skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
419 Scam aimed at goverments. Probably these people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_International_Treasur...

Significant excerpt:

"The OITC proposed to invest US$150 million in a hydro-electric project in the region, subject to Ullauri placing $20,000 in a bank account in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as a deposit. She paid in the money as requested in December 2005 but several months later there was no sign of the promised millions from the OITC.[11] In mid-April 2006 Ullauri publicly denounced the OITC as a fraud and lodged a complaint against its principal, Ray Cchat Dam, and two Ecuadorians said to be its local agents.[12]"
Peter,

You may want to follow the tech in Baltimore google group as it was created to help over come this problem. The idea is to help connect the tech circle, check it out. http://groups.google.com/group/techinbaltimore
Most people are too weak (in heart, passion, time, money) to handle a web startup by themselves. Some can. Figure out what kind of person you are, then go for it.
While you're correct, IMHO, this type of post is getting more and more common too. Do none of you complainants realise that filtering is a life skill? ;)
Thanks for the feedback, the PHP is custom as for the contrast I'll work on that and I'm in the middle of trying to work out the visuals. I like the guys vs. girls aspect, maybe I'll work on that for a v2
"Stack ranking system was harmful:"

whoa! I didn't know Google practiced stack ranking. There is a lot of unnecessary stress generated at Microsoft due to this[1]. I would have thought the Google folks would be wise enough to avoid it.

As for "....
SVP response: “If you wanted to get promoted for these non-engineering tasks, move into management"

heh! How big company ish is that?
The best way to join Google these days seems to be as part of an acquired startup. Then you are at worst running out any vesting period while enjoying those free massages.

[1] http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/07/microsoft-stack-ranking...
On point 3, I'm pretty sure CA cannabis dispensaries are required to be non-profit.
I agree publishing datasets is very very important too. Often more important than code.
The earth at night - beautiful
Paul,

Come swing by the Node one of these Thursdays, we're normally open at 7:30pm and in there working all sorts of projects until we head over to Joe^2 for drinks. We love company :)
I've wasted most of my professional life tweaking various unix software to make it work. However, the typical scientific python setup proved to be too frustrating to install on OSX. The recommended solution is to just buy the Enthought distro. If I'm paying for software anyway, why is Enthought better than Matlab?
Link to the recording: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/t...
here is a free site to host your resume - hirednext.com.
you can change the resume design on the fly and update it as easily.

... and at the same time you can be included in every employer search every time and receive job offers.
He is a member of the House of Lords. This is our unelected upper house. Their actual role in legislative government is somewhat complex (though they do have a role, some of which is not exercised by convention, some of which lacks power).

But you are right; from a practical "man on the street" perspective he is not a member of "the government".
Svpply registration is open.
Why Andreessen Horowitz Just Raised $650,000,000
Cloud Python CodeRetreat (Free, this Saturday)
Google Releases mod_pagespeed for Apache
Wow, this is one of the coolest things HN has found in awhile.

It's remarkable how, time and time again, formal incentive compensation schemes are shown to cause more harm than benefit. I started paying attention when Joel Spolsky called it out 6-7 years ago, and then read Peopleware (an excellent book) which reiterates the point (and calls it "teamicide"), and then read the Harvard Business Review article ("Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work").

Why would a company as smart as Google forge ahead with schemes like this in the face of all available evidence that it's a bad idea?
For the most part, I think most journalists look at the surface layer of a front-end and their thinking/appraisal begins and ends there. They think all back-ends, solution stacks, layers, etc. are interchangeable "guts," and that the front-end is where all the difference is made.

As much as we would probably groan at that worldview, we need to keep in mind that for many of the mom 'n pop businesses out there, that often is the case. Those are the sorts of businesses that might as well pay an enterprising 13-year-old $700 to develop a turnkey solution they don't have to worry about from a financial or operational standpoint.
What about the mention of how long it took for 2.1 and 2.2 to actually roll out, after their official releases? I know in Canada, we were delayed for several months as Rogers and Telus took their sweet time pushing the upgrade from 1.6 to 2.1...

Sure you may say "77% of devices run the latest versions" but you may be in the situation where "0% of the devices in your country run the latest version" because your carrier isn't updating the OS.

That's the fragmentation I'm afraid of.
The House of Lords is the one thing I think the Founders ditched from the monarchy which had real value. We got the Supreme Court instead, which resembles a HoL from a dystopian future where only lawyers are trusted to remember the spirit of the nation.
Python is very accessible to casual programmers, so this might be one of the reasons it has been adopted by the scientific community.
Can't you instruct your bank to automate the paying?
I would think that flag-waving nationalism is almost entirely unrelated to tearing up the stadium and eating the seats.
Your first marketing hire
In both directions:
I am a budget holder and test manager on my project. I need a tool to manage tests performed by the team. I identify the tool I want to use and purchase it. I'm not the only user, but I am a user.

