculously simple, I'm sure anyone can trivially implement it. The only issue is that it needs HTML5 Local Storage to work.

1. HTML rendered by the server has a small piece of code to generate an RSA Key Pair on the client using Javascript.
2. The randomly generated keypair is stored on the Client using the HTML5 Local storage mechanism.
3. For every request that the client sends the server, it sends the RSA Public key along with it. Also, the Server's Public Key is known by the client, and all outgoing data is encrypted.

The heavy work is already done, but by leveraging Local Storage and enhanced Javascript Capabilities, it is trivial to create a pseudo SSL functionality. This also deals with the issue of requirement of Static IPs, and other limitations of SSL.

Of course, this won't mean that the entire Website will be secure. It'll be quite trivial to create a small script to force all Form Data to get encrypted with the Server's public key - thus making sure that atleast your Passwords aren't transmitted in Plaintext.

In fact, with my current startup's application, the user's Password would never even _leave_ the client machine. Javascript would perform an MD5 hash, and the server treats that as the client's password. The issue with this is that you'll need JS active on all browsers for it to work.
While I understand what you're saying, the problem with terms like that is that they shut down rational thought for many people.

It's by no means the only such term, though: 'Republican' and 'Democrat' have the same kind of effect for a very large percentage of the problem with thoughts equivalent to, "Oh, he's an X. That tells me all I need to know about him and I don't have to know anything else."
Thank you so much, I have dropped you a mail for some design advice.
The issue with all of those is that they are different than '@' and '#': they aren't full-height characters that fill up most of the space, they have a lot of white space. Other ones that seem to have that same (desired?) property are '$', '&', and '%' -- maybe one of those would be better.

However, that negates your point about resembling the original link, so I'm not sure if they are better.
Did it actually make any claims?

It seemed to me that it answered the question "When?" and completely sidestepped "How?", in any real terms.
> I hate being the city snob, but are we really cheering on the incoming mass of people that are OK with using resistive touch screen onto our apps/websites?

Yes, because until capacitives drop in price enough to make resistives utterly redundant, devices like this mean that they're going to represent 80% of the market (well, for some markets. Markets which it would be foolish to ignore). The people who have iPads now are lead users. Give it six months to a year, and the mainstream will catch up; the vast majority won't be buying iPads because they're seen (and priced) as premium products.

Besides, modern resistives don't have to be that bad. The one on my Nokia N900 is more than usable, and I have no issues whipping the stylus out for detail work.

Unless we explicitly opt out of being accessible to the mass market, it's incumbent on us to make our apps and websites work well for as many types of interface as possible. If the flick-and-stop gesture for contact searching doesn't work well on the majority of devices, then we need to find something which does. Just because Apple have picked something they can uniformly implement across their range doesn't naturally make it the best option for everyone; in fact, they're more likely to pick something that only they can implement well as a differentiator.
Regarding the time difference you might think of offering freelancers the option to highlight when they ARE available for calls by setting up a) Calling times b) Their current desire for calls.

I.e Bob might be looking for a job and is willing to accept calls between 12pm and 1pm, but not at 3am.

Or Jane may already have enough leads and does not want to accept any calls (too busy) but normally is available between 3pm and 4pm.
We do exactly the same thing -- data-sensitive requests sent over HTTPS with a secure cookie, normal browsing over HTTP. At this point it seems difficult to implement site-wide SSL (CDN issues, browser bugs, overhead in SSL).

It seems like an important area of development for the web community to improve the tools and services available to make SSL on regular sites easier to implement. Yes, it's easy to turn on SSL, but there's a lot of nuance in a good implementation.
It seems that you have not implemented any in-page SEO.

* You have no description meta in any page (even at the home page). Help the search engines to show a good snippet of your page by adding it.

* The urls of the particular listings look like http://tekbob.com/freelancer/68573 Would be much better (and descriptive) if you had something like http://tekbob.com/freelancer/experienced-rails-mongodb-devel...

* I haven't found a single <h1> element in the whole website. Give some meaning to your markup, and start using descriptive tags. <h1>, <h2>, <th>, <strong> will help the spiders understand what are the important things in the page.

* None of your image seem to have an 'alt' or 'title' attribute. You should add these attributes to all your images, both for spiders, and for people that can not see your images.

* It would help your users (and the spiders) if you add some pages with all the tags or categories that you have. If they are too many, use at least a tag cloud.

* It seems that there's no robots.txt or sitemap.xml.

* Using YSlow on your page give also a number of hints of basic improvements to do (combine your js and css, enable gzip in your server, ...)

Also, there is no "About us", "FAQ", "Contact" or any of the usual sections that a user may want to check before posting a listing, or using your site, to see who is behind the site and whether you are serious or not.

Having a field that says when did the freelancer joined, how many contacts he has actually answered and whether he is active or not would also be nice, in my opinion. There's plenty of listing sites out there with a few entries that you do not know if are still active, or stale. They could have been entered 4 years ago, for all you know.

[Edited the format, to make it easier to read]
I wouldn't be surprised if the product design spec was a stretched-out image of an iPad :-)
It seems like you misunderstand my comment. The idea I'm getting at is that it's usually something else besides the programming that is the bottleneck, not that bottlenecks don't exist. You're going to hit architectural and database issues long before you hit Ruby's GC in most applications.
Download the 1 or 2 books you need for the day and viola, no connection needed.
Bill Gates, giving a commencement speech at Harvard:

My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/060807-gates-commencem...
That's definitely the plan! We'll let people set their hours. If you call off hours, it'll tell you to call later.

And we'll also provide an option to "delist" yourself temporarily while you are too busy and don't want more work.

Thanks for the suggestions!
I feel something that might be in the neighborhood of what you're describing, but it's different. It's more "Why haven't I figured out a strategy for helping more people get closer to where I am?"

