skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exorbyte (http://www.exorbyte.com) is hiring remote List Researchers: people who can provide us with lists of online stores for our sales staff to call on for our new SaaS Ecommerce Search engine (http://commerce.exorbyte.com). We already have someone in the Philippines. Contact: infous AT exorbyte.com
On the keyboard front, we'll have to see. Swype, Graffiti, and the old fashioned keyboard are more intuitive because they borrow something core about our usage of inputting stuff: how we hand write a character for Graffiti, and everything we know about a QWERTY keyboard layout for Swype. Swype is very easy to grasp. For some reason, I see a much more competitive 8pen as a gesture/menu command issuing system than a keyboard. Replace the characters with commands and you have a powerful widget, even for games possibly. It isn't a random set of umpteen gestures, there is some hierarchy and precision built into the thing.

I feel the keyboard domain doesn't make use of hierarchy properly though. Let's say the 8pen keyboard divides the keys into octants. Each octant does not have a collection of related things. The letters I D G Z are not related in any way, yet they are all arrived to by first moving up and rotating right.

To illustrate a better use of the hierarchy, I'll divide the thing into quadrants instead of octants. Consider a widget to edit font. The top quadrant could be font family, the left quadrant could be colour, the bottom is size, and the right is style (bold, italic etc). Using this, if I wanted large text, I would move to the size quadrant and rotate clockwise to select a large size. Here you are taking advantage of the hierarchy and ranking such a widget could provide.

The font example is really really lame, but the GUI they present has a lot of potential. You can also divide the wheel into an arbitrary number of sections. There are tons of application domains that would work for a component like this. I just hope that 8pen isn't hell-bent only on giving us a keyboard.
The Brain That Changed Everything
Convert C "Gibberish" to/from English
wow. that's a lot of white people. :)
Oops. Done! :)
Ask HN: Health insurance when telecommuting
More and more often I'm learning of new job opportunities where telecommuting is an option. In fact, several companies that sound interesting to me are made up exclusively of remote workers.

What i'm curious about is how (if) health insurance benefits are handled at companies like this. I've always worked on site for small companies that offered group health insurance plans. Due to an assortment of health issues, I believe that it would either be impossible or prohibitively expensive for me to obtain individual health insurance. Can those of you who work remotely for a company (i.e. not as an independent consultant) comment on your experiences?
I've been in the US since mid-2006 on an H1B, and making $100k+ annually. However, I'm currently in the final stages of applying for residency Down Under and am planning on leaving the US w/ my wife and son in early December. The reasons are partly family related, but also because I am fed up w/ feeling like an indentured employee under the H1B system.

I making more at my current job (~$130k/year) than I ever have and likely will for a while. However, in many other ways it's a very poor fit and long-term I believe it's a professional dead-end. But since I am currently applying for a green card through this job, I am stuck in it until I get the green card which could take anywhere from 2 - 5 years. If I get another job in the US (which I would have no problem doing w/ my skill-set) or lost this job I would have to restart the green card application process, losing at least 1.5 years. On top of that my wife cannot legally work in the US until I have my green card. She is a high-school teacher with 10 years of experience in international schools in Asia and, ironically, has a master's degree in education from an American university (although the course-work was done in Asia).

So I can definitely sympathize w/ Americans who feel that H1B workers like myself are undercutting the American IT job market--because we are! H1B jobs hold out the eventual promise of a green card, but in the meantime if you're in my situation you have to put up w/ a lousy job and pass on better paying and more interesting jobs. For some that promise of a green card is worth it, but for me it is not, so we're pulling up stakes so that I can practice my craft as a free man.
2600 Now available on Kindle
The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket
We are: http://sucuri.net.

Looking for senior C developers (with a good background in security)

and

Looking for people with a Linux sys admin background, strong security foundation and also proficient with scripting languages (shell, perl, php). Mainly to help us automate, update, manage and clean up infected sites running Wordpress, Joomla, etc ,etc.

Email me dd@sucuri.net for more details.
How much motion do you use when hand writing?

This looks to have a lot of potential, IF it can be learned easily enough. This is the first mobile keyboard I've seen that I think could have the possibility of blind typing, but we'll have to wait and see if it is practical.
Hoping to privately launch http://ironclan.com
Didn't you depleted prospects pool reachable by use of your current marketing channels?

It may be the time to think about other means to reach new sets of prospects.
Ask HN: Are the long hours required to deliver a good piece of software?
This is a question asked by Peter Seibel to Jamie Zawinski in "Coders at work", and made me think a lot.
Not sleeping at night, not eating well, working for more than 15h at the end will it be rewarded? Will it take less at the beginning but more time then to fix what we did wrong? And what about health damages? Is it worth it?
I'd like to share some thoughts about the topic.
A bit pointless, perhaps, but overall unrelated to the value of your degree, since "honorary" degrees in almost all cases explicitly state that they confer none of the meaning or credentials of an equivalent real degree.