It's approaching Christmas. I know my wife likes running, so I buy her a pair of trainers. I'm not a user, but I am the purchaser.
I agree on this specific case but consistency with conventions shared across projects is more important.

But I don't think anybody will complain if you use either of the them whereas 160 chars long expressions with no spacing between operators and funkyCamelCasing all over the code are just show-stoppers when I want to contribute a patch to a project.
That's an odd rant. The same argument could be made for any popular author (King, Rowling, Peterson, etc).

The eBooks are priced that way because the estate is afraid of devaluing the Bond brand. (Publishers know that eBook pricing is a race to the bottom and they don't want to get there too soon.)

Bond is like Batman or Holmes. Three generations going and his adventures are still published and republished in hardback, special editions, omnibuses, and variant cover paperbacks. There's also a lucrative secondary market of neverending sequels and spinoffs.

The estate doesn't want to screw Penguin on pricing by offering an electronic version at $2 when the dead tree version is $15. That undercuts the publisher across the entire line of Bond products.
Seo company Newcastle
My startup ( http://www.gmbhnews.net ) offers a solution for dynamic sites at this point. We are working to find a way to offer the same service for static sites and have this on our developpment roadmap.
Regardless of Prop 19, WA has legalization initiatives in the hopper. We were supposed to get one on the ballot this year, but the petitioning campaign was poorly organized (and lost a lot of signatures).
Sounds good to me - I don't want to listen to all the fuss about privacy, let alone pay for it.
California’s electoral technophobia
Voted you up, since it seems apparent to me that every Western country has sportsball fanaticism.
The parliamentary system is rather different from the US political system. Notably, there is "the government" and "the opposition", which are usually (but not necessarily) the two largest parties in the parliament.

(Disclaimer: I'm Canadian. This is how it works in Canada. There are differences between the Canadian and British systems, but they are much smaller than the differences between the American and British systems).
I need DEV for design collab & feedback webapp, already got more than 450members
Hello everyone,

Eval is web app that I and my friend Haris built in few days for Forrst app contest and we definitely found a lot of people interested in using it. We got around 450 members registered in first week.
After few days I was forced to pause it because Haris had too much client work and he is leading a web design company of 10 people so that was impossible.

My idea is to build a simple and nice looking system for sharing designs and getting feedback on them.

http://www.geteval.com

Current (and very bad) design:

Stream: http://cl.ly/d5c69c453802fe169eea

New eval: http://cl.ly/d8337861dd38c1021b12

Circles: http://cl.ly/84a746f63b9d83d616b1

Logout: http://cl.ly/b2aafa4cf4d7f15ae8da

I'm a bit embarrassed with this crappy looking designs but we were just trying to finish it as soon as possible since it was for a contest. It was something like a pivot and I think it validated.

If you are interested and would like to know more details, please e-mail me on: ben(at)benpixel.com

Don't forget to include some links to your work and basic biography in few paragraphs, or just link to your site.
Was there a demo for this app you built? i couldn't find a link
Linux command line techniques: IO redirection and piping
> Why would a company as smart as Google forge ahead with schemes like this in the face of all available evidence that it's a bad idea?

My guess: because it can be algorithmized.
I had to look up "stack ranking" just now, so, for the benefit of the class:

Stack ranking means that if you have a group of 20 people, during each performance review cycle the group manager is expected to rank them from 1 to 20, and the company distributes bonuses and promotions accordingly.

That just seems completely asinine.
One important reason is that you can't be good at everything. Having someone else who can focus on skills A & B while you focus on skills C & D is nice, if you can trust the other person to be competent. Especially consider that skills A & B might be things you hate, eg paying taxes and doing bookkeeping.

Another big reason is that if I put a lot of work into a new design or a feature, I'm in the worst position to critique it. You need someone else who can provide objective feedback. Customers can do this to some extent, but it is very easy to dismiss their suggestions.

Related to that 2nd point, it is often tempting to say, "this is good enough" when you have to do all the work yourself. Having someone to push you to do better can really improve the quality of your output.
Don't take a cofounder just because pg tells you you'll need one; his advice, while awesome, doesn't always apply to bootstrapped startups.

People like to draw a distinction between funded and bootstrapped startups, including me (http://yieldthought.com/post/1156084359/single-vs-co-founder...)

The poster-child for single-founder startups is Patrick (patio11), although I don't know how many more times I can refer to him as a poster-child before he asks me to stop. Read everything he's written (http://www.kalzumeus.com/) if you're going to bootstrap something.

Another notable single founder is Gabriel Weinberg (epi0Bauqu): http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/01/will-single-foun...
I suppose that's one way it might go. Another is running into someone who is informed about the BSA's legal discrimination against atheists and gays. So some may see it and think of your character being "Christian bigot". Unlikely, I think. It may have no effect, but I think it's worth consideration.