I have the benefit of being guilt-free overall. Statistically, I have no good reason to be anywhere close to where I am. So many hispanic kids end up involved in gangs, in jail, on drugs, or worse. My cousin, for example. Is dead. With a d.

So how did I beat the numbers? I got lucky because even though my mom got pregnant with me at 20 (common) she worked extremely hard (outlier), showed me the right way to go about living my life (extreme outlier), and then when I got old enough, I took over. Pushed hard, dreamed big, worked a lot, and was enough of a pain in the ass to get toward the career I want. I have my mom, computers and the internet to thank for everything meaningful I have today.

Still, I won the ovarian lottery in that I was born in North America in a country whose baseline standard of living is luxurious from a global perspective. So I feel a deep and abiding duty to advance the human condition in such a way that a larger percentage of other people get access to the silver bullet that cures all human bullshit: education.

Education is how we get everyone on its feet. I don't know how, yet. But fixing education is key to giving everyone who wants it a chance to be where I am today. Without the opportunity to learn, I'd be in jail, shooting up, or stuck in a dead-end job with no hope.

There's got to be a way to get more people on that train.
Georgian designer has created the concept of iPhone 6
All MacBooks have the same size keyboard. From the 11" MacBook Air to the 17" MacBook Pro. Same size keyboard.

The size of the keyboard has never been an issue for me, IMHO it comes down to screen real estate -- which is why my last machine isn't a MacBook at all, but an iMac 27" (my iPad provides most of the portability I need).
"Knowing what to build" is fine for technical people who are building a simple web based tool which they'll use themselves. However, this doesn't generalise to building software for complex industries.

As an example, a few years ago I was advising a company who wanted to automate the calculation of tax. You would have thought that this was easy, but in fact it's the most complex thing ever and you need that non-technical specialist domain knowledge. (You know you're in for a fun ride when you ask a question and the answer is "we're not sure, but we've booked flights to Italy to go and ask the authorities there".)

I think I have missed out a load of qualifiers in my previous comments. Here they are:

* The skills required for a startup will probably be spread out over many people.

* There's no hard and fast rule about which skills anyone will have.

* Technical people might be good at sales.

* "Non-technical" people might not be good at sales.

* "Knowing what to build" and "able to sell" are skills which may or may not be found in the same person.

* Knowing what to build might be a skill of any of your founders have, depending on their experience in the market.

There's probably a few more. I suppose this is the trouble with trying to write concise generally true comments, you forget to cover all the edge cases.
I remember it took me a dozen times of carefully reading explanations like this before I finally got what "functional" meant... I'll try to provide an explanation my former self would have easily got.

lambda x: x+1

If you only program with lambda's like these, your program is functional.

def dosomething(x):
y = x + 3 # y is a global variable
return x + 1

As soon as you have a function like this, your program is no longer 100% functional.

The dosomething function modified `state` when it changed a global variable. Another function that modifies state is "print()". Generally any function that returns nothing is almost certainly going to modify state outside of it. (Otherwise what is the function for?)

State is memory that is not `local` to the function itself.

def dosomething(x):
y = x + 3 # y is a local variable
return x + 1

The dosomething function here is functional, because the only `state` it modified was local to the function.

There you have it.
Interesting point: have Apple ever completely misjudged a product price point and moved it rather than redesigning the product? I'm not enough of a student of their history to know any examples.
1. I explained later that expected value is not what matters, but rate of return. (And obviously the sentence
about Google, as phrased, is a joke. Taken literally it would imply every other company had an expected value of zero. If I believed that I would be wasting my time with YC.)

2. Whether programs process strings and whether they're visible in your source code are separate questions.

3. That passage explains my thinking as I was figuring out the part I explained next.

4. There is definitely a subset of opportunistic investors whose motives and character deserve to be impugned. As I said, it's a proper subset of those who invest late.
This looks wonderful, especially the polishing they have been doing to the IDE. Unfortunately, it's also way outside of my price range.
Find a medium sized piece of code in a language that you already know. Pick code that is that is "good" well written "tight" code that is already written by someone else.

Spend a couple of weeks getting to fully understand how the code works. Then spend some time playing with your own modifications to it. Work on making it do something new and unique. Then once you are comfortable with it, pick another piece of medium sized "tight" code and do it again.

Pick something of a size that that seems challenging to you personally. Be it a single dll or an entire OOP application. Pick something challenging, but not so big that you cannot get a hold of it in your brain and learn from it in a couple of weeks.

After three or four of these self directed learning exercises you should have a better understanding of how to write "tight" code.

At that point, (with some additional experience under your belt) pick up an advanced programming guide for the language you have been studying and read it cover to cover.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/tight+code
I've my work cut out when I wake up. Thanks a lot for the thorough feedback. I really appreciate it!
No, none. I never went past General Relativity in school but I read a few textbooks on my own. Don't take anything I say with authority.
you should just use vworker(formerly rentacoder). I don't think we can beat them for your particular use case :)
I did check top and I can see that Netbeans and VirtualBox are the hogs. However, even after quitting them I still have sluggish responsiveness.
I have been searching the web and passing out my resume like a newsletter, but I have yet to land anything to follow my current contract.

Get away from the computer and start networking while you still have time.

Every worthwhile contract and client I've had came from someone I knew or met, whether through friends or from entrepreneur events and developer meetups. If you don't have the direct contacts with companies that need work done, make friends with other, more established, developers who do, and subcontract for them.

Also, perhaps others' experiences differ, but since I left engineering for web development, I've not had a single contract that started with a resume. I would think that if you showed people the apps you've built, your resume would be moot.
Sounds interesting. Can you offer more details of your setup and tools?