It's just cheap PR for the University.
Chris Slowe is leaving reddit
He wants to keep his Facebook private, not necessarily the project.

Which I understand entirely. I'd really rather not be linked to everyone under the sun on Facebook. There's already enough people I'm connected to who are unwittingly sharing my deets with hundreds of unscrupulous app developers.
I'm going to launch http://weddingtype.com

We have a MVP up which is just a wufoo form, but I want to commit to getting the real application finished!
To me, starring captures enough of the functionality without being a pain to manage. But I see your point.
Wait... eleven nines? Cripes!
on the one hand, corporations can take advantage of an immigrants sponsorship needs to lower wages / increase demands on their labor. you definitely seem to sympathize with immigrants on this point.

on the other hand "us native minions" (as you termed it) have an interest in artificially reducing the availability of skill in the labor market. some of your tone makes me think there's also an element of this in your stance?

i can't agree with the idea of restricting labor on the basis of the coincidence of where someone was born. there might be a sociological argument to be made when considering unskilled labor from less developed countries - but how can anyone justify restricting skilled labor, and movement between countries with socioeconomic parity (us/canada/eu/japan/etc.)?
GrexIt

http://grexit.com

10/15/2010

GrexIt lets Google Apps users create a knowledge base out of their day-to-day email communication.

Needed from HN community: Review, advice, early adopters.
I'm hiring remote workers.

But I use oDesk.
Nice! I'm launching http://wikizu.com hopefully within the next week or two.
Right people have the right to be free from smoke and smokers have the right to smoke. Each group need to respect the right of the other, the problem in this case is neither do. The anti-smokers want smoking eliminated all together and to deny smokers their pleasures while the smokers feel they should be able to foist the by-product of their pleasure on others.

The one that I differ with the anti-smokers on is bars. These are institutions with the explicit purpose of pleasure. I think owner of the establishment should be allowed to decide if his establishment is designated smoking or non. The anti-smokers don't like this because the vote would be a resounding we are a smoking establishment. Because for a good deal of the population, they don't care, they would go to a smoking bar. The non-smokers activist hate this because no one want's to hang out at their non-smoking bar. So they ruin it for the rest. In my state Bars where the last public establishments to fall and they fought hard to resist it because patrons had already voted with their feet and smoking bars where more popular than non.
I'm also an immigrant founder (actually not really an immigrant because I want to go back to Spain eventually). I have not created any jobs yet but I can assure you I've invested WAY more money in this country than I took out of it.

My girlfriend also works here and it's going to take her years to get back the tens of thousands of hard-earned euros she invested in her Master's. I have many friends in that plane.
I think once you factor in the costs related to creating and maintaining accounts (including support and billing) they aren't making much more off the small users than large ones, percentage-wise.
oh and feel free to contact me directly at ryan@twitter.com
Ah its in now... Here's the link: http://gigshare.co
It could be a loss-leader to get high-volume S3 customers using EC2 for the free transfer.
Yeah, I use that. However, once you block someone they are gone until you unblock them. All I want to do if be able to see a newsfeed from my 'top' friends and another from the 'rest'.
Thanks very much for the info. Actually there was a careers fair and one of my classmates got a good job out of it straight away, without even having stay on for a full MSc (ie. not just Post-Grad Diploma). It was Black Rock in Edinburgh. So that was heartening. I think I'd fair better in interviews than a lot of people (CS grads I know can't explain OOP or design patterns and basic stuff like that), but perhaps my CV wont be the best. I have some experience doing VB scripting for a previous office job, but I hope to add a few pet projects/web-apps and websites made for acquaintances to my resume by the time I graduate.

P.S. I can pass the FizzBuzz at least ;)
That's not actually news, but I am still happy to see that you are impressed. Here's a blog post with more info on what this means:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/05/new-amazon-s3-reduced-red...
Really slick, easy to use and very intuitive. Well done!
i spent some time looking at the local newspaper archives, it is astounding in 1900~1910, all photos go from being devoid of cars to being exclusively cars
It's this kind of magic that attracted me to Vim in the first place. I watched a professor doing that stuff in front of class and my jaw dropped. The circle was complete when a coworker watching me modify some code had a similar reaction. (Sadly I did not convert him.)
Ask HN: Behavioral Interview Questions.
Does anyone have any tips or helpful suggestions for answering Behavioral Interview Questions during a job interview?

(explanation and examples: http://www.quintcareers.com/sample_behavioral.html)

If you are an employer, do you find using this interview technique effective?

Thank you.
Create a shared knowledge base out of your email easily
We've been building this project for the last month or so and thought that the November startup sprint (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773398) would be a great place to test it out. We've lined up great content from some of HN's best authors, like Tom Preston-Werner (mojombo), Patrick McKenzie (patio11), and George Grellas (grellas).