I screen lots of resumes in hiring game programmers. Personally, it wouldn't bother me. Then again, it wouldn't help you either, because I need to know about your skills and experience. I'll figure out if you're an a-hole or a nice guy / team player on the phone, and finally in-person.
The pro-base was very split, not just dealers & growers but much of the mmj community.
Letting the principal on low interest debt increase in favour of paying off a high interest bearing one earlier, is actually a good idea financewise.
"Politicians" collectively win no matter what. Particular politicians and interest groups have varying strategies for high and low voter turnout and various vote compositions.

I fail to see what is magical about not bothering to make a move when they win either way.
Open Source Social Network for Developers
Lawyers and hackers aren't mutually exclusive.
Starting Up With a Friend is an obligatory read for everybody who considers running a company with a cofouder.

http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend...
For that matter there's nothing to stop this device having 240V AC across its pins
I'm torn between the fact that Netcraft wrote a rather large blog post taking Github to task for a simple oversight --- against the fact that there is a pervasive misconception that the HTTP cookie "Secure" flag is not a big deal. The "Secure" flag is a very big deal. You might as well not be SSL without it.
--_Clickable links:_--

http://www.geteval.com

Current design:

Stream: http://cl.ly/d5c69c453802fe169eea

New eval: http://cl.ly/d8337861dd38c1021b12

Circles: http://cl.ly/84a746f63b9d83d616b1

Logout: http://cl.ly/b2aafa4cf4d7f15ae8da
Heh. The problem with mobile phone history is that all the companies have similar acronyms. You are correct, it was NTT in Japan that was first and NMT that was second in deploying "1G" networks.
Google seems to classify self as potentially malign
The thing about readability of Perl vs. Python ... I dunno. I don't think it's the syntax itself that causes Perl to have some readability issues. Stuff like `$foo =~ s/bar/baz/g` or `join '-', split( q{ }, $a_str)` is very readable.

Context and corner cases maybe makes readability suffer. For example, what does `m///g` do in scalar vs. list context? I don't recall.
That's great for Star Trek. I'll keep interviewing technical candidates on a technical basis.
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Context: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/10/facebook-and-google.html
I'm afraid you may have missed my point...
I have no idea how the terminology is applied in the US, but in the UK, it does not include every Tom, Dick or Harry that manages to get themselves a seat in Parliament.
Call me crazy but I think that publishers should try to sell their e-books at whichever price they want to... Pirates are going to pirate, people looking for the best bargain they can by hunting around ad used book stores will do just that.
I've used XMLResume for years (using Emacs SGML mode to ensure validity when I edit it, and version control, of course). From the XML, I generate HTML, PDF, and plain text. I'm pretty sure you can even generate a Word doc if you wanted. http://kevin.scaldeferri.com/resume/
"Stack ranking means that if you have a group of 20 people, during each performance review cycle the group manager is expected to rank them from 1 to 20, and the company distributes bonuses and promotions accordingly.

That just seems completely asinine."

Worse, there is often an associated ideal distribution ("the curve") with fixed ratios for "exceeds expectations", "below expectations" and so on and managers are under pressure to conform. If you have an all superstar team, a certain number must still be in the bottom most bucket, and the bottommost 5-10 % is often let go or put on a watchlist (I am not saying this is how Google does it).

Over a few years this gets very political as you can imagine. The (bad) middle managers love this part of their jobs.
Curious, why does he end the presentation saying that a tech ladder is bad? Is the idea that they should have a management ladder, but all engineers are at the same level? That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
The usage of the term "government" in commonwealth countries, following the Westminster System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_system), refers more specifically to the executive branch (prime minister and cabinet) currently in power and not the state in general. Since the Prime Minister and his/her cabinet are merely MPs in high positions, the division between executive and legistlative in terms of personnel is not nearly as clear-cut as it is in US politics.
Spolsky's article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html
Well, seems to me the reason you'd think that is because you're stupid. It's not your fault - you were probably just treated roughly as an infant.

Wait, what's that, you don't think casting aspersions on someone's mental capacity is a valid counterargument? Well then.
"biggest mistake is still having a tech ladder"?