You know that thing about how not being embarrassed means you launched too late? Yeah, well, this isn't perfect and we know it, but we're super excited to launch it and start iterating. Please check it out and let us know what you think. We'll be releasing more features in the next few days, but today is November 1st so we wanted to get it out there.
Modify a comment block and access granted.
One thing you could do in 5 minutes is put a screenshot of what a logged-in user will see when looking at one of their games. At least then there would be something a visitor could interact with. I was curious what percent of the home page a visitor could interact with, so I added up all the things you could possibly click and whether a visitor could get anywhere with them. Turns out a visitor can interact with 0% of your home page. There is not a single thing a visitor can click on your home page that doesn't take them to a log-in screen.
Exactly, and certainly didn't exist at the time Apple were forming their iPad strategy.
Yes, it's absolutely worth it.
I think one fact needs to be understood that the method uses thumb (of a single finger) for all the typing..

I just did a small experiment.. I took the last text I sent from my phone (about 300 characters) and tried pseudo-typing it according to the keyboard the video explains.. and man, my thumb hurts! I would really prefer if there was a way to input text with multiple fingers without slowing down.

wonder how tiring it would be to type everything with this method.
This isn't possible due to rounding. If you live somewhere with 7.5% sales tax (just to pick a number) and you want an item to be exactly $1.50, you have to price it at $1.40. Want five of those? The total comes to $7.52.
Cool!

I happen to be working on a project to scratch my own itch. It's an iPhone application. I've been teaching myself flamenco guitar, which requires a specialized metronome (for counting the various rhythms).

I'm using titanium appcelerator to build the application, and it's about 50% done now (just UI work now, the functionality is there).

It's essentially a clone of beatvibe http://tivstudio.com/node/1

I am confident I will have this app submitted to the app store by end of november.

Here's the current code if anyone is interested, still very much a work in progress http://github.com/himmel/Flamenco-Metronome

I only started working on this in my off time about a week ago.
Also in this case the "desktop" would then be just any old client which could easily be upgraded/swapped out and something other than Windows could be used as OS.
Totally -- not to mention surviving long enough to let compound interest naturally magnify that difference.

As for the tactics or "logistics" -- if that means clicking 500 times/minute, then i really don't see the appeal :)
It's not the maximum amount of pennies, but the average. Only a handful of prices result in change requiring 3 quarters or 4 dimes, but 40% of prices require 3-4 pennies in change.
If you have any suggestions, I'm always willing to hear them. But no, there is no way to square the hypothesis that I've depleted prospects available with my current marketing channels when the sales chart keeps going up and to the right.

Organic SEO (and by extension AdWords) is like a river: water goes by today, either you get it or somebody else does, but there will be water tomorrow. The total market is far, far larger than my capability to service it. (There are 3 million elementary schoolteachers in the United States. I have 3,500 customers.)

The nice part about email is that it lets you "store water" if you follow the analogy, since loss to evaporation is just obscene in my business. 80% of people who signed up last October never logged in again after 48 hours from their signup. Many never logged in a second time.
This "two cultures" [1] attitude is, sadly, incredibly pervasive. The idea that there are two kinds of people, two kinds of education, and thus two kinds of careers—one in the arts, one in the sciences—is a product of irredeemable stupidity and must be resisted.

Consider the following list of people, most of whom we should all be familiar with.

- Aristotle was concerned with understanding the natural world; with logic and mathematics; and with ethics, how to live a good life, music, the theatre, and more.

- Leibniz developed the calculus, symbolic reasoning, and ideas about computation. He also wrote about law, ethics, and religious disputes.

- Bertrand Russell made major contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language and mind, as well as being a prominent public intellectual and peace campaigner.

- Saul Kripke developed Kripke semantics for modal and intuitionistic logic, as well as making major contributions to the philosophy of language, mind, and epistemology and metaphysics.

I'm sure everyone here can think of many more examples, and no doubt your personal interests will influence your selections (as mine obviously have). My point is that an interest in, and the ability to make a major contribution to the arts or sciences in no way precludes making a contribution to the other. Yes, writing a proof is different to building a web service, which in turn is different from writing a book on Spinoza or studying the family dynamics of drug addicts. But the classes of people who do these things are not disjoint. We live in a world of specialisation, but that doesn't mean we have to live in a world of separation; that we cannot have broad interests and broad capabilities. When I was a child I learned about the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, but I also read the Iliad. There's no contradiction there, so why do so many people subscribe to the idea that people who do the latter can't do the former, or vice versa?

There is nothing contradictory in being able to write well, derive logical proofs, appreciate literature and disassemble a computer (or a car!). The call for mutual respect is appreciated, but surely we should demand more: a denial that this divide should exist in the first place.

One small nitpick, about learning fundamentals rather than practical skills making it harder to get hired. Even assuming it to be true, I don't think it cuts at all cleanly across the Arts/Sciences divide. A good understanding of complexity classes is not something I would call practical, i.e. able to be applied directly to so-called "real world" problems. My guess would be that it might make one hireable, in that employers might value the kind of mind which can comprehend such things, but that the number of places hiring people to use that knowledge directly is probably extremely limited. The problem that arts students might be facing is more that their skills are hard to quantify than that they are more concerned with fundamentals.

[1] The term "two cultures" comes from C.P. Snow's famous 1959 lecture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Hey all: we just launched an app to help you all launch awesomeness for the November Startup Sprint. We've lined up awesome daily content about building and launching sweet stuff, as well as a great way to track and share your progress. Check it out here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857508
FYI, in EU (or at least in Finland), euros are rounded to the nearest five cents and stores don't even accept the 1 and 2 cent coins, even though they exist.
This article oddly doesn't really address the subject of this post. It really argues why open source shouldn't be more insecure, but really gives no argument why it is more secure.

I've always found that open sourcing code makes it more likely bugs are found, whether by white or black hats. But due to the asymmetry in the value of security bugs, finding more bugs is actually a bad thing.
A lot of other-than-US governments are adopting linux and FOSS, and the Obama administration's been fairly friendly with Mac desktops.
At least we have vnc.
Thanks Jeff. I see you've been using it already :-)
Based on a recent salary guide/study, in the US, those graduating with a focus on it security may have a better chance of gaining employment upon graduation do to demand for networking/security talent. http://www.securityweek.com/it-salary-guide-shows-increase-s...
My buddy owns a small courier company (which I helped found a few years back). I'm about to write a piece of android software for his couriers to solve exactly this problem: when they get a "nobody at home" situation, they'll have to post a note on the door, then take a picture of the note and scan the package, while the software records the GPS (or network) coordinates.

A HTC Wildfire is around $50 with subscription, and once all couriers have them we intend to extend the system as much as we can. Lots of cute stuff should be possible with a combination of camera/barcode reader/gps/internet device.
Not only trees but also linear or integer programming approaches. (That's where my theoretical background lies, by the way.)
13 Beautiful Inkscape Tutorials for Creating Stunning Vector Graphics
Community for Lisp Game Development
I love it! I think it's a great idea, real slick implementation, and you seem to really be motivated to see it grow. Very cool - thanks for creating such a great tool. :)
Better yet, why is it not possible to just force the conversion at the till itself. Are most POS machines not capable of having the taxes rounded to the nickel instead of the penny? Then it all simply becomes transparent to everyone involved.
I'm talking about video, not audio (unless the RIAA also plays in the video space too). I've completely moved off of iTunes for music as I prefer streaming services like Grooveshark and subscription, like Zune Pass.
Could I also please sue various world governments for not considering me ;)
Some comments you can't not vote up. Thank you.
Edits the timestamp... ;-)
It's incredibly rare in my experience.
I'm pretty sure pricing is set by the franchise's corporation office, so that would be no easy feat. Also, if the tax percentage changed all the pricing would change as well.
Hackety Hack 1.0, for reals.
Any movement is going to have its share of crazies, but as a whole tea party folks are great people. A lot of those "racists" are plants, I've gone to a few events and those people are quickly booed out.

Just go to an event and talk to the people yourself.
If that's all it is, then I'm happy.

But I doubt it will be. For example, Apple's current app store is not merely an installation mechanism; it also allows them, to disable apps they don't want running on your machine. And after 30 years of flailing around, Apple has finally found a business model that works for them. I expect them, therefore, to copy as much of it as they can on the Mac.
My experience has been that if you are "telecommuting" for a reputable company and are not considered an "independent consultant" or are otherwise labeled as a 1099 employee you are carried under the company's group health insurance plan (assuming they offer health insurance). It really depends on the company though and how your employment is set up with them. For example, I know that Microsoft has many employees who are remote or field employees, meaning they primarily work from home or a client location. These employees are full-time MS employees and receive all benefits any other MS employee receives. Occasionally they receive more in the sense they are compensated for home phone and/or Internet costs as well.

Ultimately though it really depends on the company and if they offer benefits. Be sure to check with the company and ensure they are reputable before taking any job where the workforce is exclusively made up of remote workers. The nature of that description makes it sound like the employer will be 1099ing you at the end of the year, but I could be wrong. If you are a 1099 employee you will most likely have to obtain your own benefits.
Entrepreneurs: should Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington be your cheerleader?
Just launched http://www.tradesalerts.com/ ... it is a stocks alerts service for short term investors looking to profit from cyclical patterns in stocks.

Do take a look and give me some feedback.