What specifically is this referring to? A separate career progression for techs vs managers? I thought that was desirable so you don't need to move your best engineers out of engineering positions to promote them. I fear I'm missing something.
Of course! In fact, I just discovered that The Art of the Fugue, which I believe Bach wrote toward the end of his career, really does sound better to me than his earlier stuff. Good for him for plugging stubbornly on in the genre he had mastered and which he knew best.
This would be huge cash if you affiliate-linked everything to similar products on Amazon. Are you doing that?
Context (since I had no idea what Serco meant): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serco_Group

"The Guardian has called Serco "probably the biggest company you've never heard of." "
Eventually, I mean.
It does seem asinine. Although frankly I can't think of many ways that seem much better. Do you always just give everyone on your team the exact same bonus?
Hear! Hear!
a. they can fill in holes in your startup game (biz dev, marketing, chasing funding etc).

b. Two heads are better than one, partnering with someone has shown me that I don't have the god-like monopoly on good ideas that I once thought I did.
pg, care to incorporate this in to HN? (maybe as an opt-in option)
Re: Taxes

Keep in mind the polar opposite of the power grid is that everyone keeps a personal generator they build with their own hands and continually feed fuel they gather with their own hands.

Sometimes a little ineffiency in one place allows you to be more efficient in other places. Don't knock the power grid and transitively the federal government.
That's one option. Not giving bonuses at all is another option. Tying incentive comp to business events (recruitment, customer acquisition, an A/B test and minor feature change that produces a 1% uplift, etc) is another option. Anything has to be better than going out of your way to stratify an otherwise well-functioning team.
This article doesn't even refute the idea of OS level fragmentation. They arbitrarily bundled two versions. If you look at the original data, the most share held by any single version of Android is 40.8%: <http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...; And it's not even the newest version!

The less spin-laden headline would be: "What fragmentation? 36% of devices run Android 2.2."
How online training can benefit your brand
The NFL is (currently) the exact opposite of what you describe. Draftees entering the league right now earn disproportionately higher amounts than many veterans, and it is a major point of contention in the upcoming CBA bargaining.
There are some very interesting filters:

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/filters.html

It will automatically strip inline css and js out of a html page and then create links to an external version. It will automatically set very long cache times. It minifies css and javascript on the fly, strips whitespace and comments from the html.

Then for images, it automatically rescales them, strips out meta data and recompresses. It even converts img tags to use data: uris when it's safe and efficient to do so.

I love it.
I ran into the same problem last year and wound up building a personal search engine. It reads in listings from rss feeds and mailing lists and runs them through a simple ML classifier to filter out the dross. The classifier is seeded a list of keywords and then trained by feedback (thumbs up / thumbs down). It also doubled up nicely as an example project when I came to applying for jobs.

I've been thinking about adding a web interface and making it available to the public. Would anyone be interested in this sort of thing?

I have plenty more ideas for data sources eg follow links from HN and Reddit and crawl for links named jobs/careers. I could seed the classifier with content from uploaded resumes or from personal blogs. If enough people were to use it I could switch to collaborative filtering for the scoring. Imagine waking up to an RSS feed full of recommended positions based on the technology you write about in your blog and the code you upload to github.
The only thing worse than crappy submissions is people complaining about crappy submissions.
I worked in projects where different used slightly different coding styles and I did not find it getting in the way too much -- you just match the style of the code you are working with. I am surprised there are people who will not contribute to a project because of this.
> then there shouldn't be airlines because it's just not a profitable business, right?

Hence the constant bankruptcy / bailout cycle. They are in effect subsidized by the government. I believe American Airlines is the only legacy carrier not to have been through bankruptcy.
So, Americans won't get Irony?
I'm an American living in Canada and the political focus seems to always be on the government (PM and cabinet) and the House of Commons. I never really hear mention of the Senate (basically the House of Lords of Canada), and being unelected, I assume it's not really taken too seriously. In the US, the converse is true, where the Senate is more powerful than the House and Senators are considered to be more important in pretty much every way.

In such an environment where people have little power but have the air and outward appearance of having a lot, I would suspect bizarre speeches aren't uncommon.
Table Connect for iPhone
How Adobe ruined Fireworks CS4/CS5
[infograph] The Mobile Developer Journey from App Design to Monetization
In the US, AMA means American Medical Association.
I have very little sympathy for people who hire managers to run their company and then complain that the managers are running the place in to the ground.

When you hire someone and they end up doing a poor job, it's your fault, and your responsibility to clean up the mess. This applies just as much to hiring managers as it does to hiring level 1 support techs.

Personally, I think that owners (or shareholders) that don't understand this (and that keep hiring managers who didn't act in the interest of owners at previous jobs) is a big part of what is wrong with our economy.
Google's mod_pagespeed for Apache
I believe they're releasing this, as a fun way to test the water with HTML5, Javascript, etc.

I believe they're pissed off with iOS development, as it's significantly more hassle than their usual routine of web development. I think they're lining up HTML5 as their solution to mobile. So we'll see Basecamp,Backpack,Highrise, etc move to HTML5, this way they'll have iPhone,iPad,Android supported.

I believe this based on the snippets of JS they've generously released, and I believe there is more to come.

I think this is far more likely than it being a publicity stunt.
It sounds like the Ask YC Archive at http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive, or Search YC at http://searchyc.com/ could be helpful.